On Monday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, told the entertaining story of being added, alongside Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance, to America’s group-chat plans to bomb Yemen.
Not the most obvious stuff of comedy, perhaps. Yet the affairs of men turn farcical precisely when they’re trying to be most serious. The cast here included the US National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defence, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, the Director of the CIA, and a handful of others holding Importantly Capitalised roles.
Much is already being made of the fact that those involved have previously frothed at the mouth about their opponents’ sloppiness with classified information, but the greater point is not about Republican hypocrisy. What we have instead, and what makes it comic, is the sort of human frailty as common to Wernham Hogg (the Slough branch of Dunder Mifflin) as it is to the Oval Office.
No need to have watched The Office in either its American or British incarnations to recognise these errors. Yes, I was as irritated as anyone the first time someone at work hit ‘reply all’ by mistake, and treated the thousand medical and surgical consultants I was working with to their views on a temporary road closure on the hospital site. Soon, however, I was seduced by the comic genius of fate. Irresistible, seeing hundreds of my supposedly bright colleagues beg us to stop replying to all – while, naturally, replying to all.
Just flawed mortals like us, tripping into the predictable consequences of carelessness
In 2016 the NHS’s email service was brought to a brilliantly grinding halt one Monday morning with a message mistakenly sent to a million of us. Thousands replied, asking that people not ‘reply all’, and replying to all as they did so. One genius – I long to believe it was deliberate – added a request for read-receipts.
Once every couple of years my NHS Trust offers a repeat of the experience, and these days my anger is nil. On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined! My mood is only soured when the flood of misbegotten and misdirected responses starts to slow, and the fun is over.
Yet the underlying theme is familiar: even among world leaders arranging the most serious of geopolitical matters, the comedy of human error finds fertile ground. There seems to me no real diplomatic problem with Vance and Hegseth sniffing about America having to protect European trade because European navies are too weak. Their contempt is no surprise, since we knew they felt that way. Reasonable that they should, too; there seems no obvious reason why Europe should expect America to subsidise its protection.
Equally, this was no four-dimensional chess, no clever open-mike moment masterminded by a Presidential genius with orange hair. No, just flawed mortals like us, tripping into the predictable consequences of carelessness. Modern technology makes everything easier, and we cannot reasonably expect that not to include our pratfalls.
‘For what do we live,’ asks Austen, that most genial and human of novelists, ‘but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’ Our own turn to mistakenly hit ‘reply-all’ lurks only a keystroke away. The world is full of fools and idiots, tripped up by their carelessness and pomposity, and eventually one of them is always us. Easy for me to sit in comfort and write about the errors of others. But an irresistible pleasure all the same, I think, as I click send, and submit this piece to you all at the New Statesman.
Catch up on the latest Spectator TV:
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