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It’s hard to win these days. Not only do we have worries about war, we’ve got worries over worries about war. Is the Biden administration’s foreign policy dangerously cautious? That’s what Peter and James discuss – and argue about – with our guest, AEI’s Kori Schake.
The hosts (minus Rob, who was off podcasting elsewhere…) also chat about Italy’s Giorgia Meloni; James gets peeved, and it’a lots of fun; they do some speculating of their own about the bubbles in the Baltic; and Peter recalls the time he had dinner with a mega-celeb and had no idea who said mega-celeb was.
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And that Hitler guy. Man, those central casting types sure fooled us. And what about famous man-on-horse characters Goldwater and Reagan. What a bunch of dupes we are!
Was that response meant for me?
Yes I am not pro Putin. I’m tired of being called pro Putin because I dared to say I don’t think the United States of America should spend any blood and treasure defending one ofvthemost corrupt nations on the face of the planet So that our corrupt politicians can continue to launder their money to their hearts content.
But go ahead keep telling me I’m pro Putin I’m a Putin sympathizer because I don’t want to send troops to Ukraine and because I don’t want to send arms to Ukraine. Ukraine is none of America’s business.
And the fact that everybody who wants me to support Ukraine continues to say that I and anybody else who doesn’t want to support them is pro Putin shows how corrupt and venal your defense of Ukraine is.
If your side was in the right you wouldn’t have to resort to calling the other side names.
I mean . . . Zelenskyy literally is right out of central casting, chosen for the role by Ihor Kolomoisky, who is in deep with the Biden Crime Family.
Yes.
Seek help. I didn’t call you anything.
What I mean and didn’t do a very good job of explaining, is men who are capable of talking you into trusting them as they smoothly steal the money out of your wallet. That is Zelensky.
But that’s how the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. Not by US boots on the ground but by funding the Mujahideen.
Yes – they morphed (predictably?) into the Taliban and it didn’t end there.
Yes – it destroyed Afghanistan and the Afghan people paid (and continue to pay) a terrible price.
But funding local insurgents worked. That’s why the US tried it in Syria.
Perhaps not the most moral approach, perhaps with a resulting fall in how the US is perceived there, but arguably effective and with a lower political price than direct engagement.
The mooj didn’t just “morph”. They were increasingly co-opted by Pakistan and elements of Saudi. None of Afghanistan’s powerful neighbors want Afghanistan to be a country capable of expressing a will. And verily, it is not.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Weren’t Saudi and Pakistani interests known at the time? If they were, then it’s reasonable to think that their actions were – at least in general – predictable?
It remains an area of chaos. And – jmho – an ongoing source of political instability for Pakistan. This really can come back and bite them hard – which I find appealing, as an Indian, but also think would be a really bad thing, for the same reason.
Does a similar approach in Ukraine carry the same dangers? Obviously not with a Muslim face but something more indigenous to Eastern Europe?
Who let Mrs. Strangelove on the podcast?
Interesting choice of word too — malleable. Not persuadable, but malleable. From Websters dictionary – Malleable:capable of being extended or shaped by beating with a hammer.
Ding Dong.
Somebody handy with audio (and who does not work for the podcast outlet, which would be BAD FORM) could replace her responses with equivalents from General Turgidson.
Uh huh.
“For all the Putin Sympathy “
Was that directed at you? Was there any name-calling? Re-read the thread. You will see GENUINE sympathy for Putin.
Perhaps if you had worded it as “For all the sympathy I might otherwise have for Putin…”
Slightly off the mark — I wasn’t talking about my sympathy, but that expressed at various points in the thread.
I have been accused of being pro Putin multiple times so it makes total sense when somebody makes Putin sympathy that I think that there are directed against me.
But you go on telling me I need to seek help because I’m being unreasonable afbeing unreasonable after having been accused of being a Putin sympathizer multiple times at ricochet.
Maybe you can get the moderators to ban me for not liking being called a Putin sympathizer.
I think the word you were looking for, James, is obtuse. It’s fine to think oneself is right. What’s not fine is to presume oneself is right about things unknowable. Shake does not persuade because she does not acknowledge the validity of the conflicting viewpoint, batting it down with an unfair assertion of fear instead of arguing in good faith about why she believes the fears are unfounded, though real.
It was funny hearing her chastise Slava Bandwagoners as not being sufficiently on the bandwagon. Paraphrasing, if you’re not willing to put US lives at risk, how dare you put that Ukraine flag in your username.
Exactly
Or if not unfounded, at least outweighed, in her opinion.
Yeah, that. Although I don’t put The Latest Thing in my twitter username, because it’s narcissistic preening. And I say that as a preening narcissist.
Obtuse is close, and you summed up well what was so frustrating about it. I was annoyed when Jimmy Carter told us we had to get over our inordinate fear of Communism, but being informed that I have to get over my inordinate fear of a retaliatory nuclear strike is something quite different.
In the elevated esoteric plane, I support regime change in Moscow. The world would be better off with a Western-facing Russian president who wanted to return to the good old days of shoveling kleptorubles to the oligarchs, gushing gouts of money to the military to steal as they please at the expense of force projection, and keeping the urban elite happy with Western brand-names and ApplePay at the Moscow Metro. If the Russian people ever demand something better, good on ’em, as the Aussies say.
Or they can marinate in their national neuroses. Whatever. As long as they don’t decide to galavant about outside their borders because they has a sad about their lost empire or treatment by the evil meanies who want to make them kneel in the mud. (I mean the West, of course; when their leaders want them to kneel in the mud, it’s TRADITIONAL NOBLE RUSSIAN SUFFERING FOR SOULFUL REASONS.)
On a practical level, regime change opens up not a can of worms, but a pallet of 246 shrink-wrapped flats of cans of worms. The Stans get restive, and go their own way – for good, maybe, but mostly more local variants on warlords-in-suits. The east falls to Chinese influence. The nub of Rus turns into sullen Monaco with nukes and hurt feelings. This could happen anyway. But it seems idiotic to think we can kick over the dominos, Navalny will get out of jail and have Pussy Riot play at his inauguration, and everything will be awesome.
Every time I hear the reason Putin is restive is because of NATO encroachment by nations voluntarily joining the pact, despite the fact that Russia is the only country that’s been invading its neighbors over the past decade, I think: He’s playing the snowflake card and we’re folding. (Actual missiles planted ninety miles from Miami in the early 1960s doesn’t even compare, as I imagine even Khrushchev would agree.) The problem, yet again, is our binary mindset. Ukraine being corrupt is more important to some than the NATO goal of defending the group against aggression. This excuse sounds like a dodge against just saying flat out that Ukraine’s plight is not worth American blood and treasure (a completely honorable position). For others, Ukraine (rather, the personalized Ukraine embodied by Zelensky) is nothing but heroic, despite its obvious nationalist tendencies and massive corruption (a view exacerbated by Biden’s clear conflict of interest involving the nation while still VP, something theorists like Shake don’t seem to take into consideration as they yell, “Charge!” The Congress is utterly worthless in this regard. Then, too, in light of the natural disaster taking place as the interview was going on, Shake’s insensitivity (could insensitive be the word?) to the concerns of non-theoretically minded regular folks—the ones who make her work possible—is mostly what comes through.
Yes, lots of important matters to discuss, but….
I came here to say how shocked I was to hear @peterrobinson‘s Bowie story.
Uncommon Knowledge, indeed.
I don’t know that Bowie ever worked for Conoco, so color me unimpressed.
Maybe they could play an ancient instrument in a surprisingly classy way like Lizzo.
It’s not honorable from their perspective.
We have gone from George Washington’s “no entangling alliances” to Monroe’s “OK, entangling alliances but only in our hemisphere” to “America: World Police” in very short order.
There is a strain of people in the modern Republican Party that has dug up Ronald Reagan’s corpse and are trying to make it dance to some Cold War Remix. You ain’t a lover of freedom unless you’re disco dancing to Zombie Ron and the new Anti-Russian Apocalypse Band with American boots on the ground. And if you disagree, you obviously are a Putin (boot) licker.
Well, if we are going to prove our GOP bonafides with necromancy, I choose to channel Senator Robert A. Taft. The late Senator from Ohio was known as “Mr. Republican” during his time in office. The eldest son of the original “Big Guy,” President William Howard Taft, had been derisively referred to as an isolationist, by both the Democrats and his own party. Three times he launched bids to follow his father into the Oval Office and three times he was thwarted by the Thomas Dewey wing of the GOP.
The Taft approach to American foreign policy can be summed up thusly:
Taft’s last attempt at the presidency was short-circuited by the recruitment of Dwight Eisenhower who fully bought into the Truman vision of the postwar world. By the time Ike realized the dangers it posed for the nation he was on his way to retirement in Gettysburg.
The leftist journalist, Nicolas von Hoffman, summarized Taft’s foreign policy as “a way to defend the country without destroying it, a way to be part of the world without running it.” Michael T. Hayes, a professor of political science at Colgate University, called it “The Republican Road Not Taken.” But even if Dewey and Company not persuaded Eisenhower to run in 1952 it probably would have made little difference. Taft was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer early in 1953 and was dead by July 31st.
There’s no doubt that U.S. presidents since World War II have gotten our country into many more foreign entanglements than any Founder would have agreed to and many more entanglements than might have been expected given the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. I suspect this has happened in large part because of the creation of NATO and other mutual protection pacts (cynically sneered at by contemporaries but rushed to after the war, especially as the arms race heated up), also as the result of expansive U.S. corporations becoming international and, so, making Americans vulnerable across the world, and to massive developments in communications and international travel East and West. I believe that honorable is, in practicality, not to be found and that focusing on it gets in the way of saying simply “yes” or “no” instead of “yes, but … ”