Tag: Foreign Policy

Corcyra Again

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I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven’t been rejected yet.  But I found out it takes up to a month to get a letter after submission so I might not know anything for quite a while.  Well, patience is a virtue.

I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast today.  It was on US Foreign Policy and he was making a distinction of a realistic foreign policy (meaning in the interest of Americans) versus one based on some kind of moralistic crusade like “making the world safe for democracy.”  I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump’s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States.  It was interesting and hearkened back to Woodrow Wilson and his attempt to restructure Europe in his image of what modern countries should look like, namely, the United States, which sounded a lot like every neo-con secretary of state for the last thirty years.

And all of that was good stuff.  But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War.”  And that always holds my interest.  It’s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today’s headlines.  He reviewed Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Melian Dialog and showed how these stances mirror the foreign policy reality and the attendant justification that we see today from an imperial state.  All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia.  I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.

What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra.  Here the Athenians and the Spartans encouraged the aristocrats and the peasants in Corcyra to back respectively the Spartan (aristocratic) form of government or the Athenian (democratic) form of government in Corcyra.  And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn’t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.

“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.”

It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not.  The last time was October of 2017.  And since then, we’ve had the January 6th “insurrection” and Merrick Garland’s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building.  It’s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow “citizens.”

But it’s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people’s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor.  That’s why I’m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here.  I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living.  Well, that enough.

Super Power Relations

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Glenn W sent an email with a link to a podcast where Jeff Nyquist and Alex Benesch discuss how Donald Trump’s election impacts the global power struggle between the United States, Russia and China (link below).

https://youtu.be/OOiVNxt9I0M?si=bUOHY_mfan-wEOGu

It’s an analysis of the Chinese strategy to undermine Trump’s domestic political coalition.  There is also discussion of how Trump’s handling of the Ukraine war will impact Chinese/Russian relations.

Thank you, Glenn for passing this along.  It’s interesting to know how much the Chinese think about and plan to undermine the American domestic political situation.  And if the CIA were any good at their job, they’d have all of this intel available for Trump in a useful and convenient form as soon as it is available.  But, of course, they’re so busy trying to undermine him themselves that they can’t get around to something like that.

Watching the video made me think about how American domestic politics is viewed in such different places as Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.

But it didn’t change my belief that almost all the problem in our country and most of the problems in the world are a result of the dysfunctional and even destructive system and culture that has taken hold of our country and by extension is being imposed on the rest of the world.  The adoption of a culture that celebrates above all else aberrant sexual identities and practices, but also emphasizes the vilification of European peoples and cultures and the need to eliminate their identity from their own countries, is singlehandedly bringing about the destruction of Western civilization.

I believe that most of the problems in this country stem from these two cultural projects of the Left.  And I think if these programs are eliminated it will cure most of the social dysfunction, we see around us today.

And that is why I believe that if Trump continues on with his program to eliminate things like the recognition of multiple “genders” and DEI and other affirmative action programs from the US federal government he will single-handedly solve the majority of societal ills that we find ourselves engulfed by.

Now as far as foreign policy goes, I see a clear linkage between the war in Ukraine and these same cultural dysfunctions.  Russia is a pariah for the Left because it eschews the LGBTQ movement absolutely and refuses to accept the “white shame” culture within its borders.  Whereas Ukraine was willing to accept the rainbow flag as the price it paid to get CIA and State Department funding for its color revolution.  And you can see a similar dynamic in Hungary where Orban refused to bend the knee to the homosexual mandate and so he also became an enemy of the left.  They tried to overthrow him in a recent election, pouring in all kinds of USAID money into the effort.  But he won and now he’ll benefit from Trump’s reform of the State Department and foreign relations in general.

It was heartening to see JD Vance meet with the AfD candidates for parliament in Germany and confront the government there with their refusal to stem immigration and their anti-free speech polices and attitudes.  It’s this kind of confidence in the advantages of a free and populist society that will advance our point of view in many places.

And that brings me to the question of what I think American policy should be toward the powerful countries like China and Russia.  We should be neither fearful of nor bellicose toward them.  The United States has ample enough stockpiles of nuclear tipped ICBMs to ensure that neither Russia nor China will attack us or our allies.  But by the same token, what business have we rattling sabers at Putin or Xi?  Our neocons in the State Department initiated the color revolution in Ukraine and then provided massive military aid and convinced the Ukrainians that the Russians would just capitulate to Ukraine joining NATO.  Up until Obama’s administration it was understood that attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO would be crossing a glowing red line that Putin would retaliate against.  So, they did it anyway and he invaded.  Now he’s been bloodied by our Ukrainian proxies using our most sophisticated weapons systems and so we’ve turned this into a war of attrition where Russia will lose a million men and Ukraine will lose two million men and a third of their country and we’ve possibly made the Russians our bitterest enemies for generations to come.  And they’ve embraced China because of it.

If Trump can figure out a way to blunt some of this damage, he should get a Nobel Peace Prize for sure.  But in general, I hope Trump’s foreign policy is guided by the precept that our foreign policy should be primarily concerned with improving the security and prosperity of the American people.  That’s it.  We’re not out to spread democracy and we’re not trying to save the world.  Climate Change and Ending World Hunger are not our priorities.  Evicting the illegal aliens and bringing the price of a dozen eggs down are.  So that explains my myopic vision of foreign policy.  If the Chinese try to get involved in undermining the Trump voter coalition, I’m guessing they’ll be a lot less effective than the Democrats are.  The Left knows the American lingo better and they’re much better liars than the Chinese are.

So, Donald Trump, just keep pummeling the Left and everything else will follow along like a master plan.

Policy Foreign

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Our foreign policy is run by people whose plan seems to be destabilizing the whole world.  They have simultaneously provoked crises in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Far East and now South America.  That is impressive by any standard.  They haven’t managed to piss off the Pope but only because he happens to be an atheistic pedo-protecting commie like them.

Maybe the most interesting thing about this situation is that they don’t seem at all alarmed that a lot of it is going badly for the sides they allegedly support.  Ukraine seems to be failing in its war with Russia.  The West African nations that revolted against the Western approved leaders have seemingly triumphed over the response from France and the United States.  The United States has given such mixed signals in the Gaza war that both the Israelis and the Arabs are angry at Dementia Joe.  China has basically shrugged its shoulders and walked away from any negotiations about Taiwan.  And now Venezuela has sized up the United States’ depleted military condition and decided to annex the oil-rich two thirds of its neighbor Guyana.

Venezuela is most probably causing trouble at the suggestion of Russia.  Putin is looking to punish the United States for forcing the Ukraine war.  While Donald Trump was in office the world mostly got a break from the color revolution Neo-Con skullduggery that was the order of the day during the Obama years.  Relations with our adversaries was respectful and quiet.  But now that Biden has allowed the Kagans and their allies to once again destabilize an unsuspecting world, we can expect all our enemies like Iran, North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba and the rest of them to align with Russia and China and cause us grief wherever they can.  And they are.

But worse, the actions of this administration have even driven India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia into the Russians’ arms too.  Now this takes a very special kind of stupid.  The only thing they haven’t done yet is radicalize the Canadians.  But the year isn’t quite over yet so who knows.

You know, it’s hard to understand if there is some method to this madness.  They legitimately seem more interested in the public relations victories around LGBTQ inclusion in places like Afghanistan than in the legitimate priorities of the American people.  The only thread that seems to connect all of the radical foreign policy adventures is that the Neo-Cons assume that the United States is still the unipolar hegemon over the whole planet and no other power can resist any of our actions at all.  So, Russia and China are playthings for us to swat around with no consequences to fear.  And smaller countries like Iran and Venezuela don’t even merit military consideration and can be controlled by economic sanctions.

Of course, the fact that we’ve just finished with twenty years of failed nation building in the Middle East and no longer can get enough recruits to keep our armed forces at full strength doesn’t even register with the adventurers in the State Department and the CIA.  They’re raring to go at other borders of the Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia and beyond.  It’s hard to imagine that these people are really as blind as they seem to be.  They don’t seem to care that they may unleash a war that will have very serious consequences for the citizens of this country.  Even a major nuclear exchange is hardly an impossibility in the brinksmanship environment that they’ve created.

Now, I understand that this is a dangerous world and the United States must play hardball with countries that are ideologically committed to destroying us.  Iran has been such a state for over forty years and China and Russia are major global adversaries of ours for many reasons.

But I almost feel that the Neo-Cons that have been in charge of our foreign policy for the last couple of decades are more dangerous to this country than all of the rest of the world put together.  I don’t know if it’s practical or even possible to clean house at the CIA and the State Department but if I were Donald Trump, I’d clean out those two viper’s nests as one of the first orders of business.  Well maybe right after the FBI.  But definitely pretty soon after.

Manifest Destiny

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I read recently that globalists have a plan to combine Mexico, America and Canada into a North America Union.  I won’t go into why I think such a plan is bad for us.  But because of all the talk about unions I had an idea.  Let’s conquer Canada.

Not all of Canada.  We’ll leave Eastern Canada alone.  Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces don’t seem worth fighting over.  They’re filled with people who remind me of New Englanders.  We should annex the Western and Northern provinces.  And while we’re at it we might as well buy Greenland from Denmark.

Now hear me out.  I have a good reason.  I hate Justin Trudeau and I think most people in Western Canada hate him too.  Well, with the exception of Vancouver but we’ll just rename it North Seattle and fold it into the west coast exclusion zone (California, Oregon and Washington) that will be set up to prevent normal people from wandering in and suffering mental anguish from listening to crazy people.

So, we’ll liberate the good people of Western Canada and immediately begin intensive extraction of fossil fuels, radioactive minerals and anything else that will allow us to restore our civilization to a prosperous state.  Meanwhile we can allow Eastern Canada to feel virtuous that they are no longer responsible for the use of evil fossil fuels from underneath their territory and in fact will no longer have enough petroleum to keep themselves warm and will therefore sink back into a neolithic existence where they’ll feel most morally comfortable.  At that point the French and the English Canadians can resume their eighteenth-century war on a more equal footing and let the best man win.  Hopefully Justin Trudeau will be one of the first victims of that conflict.

Now with all the resources we need for the foreseeable future it would be time to institute the great plan.  A Manhattan Project to accomplish something worthwhile.  The plan is to resurrect and modernize the industrial base of the United States and thus make us self-sufficient again.  And while we’re at it we can figure out the energy resources that will get us through the next thousand years.  Things like that are the natural province of scientists, engineers and economists, not hysterical teenage girls, nitwits and pseudoscientists.

But as soon as the conquest of Western Canada is complete it will also be time to begin re-evaluating our relationship with the other nations of the Earth.  Our alliances have been fraught with dependence and dysfunction.  NATO is a ridiculous sideshow.  The first question to be asked is, does Russia have an interest in conquering Belgium?  The people in Belgium believe in things that the Russians find repugnant.  Their country is a tiny postage stamp that could fit in a suburb of Moscow.  Their only exports are overpriced chocolates and bureaucracy for which there is no demand.  Europe is putatively one of the richest and most technologically advanced regions on Earth.  I think we can leave them to their own devices to defend themselves from their neighbors.

Now China is a threat to Japan and Korea.  If we sell some ICBMs to these folks that should shore up the balance of power there and end our responsibility to these countries.  And for the rest of the world, I don’t have much interest.  Let the Indians and the Russians and the Chinese worry about the Iranians and the Arabs and the Turks.  I suppose the Africans will need some help but it can be on a private charity basis.  I figure the Australians and the New Zealanders can ask the Brits for nukes if they need them.  And we can insist that Mexico and the countries to the south must stop trying to move in with us.  We can’t figure out their problems for them.  They’re going to have to do that on their own.

So, there’s my whole plan for the world.  We can oversee northern North America (most of it) and let the rest of the world figure things out for themselves.  Needless to say, we’ll need to have a very capable military and cutting-edge weapons systems to make sure no one is tempted to cause us any trouble.  But for the most part we can mind our own business and make the lives of Americans the best they can be.

Maybe when we’ve done a really good job of raising the standard of living of the bulk of our people to middle class then we can think about interfering in other people’s affairs.  Until then let’s see if we can get back to post World War II levels first.  That would be the bench mark we can shoot for.  Take that Trudeau.

What is the Next Big Surprise?

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In corporate engineering one of the big buzzwords is risk management.  We’re supposed to evaluate all the possible risks and rate them according to probability and severity.  This allows you to plan a remediation or prevention action for each possible risk.  This allows us to kid ourselves into thinking we are in control of what will happen to us in the future.

But in reality, there is always an X factor, the unknown unknown, the thing that we don’t know that we don’t know.  And there is Murphy’s Law that says that the worst thing possible always happens at the worst possible time.  What that means is that when a system is already stressed the chances that something bad will become something terrible becomes almost inevitable.

Regardless of ideology, both the Left and the Right will admit that when the United States was the sole superpower in the 1990s foreign policy was more predictable.  No one messed with the big dog.  Not the Russians, not the Chinese or any of the regional powers like Iran or India or Pakistan.  Sure, they could pull some proxy mischief in Lebanon or Somalia or some other rat hole but nobody would go toe to toe with us back then.  And that made it a lot easier for us to make policy.  We moved carefully and slowly.  But we could be sure that as long as we took it nice and easy and actually knew what would be the outcome of our actions that no one would gainsay it.  The Europeans would gripe but accommodate us.  The Arabs would threaten and then do nothing.  The Russians and the Chinese would condemn and posture and then do nothing.  And all the small countries would go to the United Nations and draft a resolution condemning us which we would veto when it got to the Security Council.

But those days are long gone.  Since then, we have frittered away our superpower status chasing Al Qaeda and ISIS psychopaths from Pakistan to Morocco.  We disillusioned a generation of American warriors in the sands of Iraq and we have handed over our industrial wealth to the Chinese.  Our military has become a political football to be kicked around over transgender and feminist talking points.  And now witch hunts to uncover white supremacists in the rank and file has taken unit cohesion to an all-time low.  No one thinks we are in charge anymore.

Imagine if you can the chances that China, Vietnam, Japan, North and South Korea, Myanmar, Russia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Libya will between themselves figure out an equitable arrangement that will satisfy them all.  When we were calling the shots, we could make the bigger, stronger countries toe the line and only the rat holes were given a pass.  The outlaws like North Korea or Iran were isolated commercially and socially.  But now the Chinese are openly mocking us when we condemn their brutal tactics against the Uighurs.  They only have to point to our cities burning during the BLM riots and both our weakness and moral confusion are self-documented.

China is now openly pursuing its own interests everywhere from Equatorial Africa to Latin America and Russia is involved militarily and commercially in the Middle East in Iran, Turkey and Syria.  Russia’s saber rattling in the Ukraine and other parts of its former domain in Eastern Europe highlight that NATO isn’t what it once was.  And speaking of Europe, it is in upheaval.  The madness that has infected the United States is just as virulent there.  The EU is in total disarray and nationalist movements are springing up all over threatening the very existence of the EU.

So, what’s my point?  Alright, when 9/11/2001 happened we were no longer the world military hegemon we had once been.  We were already starting down the road of de-industrializing our country in favor of Chinese outsourcing but we still had a very, very potent military and we were still for the most part a unified country with a deep streak of patriotism.  We could rally the whole country, Democrats and Republicans and put together a war effort that would up-end a country like Afghanistan in weeks.  We could hammer a medium sized country like Iraq in a few weeks too.

9/11 was our last big surprise and we had the wherewithal to answer the challenge.  But what about the next big surprise?

What about now?  If we were attacked by Iran or if the Taliban staged a major attack in Afghanistan would Americans come rallying around and enlist to do their part.  I don’t think they would.  The feminized millennial males would just mumble something about Gaia under their breath and go back to drinking their soy lattes.  If Joe Biden got on tv and begged the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to support him in a new emergency I think they’d throw a lamp through the screen.   This government and the media have vilified the flag and the national anthem and the soldiers they stand for.  They’ve told us that what we stand for is racism and hate.  Well, then let Joe Biden get Antifa and BLM to fight his wars.  The rest of us should take a knee.

I’m not sure that the next big surprise will be a terrorist or military attack.  It could be a fuel shortage or an agricultural blight or even another bio-attack.  The point is there isn’t any good will left in the country.  Nobody will be rallying around anything.  If the BLM riots get out of control and one of the big cities in the blue states burns down, I don’t think any of the red staters will care in the least.  They’ll probably cheer.  In fact, I’m hoping Derek Chauvin is acquitted of all charges and Minneapolis is burned to the ground from end to end by the mostly peaceful Antifa and BLM thugs.  I think it would be the best possible outcome.  Minnesota would reap what they sowed.  It would be what Obama was so fond of calling a teachable moment.

When the next big surprise happens, it will end the illusion that this is one country.  And that will be a very good thing.