German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once remarked, “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.” If America repeats the idiocies of its past, it will have to rely on that Providence once more to protect us.
The confidence that the US can act as a deterrent to international infractions has declined, making the world a less peaceful place. I am convinced that American military weakness will always encourage tyrants to expand their territory. As Noah Rothman wisely pointed out, the UN and treaties of ink will never be sufficient to deter a tyrant. A preponderance of American military might assure global peace.
On 9/11, we learned that the world is smaller than we think—that retreating from the world is not an option, and that if we do so, our enemies take advantage
On 9/11, we learned that perceived weakness in any form—economic, military, or ideological—invites aggression from our enemies. One generation later, we are deliberately destroying our own energy policy, focusing on expanded and fiscally irresponsible welfare statism, cutting our military capacity, and pursuing radical ideological dissolution.
On 9/11, we learned that we have more in common than we do that separates us. One generation later, the president of the United States speaks about his fellow citizens as threats to democracy and declares that those who do not deal with him are existential problems for the republic.
We learned on 9/11 that the world is a chaotic and terrible place, in which the right may not always triumph and the wrong may do to the decent terrible damage. One generation later, we seem to have forgotten that simple lesson, instead regressing to a puerile innocence in which we are constantly shocked by brutal realities.
I want to discuss four countries briefly. The first two involve American military presence. I have long believed America needs to exert its substantial military might conservatively. I do not think that was done either with Afghanistan or with the Ukraine. There were other ways to deal with 9/11 than to attack either Iraq or Afghanistan, and there were other ways to deal with Russia-Ukraine. The cost in human life and American expenditure did not justify either action.
Afghanistan
When Kabul fell, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were on vacation, just as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson had been earlier that summer, when the country was falling apart. America's campaign in Afghanistan failed, but not for lack of trying. To date, the U.S. has spent over $2.3 trillion on the war—not including down-the-road interest payments on money borrowed or the lifetime care that veterans will require. It is estimated that over 46,300 Afghan civilians, 69,000 Afghan military and police officers, and 6,200 U.S. contractors and soldiers died during the conflict, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project. What about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — you know, the chaotic mess that President Biden called a “success”? Wasn’t that the withdrawal that was marred by a terrorist attack that killed more than 180 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members? And didn’t we leave behind tens of billions of dollars in military equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban?
Good thing it was a “success,” right?
Ukraine
The nature of U.S. involvement has been a compelling question throughout this war. America has spent decades blurring the lines between war and not-war in our foreign policy, so much so that it is difficult to say if we are "at war" in Ukraine already. Certainly, Russia says we are, and it is hard to imagine we would disagree were positions reversed. If Moscow helped another country kill American generals and sink our prize warships, surely, we would pursue reprisal? And that is the strange thing about Ukraine: The Russian regime accuses Washington of waging a proxy war, and you do not have to concede at moral high ground to the Kremlin to recognize that is at least partly true. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has explicitly said Washington wants Russia to come out of this conflict "weakened," an aim more ambitious than simply helping Kyiv repel Moscow's unjust aggression.
The core issue in the war between Russian and Ukraine seems to be that Putin wants a promise from the West not to admit Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and more generally to accept that Ukraine and Belarus lie within Moscow’s sphere of influence. Biden refuses to make that promise. Is fighting over this issue worth the risks—including, at the extreme end, the risk of war with a nuclear power? Ukraine is currently not a member of NATO, and we have no treaty obligation to defend it. Moreover, the chance that Ukraine will become a member of NATO anytime soon is exceptionally low. It is too corrupt (as the Biden family should well know) and its political institutions too feeble to permit that. So, Biden is asking the West, and the American public, to bear the costs and risks of his Russia policy for the sake of a hypothetical question about NATO’s future membership -besides Biden has backed every possible foreign policy blunder. As John David Davidson noted, for several years, we partnered with others in the West to tacitly commit to defending the Ukraine from Russia. At the same time, we have reduced our energy output while Germany and other European powers become depend upon energy from Russia by waiving sanctions on the Nord stream 2 pipeline in May of 2021. Russia-Ukraine war is unnecessary and avoidable: For Moscow, a recognition of its strategic claim on Crimea and the port of Sevastopol as the home of its Black Sea Fleet. For Kyiv, the promise of political independence and greater integration with Europe in exchange for territorial concessions. The West should have also considered the folly and recklessness of floating the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine, something no serious person ever thought Russia would accept without going to war to prevent it. Margot Cleveland says the neocons are back, if only for a moment, and they would like you to consider the idea that we shoot down some Russian warplanes, or annex Ukraine into NATO, or do any number of other reckless and provocative things to get us into a war with Russia. V. D. Hanson says that Ukraine can defeat Putin’s expeditionary army if the US and its NATO allies increase aid, do not embrace no-fly zones or other provocative trajectories to World War III, cease crazy talk of killing or removing Putin, stop whipping up hatred of all things Russian, and remember that history was never on Putin’s side when he invaded Ukraine.
China
The number of Chinese who have severed their ties to Chinese communist organizations reached over 400 million on Aug. 3, according to the Global Center for Quitting the CCP, an organization dedicated to processing and tracking online declarations denouncing CCP memberships. The global movement is known as “tuidang,” which means “quit the Party” in English.
For years, the McConnell and Chao families have maintained a symbiotic relationship that grants opportunities to the Chaos’ shipping company, Foremost Group, which operates in and on behalf of communist China. As Schweizer documented in his 2018 book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” McConnell took a strong stance against China before his marriage into the Chao family. According to Peter Schweizer, it was a 1994 trip arranged by James Chao, McConnell’s father-in-law, and sponsored by China State Shipbuilding Corp. (CSSP), one of the CCP’s largest military contractors and an unofficial arm of the CCP navy, to meet the Chinese president that pushed McConnell to “increasingly avoid public criticism of China.”
Italy
Some of the wariness of the new government in Italy originates in Brothers of Italy’s checkered past. The party has struggled to distance itself from its origins in the post-World War II parties founded by Italian fascists. Meloni herself has written that she “does not belong to the cult of fascism.” Still the stain will never be fully erased. Today, Brothers of Italy aligns itself with conservatives. It is currently “a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the EU Parliament, which includes other conservative political parties, such as Poland’s Law and Justice Party, Spain’s Vox party, and formerly the U.K. Conservative Party. The mainstream media lazily portrays these parties as “far right,” but this is an unfair caricature. There are certainly radical, far-right parties in Europe, but those parties are not among them. They hold similar policy views to conservative Americans and most of the Republican Party membership.
No comments:
Post a Comment