A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It’s a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.
I haven’t posted much in recent years. There are two reasons: 1) Better things to do/things I enjoy more and 2) I’ve been a bit more at-ease with the world – not so much with the Big Picture but with it on a day-to-day basis. So much for #2.
“Observe, orient, decide, act.”
The nominal goals of the incoming administration include:
It doesn’t seem plausible that all of those things can exist simultaneously. #1 is conditional on #4. #2 and #3 will alienate international allies and result in a loss of goodwill that will #4 much more challenging. On the domestic side, imagine that #s 2 and 3 and the violence necessary to implement them will alienate many people who maintain our security. That feels unlikely to play out well in the long run – and perhaps not even in the short run. Our adversaries are opportunistic. They will try to take advantage of internal strife. I hope he goes for #1 and #4. He’ll trash our country just like he has every other one of his ventures, but going for #1 and #4 would leave us in the least worst position when (if?) people get serious about climbing out of the crater. (Prediction: He’ll go for 1-3 and think he can coerce 4. It won’t work and we’ll end up with 2 & 3.)
That’s hope and speculation more than observation but it’s part of how I’m trying to orient myself.
Rep. Raskin’s statement strikes the appropriate balance between self-defense and consideration for the lives of by-standers:
“Israel has the indisputable right under international law to engage in military self-defense against this explosion of mass terrorist violence. It may act to stop and repel the violence, completely secure its borders and people, and disarm and neutralize Hamas…
A just war undertaken in self-defense must be prosecuted justly, according to international and humanitarian law, the central purpose of which is the protection of civilian life from military violence…
The ultimate legitimacy of even the most just war depends not only on the original righteousness of its cause but on the legality of its prosecution and the military’s attention to the rights and lives of innocent civilians. The defense of innocent civilians on all sides is not an obstructive legal doctrine or battlefield annoyance but the entire purpose of a just war against an enemy that has set itself against humanity. Contempt for civilian life is the hallmark of terrorist regimes and actors, not liberal democracies.
“Parochial isolationism requires fantasy, and it’s deadly for others.”
– Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon
Is it just me or do Millennials and Gen Z have much less interest in foreign policy than Gen X (my generation) had at their age? That’s a real question not a rhetorical one. My memory is that Gen X was fairly engaged with the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, US involvement in Central America. The USSR seemed like an existential threat. We paid attention. Gen Z was maybe a bit young at the time, but I don’t perceive much engagement from Millennials with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Not many of any age were engaged unless they were there or had friends or family who were. Were Millennials any different than our population as a whole?) Neither demographic seems particularly engaged on tensions with China or the war in Ukraine. Am I off base?
Excerpting and adapting some text from an opinion piece in the Washington Post:
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan reflects a sound realignment of our national interest. It puts us on better footing to deal with the new challenges of the 21st century and clarify to allies and adversaries what we are and are not willing to expend resources on. Ending the long and futile war in Afghanistan will allow us to focus more attention on bigger priorities.
Foreign policy pro tip: Ultimatums to capitulate don’t work. (Carrot + stick >> stick.)
By his own admission, President “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars” made the same mistake in Libya that President “Mission Accomplished” made in Iraq. It’s almost as if that Best and the Brightest thing doesn’t always work out.
Obama’s admission that his failure to plan for a post-reconstruction Libya was his greatest mistake—and his concomitant refusal to say that the intervention was a mistake—makes me wonder how many times a government gets to make the same “mistake” before we get to say that the mistake is no mistake but how the policy works.
I mean when you have a former University of Chicago Law School professor/former Harvard Law Review editor doing the exact same thing that his alleged ignoramus of a predecessor did in Iraq, when you see that the failure to plan for a post-intervention reconstruction is not a contingency but a bipartisan practice, don’t you start wondering about the ideology of intervention itself?