agreed. The irony is that the Republicans are writing this as if Biden is Hitler and our imperial aspirations are destroying cultures around the world and making it unfair to China.
They don't know what they want, but they sure as hell don't want Biden getting credit for anything good, so they bring out the pretzel machine.
The other comment I made... Biden is going to be playing the Marjorie Taylor Greene speech on his own ads for the 24 election. She's so catastrophically stupid, she had no idea how all of the things she was saying might actually be viewed by most Americans as good things. She's a national embarrassment...regardless of the party/people you support.
It's unfortunate that it's now down to (mostly) conservatives to question imperialism and militarism. It's still a bipartisan support project. See defense budgets and continued 'nation building'.
Some of that is merely partisan dynamics. They go high/right, we go low/left, and vice versa.
It's about half of the story. The US wants to remain the sole superpower and preserve 'primacy'. And that has implications.
agreed. The irony is that the Republicans are writing this as if Biden is Hitler and our imperial aspirations are destroying cultures around the world and making it unfair to China.
They don't know what they want, but they sure as hell don't want Biden getting credit for anything good, so they bring out the pretzel machine.
The other comment I made... Biden is going to be playing the Marjorie Taylor Greene speech on his own ads for the 24 election. She's so catastrophically stupid, she had no idea how all of the things she was saying might actually be viewed by most Americans as good things. She's a national embarrassment...regardless of the party/people you support.
So what's not clear is what would the writers prefer. OK, guilty as charged...the US wants to be a superpower. Are the conservatives suggesting that's a bad idea? That having allies to possibly address China's global plan is a bad thing? Is part of making America great again losing influence and security everywhere else? (...)
Amidst the dross that clutters the New York Times op-ed page on most days, glimmers of enlightenment occasionally appear. A recent guest column by Grey Anderson and (...)
So what's not clear is what would the writers prefer. OK, guilty as charged...the US wants to be a superpower. Are the conservatives suggesting that's a bad idea? That having allies to possibly address China's global plan is a bad thing? Is part of making America great again losing influence and security everywhere else?
If they aren't careful, they are going to make Biden into one of the great statesmen of the 21st century. Hell, you've got MTG out there screaming that he's focused on jobs, the middle class, education, middle america, healthcare and workers. He's doing infrastructure and fighting global warming!!!! Damn Him!
Besides not paying taxes and letting companies do whatever they want, the Republicans seem to support having no government and surrendering everything that created the country they occupy. "The great revival of the American Empire". Unless you're one of them "woke" types, that sounds pretty good.
Amidst the dross that clutters the New York Times op-ed page on most days, glimmers of enlightenment occasionally appear. A recent guest column by Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney offers a case in point.
âNATO Isnât What It Says It Is,â declares the headline. Contrary to the claims of its architects and defenders, Anderson and Meaney argue persuasively that the central purpose of the alliance from its founding was not to deter aggression from the East and certainly not to promote democracy, but to âbind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order.â In return for Cold War-era security guarantees, Americaâs European allies offered deference and concessions on issues like trade and monetary policy. âIn that mission,â they write, NATO âhas proved remarkably successful.â A plot of real estate especially valued by members of the American elite, Europe thereby became the centerpiece of the postwar American imperium.
The end of the Cold War called these arrangements into question. Desperate to preserve NATOâs viability, proponents claimed that the alliance needed to go âout of area or out of business.â NATO embraced an activist posture, leading to reckless state building interventions in Libya and Afghanistan. The results were not favorable. Acceding to U.S. pressure to venture out of area proved to be costly and served chiefly to undermine NATOâs credibility as a militarily capable enterprise.
Enter Vladimir Putin to save the day. Just as Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine provided the U.S. with an excuse to forget its own post-9/11 military failures, so too it has enabled NATO to once more constitute itself as the chief instrument for defending the Westâand, crucially, to do so without actually exacting a blood sacrifice from either Americans or Europeans.
In this context, the actual fate of Ukraine itself figures as something of an afterthought. The real issue centers on reviving damaged aspirations of American global primacy. With something like unanimity, the U.S. national security establishment is devoted to the proposition that the United States must remain the worldâs sole superpower, even if this requires ignoring a vast accumulation of contrary evidence suggesting the emergence of a multipolar order. On that score, Putinâs recklessness came as an impeccably timed gift. (...)
You never refer to a rules-based order without ironic quotes. Is that because you dismiss the concept; i.e. you think a rules-based order s a bad idea, or something else?
I think internationalism is a good idea when approached in a genuine manner.
Lol. You're trying to trick me. I'm not panicked. It's not my thing. I'm just bored. I'm more the type to ease into the discomforts of straight line futility in the shape of the murder merry-go-round. I was a '70s soldier in Europe. Sure, it was a different time and situation, or was it? I learned about the warm blanket of justification in the cold war. After all, a little hot blood goes a long way. Ask any low ranking battlefield veteran who ever stared into the eyes of death. Redundancy is all the rage these days. Witness the advancing knowledge of experience. I'm also a realist in the form of an idealist. I know we're always moving in the wrong direction and I can accept the reasons even if I can't accept the rationale. I resolve to do better next time.
The US and its faux ârules-based orderâ
A recent UN meeting about the Iran nuclear deal showed how Washington doesnât live up to the standards itâs constantly preaching.
You never refer to a rules-based order without ironic quotes. Is that because you dismiss the concept; i.e. you think a rules-based order s a bad idea, or something else?
The US and its faux ârules-based orderâ
A recent UN meeting about the Iran nuclear deal showed how Washington doesnât live up to the standards itâs constantly preaching.
The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue. The Wall Street Journal reports that the âChinese spyâ balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February 2023 did not in fact transmit pictures or anything else to China. White House economists have been trying to excuse persistent U.S. inflation saying it is a global problem and inflation is worse elsewhere in the world. Chinaâs inflation rate is 0.7 percent year-on-year. Financial media outlets stress how Chinaâs GDP growth rate is lower than it used to be. China now estimates that its 2023 GDP growth will be 5 to 5.5 percent. Estimates for the U.S. GDP growth rate in 2023, meanwhile, vacillate around 1 to 2 percent.
China-bashing has intensified into denial and self-delusionâit is akin to pretending that the United States did not lose wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more. The BRICS coalition (China and its allies) now has a significantly larger global economic footprint (higher total GDP) than the G7 (the United States and its allies). China is outgrowing the rest of the world in research and development expenditures. The American empire (like its foundation, American capitalism) is not the dominating global force it once was right after World War II. The empire and the economy have shrunk in size, power, and influence considerably since then. And they continue to do so. Putting that genie back into the bottle is a battle against history that the United States is not likely to win.
Denial and self-delusion about the changing world economy have led to major strategic mistakes. United States leaders predicted before and shortly after February 2022âwhen the Ukraine war beganâfor example, that Russiaâs economy would crash from the effects of the âgreatest of all sanctions,â led by the United States. Some U.S. leaders still believe that the crash will take place (publicly, if not privately) despite there being no such indication. Such predictions badly miscalculated the economic strength and potential of Russiaâs allies in the BRICS. Led by China and India, the BRICS nations responded to Russiaâs need for buyers of its oil and gas. The United States made its European allies cut off purchasing Russian oil and gas as part of the sanctions war against the Kremlin over Ukraine. However, U.S. pressure tactics used on China, India, and many other nations (inside and outside BRICS) to likewise stop buying Russian exports failed. They not only purchased oil and gas from Russia but then also reexported some of it to European nations. World power configurations had followed the changes in the world economy at the expense of the U.S. position.
War games with allies, threats from U.S. officials, and U.S. warships off Chinaâs coast may delude some to imagine that these moves intimidate China. The reality is that the military disparity between China and the United States is smaller now than it has ever been in modern Chinaâs history. Chinaâs military alliances are the strongest they have ever been. Intimidation that did not work from the time of the Korean War and since then, will certainly not be effective now. Former President Donald Trumpâs tariff and trade wars were aimed, U.S. officials said, to persuade China to change its âauthoritarianâ economic system. If so, that aim was not achieved. The United States simply lacks the power to force the matter.
American polls suggest that media outlets have been successful in a) portraying Chinaâs advances economically and technologically as a threat, and b) using that threat to lobby against regulations of U.S. high-tech industries. Of course, business opposition to government regulation predates Chinaâs emergence. However, encouraging hostility toward China provides convenient additional cover for all sorts of business interests. Chinaâs technological challenge flows from and depends upon a massive educational effort based on training far more STEM scientists than the United States does. Yet, U.S. business does not support paying taxes to fund education equivalently. The reporting by the media on this issue rarely covers that obvious contradiction and politicians mostly avoid it as dangerous to their electoral prospects. (...)
President Joe Biden on Monday quietly nominated Elliott Abrams to serve on a bipartisan diplomacy commission, a move that human rights advocates condemned as outrageous given the longtime Republican officialâs past as a defender of Latin American death squads and cheerleader for murderous U.S. foreign policy interventions. (...)
