Emergency personnel work at the site where an apartment block was heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro, Ukraine on January 15, 2023. (REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne)
What makes no sense? The denial of aid to Ukraine, of course. Recently I listened to an interview of Ryan Zinke (R, Montana) regarding the four bills that were introduced by Speaker Mike Johnson to provide aid to Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and our defense industrial base. Zinke’s skepticism about supporting Ukraine is, to put it mildly, incoherent. Why single out Ukraine? It’s bonkers.
Ryan Zinke (R, Montana)
A person can be forgiven for concluding that a good chunk of the Republican caucus is scared, maybe petrified, of the screeching minority in the part of the party most infected with Trump Personality Disorder (TPD), people like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) and Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky). They threaten to oust Johnson for simply putting Ukraine aid on the floor for a debate and a vote. Shrill, fire-breathing fanatics have outsized influence in a paper-thin Republican majority in the House, ironically a consequence of Trump’s ludicrous 2022 endorsements (he would like to shift blame to abortion).
What is TPD? These are people who, like Trump, confuse theatrics for common sense. It’s a form of political personality that treats stridency, bluntness, and coarseness as the virtues of a statesman.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia)
But why the hostility to Ukraine? Zinke provided the usual humdrum about needing to secure our borders, our depleted munition stockpiles, and Ukraine corruption. Yet, the first two excuses are ridiculous. Money and supplies going to Israel and Taiwan, which he supports, also steer resources away from our border and weapons inventories. As for corruption, is Ukraine any more corrupt than, say, Chicago, our teacher unions, any of our unions, defense contractors, our litany of eco-industries with both hands in the public purse, et al?
The corruption angle is a ruse to hide an affection for Putin by loud-mouthed zealots who’d never win the spelling bee. It’s all tied up in the Russia hoax melodrama of 2015 to 2019. The left scapegoated Hillary’s 2016 loss on Russia, so the dimwitted Trump enthusiasts quickly discovered their inner Putin. “They’re against him, so we must be for him” is the dictum. The door was thus opened to a love for authoritarian public cleanliness, physicality in political persona, Potemkin visits by Tucker Carlson, and the balderdash of Candace Owens’s rantings — and a willingness to leave Ukraine dangling.
A Ukraine flag on a Trumpkin’s house became as incongruous as the tortoise besting Usain Bolt in the 100 meters.
Ditto for the thought process in the donkey party’s embrace of Ukraine-love. Their own “for ‘em/against ‘em” dialectic led them to replace their LGBTQ+ rainbow flag with Ukraine’s. Russia gave us Trump, in their disturbed thinking, so let’s inflict Ukraine on the Russians. That’ll teach ‘em. It’s, frankly, astounding to watch them after they spent the later years of the Cold War siding with the Russians.
Where’s all that stuff about partisanship ending at the water’s edge in foreign affairs? Hogwash.
Is the MTG caucus aware of the new Axis? It’s not hyperbole to notice the similarities between Germany/Italy/Japan circa 1939 and Russia/Iran/China circa 2024. There are more 1939 similarities in this new triumvirate of evil than during the Cold War (the bipolar U.S. v. Soviet Russia), including a rehash of “American First” isolationism – another Trump legacy. They might concede Iran to a lesser extent, but their cyclopic monovision really only sees China. Thus, as in der Fuhrer gobbling up the Rhineland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, they are willing to return Europe to a battlefield, just eighty years later. Their myopia, alongside the rank pusillanimity in other parts of the Republican caucus, is a cloning of a combination of Britian’s Neville Chamberlain and U.S.’s own Charles Lindbergh throughout the party. Is anyone noticing that we’ve been down this road before?
German soldiers marching into the Czech “Sudetenland” in 1938
Pass the Ukraine bill, and damn The Squad, the TPD Republicans, and the cowardly in GOP ranks.
The Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” is in my view a noble sentiment. America is a dispirited nation today. In some ways we have become a laughingstock on the international stage (Remember Kabul?). Our navy has fallen under 300 ships which means that a focus on saving Israel effectively could be an abandonment of Taiwan. Our defense industrial base is so emaciated that it can hardly support our peacetime military, let alone two stalwart allies like Ukraine and Israel willing to bleed in defense of the West. We eviscerate ourselves in masochistic eco self-flagellation and race/gender Marxism. This, for me, should be the impetus for a real campaign to Make America Great Again.
But inside that cluster of elements surrounding Trump comes a special definition for Great. “Great”, for them, is tantamount to isolationism: diplomatically, militarily, and economically. America for these folks becomes a better place when we abandon the world under the guise of our domestic problems. This won’t end well. MAGA has made itself into a funeral dirge for America.
Michael Ramirez is my go-to cartoonist for he captures our current moment so well. Ramirez harkens back to the conservatism of Reagan, Thatcher, Buckley, Goldwater, and back to a time when we had a 600-ship navy, and not to the Trump cult of personality with its infatuation for isolationism.
In the cartoon, Ramirez reminds us of the bloody future awaiting us when we let despots run wild on the continent of Europe. Trumpkins are oblivious. Dickens’s specter of Christmas Yet to Come stands before us.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is back in the news with the movie “Oppenheimer” hitting screens across the country. As a movie, I give it “thumbs up”. It was well-scripted, acted, and moved at a captivating pace. Hats off to Christopher Nolan.
As history, I have my doubts.
Oppenheimer’s place in the period before, during, and after World War II is a much more contentious topic and should be. Was he a man of dubious loyalty, maybe even going so far as to engage in espionage? More interestingly, could his philosophical sympathies cloud his judgment in managing Los Alamos? These questions cannot be answered in a movie. Sympathy for the man abounds, possibly richly deserved, but some aspects of the real story are missing. One thing is glaringly clear: nothing, absolutely nothing was mentioned, or in any way referenced, of the Venona project and its WWII decrypts of Soviet communications from the US to Moscow, or the confirmatory information gleaned from the briefly opened Soviet archives after the downfall of the Soviet regime in 1991.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
PBS added to the Oppenheimer lore with a recent American Experience documentary, “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, with the same blank spots as the movie. Number one, the “trial” wasn’t a trial. It was a panel to determine whether to pull Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Step back one moment from the Hollywood-made aura about the man, however, and look at the facts. Fact number one, no evidence has come to light of Oppenheimer’s involvement in espionage. So, as a matter of law and logic, the claim of alleged treason is simply a suspicion at best. On the other hand, the raw insights gleaned from Venona and Soviet archives presents a more complicated picture.
For a clearer assessment of the period, PBS ironically came to the rescue some years back with Nova’s “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies” which was primarily based on the historical work of John Haynes and Harvey Klehr (watch it below). The documentary and the book, “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, point to serious Soviet penetration of the US government and the Manhattan Project. The movie mentions the espionage of Klaus Fuchs, but the reality is that the illicit activity didn’t end there.
Arlington Hall, Va., where the decrypting took place.
Americans acting as Soviet agents were littered throughout Roosevelt’s administration. Lauchlin Currie, FDR’s chief economic adviser, Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Alger Hiss at the State Department, and a smattering of others in intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies were identified in Venona decrypts and later confirmed in Soviet archives as sources of America’s most important secrets. Some 300 Soviet cover names were identified in the decrypts with only about 100 attached to specific individuals. One of the unidentified was “Quantum”, and he was clearly somebody very, very important at Los Alamos.
The movie to its credit mentioned Klaus Fuchs, but there was more at Los Alamos. One such person was Theodore Hall and his friend and Harvard confidant, Saville Sax. Fuchs and Hall, independent of each other, provided sketches and descriptions to the Soviets of the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki. Shortly after the successful Trinity test in July 1945, the Soviets and the head of their nuclear effort, Igor Kurchatov, had in their hands what we had achieved and how. Possibly this explains Stalin’s nonchalance when informed by Truman of this “super weapon” at Potsdam.
Lauchlin CurrieTheordore Hall
For me, the media productions unwittingly say more about the cultural milieu in our academic communities at that time as well as today. Already left leaning, the onset of the Depression confirmed Marx’s critique of capitalism for many academics, just like today’s Great neo-Marxist Awakening on our campuses. Is it all that surprising that Oppenheimer, like many others, was swimming with the subcultural current?
Who was “Quantum” and what role did Oppenheimer’s well-documented interaction with known communists and involvement in communist front activities have on his standing as a possible security risk? Suspicions were heightened, especially after the Venona decrypts were making the rounds through federal authorities.
Yet, until informed otherwise, sympathies doth not necessarily make a traitor. Oppenheimer was a man constantly torn between his deep-seated beliefs and his work. It was probably true for many at Los Alamos. Some let their sympathies get the better of them. Fuchs was captured at Heathrow airport trying to escape. Ted Hall escaped prosecution most likely due to the difficulty of using the decrypts in court and the reluctance of US authorities to expose our decrypting activities. Many others were fingered but avoided the bar of justice for the same reason.
It’s a story that at the very least would add greater depth to the movie, not only making a good movie but also better history.
Please watch “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies”. You’ll find it interesting in light of the movie.
It was said of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the 1930’s that he was naïve, that he really didn’t comprehend what he was up against in Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler. A career in business, consensual government, Parliamentary debate, and compromise among political actors and parties didn’t prepare him for dealing with the time’s new brutal, totalitarian utopians like Hitler – more street thug, but with a vision, than anything. Mistaking the chancellor for opposition mp’s in the House of Commons led to appeasement and a goon’s growing appetite for more in Czechoslovakia, Poland, lebensraum, and six years of the bloodiest war in history.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving the piece of paper with Hitler’s signature announcing “peace in our time” after his arrival at the airport in London in 1938.
Chamberlain was honest but naïve. In contrast, Sen. Josh Hawley’s Russian appeasement is grounded in reasoning so confusing and disjointed that a person can be excused for questioning his sanity or drawing the conclusion that it’s pure demagoguery. In sum, it’s a thought process that might sell in a schoolyard to people who still believe in the Easter bunny.
Hawley is following in the footsteps of John Kerry, erstwhile Democratic candidate for president in 2004. In a 2004 March debate (see below), Kerry declared, “[I] actually did vote for the $87 billion [$87 billion Iraq War appropriation] before I voted against it.” Kerry was sending reassurances to the dominant left wing of the Democratic Party. Here’s Hawley expressing his own flip-flop in support for Ukraine (see below):
February 24, 2022 – “Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and invasion of its territory must be met with strong American resolve.”
February 24, 2023 – “I would just say to Republicans: You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.” Adding, “It’s time to say to the Europeans: No more welfare for Europeans.” Shortly before these comments, he said more succinctly, “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now.”
John Kerry, Democrat presidential nominee in 2004.
What to make of that Hawley hash? One year passes and he’s ready to act like the Democrat-led Congress of 1973 when they approved a cut-off of funds for military operations in Indochina (see below). It could simply be the pandering demagogue that resides in many a politician’s soul. He’s certainly got his nose in the air and is picking up the scent of the reinvigorated isolationist right.
It doesn’t make any more sense after dissecting his meandering rationalizations. We can’t support Ukraine and address a train derailment? What? Are we Guatemala? This is a policy pronouncement groping for a justification.
The thought-funk doesn’t get any clearer as he bounces from complaints about Europeans not doing more, to amazingly suggesting that the Ukrainian success means . . . end the support. Got it? It doesn’t make any more sense to me either. Do I need to say it? Ukraine’s successes can be greatly attributed to our willingness to keep them in the field with the weapons and munitions to grind down the Kremlin boss’s Wehrmacht (see below for an excellent piece on the Russian losses and failures), and all the while sending a signal to Xi that taking Taiwan won’t be made easier by the influence of the trembling knees of appeasers like Josh Hawley.
Destroyed Russian tanks and vehicles piled in Ukraine.
Let’s face it, the posture may be more of the schoolyard at work: Biden’s for it so we must be against it. To be fair, I find the Left’s totemistic virtue-signaling with the Ukrainian flag flying from dorm windows, like the Viet Cong flag of yesteryear, chintzily exhibitionistic. Still, I don’t care how they get there, or how they express it, so long as they continue to support sticking a thumb in the eye of one of Xi Jinping’s allies.
It’s stunning to find the Right more like Chamberlain or Code Pink than Theodore Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. This may come as news to the isolationistic right, but this isn’t 1814 when it took three weeks for the letter announcing the end of the War of 1812 to reach New Orleans after the battle had been fought. Oceans no longer insulate us from the world’s travails, especially if they’re patrolled by Putin’s and the PLA’s navies or leaped by tribesmen and disgruntled urban jihadis who decide to express their hate by seizing airliners. ICBM’s, hypersonics, jet aircraft, prosperous economies, super cargo ships, the space domain, satellites, trade, and modern communications should remind anyone that the security value of oceans has long been downgraded.
Hypersonic flight path compared to a conventional missile over an ocean.
Like it or not, the world is interconnected, and so are human endeavors. Fecklessness in international relations isn’t a virtue. Appeasement toward Russia diminishes the value of any bellicosity toward the CCP. Deterrence becomes a dead word. The “pivot” to Asia will be imperiled, not enhanced, by a retreat in Ukraine.
The Roman general Vegetius was famous for writing, “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” – if you want peace, prepare for war. I don’t know where appeasement fits into the equation.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Hawley’s 2022 stance on Ukraine was uncovered in a Tweet by the reporter John McCormack on Feb. 24, 2022 at https://twitter.com/McCormackJohn/status/1496878265138806784
* John Kerry’s Iraq War flip-flop can be found here: “Kerry discusses $87 billion comment”, CNN, 9/30/2004, at https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/30/kerry.comment/
* “Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/?utm_source=recirc-&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* US congressional actions to restrict and prohibit military actions in Indochina can be found here: “Congressional Restrictions on U.S. Military Operations in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, and Kosovo: Funding and Non-Funding Approaches”, Congressional Research Service, 1/16/2007, at https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/RL33803.pdf
* Excellent piece on Russia’s losses and failures in the Ukraine War: “Russia’s Winter Offensive Is Criminally Incompetent”, Mark Antonio Wright, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/russias-winter-offensive-is-criminally-incompetent/?utm_source=recirc-&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
In the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus of the first century AD, zealots were the fourth and final of the Jewish religious sects in the Roman province of Palestine of his time. Today, we know the word to mean firebrands. They are understood to be absolutely committed, blinded to alternative knowledge, and can be monomaniacal to such an extent that the restraints of compassion and reason are stunted.
Thousands of Trump supporters at a November 2020 Trump rally shortly after Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. (photo: USA Today)
Firebrands are frequently blinkered and susceptible to committing atrocities and stumbling into big blunders. A class of fanatic, newly enthused by the late 19th century’s initial and facile discoveries in the science of heredity, appeared as devotees of eugenics: breed a better human as you would a hunting dog. Enthusiasts were everywhere in the period from the US Supreme Court (Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”, Buck v. Bell, 1927) to Germany’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) of the 1920’s and 30’s (see below).
In 1940, the fate of the wife of the journalist and writer Joseph Roth, Friedl Reichler, would be swallowed in the mania for the pseudoscience. Suffering from schizophrenia, she was institutionalized, and there she was in an asylum waiting to be rounded up in the Nazi euthanasia campaign of that year. She and fellow patients were gathered, transported to a camp, stripped naked, and marched into a gas chamber.
Boys with Down Syndrome at Dachau who were to be euthanized (l); the graves of the victims of the Aktion T4 euthanasia campaign outside the Hadamar Institute, one of the killing centers.
What makes a person an active participant in abject brutality? Mark Twain may have gotten it right when he wrote:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
In my mind, it’s incomprehensible, but incomprehensibility is a common feature of our politics. A version has settled on the outskirts of the right in this moment. It has infected even normally sensible people. I admired Victor Davis Hanson until he exhibited signs of the disability. Since the case for the support of Ukraine is so strong, I’ve often wondered why he is a Ukraine skeptic till I listened to his podcast interview with Iddo Netanyahu, the brother of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (see below). Hanson and Iddo are simpatico on Ukraine.
Iddo and Hanson believe the war is unwinnable for Ukraine. So, they’re eager to advise cutting a deal. What kind of deal? They don’t say, nor how to get there without Putin’s concurrence. While they both reach the same conclusion, they probably unknowingly arrive at it from different angles. Iddo is an Israeli patriot with Israel’s precarious national security concerns in a very dangerous neighborhood at the forefront of his mind. Understandable. I would like to think that Hanson is an American patriot with an equal understanding of our unique responsibilities and interests as a global superpower. Last I checked, Israel isn’t part of NATO; we are, and should be. The interests of a superpower and a nation facing local existential threats often diverge because the circumstances of the two nations are so different. Hanson shows no sign of recognizing the distinction.
Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, February 2023Russian base outside Palmyra, Syria
The Russians in Syria to prop up Assad illustrate our divergent interests. Israel needs Russian acquiescence to strike Hezbollah targets in the country. Iddo’s desire not to say anything to threaten the delicate relationship would make him circumspect on Ukraine. The US isn’t shackled by the need to cater to Putin’s sensibilities and whims. In fact, we didn’t worry about it when a large force of Russian mercenaries and Syrian fighters assaulted a small American post in northern Syria in 2018 resulting in 200 Wagner Group Russians dead from American firepower. A superpower must behave differently from a regional power.
American special forces in Manbij, Syria, near the border with Turkey, February 2018. (photo: Mauricio Lima, The New York Times)
By circumstance, our stance on Ukraine needs to be different from Israel’s. Hanson doesn’t get it, and neither does some of the other unhinged elements on the right. Hugh Hewitt got a full blast of the fringe-right’s kookiness during his radio talk show earlier this week (see below). He may have filtered callers to concentrate on critics of his pro-Ukraine position. Many sounded awfully similar to Rush Limbaugh’s seminar callers, but from the right. Rush noticed that they would lie about their affiliations and rigidly recite from a uniform set of talking points. Hewitt’s callers were monotonous with some variation of the same bullet points in opposition to support for Ukraine: (1) we’re ignoring our problems; (2) we should be spending the money on ourselves; (3) we’re depleting our stock of munitions and weaponry; (4) we can’t afford it; (5) Biden is a bad man; (6) the war is made endless with our involvement; (7) we have no interest there; and (8) the Russians have nukes so we ought to be afraid.
One person or group doesn’t have to be orchestrating the callers. More feasibly, the monotony shows a slavish devotion to a narrow cast of sources. Suspect influencers include the self-styled “populists” on Fox News primetime, the Gaetz/Boebert/MTG wing of the Republican caucus, and a selected chorus of online sources feeding their biases.
Among the guiding lights on the right is Molly Hemingway, a guest on the same Hewitt episode and exhibiting no more coherence than the callers. Stock Hemingway complaints were our prolonging of the war (another WWI) and the exhaustion of our stockpile of weapons and munitions. Neither holds water. A hamstrung military industrial supply chain is a call to unshackle it, not an excuse to leave Ukraine dangling. Increasing our industrial capacity is something we have to do anyway if we are to follow Molly’s advice to take on the CCP.
Her fear of another WWI is actually a call for the appeasement of Putin since our only real leverage is with Ukraine. We can force them to the bargaining table because they are dependent on us. The idiosyncrasies of the Kremlin’s rule and the marketability of Putin’s fossil fuels diminish our clout on the boss. Besides, sanctions and near-uniform international condemnation did nothing to dissuade the invasion or prevent his inhuman conduct of the war.
Victims of Russian atrocities in body bags in Bucha, Ukraine, 2022
The loopy right is guilelessly borrowing the Left’s playbook from the Vietnam War era. At the time, peace, peace, peace, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate was the drumbeat without much thought of a balanced settlement or how to get there. Really, the Peace Movement just wanted us out of South Vietnam which left the South Vietnamese in the same situation as the shortsighted right would leave Ukraine. War-game it. Its practical effect is appeasement. When will we finally show signs of learning that the actual consequence of appeasing aggressive dictators is a shattering of deterrence for other blustery assailants on the world’s stage? The world becoming the equivalent of South Chicago will only increase Prozac sales.
All the other arguments are equally specious. We can’t afford something that is less than a rounding error in the bloating federal debt? We could spend it on ourselves, but on what, and with what effect? More money for the folks that gave us the War on Poverty and our inner-city war zones? Yes, we could spend it on other things, maybe even efficaciously, rather than give the Ukrainians the wherewithal to resist on the front lines in the battle against the Axis of Evil so we won’t have to in Poland or the Fulda Gap.
You know, we could do both – help distressed Americans and Ukraine – by actually showing some guts in reforming our bankrupting entitlements. Don’t talk of selective spending restraint while avoiding the big elephant in the room – entitlements! The talk is risible.
The Ukraine skeptics often complain of the lack of an “end game” in Ukraine. Really? Do they have one in their gung-ho pivot to confront the CCP? If it is to stop and corral the CCP, why wouldn’t that be good enough in regard to Putin? Putin being forced to withdraw from the Ukraine, with Putin in caged retirement at some dacha as icing on the cake, are indeed pleasant thoughts.
The incoherence is astounding, about as muddled as the thinking of the peaceniks in the revolving door between the 1960’s Anti-War and 1980’s Nuclear Freeze Movements. Move over Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and David Dellinger (of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), Trump barges in and co-opts the rhetoric. Trump has his nose in the air, like any demagogue, and gets a whiff of anti-Ukraine fever on the right as anti-South Vietnam dementia was all over the New Left of the 1960’s. “Warmongers” and “teetering on the brink of World War Three” could have just as easily dripped from the mouth of Abbie Hoffman in one of his rants on the Berkely campus as it did Trump on Tuesday (February 21, see below).
Abbie HoffmanSixties anti-war protest
Trump tries to not completely turn off his audience on the right by magically trying to square his circle of bombast. Out of the other side of his mouth he blurts “peace through strength”, not explaining how “strength” is not the language of a “warmonger”. He leaves us with the hollow “right kind of leadership” – meaning his – to lather over the discrepancy. His silver tongue will magically transform Putin into a monk. He, the Great Trump, will talk Putin into niceness. Doesn’t this sound a bit delusional?
Even more flummoxing to a sane person is an honest accounting of Trump’s past, which shows him to be a “warmonger” yesterday as he condemns the “warmonger” of today, all the while trumpeting the warmonger’s “peace through strength” line. Got that? It’s rhetorical hash to stake out an identity among an element of the party blinded by fury. To be blunt, the gambit is Trump’s usual performance art as politics.
The caterwauling will only embolden Putin and cut Ukraine off at the knees. Don’t ever complain about Biden’s Afghanistan debacle when you are prepared to create one in Ukraine.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Nazi euthanasia campaign: “Aktion T4, The Nazi Program That Slaughtered 300,000 Disabled People”, Richard Stockton, ATI, 6/3/2021, at https://allthatsinteresting.com/aktion-t4-program
* Victor Davis Hanson’s interview with Iddo Netanyahu: https://victorhanson.com/from-the-sea-of-galilee-iddo-netanyahu-on-israeli-politics/
* The unhinged right was on abundant display in High Hewitt’s show on Tuesday (2/21): https://hughhewitt.com/todays-podcast-325/
* Donald’s latest video comment on Ukraine from 2/21/23: “Trump: In My Next Term, The Warmongers, Failures, And Frauds In Our National Security Establishment Will Be Gone”, Tim Haines, Real Clear Politics, 2/21/23, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/02/21/trump_in_my_next_term_the_warmongers_failures_and_frauds_in_our_national_security_establishment_will_be_gone.html
I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast. I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country. But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine. It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right. Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress? Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine? It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations. It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.
Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.
The behavior boggles the mind. Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this. Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv. Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO. Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well. The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so. Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?” More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.
I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below). It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland. The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one. Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide. From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one. Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable? Once again, it boggles the mind.
Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.
Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing. The question then will be: who got worn down? One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.
Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons. That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them. But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done. Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin. Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps. Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960. Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights. Don’t you think that he knows this? Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?
But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics. A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump. A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter. Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky. Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them. Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.
Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.
Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge. See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe. Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.
Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.
So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene. VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.
VDH, I’ve got your complaints. Now, what do we do? If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe? Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by? Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.? It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem. It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.
It still comes down to one question: what do we do? Do nothing? If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes. I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan. Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.
Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words. If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield. Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that. Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out. Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.
Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).
Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi. The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime. Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine. It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.
My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess. Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world. That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.
RogerG
See and read more here:
* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE
* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html
* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/
Marjorie Taylor Greene at press conference announcing a privileged resolution to audit aid to Ukraine, Nov. 17, 2022.
For Immanuel Kant, the “crooked timber of humanity” is a universal. He wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Yes, we do have a flawed nature and philosophies and ideologies can’t cleanse us of it. We aren’t saved by diversity trainings or renewing our commitment to Trump’s “stop the steal” crusade. “Gender therapy” – medical interventions such as synthetic hormones and surgeries – to straighten us out is an invitation to disaster. Simpletons, kooks, and charlatans are legion throughout the political spectrum and even the professions, and though they might agree with us on many matters, that doesn’t turn them into founts of wisdom. A prime example on the right can be found in the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene. At times, she dispenses sheer nuttery. She isn’t the only one.
Occasionally, the nuttery awakens as a consequence of a certain issue. The Ukraine War comes to mind. For anyone in their right mind (as in sober seriousness), befuddlement is the proper response to calls for appeasement in the face of thuggery and butchery. What else would you call it but appeasement? Marjorie Taylor Greene is consumed with it.
There’s an element on the Right intent on reviving the America First Committee of 1940. Aid to Britain was in the crosshairs at that time. The Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry was as overjoyed as Putin’s Foreign Ministry kleptocrats must be at this latest edition. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with all the confidence of a half-witted zealot, and with her coterie of the like-minded in tow, announced a “privileged resolution” to place aid to Ukraine under a cloud of suspicion. This thing isn’t about a prudent audit of a government spending program. Who opposes that, along with one for all the other federal spending monstrosities that are bankrupting our children’s future? But this one targets the Ukraine.
I smell a rat. The biblical injunction, “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16 KJV), applies. These people have a track record of their illicit intentions. It goes far beyond prudence. She shares Trump’s weakness for Twitter bombast when she texted in March 2022, “We should not spend billions of American’s hard earned tax dollars on lethal aid to be given to possible Nazi militias that are torturing innocent people, especially children and women.” Additionally, “The US must demand Zelensky stop his military from torturing his own people.” Notice Putin’s “Nazi militias” propaganda line? This could have easily (and did) come out of his press spokesman. This gang isn’t a collection of original thinkers.
Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), that other blowhard, has been pounding the drum for not doing anything on the international stage till we solve all our problems, or so it seems. In February 2022 at CPAC, Gaetz thundered, “Why should Americans have to pay the costs for freedom elsewhere when our own leaders won’t stand up for our freedom here?” Gaetz is correct to lambast Biden and his administration for their derelictions and disastrous policies but to say that our country’s foreign policy is tied to getting everything right here at home before we can do anything abroad is utter folly.
Our nation’s vital interests and security are of greater importance than Gaetz’s or Greene’s policy peccadillos. Yet, here they are advancing the ludicrous. They have a train of telegenic fellow travelers in the Right’s media. Candice Owens is similarly loose in her logic, tongue, and keypad when she tweeted, “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.” In the wake of Putin’s claim that Russia created Ukraine, Owens in a fit of balderdash proclaimed, “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians…They speak Russian.” Whew, what do with that logic-chopping? Many people in the U.S. speak Spanish, but does that mean that Spain created the United States?
Candice Owens on her podcast show
As for the assertion that Russia created the Ukraine, it ignores one salient fact: Russia is an empire, a polyglot. Meaning, it’s a collection of separate peoples that have one thing in common: these regions came under Russian imperial rule over the course of centuries. So separate is Ukraine’s identity that Stalin tried to wipe it out in the 1930’s, going so far as to try to starve it to death in the Holodomor. Russian was imposed over the native Ukrainian language. Yes, Candice, the languages are different with divergent alphabets, “vocabulary, pronunciation of words, and so on [see below].” Language is a marker for so many other distinctions.
Candice, reliance on Putin as a scholarly source for an opinion is a junior-high level term paper mistake.
And, by the way, this discussion by us is superfluous since the Russians know it. Once given the chance, this polyglot empire flew apart with the collapse of the iron fist of the Soviet CCP. The Ukraine gained its independence along with Kazakhstan, etc. The Ukraine was so distinct that General Secretary Khrushchev drew its boundaries decades before. Agreed, he outbounded them a bit, but he obviously knew the Ukrainians to be a distinct enough people to recognize the fact with borders. Besides, the Politburo and the Soviet CCP agreed to the lines. It’s disingenuous for them to “speak with forked tongue” later and use a spurious argument to first lop off parts of the country and then invade and try to extinguish it. Poland was similarly imperiled in September 1939. Let’s face it, it’s a rhetorical gambit for empire-building thugs.
With every disclosure of Russian brutalities (see below), this troupe on the Right seems intent on shoving their foot further down their throats. It’s a cast of clowns. Is this element on the Right the appeasement caucus? Are they in the grip of fear of Russian nuclear weapons? If so, I can’t think of a stronger endorsement for every tyrant to get some for themselves. Where’s their argument to defend the rest of Asia from a nuclear Red China or the oil-rich Middle East from a jihadi-riddled and nuclear Iran? The fear of an aggressor hurting us is a poor basis for conducting foreign policy.
erhii Lahovskyi, 26, mourns over the body of his friend Ihor Lytvynenko, in Bucha, Ukraine, April 5, 2022. (Zohra Bensemra / Reuters)
Today’s America First dimwits have much in common with the 1980’s nuclear freeze movement. Back then, the anti-war movement of the abandonment of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia found another cause near and dear to their hearts in stopping Reagan’s effort to balance the Soviet Union’s intermediate missile threat to our western European allies. The placement of American intermediate missiles to counter the unopposed Soviet threat was declared by peaceniks to be provocative. Sound familiar? Greene earlier this year blamed our efforts to assist Ukraine for “Poking the bear”. You see, if only we hadn’t expanded NATO and recognized the alliance with military facilities amongst out allies, everything would have been hunky-dory with Putin. If only we had granted Putin a veto for NATO expansion, all would be goodness and light. It’s a version of the old blame-America-first tactic of the 60’s New Left. It took awhile but the brain-dead Left managed to find common ground with the brain-dead Right. Like seeks the company of like, brain-dead that is.
With cranks like these on the Right, we on the Right don’t need any enemies. The Left has The Squad to live down, and the Right has Marjorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz and company. Don’t expect the public to trust the Republicans with power with dunderheads like these becoming the face of the GOP. They just end up running interference for the socialistic Democrats.
* “Difference Between Russian and Ukrainian”, Ask Any Difference, at https://askanydifference.com/difference-between-russian-and-ukrainian/#:~:text=The%20main%20difference%20between%20Russian%20and%20Ukrainian%20is,their%20vocabulary%2C%20pronunciation%20of%20words%2C%20and%20so%20on.
Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent. I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right. There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”. Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America. It’s incoherent, but there it is. Bubble #1.
That’s not all. Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites. The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life. This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.
Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles. In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out. One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors. In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not. Sorry Tulsi and Tucker. One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders. Is this carte blanche for intervention? No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned. When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th. Weakness invites horrors.
Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth. A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light. As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity. The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.
Russian energy giant Gazprom
Working on the Nordstream 2 pipeline in December 2019, now halted due to Russia’s Ukraine invasion. (The times of London photo)
Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep. For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya. The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR. Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour. Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign. Done deal. Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass. After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.
In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps. And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves. But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades? I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country. Odd. It’s perplexing. Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?
Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined. Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR. Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.
Victims of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, waiting for burial.
No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail. The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance. Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Not even diplomacy works without it. That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit. The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety. Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind. State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out. Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.
The formula applies to us as well. To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it. The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits. Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too? Say goodbye to Taiwan. Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license. No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.
Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2. Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia. Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio. The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures. The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following. Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.
North Sea windmills
Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine. Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal. Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.
Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels. But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover. And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks. When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed). Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.
In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland. For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters. Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right. Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear. Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place. At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.
Late spring freeze in Europe, 2017. This scene is from Chisinau, Moldova. Try heating your home or getting to work with no nuclear power and Putin reducing your fossil fuel supply by a third to a half. Don’t expect much help from “sustainables”.
We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.
The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.
Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.
Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.
Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:
“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”
In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.
Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.
The normally sensible Brit Hume on Bret Baier’s Special Report on Wednesday (3/16/22) asked the salient question on Ukraine: What is our national interest in Ukraine? It’s the same question every government has to ask when facing an international dilemma such as this one. For Hume, his inflection and posture inferred skepticism about a major US national interest in support of Ukraine. Take a tour around much of the Fox News primetime lineup and you’ll get commentary heavily dowsed in doubt with some bordering on complete rejection of any. Are they right? No, a hundred times “No”.
In addressing the query, one factor corrupts the popular media that influences much public opinion. A competent answer rarely lends itself to cable show compression – i.e., soundbites. The setting favors the cynic and hampers proponents. It’s much easier for a detractor to ask the question and force proponents to contrive a response to fit 10 seconds. Is that how we want overriding issues to be treated? Hardly.
Any intelligent consideration of the national interest in Ukraine begs particular questions. What would Europe and the world be like after a Russian conquest of Ukraine? Would it be a friendlier world for the US? An additional and related question: What would Russia under a reenergized Putin be like after a Ukraine conquest? Is a cooperative, agreeable, and contented Putin a likelihood? Oh, what will the CCP be left to think?
We study history for its clues on human nature.
As such, one could be excused for having a dim view of our prospects in this return to a world of contending hyper-powers. History is not encouraging. It’s rhyming in the cadences of the 1930’s. Once again, we have revanchist powers in Europe and Asia, and they have the additional liability of having nuclear arsenals. Their actions should focus the mind in a sterner way than a border dispute between two small satraps. A bear leaves more evidence of its passage than a mouse. Watch for the bear, not the mouse.
Trundling to the way-back machine, fascist Germany and Italy weren’t satisfied with the Rhineland and Abyssinia. Japan wasn’t made sanguine with Manchuria. League of Nations protests and sanctions didn’t halt Imperial Japan’s behavior and the Munich appeasement of forcing Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland didn’t whet Hitler’s appetite. The West had dug itself into such a deep hole by 1939 that it took six years and 75-80 million deaths, 3% of the world’s population, to bring the malefactors to heel.
Signing ceremony for the Axis Powers Tripartite Pact, January 1940; seated at front left (left to right) are Japan’s Ambassador Saburō Kurusu (leaning forward), Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano and Germany’s Führer Adolf Hitler (slumping in his chair).Putin and Xi meet in June of 2018.
A new axis has taken shape reminding us of that old one. The 1930’s edition began in 1936 with treaties of cooperation among the serial aggressors and ended with the full-blown military Tripartite Pact in 1940. Acting in historical lockstep, Putin and Xi met on February 4 to announced a bipartite pact with world-hogging spheres of influence. The joint statement reads as follows:
“The new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation . . . . Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour [sic] revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”
They are angling for a resuscitated Soviet Empire for Putin and Xi’s rendition of Japan’s old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – “Asia for the Asians”, er CCP, so to speak.
And, simultaneously, as in that bygone era, we have a recurrence of an anti-war Right. We are quite familiar with the Left’s aversion for anything nationally muscular. They have a habitual zeal for opposition to the military and for the peddling of facile “peace” – of the better-red-than-dead variety – and the accompanying disparagement of any nation deserving of our sympathies. Such was evident on the 1930’s Right – Lindbergh’s America First Committee and leading congressional figures like Sen. Robert Taft (R, Ohio) – and increasingly appears to be true today. Scan the Right’s media offerings (Fox News primetime, Newsmax, and a host of other digital offerings) and you’ll see the smearing of Ukraine, fears of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of spilt American blood on foreign soil, and the hyperbole of a new World War III at every turn. At the end of the day, it’s a repackaged 1930’s playbook that calls for unilateral abandonment of a national interest if a foreign thug threatens.
The now-worn playbook shows in a diminished military capacity, both then and now. Today’s defense doctrine went from simultaneously fighting two wars to one. In order to fulfill the “pivot to Asia”, we had relegated ourselves to abandoning Afghanistan. Defense spending as a share of GDP gradually declined from 9% in the 1960s to under 4% today. We are doing our best to recreate the circumstances that led to Pearl Harbor. This time, we may not have the time to build up. As Congress begins the debate of a new draft law, the nukes had already left their silos and advanced divisions of the People’s Liberation Army have landed on the shores of Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands.
So, how will a disquisition like this one be shoehorned into a Laura Ingraham or Joy Reid segment? Hmmm.
Something lurks behind the paralyzing alarms of our celebrities on the Right (and maybe the Left). One thing might be the hankering for the type of international dealings of the sailing-ship era. It was a time when oceans blocked anyone but the most capable and determined assailant. The 21 miles of the English Channel’s Dover Strait proved to be insurmountable even for Napoleon at his height of power. Today, an airborne division can be dropped on Albany in a matter of hours; 30 minutes is the time from an ICBM launch from its Aleysk silo to Chicago (faster for sub-launched and hyper-sonics); WMD can come in a suitcase; and cyber invasions to bollix our grid are nearly instantaneous from Beijing keystroke to PG&E. Someone tell Tucker Carlson.
Russia’s new mach 9 Tsirkon hypersonic missile
Secondly, in a display of obeisance to simple-minded Trump-talk, they have a 1950’s template for America. It was a time when the U.S. was riding high, alone in the world, as Europe and much of Asia were in rubble. In a way, they are right to admire the time because those were the halcyon days before environmentalist triumphalism and the regnant belief that federal spending can cure deep-seated personal problems, alongside its attendant and economy-dragging trillion-dollar deficits. But, by clinging to Trump’s rhetorical apron strings, they take it much further in bashing a trade deficit that neither he nor they understand. In a clear example of foot-shooting, their targets include trading relationships with our allies and the ones that we’ll need to counter China’s latest edition of Asia for the Asians. It’s as if they chucked Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Statecraft for Dummies out the window and are winging it.
It won’t end well after the rampages and the torching of 12% of US GDP (US exports’ contribution to GDP). Gazing back into the history, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression share the same womb.
Mothballed US Navy ships in Suisun Bay, Ca.
The doom of repeating history, in Descartes famous words, looms large. Don’t expect expansionistic predators-with-nukes to be impressed by an economic and military retreat to fortress America. We will quickly learn that the world as a playground for powerful rogues will not be to our liking. We’ve seen it before, déjà vu all over again. Thus, we have a national interest in keeping Putin and the CCP at bay, if for no other reason than to avoid the accusation of flunking high school History. The sooner we discredit the anti-war Right and Left and its incipient isolationism, the sooner our national interest will come into focus.
Let’s hope at this momentous hour that we don’t shrug our shoulders and say under our breath, c’est la vie. We will live to regret it if we do.
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