The Donroe Doctrine — hilarious. Best thing that has happened to Canadian nationalism in a long time. Good wakeup call for Europe.
The Panama Canal nonsense will ultimately hurt US business interests throughout Latin America as did the recent unconditional support for ethnic cleansing terrorism and baby killing in the Gaza concentration camp. Perhaps it does not matter as long as the bipartisan view is that money falls from the skies.
The American Enterprise Institute has officially entered the competition for which establishment DC think tank can come up with the most tortured argument for increasing Americaâs already enormous Pentagon budget.
Its angle â presented in a new report written by Elaine McCusker and Fred "Iraq Surge" Kagan â is that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require over $800 billion in additional dollars for the Defense Department, whose budget is already poised to push past $1 trillion per year.
Before addressing the Ukraine conflict directly, itâs worth looking at the security outcomes of high Pentagon spending during this century. As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has found, the full costs of Americaâs post-9/11 wars exceed $8 trillion. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions have been driven from their homes, thousands of U.S. personnel have died in combat, and hundreds of thousands of vets have suffered physical or psychological injuries. And this huge cost in blood and treasure came in conflicts that not only failed to achieve their original objectives but actually left the target nations less stable and helped create conditions that made it easier for terrorist groups like ISIS to form.
Any call for ratcheting up Pentagon spending needs to reckon with this record of abject failure for a military first, âpeace through strengthâ foreign policy. The new AEI report fails to do so.
As for its central thesis â that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require a sharp upsurge in Pentagon spending â neither part of the argument holds up to scrutiny. (...)
trump wants to take a place with a population greater than California and a land area greater than the entire US and give them the senate clout of N. Dakota
he wants tariffs to keep manufacturing jobs out of Canada but also wants Canada to be part of the US so tariffs won't apply and the jobs could stay there
As the incoming Trump administration prepares to take office on January 20, 2025, a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy priorities and broader national strategy goals is already underway. Advocates of realism and restraint welcome Trumpâs emphasis on a foreign policy that prioritizes pragmatism and âpeace through strengthâ over ideological moralism, even while liberal internationalists fear the effects of âAmerica Firstâ policy on multilateral alliances.
Both sides recognize, however, a need for a prudent shift from crippling foreign policy misadventures and ideational stagnation to a bold U.S. foreign policy vision in all theaters of potential competition.
Among the constellation of apparent global security hotspots, three seemingly disparate locations â Taiwan, Greenland, and the Panama Canal â have emerged as serious contenders in the geopolitical realignment of interstate competition over resources, trade and shipping routes, and political-military dominance, becoming the recent focus of President-elect Trumpâs typically boisterous social media posts over the holidays.
All three, whilst geographically distant, do share a common denominator â China â a so-called âpacing challengeâ deemed most intent on dislodging Americaâs hegemony, supplanting its economic clout, and challenging its military primacy in an increasingly multipolar world. All represent tests for the kind of foreign policy Trump says he wants to pursue, while denying Chinese encroachments in key strategic areas. (...)
Part of the so-called Washington swamp is the opacity of the funding going to powerful think tanks that provide policymaking expertise to Capitol Hill, to White House staff, and to agencies, including the Pentagon and State Department. It is no secret that the think tanks that have an outsized influence on foreign policy and national security affairs receive grants from the government to conduct studies and research to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, these organizations get tons of funding from the military contractors who stand to benefit from those reports and research in support of American war policy.
Foreign governments, too, are plowing millions into think tanks in hopes to influence the direction of policy their way.
Not only do think tanks generate a lot of paper but their experts write op-eds, they testify before Congress, they are called upon by reporters and producers to give their take on policy and world events â like the wars Washington is currently funding with American money and weapons â all over the information landscape. In short, they help shape perception and manufacture consent. (...)
I asked a Mexican friend why I didn't see a lot of homeless people around like we have in the states. He gave me a puzzled look and said, why would we have homeless people? If you are hungry a Mexican will give you a burrito.
The rest of the world looks at us and just puzzles. It really doesn't have to be this way.
I asked a Mexican friend why I didn't see a lot of homeless people around like we have in the states. He gave me a puzzled look and said, why would we have homeless people? If you are hungry a Mexican will give you a burrito.
The rest of the world looks at us and just puzzles. It really doesn't have to be this way.
Contemporary neoconservatism is, in its guiding precepts and policy manifestations, a profoundly ahistorical ideology. It is a millenarian project that not just eschews but explicitly rejects much of the inheritance of pre-1991 American statecraft and many generations of accumulated civilizational wisdom from Thucydides to Kissinger in its bid to remake the world.
It stands as one of the enduring ironies of the post-Cold War era that this revolutionary and decidedly presentist creed has to shore up its legitimacy by continually resorting to that venerable fixture of World War II historicism, the 1938 Munich analogy. The premise is simple, and, for that reason, widely resonant: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in his âlust for peace,â made war inevitable by enabling Adolf Hitlerâs irredentist ambitions until they could no longer be contained by any means short of direct confrontation between the great powers.
Professor Andrew Bacevich brilliantly distilled the Munich analogyâs two constituent parts: âThe first truth is that evil is real. The second is that for evil to prevail requires only one thing: for those confronted by it to flinch from duty,â he wrote. âIn the 1930s, with the callow governments of Great Britain and France bent on appeasing Hitler and with an isolationist America studiously refusing to exert itself, evil had its way.â This is the school playground theory of international relations: failure to stand up to a bully at the earliest possible opportunity only serves to embolden their malignant behavior, setting the stage for a larger and more painful fight down the line.
The Cold War years saw a feverish universalization of the Munich analogy whereby every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, every peace deal is Munich 1938, and every territorial dispute is the Sudetenland being torn away from Czechoslovakia as the free world looks on with shoulders shrugged. This was the anxiety animating the spurious domino theory that precipitated U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam, but appeasement fever was kept in check by the realities of a bipolar Cold War competition that imposed significant constraints on what the U.S. could do to counteract its powerful, nuclear-armed Soviet rival.
These constraints were lifted virtually overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet bloc. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the end of the âVietnam syndrome,â or Americansâ healthy skepticism of war stemming from the disastrous decades-long intervention in Vietnam, following U.S. forcesâ crushing victory in the Gulf War. The George W. Bush administration gave itself infinite license to intervene anywhere against anyone, including preemptively against âimminent threats,â on the grounds that anything less is tantamount to appeasement. âIn the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war,â Bush said in 2003. âIn this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.â
Even as the threat landscape has shifted since 2003, neoconservatismâs epigoni have trotted out the Munich analogy to justify every subsequent military intervention in the Middle East. Where direct confrontation is too costly and risky, as with Russia and China, the historicists insist that anything short of a policy of total, unrelenting maximum pressure and isolation amounts to appeasement. (...)
