The Emperor's New Foreign Policy

Sorry about this piece of AI dreck, I saw it and couldn't resist it. I think the source has something to do with crypto, I won't link it.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Democratic President Harry S Truman attempted to buy Greenland in 1867? (Hint: Truman was born in 1884, and his presidency was between 1945 and 1952.)

The Fox Friend in the video—I believe it's Katie Pavlich, who used to blog at the truly demented Heritage website Townhall, and now hosts Fox Nation's "Luxury Hunting Lodges of America", is that a real thing? where they burnish their anti-elitist cred by worshiping people like Harlan Crow?—really says those words. Click the link and watch if you don't believe me. I think I know what happened: there's a moment, around 30 seconds in, where she casts her eyes down at the table, as if checking her notes, and my idea is that's what the notes say, just "1867" and "Harry Truman", maybe drawn from a quick scan of the Wikipedia article on "Proposals for the United States to Purchase Greenland". A brief look of panic crosses her face as she realizes what she's saying can't be right, but she soldiers on with a smile.

It's part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump Republican party, of course, to pretend there's nothing outlandish about Trump's suggestions, re-aired in his Tuesday press event, that the U.S ought to purchase Greenland, acquire Canada as a 51st state, reconquer the Canal Zone, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't know what all else. Look, folks, your Democrat Harry Truman did the same stuff, or some of it! It's not abnormal at all!

War Between the Orthodoxies

 

This tanky website

Zelensky's war on Orthodoxy continues, as a priest is apprehended during a service in Chernivtsi, far West Ukraine.

Are these "Western values"? pic.twitter.com/GSbVWQnJs1

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) March 24, 2023

(where by "tanky", I mean "person who sees Putin as the heir to Stalin and thinks that's a good thing" for the world proletarian revolution, even if thinking so involves trying to think that a good Marxist is obliged to give deference to the Russian Orthodox church because "Western values") is engaging in some especially vicious propaganda, obviously not as bad as the continuing claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis, but in the same family. I think I've touched on this before, but I need to go through it in some detail, because it's just too wrong to be borne.

Encore Presentation: Embedding

Now we're beginning to see, thanks to Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, that the awful decline in President Biden's approval numbers was caused neither by public indignation over inflation nor Fox News bogus preoccupation with the president's age, but mostly by our "liberal" media's insane rage over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I felt like re-upping this post from when it was going on, trying to puzzle out what the journos were so outraged over:

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

Embedding

 

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

Afghanistan Note

Blue Mosque, Mazar-e-Sharif, site of the grave of Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. Photo by Steve Evans, 2005, via Wikimedia Commons.

Do we want to talk about Afghanistan? Not really. Maybe just to acknowledge that it feels pretty bad, and propose an official apology of sorts, not just for destroying the country, but for our inexhaustible conviction that we were actually fixing it, like deluded Americans in a Graham Greene story, the same story as always.

I feel especially bad because I found myself, in the last few weeks, starting to sort of believe people getting interviewed on BBC World Service, Afghan and US officials, suggesting everything might be fine, there's an excellently trained and richly equipped Afghan army. Everything was not fine, as we've been hearing for a while now. most importantly in this huge 2019 work from the Washington Post: 

The Trumpy Doctrine

Illustration via The Week, May 2019.

So another Arab country just made "peace" ad maioram gloriam Trumpii with Israel—Morocco, which, needless to say, was not at war with Israel in the first place. On the contrary! As Wikipedia dryly notes,

While Morocco did not recognize Israel as a state, the relationship between the two was secretly maintained after the establishment of Israel in 1948. For many years, Hassan II had facilitated the secret relationship with Israel, and it was considered as instrumental in stabilizing Morocco and beating possible anti-royal threats within the country.^[1] The former secret relationship continues to play an important role in growing Israeli–Moroccan ties, despite the lack of formal relations. The Israeli passport is accepted entry to Morocco with a visa granted on arrival.^[2]

Uh, Mr. President, they seem to have plenty of peace already!

The benefit for Israel isn't, of course, less war, but, as in all these cases, decreased support for the people of the occupied Palestinian territories, in whose name Arab countries have been refusing to recognize Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967, and at this point, as Israel has really abandoned pretending to back a two-state resolution, de facto support for Israel's annexation of the territories.

Literary Corner: To Greenland's Icy Mountains

The Way It Should Work

by Donald J. Trump

It was the G8 for a long time,
and now it’s the G7.
I could certainly see it being the G8 again.
If someone would make that motion,
I would be disposed
to think about it favorably.

As you know, for most of the time
it was the G8 and it included Russia.
I guess President Obama—because Putin
outsmarted him—President Obama thought
it wasn’t good so he wanted Russia out,
but I think it’s much more appropriate
to have Russia in. A lot of the things
we talk about have to do with Russia.

President Obama didn’t want Russia in
because he got outsmarted.
Well, that’s not really the way it should work.

That "if someone would make that motion", another evocation of how little he feels himself being the president, being in power—the idea that these things are accomplished at meetings to which he's not invited (it doesn't occur to him he could "make that motion" himself), conducted more formally than the things he sits in on. But also raises a mystery: in our world, the Russian Federation was expelled by the G8 after the internationally illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, the most flagrant violation of territorial sovereignty since the Axis powers lost World War II, but in Trump's world it was—he "guesses"—because President Putin "outsmarted" President Obama. What?

I'll get back to the poem, but I'm really obsessed with his rage at Denmark for making fun of his plan to buy Greenland's 836,300 square miles:

For the Record: Who Knew?

Chinese exceptionalism: It's much simpler if they just own everything (via Wikipedia). 

Apparently the Emperor had no idea the Chinese military might build up islands in the South China Sea and use them for missile launch pads.

Mattis Accuses Beijing of ‘Intimidation and Coercion’ in South China Sea https://t.co/4ROkZv4LJf

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2018

What? You're wondering if Mattis is surprised? Or you're wondering whether you're surprised yourself? Or the question mark is a slip?

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2018

The Afghanistan speech

Kabul record shop, late 50s or early 60s, via Daily Star.

"On Afghanistan," writes Mr. Bret Stephens, "There's No Way Out." And he goes through everything, I mean everything, light footprint, big footprint, nation building, focus on terrorists, using Pakistan, using diplomacy, using a troop surge, nothing works. The best thing is the thing Trump came up with, he decides, which is the light footprint but with a little more heft, and a long-term, possibly unending, not getting out at all:

With relatively modest troop increases, we can provide the elected Afghan government with sufficient military support to reverse some of the Taliban’s recent gains and ensure that it cannot seize Afghan cities or control entire provinces. With relatively modest troop numbers, we can also try to keep U.S. casualties relatively low over time, avoiding the political race to the exits when combat fatalities rise.... Trump, incredibly, may have alighted on the best of a bad set of Afghan options.

It's magnificent that the single thing he picks out of Trump's speech is the thing Trump not only didn't say, but announced as a really important point that he wasn't going to say:

We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities.

I know everybody else says he wants to send 4,000 additional troops, but the speech doesn't say it, and specifically says he doesn't want anybody to know whether he does or not. And he does say lots of other stuff, about punishing our nuclear-armed Pakistani allies if they don't shape up, I think that was option 5, and rewarding India if they spend more money on Afghanistan's infrastructure, by not starting a trade war, I think, which is one of the options Stephens completely missed:

The Petersburg Candidate. I

Via PressProgress/Canada.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, joining the emerging Serious Conservative consensus on the Russian collusion question ("The 'Manchurian' President?"):

The whole Russia affair might, in other words, just be what it looks like when an inexperienced, incompetent and, yes, sordid presidential apparatus tries to pursue a different foreign policy agenda than its predecessors.

Nothing to see here, folks! Just some of that there rookie naïveté that's been going around, and sordidity of course. It's bound to look as if the Trump administration has sold itself to the pursuit of Putinian interests, because that's the way the incompetent and sordid always roll, but that doesn't mean they actually have.

It's just the same as when the poorly trained Bullwinkle pulls a bear out of his hat instead of a rabbit. You think he must have done it on purpose, but it's really just an accident brought on by his inexperience. And sordidness.

West of Eden: Green Zone

Tent in the background. Photo by Karim Kadim/AP via Salt Lake Tribune.

Meanwhile, as Tom Friedman was moping in Sulaimaniya waiting for the lithium to kick in, something was, believe it or not, happening in Baghdad, though generally unreported as far as Dr. Google noticed by my usual sources at the New York Times and the Guardian and NPR (I heard about it on BBC), getting going in a big way last Friday, when

Thousands of supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held what they billed as a “joint” Sunni-Shi'ite prayer service Friday outside the main entrances to the government-controlled “Green Zone.”  Sadr has given Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a Saturday deadline to carry out governmental “reform” and install a new Cabinet composed of technocrats instead of political loyalists. (Voice of America)

Yes, it's the Orson Welles–resembling "renegade cleric", in the Homeric (Simpson?) epithet beloved of the US press of ten or twelve years ago, and the mass Sunni-Shi'a cooperation without which there will be no change for the better in Iraq (as I've been saying for a while now), in a huge effort to force the Abadi government to purge itself. When Abadi failed to meet his deadline on Saturday, Muqtada made his way into the Green Zone, with the assistance of the security forces, to begin a sit-in, ensconced in a tent:

Ghibelline, why can't you be true?

Combat between Guelfs and Ghibellines in 14th-century Bologna. Wikipedia.

Ross Douthat, normally a reliable Guelf (we don't call him Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, for nothing), takes out a Ghibellinish stance for a test drive this morning, in favor of Empire and in opposition not so much to the liberal Papacy as to modernism, democracy, self-determination, and the Suicide of Britain, by which he means the possible devolution of the UK into its component English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Manx and Cornish and so on nations, which hasn't actually happened but, you know, might some time:

White House Fool Report: The Long Day Whines

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world...
(J.W.M Turner illustrating Tennyson's "Ulysses", image via gleamsthatuntravelledworld.)

I made up the headline (invoking Anthony Burgess) for Fox and the Breitbartlets and so on, but they frankly seem a little too stunned by the events in Panama City for any real whining. NRO literally has nothing! I think it's going to take them a few days to rev up.

For my part I was very glad, obviously, to see Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro having an amicable chat, but the biggest thing for me was the strange little cuckoo's egg in the words Obama addressed to the Civil Society Forum in Panama City, as he was defending their freedom of speech and assembly and explaining that the US would continue to have their back:

A talent to bemuse

Robert Ryan in God's Little Acre (1958).

Today's David Brooks is one of a kind of mini-series in which he pokes about in the backyard for bones borrowed from the opinionist Kevin Lewis of the Boston Globe.

Lewis performs an odd but very valuable little public service in the form of a daily blog at the National Interest where he runs, without comment, the author-written abstracts of social science papers recently published or accepted for publication.

David Brooks is a subscriber, and I guess regularly picks up on particular abstracts and copies them into his Rainy Day Social Science Prompts file, and then every once in a while (December 2010, March 2011, December 2012, and today) assembles [jump]

Let them eat policemen

Shorter David Brooks, "The Republic of Fear", New York Times, March 25 2014:

Several horrifying anecdotes prove that the entire developing world is locked in the grip of fear because the United States spends more money on eradicating poverty than on creating better justice systems in these unhappy countries. Startlingly, it seems that instead of having too much government, they don't have enough. Forget being the world's policeman, we need to be the world's personal organizer.

Kirsten Dunst in the 2006 film by Sophie Coppola.

The message Brooks is cribbing today is from a quite new book by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros, The Locust Effect, whose authors and publisher will no doubt be too [jump]