Realism

 

Bucha, Ukraine, photo by AP via Arab News.

When I said I'd "loudly opposed" every US war since before Michael Tracey was born, I wasn't being totally honest, and I think I need to revise that a little: I didn't make as much noise over Grenada or Panama as I probably should have, because I expected them to end quickly and didn't think a lot of people would get hurt, in which opinion I was basically right, though of course every death is a bad thing (and estimates of Panamanian civilians killed run anywhere from 300 to 3,000, which would make it a lot worse than the way I remembered it), and I really didn't oppose the first Gulf War at all, not properly speaking.

Clausewitz was exactly wrong, as I've said before: politics is war continued by other means, not the other way around. And when the situation comes back down to war, that's a regression—a failure of politics; at least one of the parties blundered, and it shouldn't have happened. The Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations made a series of errors in encouraging and abetting Iraq's long and disastrous war on Iran, which left Iraq in a dire economic situation, hugely indebted to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, even as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were working with the US to keep oil prices low; and the Bush administration made a crucial error in 1990, in failing to make it known to Saddam Hussein that seizing Kuwait would bring a war on. It was a mistake similar in kind, if not degree, to the mistakes the World War I Allies made with Germany between 1919 and 1938.

China

 

Nine-Dragon Wall, Beihai Park, Beijing, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a very fraught time in the history of Chinese-American relations, as I hardly need to point out, with everybody needing to recover from the distortions of the Trumpery, when the US was ruled by an ignorant emperor whose mind was entirely focused on the irrelevant—nice playdates with their emperor, fighting over the balance of trade, and blaming them for the coronavirus—leaving them a more or less free hand in stealing intellectual property, militarizing the South China Sea, competing with the US for allies in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, and violating human rights around the country's perimeter. While their rulers must be relieved at the prospect of a period of predictable stability, they know they will be coming in for harsher trade conditions

“Despite Trump’s claim that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the ultimate results of the phase one trade deal between China and the United States — and the trade war that preceded it — have significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve. The effects of the trade war go beyond economics, though. Trump’s prioritization on the trade deal and de-prioritization of all other dimensions of the relationship produced a more permissive environment for China to advance its interests abroad and oppress its own people at home, secure in the knowledge that American responses would be muted by a president who was reluctant to risk losing the deal.” 

and heavy criticism from the Biden administration, as in reaction to this week's news stories from culturocide in Xinjiang, where they are breaking up families of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minority groups by shipping young people to jobs thousands of miles away where they won't be able to speak their languages or practice their religion, to killing democracy in Honk Kong.

The present now will later be past. That's a promise.

Don't try this with a real bagel. Especially if you're using real water! But if you do, don't panic, you'll probably be fine. Image from Swimline Water Sports.

Corey Robin, yesterday:

There’s a certain type of person who came of age around the time that I did—or just before or not long after—whose entire political identity is shaped around the idea of being realistic, of shedding childish enthusiasm and adolescent dreams. They were anarchists or activists or God knows what in high school or college. But now they know better. They can sling phrases like “How are you going to get it past Congress?” with all the bark of a short-order cook. They’re unafraid of clichés. They’re more mood than mind. And their world is about to come to an end.