One Lemon Leads To Another Dept.

     There are many things I could say about foreign aid, but the great majority of them are obscene. If we start from the premise that using the tax funds of the nation – i.e., the money already stolen from working Americans – to benefit the denizens of foreign hellholes lands is somehow legitimate, you can rationalize any number of subsequent offenses against the laws of God and Man. But unless my Gentle Readers would like me to start foaming at the mouth this early in the day, I’d better pass from that subject right now.

     Sarah Anderson comments thus on Marco Rubio’s “reformed” foreign aid plan:

     [W]e're no longer just tossing money out the door; there's an end goal. We're partnering with these countries to help them stabilize and eventually take care of themselves with less and less of our help. As a part of the plan, the countries' governments themselves must also increase their domestic health spending. A State Department fact sheet promises that "U.S. government financial support will be linked to countries’ ability to meet or exceed key health metrics with financial incentives for countries who exceed those metrics."
     It's a model that Rubio has been pushing from day one since he took over the State Department, and it's the most logical one for foreign involvement.

     No, Sarah. I like you and I think you write reasonably well, but the “most logical [model] for foreign involvement” is warfare. That’s what comes of laying big prizes before a gaggle of rapacious Third Worlders: they fight over it until one manages to get away with the lion’s share of the booty.

     But let’s leave that highly predictable outcome to the side for a moment. When the fighting is slight and quickly resolved – usually because the most powerful bureaucrats of the recipient government get their claws into the money immediately – the consequences are almost never the ones hoped for:

1. There’s a charade of “bidding” for contracts nominally aimed at the purpose of the aid money;
2. The money goes to the bureaucrats’ relatives or supporters;
3. A great show is made of the inception of the purposed effort;
4. Third World work ethics – steal as much and do as little work as you can – kick in;
5. The money is spent but the “work” is never more than substandard;
6. American Foreign Service representatives frown at the results;
7. The representatives report to the domestic hierarchy;
8. The aid is increased for the following year;
9. Return to Step 1.

     Am I being an old cynic? Why yes, I am – but it’s a cynicism built from observation over five decades. It’s powered by the dynamic that dominates diplomats and diplomacy. It’s protected by the utter unwillingness of politicians and their high-ranking appointees ever to admit to a mistake. And it’s as close to a law of Nature as any phenomenon that involves unequal categories of human beings.

     But supreme among the conceits of professional politicians is this one: We can do it. We can overrule all the rapacity and all the venality that have made the Third World what it is. We’re The US of A! Besides, I can’t admit that the whole deal is a scam, that foreign aid is a huge, unConstitutional mistake. The voters / my superiors would crucify me in public!

     And billions of dollars taken forcibly from American workers in taxes are poured into Third World ratholes year after year on that basis.

     Do you know a way to stop it without toppling the federal government in its entirety, Gentle Reader? I don’t.

Could We, Should We Dept.

     Actor Kevin Sorbo asks:

     Muslim militants post selfies with thousands of dead civilians after conquering major Sudanese city! So what are we going to do about it??

     Hm. Sudan, you say? That’s in Africa, isn’t it? What we used to call the “Dark Continent?” Doesn’t Sudan, a sovereignty with a seat in the United Nations General Assembly, have its own military? Couldn’t they do something about the violence? Or is the Sudanese government disinclined to act?

     If that last is the case, an American expeditionary force would have to contend with both the Muslim militants and the Sudanese army. We might have to destroy the latter before we could confront the former. What then? More “nation building?” Perhaps another massive occupation force, to give our precious diplomats and experts time to teach the Sudanese to be civilized members of the global community? That worked out well in Afghanistan, didn’t it?

     And there’s this question to answer: What American interests would be served by intervening in Sudan’s internal chaos?

     Yes, I’m being a bit heavy-handed here, but the impulse demanded some air. We forget so swiftly what our other foreign interventions have wrought. We overlook the savagery that characterizes all of Africa. We think ourselves too powerful to be gainsaid... and too benevolent to be wrong.

     But maybe this time it will be different, you say? What evidence exists for that proposition? And what degree of bloodshed on the part of young Americans would you be willing to invest in the possibility?

     I am so tired of this shit.

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     Intervenors of every variety call for America to fix other peoples, other nations, other continents. Some of them are genuinely benevolent. Some of them sincerely believe in America’s omnipotence. And some of them see an opportunity for power or baksheesh. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We can’t do it.

     With all our power and wealth, we cannot raise savages to the level of intelligence and clarity required for the job. I wrote about this long ago:

     America is what it is because it is a made society, founded on clearly understood principles by a pioneer people. The societies of Africa are legacy societies, weighed down by the tribal traditions, superstitions and animosities of thousands of years, unleavened by the Enlightenment from which our core concepts sprang. Until Africa renounces its past, there will be no room in which to build a new future.

     But Africa will not renounce its past. It hasn't yet outgrown its belief in magic. Combatants in the Liberian nightmare are eating their slain enemies' vital organs, in accord with the ancient voodoo belief that this will add the strength of the vanquished to their own. So Liberians look across the Atlantic and cry, "Help us, Lady Liberty! Feed us! We are poor and terrified, you are rich and strong! Bring your breadbasket and your gun and deliver us from the darkness!"

     You cannot have a civilized nation without civilized people. You cannot have a civilized people without both Christian ethics and the Enlightenment. Haven’t our previous ventures into civilizing other lands made that clear yet?

     But that do-gooding impulse can be so strong.

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     The West can’t help Africa. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself. – Kim Du Toit

     Painful truths are the most aggravating kind. Where’s the Advil? Never mind that; where’s the Oxy? Let’s forget our record of failure at uplift, roll up our sleeves, and get on with it! After all, we’re Americans! And this time, we have experience to draw on, right, guys?

     Experience is supposed to teach. And it does: it tells you why you’ve just busted your skull... after you’ve busted it. But the test comes first; the lesson comes afterward. We’ve had the test several times. We’ve “busted our skull,” figuratively at least, on each occasion. Yet many have failed to absorb the lesson.

     Christian missionaries have strained to bring Christianity to the Dark Continent. Their successes were mostly in European colonies. When the colonial powers retreated, Christianity and its influence began a steady retreat. That wasn’t (and isn’t) because there was something lacking in those missionaries’ efforts, or in Christianity itself. It’s Africa itself: the African mentality in the African environment. Kim Du Toit’s essay, quoted above, delineates the matter too well, and too painfully, for an intelligent reader to miss it.

     Islam found a fallow field in Africa. It appeals to the savage mentality: conversion by the sword! If they won’t accept Allah, kill or enslave them! Scant wonder Islam is sweeping through the continent. Africa couldn’t be more suited to Islam if they’d been designed for each other.

     Continuous tribal warfare is equally well suited to Africa. It’s returned in force in every country where Europeans once ruled and have retreated. Only watchful, unrelenting, greatly superior power can keep the peace when the natives’ fondest wish is to slaughter one another. Well, yes: first they go after any whites that were foolish enough to remain. Then, the fun really begins!

     Islamic forces are rapidly expunging Christianity from Nigeria and any other parts of Africa where it’s hung on. The Enlightenment finds few fans among Africa's savage, bloody-minded natives. There’s one and only one cure:

     So here’s my (tongue-in-cheek) solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.

     Kim may have intended that facetiously, but it’s no less true for that.

Ultra-Quickies: There Is One Popular Commentator, At Least

     ...who has eyes that see:

     One beef about Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell (he’ll stay on in that critical job while acting DNI) is that he gives the euroweenies the sadz by telling them things they don’t want to hear, like “Pay your share of NATO, deadbeats,” and “Stop sucking up to the mullahs, jerks.” Okay, I added the “deadbeats” and “jerks” parts. And it is indicative of our failed establishment’s mindset that the alleged pros are more concerned with pleasing foreigners than protecting American interests. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     I’m glad someone else has finally noticed — and has said so out loud.

Quickies: Snark, Grandmaster Level

     I have a special admiration for persons who can cheese off their adversaries with well-honed facetious sarcasm: i.e., snark. I’m not all that good at it myself. It’s a skill I’d love to acquire. And I believe I’ve found someone qualified to teach me:

     Since 2016, delinquent NATO allies have coughed up an additional $130 billion in new defense spending. Trump also is redirecting NATO’s focus away from Russia and insisting the alliance address more serious threats such as cybersecurity, Syria, terrorism, and China.

     But it’s not supposed to happen this way. Any progress with America’s allies—or enemies—only can be achieved, we are cautioned, through proper channels of carefully constructed diplomatic finesse.

     Very important people with very important advanced degrees from very important universities must be involved at every step. Coaxing American allies to stop welching on their debt requires many white papers and think tank conferences and pricey parties at well-appointed embassies.

     Before the president speaks with another head of state, polite talking points must be drafted and edited and redrafted and approved by dozens of people with lengthy titles who occupy offices situated along the Potomac River decorated with many impressive diplomas and commendations.

     So it’s understandable why people who have been groomed their entire lives to one day serve as the deputy director assistant undersecretary of East Samoan Affairs are a little huffy at the Trump Administration.

     Julie Kelly has not only captured the actual attitude of those “very important people with very important advanced degrees from very important universities;” she’s dealt them a backhanding that will have their eyes watering and their ears ringing well into 2020. Bravo, Miss Kelly!

A Distribution Of Motives

     It’s commonplace for private-citizen observers of political squabbles to assume a uniformity of motives on each of the contending sides. However, it’s seldom that way. It certainly isn’t that way in the “impeachment” foofaurauw currently dominating the news from Washington.

     For a first mouthful, have some observations from Tucker Carlson:

     Carlson’s take on the motives of those such as George Kent and William Taylor, career State Department functionaries, is almost certainly a bull’s-eye. Over time, individuals in the “permanent government” – what we’ve more recently been calling the Deep State – come to believe that they’re more important, vested with more authority, than they really are. For example, Kent and Taylor have argued, without being perfectly explicit about it, that they’re empowered to make foreign policy, rather than just to carry it out. But that’s not their role.

     The United States of America’s head of state – the individual who speaks for our country in our dealings with other lands – is the elected president. Within the constraints of Constitutional and legislated law, it is he who determines American foreign policy. He may ask others, from the State Department or elsewhere, for their knowledge and opinions, but he is not bound by them.

     It’s become clear that President Trump’s decision to de-emphasize distant conflicts in which the U.S. has never been more than a third-party participant has rankled the foreign-policy establishment. They want control; Trump has wrested it from them.

     It put me in mind of a segment from an old movie: Harrison Ford’s star vehicle Air Force One:

     Far too many “experts,” career diplomats, and assorted “advisors” would react just as did the national security advisor in the clip. It offends them that the President is the true holder of foreign-policy authority. Many of them will strive to usurp it from him...just as William Taylor and George Kent appear eager to do.

     But the motives of those careerists are essentially “rice bowl” motives. They’re trying to protect “their turf.” The motives of the Congressional Democrats conducting the impeachment farce are quite different. They are all too aware that President Trump’s foreign-policy changes have been both beneficial and popular. Those changes will be assets to him in his bid to be re-elected: an effort that appears destined for a smashing success. Indeed, one of their current glamor-girls has already admitted it:

     Some commentators believe that the impeachment attempt will rebound to the Democrats’ detriment. Some of those commentators are on the Left. That suggests that there’s a division within the Democrat Party: possibly a more serious division than the visible fissures in the GOP. Time might yet reveal infighting the Democrats’ top management has been anxious to keep en famille.

The Original Dream

     I found this on Gab and had to steal it:

     That was the original idea. George Washington himself said so: “Steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” Thomas Jefferson echoed the sentiment: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” The Old World, whence America had been born, was a quarrelsome, strife-riven place. The New World had the potential to be free of that nuisance – but only if it could remain aloof from the Old World’s quarrels.

     So what changed? What was it that caused the United States, once referred to by European statesmen as “the Great Neutral,” to immerse itself in the troubles of all the nations on Earth? Never mind the wars we’ve fought; we operate military bases in dozens of other countries. Uniformed Americans stand posts around the globe. How did this come to pass?

     Harry Browne is of the opinion that by 1914, America had developed a governmental class, or power elite, that was eager to be recognized as such by the power elites of other nations:

     By then, the U.S. government resembled the typical old-world governments, and was anxious to take its place as a “world power.” This was facilitated by entry into the European “World War.”

     In passing, I will note that as august a figure as Winston Churchill stated on at least one occasion that there was no need for America to enter World War I, and should have stayed out of it.

     When World War I was over and the disastrous Versailles Treaty had been imposed upon defeated Germany, Americans’ natural “mind your own business” instincts reasserted themselves. We reduced our Army back to pre-War levels and remained aloof from the League of Nations. And of course, the eight Harding / Coolidge years were a time of great prosperity and optimism. But as I’ve written before, in the contest for power he who wants it above all other things will have a natural advantage over those who merely see it as a service to be rendered to the nation. And so we had the rise of “The Great Engineer,” Herbert Hoover, and the never to be adequately damned Franklin D. Roosevelt, men who worshipped State power and were eager to expand it – as long as they were at the helm, of course.

     The growth of State power inevitably involves militarization. The 1930s’ explosion of fresh conflicts in Europe and the Pacific could provide our governmental class with a perfect rationale for regrowing a “world power’s” military. However, Americans’ memories of sacrifice in World War I and disdain for involvement in the troubles of other lands remained dominant until the attack on Pearl Harbor – so much so that FDR had to promise, as part of his 1940 campaign for re-election, that “Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars.” As anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge is aware, that was a flat-out lie.

     War has always been an engine by which to expand the State and its powers over private persons and their undertakings. A war that leaves half the world in a state of enervation and defenselessness offers even greater opportunities. Robert Higgs develops this thesis further in his masterwork Crisis and Leviathan.

     And so today we have the largest, most widely spread military in all of human history. Paradoxically, as it’s grown these past few decades, its traditional military capabilities have shrunk. We can no longer dominate other First World nations in conventional wars. (It’s fortunate for the U.S. that there’s no current need to do so.) Our possession of a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction – almost entirely nuclear – is what makes us a “hyperpower.” While other nations fear to displease us, it’s mainly for our economic potency rather than our ability to invade them.

     The crowning irony is that there’s no going back, at least in the foreseeable future. America’s gigantic military has become a necessity owing to our involvements around the world, many by treaty, from which we cannot easily extract ourselves. Worse, two other large militaries, those of Russia and China, constitute threats that must be counterbalanced, and there’s no one else to do it. Perhaps worst of all, hostility to the U.S. within our own hemisphere is such that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are no longer sufficient protection against invasion. Consider the mess at our southern border in that light.

     I’m acquainted with a number of military men, both veterans and in current service. They’re honorable people doing a necessary task; no odium attaches to them. Indeed, they’re among the best of us. But it would be nice if the need for their service, and all that goes with it, were less than it is. And as I write those words, a great many aphorisms about the pointlessness of wishing come to mind.

Negotiations And Dogs

     “You can always get an agreement if you’re willing to give enough away.” – Robert Dole, formerly U.S. Senator from Kansas

     Among the minor differences that distinguish humans from dogs is this one:

     The dog is aware that there’s a tasty treat just out of his reach. He wants it – oh, most definitely! – but the fence is in his way. What he will not do, in all probability because his mental horizon is far too short, is to back up and go around the edge of the fence. That would increase the distance between him and his goal. He is unable to resist the need to get as close to it “as he possibly can,” despite the palpable limit to his approach.

     This is called an approach-avoidance conflict. Human beings can resolve it, owing to our wider band of perception and our ability to reason out a course of action over time. Dogs cannot.

     You could easily get the feeling, from reviewing the “negotiating” approaches previous administrations had taken with North Korea, that those administrations were staffed entirely by dogs.

     President Trump’s recent moves in his parleys with North Korea indicate that he understands the importance of being ready to back away from a bad deal. He wrote as much in his early book The Art of the Deal. He also understands that sometimes there’s no other move available to a realistic negotiator.

     The North Koreans succeeded in extorting a great deal from prior administrations. They did this largely by behaving badly: making threats against South Korea, a client state of ours, and after their acquisition of nuclear explosives, by extending their threats to a far larger sphere. The U.S. State Department, owing to the ingrained institutional belief that “we have to be nice to them to get them to like us” for damned near every conceivable value of “them,” responded to the Norks’ bluster with offers of freebies – oil, technology, and a light water nuclear reactor – in exchange for essentially nothing. Historians will eventually note these episodes as the ultimate in international folly, akin to allowing Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia in exchange for a feeble, soon to be broken promise of peace.

     At least one other commentator viewed these episodes as America “training” North Korea to behave badly. That’s a pretty accurate assessment of the thing.

     President Trump has demonstrated that such “training” can be countervailed. The Norks’ recent protestations of willingness to return to negotiations and international decorum are cheering signs that the “training” is easily dispelled. But to return to the earlier theme, the previous administrations acted more like dogs, unwilling to increase the distance between them and their goal, than like men able to see that the fence is bounded in time. American military and economic power is so much greater than that of any other nation that there is never an absolute need to kowtow before some other nation’s bluster or threats. It merely requires the willingness to walk away – in effect, to let unstated threats of military and economic countermeasures hang in the air for our interlocutor to ponder. That’s all President Trump has done.

     Yet there are persons, some with high perches in the Punditocracy, who continue to rave that President Trump is a menace to “peace.” Well, perhaps some old dogs can learn new tricks, but clearly there are some who can’t.

Hard Cases Make Bad Foreign Policy

     It’s commonplace to hear or read pronouncements – sometimes elaborate ones that amount to proposed replacements – on an administration’s “foreign policy,” especially by opinion-mongers who disapprove of what the administration did most recently. Time was, I held such discussions to be critically important. Indeed, I held them to be so important that I read rags such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy cover-to-cover, practically the instant they arrived in my mailbox. (At the time I was deep in my studies of strategic-weapons planning and defense postures. So sue me.)

     As my Gentle Readers have already divined from the previous paragraph, I no longer think so. Indeed, I think the notion that an administration can have a “foreign policy” is a bit naive. And of course, this being the loudest and most opinionated of all loudly opinionated blogs, I’m here to tell you why.

     Why now? Syria, of course. Specifically, the alleged use of chemical weapons at Douma a few days ago.

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     Like it or not, the determination of how the nation should act toward other nations is the president’s duty. Congress can constrain him to some degree, mainly by its exercise of the power of the purse, but when the U.S. confronts a decision about whether or not to use military force, the nation’s sword is in the president’s hand. He and he alone will wield it.

     Let’s look at a trying scenario or two. Here’s Scenario #1: Another continent is convulsed in a devastating war. It’s gone on for years and appears likely to go on for years more. The president’s sympathies lie strongly with one side, but the nation is firmly opposed to involving itself in the troubles of other lands, and he’s fully aware of it. Indeed, his re-election campaign made a big deal out of his unwillingness to stick America’s nose into that conflict.

     The president discovers that he can contrive an excuse for sending an expeditionary force to assist his preferred side. Moreover, he knows that should he do so, the country would rally behind its men at arms, as it nearly always has. He acts accordingly – and dooms the world to a still greater conflagration only a couple of decades down the river of Time.

     Now, Scenario #2: Another continent is convulsed in a devastating war. It’s gone on for years and appears likely to go on for years more. The president’s sympathies lie strongly with one side, but the nation is firmly opposed to involving itself in the troubles of other lands, and he’s fully aware of it. Indeed, his re-election campaign made a big deal out of his unwillingness to stick America’s nose into that conflict.

     The president discovers that he can contrive an excuse for sending an expeditionary force to assist his preferred side. Moreover, he knows that should he do so, the country would rally behind its men at arms, as it nearly always has. He acts accordingly – and is hailed as the savior of Mankind for having brought an end to an unspeakable horror and having contrived an enduring peace.

     What’s that you say? The two scenarios are the same, so how could the reactions of the electorate be so greatly at variance? Well, yes. That was the point. The reaction of the electorate to Woodrow Wilson’s insertion of the U.S. into European War I differed radically from its reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insertion of the U.S. into European War II. The detail differences in setting that evoked the dramatic differences in reaction are what mattered.

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     Probably the determinative factor in whether a nation’s people will approve of its executive’s decision to make war is whether the contest can be given a moral cast. In European War I (a.k.a. World War I and The Great War), President Wilson (“He kept us out of war”) had no such hook on which to hang his decision. He had been inclined to involve the U.S. practically from the outset. His rationale for doing so was contrived from the sinking of the Lusitania and the famous Zimmerman telegram. While one could certainly argue that the implied threats to American lives and interests expressed by those two events constituted a casus belli, one could just as credibly argue that they constituted reasons for the U.S. to cease its shipments of war materiel to Britain. Had Wilson followed the latter course, European War I would probably have petered out after a negotiated settlement of claims between the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. It’s possible that European War II (a.k.a. the European theater of World War II) would not have occurred, though given the vagaries of national sentiments that’s far from guaranteed.

     By contrast, in European War II President Roosevelt (“Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars”) had excellent arguments, moral and practical, for involving the U.S. One was the German alliance with Japan, which had already committed an overt act of war against the U.S. by striking the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The second was Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S. on December 11, 1941, which was swiftly answered with an American declaration of war on Germany. The third was the mass of horrific reports about Germany’s genocidal pogrom against European Jewry, which we now call the Holocaust. Those events were sufficient to animate the American people in favor of war. Indeed, it’s possible that any one of them would have been sufficient even without the others. And despite the rise of the Soviet Union, the imposition of the Iron Curtain, and the immense costs European War II inflicted on the U.S. – far greater than the costs we suffered from European War I – both popular sentiment and the opinions of historians remain quite strongly in favor of our having taken a hand in it.

     In neither case could we say that a predetermined “foreign policy” had anything much to do with it.

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     And now to Syria and the use of chemical weapons at Douma. At this time it is unclear who deployed those weapons. It’s also unclear what interest whoever did so thought to advance by using them. The arguments are raging on all sides. Currently, President Trump appears inclined to believe that the regime of Bashar al Assad is to blame. Moreover, he seems inclined toward punishing that regime with an air strike. Here are my questions, none of which I can confidently answer from available reports:

1. Who decided to use war gases?
2. What did he hope to accomplish by using them?
3. Does the use of war gases justify American action against their employer?
4. Would American action, if taken, conduce to further American involvement in the Syrian conflict?

     ...but I contend that no matter what the answers might be, the president’s decision will have more to do with Americans’ sentiments concerning the proposed action than with his previously declared “foreign policy” of treating military action as a last resort. If the preponderance of popular opinion is that he should act against the putative miscreant, he probably will; otherwise, he probably won’t.

     The sword does rest in the president’s hand, but under current circumstances he cannot be confident that what his intelligence sources – domestic or foreign – tell him about the gas attack is true-to-fact – and he knows it. Indeed, it’s a large part of what got him elected. Therefore he must rely principally on popular opinion. It’s a more reliable gauge than any dictum that emanates from the State Department, the DIA, the CIA, or any foreign intelligence service. And it might well cause him to wield the sword in a conflict in which the U.S. has no obvious stake.

     Foreign policy decisions are like that.

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     The above flows from a cynical realization:

In every nation, the diplomatic, military, and intelligence communities are in business for themselves.

     The implication is plain. It always has been. The president cannot merely assume that what the State Department, the intelligence agencies, the military, and self-interested foreign actors are telling him is the truth. He knows, from both theory and practice, that those entities have agendas of their own. Sometimes those agendas will prove harmonious with the real national interest, but sometimes they won’t. In the usual case it will be impossible for him to tell.

     The notion that a predetermined foreign policy can remain “in force” is ludicrous. Every such decision will be represented to the president by at least some of the interested parties as a good reason to depart from his prior posture. Moreover, he would be well advised to listen attentively to everyone involved – but not because what they tell him is trustworthy.

     I could go on. I could discourse at length about the internal dynamics that give rise to contentions over foreign policy decisions, especially those about the use of military force. I could tease out why it’s wise for the president to listen closely to all the arguments, to compare them with what he knows of the institutional agendas of the proposers, and to contrast their emphases with one another. But this screed is already at a reasonable stopping point.

     More anon.

Quickies: Something To Cheer About

     The international political scene has been short of “Hip hip, hooray!” moments in recent years. It appears one has just been delivered:

     DAVOS, Switzerland — In unscripted remarks to the press on Thursday, US President Donald Trump said the US would no longer transfer monetary aid to the Palestinians unless they entered peace negotiations with Israel, and excoriated the Palestinian leadership’s reaction to his decision last month to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

     “That money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace, because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace, and they’re going to have to want to make peace, too, or we’re going to have nothing to do with it any longer,” he said.

     Thank you, President Trump. (And thank You, God.)

     It’s a commonplace that Arab Muslims respect power and nothing else. We’ve tried to get them to like us – the besetting fault of Americans – by treating them as equal negotiating partners with Israel. For decades we’ve tried to pay them to like us, with generous “foreign aid” payments that have mostly gone to the bank accounts of Yassir Arafat and Mohammed Abbas. But Arab Muslims regard that sort of treatment as a sign of weakness, an indicator that they can press for more and get it.

     At last we have a president who gets it. He’s taken a firm line with them, one they can’t help but take seriously. Moreover, President Trump, who recognizes the moral inequality of the contending forces in that region, is likely to be contemplating harsher measures.

     The Palestinian irredentists were at the zenith of their negotiating power twenty years ago...and they blew it. They’ve lost a great part of their public respect since then. Only anti-Semites and the propagandists of the Islamic world would dare to claim otherwise.

     President Trump knows the score. He’s not likely to allow the Palestinians any latitude for mischief...as long as he’s operating from his own convictions. Whether the coterie of Deep State globalists, Palestinian sympathizers, Muslim mouthpieces, and State Department careerists he must fend off can drag him away from his eminently sensible position, we must wait and see.

Alliances

     It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world....There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. – George Washington’s Farewell Address

     [P]eace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none... – Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

     In contrast with the days of the Founding, Americans of our time have grown accustomed to having their country deeply embroiled in the affairs of other nations – to the extent of (at one time) having military forces stationed in more than half the other nations of the world. Though we’ve pulled back somewhat from those days of our widest extension, we remain inexplicably committed to certain foreign “partners.” Far too little thought goes to America’s own interests – specifically, what we get from pouring out our treasure and putting our finest young men at hazard for the defense of other lands.

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     Brux, a military power of size and prowess, was becoming concerned about the looming threat of Frammistan, a power of comparable size well to the east that had begun to assert itself in ominous ways. The most important of the buffers between Brux and Frammistan was Wazznia, a smaller nation than Brux, albeit with a robust economy and a martial history of some note. The ruling council of Brux decided to explore the possibilities of an alliance with Wazznia, implicitly directed against the threat emanating from Frammistan. They instructed the Brux Minister of Defense (BMD) to approach Wazznia’s Secretary of War (WSW) about it. The following conversation ensued.

BMD: An alliance that treats an attack on either of us as an attack on both of us would serve both our interests.
WSW: Hmmm...I suppose it would, but you’ve got a much larger military than we do. Realistically, how much could Wazznia contribute to the defense of Brux?

BMD: It’s not about your size. It’s about your geographical position. An assault on Brux would have to come through Wazznia. We’d like the Frammisti to be aware that Brux wouldn’t wait for its own borders to be violated – that we’d respond to an assault on Wazznia with the same degree of commitment and force.
WSW: You know, that sounds really good for Wazznia. I think we’re in!

BMD: Excellent. I’ll just nip off home and—
WSW: I can’t wait to tell Wazznia’s prime minister! From now on, Brux will defend Wazznia! No more need to conscript our own sons. No more need to maintain a military of our own. And all the money we’ve spent on arms and the fortifications on our eastern border can be channeled into our welfare system. Imagine all the votes our party can buy with that!

BMD: Uhhh, you know, that’s not really what Brux has in mind...
WSW: (lost in rapture) The peace faction will be mollified! The barracks can be used to house the homeless and the disabled. We might even succeed in balancing the Wazznian national budget. (Sobers and turns to BMD) Brux will, of course, station forces in Wazznia for this new responsibility, right?

BMD: Well, I suppose it would be appro—
WSW: Even better! Brux will need to rent land on which to station them. And they’ll spend their salaries at Wazznian stores, on Wazznian goods. It will heal our balance of trade. We’re looking at an economic boom!

BMD: (hurriedly) You know, I was going to mention your sale to Frammistan of high-tech components with military applications. If we’re going to be allies, don’t you think you should put a clamp on that?
WSW: Not at all. With no Wazznian forces along the Frammisti border, cross-border trade can increase. In fact, the threat to Frammistan from Brux’s own forces will expand the market for it. What a great idea! I can’t believe Brux is being so generous to us!

     Brux’s Minister of Defense returned to his ruling council somewhat shaken. Given the Wazznian Secretary of War’s reaction to the idea, an alliance no longer struck him as particularly attractive. Even so, the Foreign Minister looked upon the idea with favor. Worse, when his report was presented to his nation’s elected legislators, a substantial fraction of them remained strongly in favor of a pact. However, they were evasive about their reasons.

     When he looked into the matter, he found that those who supported the proposed alliance were aligned with economic interests that would benefit from the expansion of Brux’s military, an expansion the proposed alliance would surely require. In particular, Brux’s aviation industry stood to profit handsomely from the expansion of Brux’s Tactical Air Command. Under no circumstances would Brux put soldiers in the field without tactical air cover...but to strip the homeland’s air defense for that purpose would be unthinkable. Thus, Brux would have to increase its expenditures on air-superiority fighters by many billions of gazoutehs – and that didn’t address the need to hire additional maintenance personnel to be stationed in Wazznia.

     The Minister of Defense, being more daring than most appointed officials, mentioned these facts in a televised interview. Almost at once, he was denounced by the pact’s supporters. The most virulent of them accused him of being covertly in league with Frammistan, eager to see Brux’s sacred soil violated by the dreaded Frammisti legions. A few stated outright that he was a traitor to his own country.

     His party’s advocates in the media remained curiously silent.

     The Minister of Defense decided to leave the matter before the pact’s promoters contrived to remove him from his post. “I’ve done my part,” he told himself. “It’s out of my hands.”

     The alliance was struck. The results were as the Wazznian Secretary of War had foreseen in his rhapsody. And tensions between Brux and Frammistan increased.

---

     Shall we apply our intellects to our “sacred alliance” with the nations of Europe via NATO, Gentle Reader? Europe, the aggregate population of which is greater than ours? The aggregate GDP of which is comparable to ours? The nations of which have benefited to the tune of over ten trillion dollars from the free defense America has provided them...and which have seldom politically supported or militarily assisted America in its foreign conflicts?

     How would Brux’s Minister of Defense view the NATO alliance?

Baksheesh: An Addendum

     With regard to this morning’s essay. Military / SF writer Tom Kratman has graciously supplied the following snippet from his novel Countdown: The Liberators:

     “Oh, God,” moaned Adam, seated between Abdi and Gheddi, “what is this?” The boy covered his mouth and nose with his hands and began to cough and sneeze from the thick dust that swirled around the bus. His kidneys were in agony from the pounding they’d taken from the combination of bad shocks and worse road.
     “I believe this is called ‘foreign aid,’” Labaan answered.
     The captive looked confused, and from more than the aftereffects of the drugs he’d been given.
     “Foreign aid,” Labaan repeated, with a sneer. “You know: When guilty feeling Euros and Americans shell out money, ostensibly to help the people, but the money all ends up in the hands of sundry corrupt rulers and their relatives?”
     “I don’t…”
     “Understand?” Labaan stood up and, using the bus seats to hold himself erect against the bouncing, walked to the rear where Adam sat. Abdi moved over to open a space for Labaan to sit.
     “We are travelling on what is supposed to be an all-weather, asphalt highway. Money was budgeted for it, no doubt by a consortium of Europeans and Americans, governmental and nongovernmental, both. No doubt, too, a generous provision for utterly necessary bribes was built in to every bid…well, except maybe for the Americans. For that matter, probably no American concerns bid on the project, since their government is death on paying bribes if they catch someone at it. Such an unrealistic people.”
     If ever someone wore a smile that was three fourth’s sadness, that someone was Labaan. “Now let me tell you what happened with all the money that was supposed to go for the road. First, some very high ranking people in this country took the twenty or so percent that was factored into the bids for bribery. Then someone important’s first cousin showed up, waved some official looking papers, sprouted something in the local language that the contractor couldn’t understand. Then, in really excellent French, that cousin explained all manner of dire probabilities and suggested he could help. That cousin was then hired as a consultant. He was never seen again, except on payday.
     “An uncle then showed up, in company with four hundred and thirty seven more or less distant family members, every one of which was hired and perhaps a third of which showed up for work on any given day, except for payday.”
     The bus’ right front tire went into a remarkably deep and sharp pothole, causing the metal of the frame to strike asphalt and Labaan to wince with both the nerve-destroying sound and the blow, transmitted from hole to tire to almost shockless suspension to frame to barely padded and falling apart seat to him.
     “A guerilla chieftain,” he continued, once the pain had passed, “perhaps of no particular relationship to the ruling family, then arrived, offering to provide security with his band of armed men. He was, at first, turned down. And then several pieces of heavy construction equipment burned one night. The guerillas were quickly hired. They never showed up either, except for their leader, at payday, but no more equipment was burned.
     “Then came the tranzis, the Transnational Progressives, average age perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two, and knowing absolutely nothing about road construction. Indeed, most of them wouldn’t have even known what it meant to work. Rich boys and girls, trust fund babies, out to feel good about themselves by saving the world. They filled up every hotel room and hired the few competent, and critical, local engineers to do important things like act as chauffeurs and translators.”
     The bus had now arrived at a washboard section of the road. Labaan kept speaking, but the steady thumpkareechsprong of the road and bus made his words warble almost as much as a helicopter pilot’s over a radio.
     “More cousins came, and they, of course, had to be hired as consultants, as well.
     “At about this time, the accountant for the project arrived and explained that it could no longer be done to the standard contracted for. The substrate began to suffer and the thickness of the road to be reduced. The demands for money, for the hiring of spurious workers and spurious services, never ended. With each mile of road, that substrate became less to standard and that surface became thinner.”
     Labaan shook his head. “And then came the first rain…”
     At that moment, both front tires went into a large, more or less linear hole, adding the screech of metal as the fender twisted to all the more usual sounds.
     “As I said: ‘Foreign Aid.’ And it doesn’t matter a whit whether it come from NGOs, quangos, governments, or rock stars; it never does a bit of good. Never. Fifty-seven billion United States dollars come to Black Africa every year in aid, official and unofficial, Adam. Fifty billion is deposited to foreign accounts by our rulers.”

     I have no doubt that apart from the names of the particular persons and places involved, this is an exact description of the “process.” Israel may be an exception. Reflect on that.

Yet Another Hand Out For Baksheesh

     “Ev'ry one's got something
     And they're out tryin' to get some more.”

     (Randy Newman.)

     Seldom are foreign politicians looking for a handout quite this open about it:

     Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos withheld his approval of President Trump's proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico Thursday evening in an interview with Bret Baier.

     "The best wall that you can build is economic development in Central America and South America," Santos responded when asked for his thoughts on the wall.

     "I urge President Trump and all of the United States to look more to the south," he told Baier. "The strategic interests of the United States are much more important in the south, in Latin America, than many parts of the world."

     It’s not unexpected that the potentate of some other country should wheedle the president of the United States for a bag of American dollars. It’s happened often enough in the past. The irony here is that a huge flood of U.S. cash already flows into Colombia, every day of every year. However, it’s private cash: money Americans freely spend on the drug of their choice: cocaine. At this time, that flow is the lifeblood of Colombia’s economy.

     Perhaps Santos hasn’t caught enough of that river of greenbacks in his personal bucket. Or perhaps he’s been pressured by other Central and South American satraps to use his influence on American federal policy – considerable, given the effort Washington has put into interdicting the flow of cocaine into the U.S. – to get some American bucks for his Latin brothers in corruption, who don’t have a coca money tree to shake. Either way, the thrust of Santos’s statement cannot be denied.

     But the implied request itself must be.

---

     Quoth Isabel Paterson:

     Loans made by one government to another do not answer to any of the proper conditions of credit. The money lent belongs to the people of the lending nation, not to the officials who grant the loan; and it becomes a charge upon the people of the borrowing nation, not upon the officials who negotiate the loan and spend the money. There is no collateral, and no means of collection by private action. If the debt is not paid, war or the threat of war is the only recourse. Meantime private production is wrecked; the economy of the lending nation has to bear the capital loss; while the economy of the borrowing nation is loaded with the dead weight of government projects (buildings, armies, etc.) for which the money is spent. It is an infallible formula for disaster.

     It cannot be put more clearly than that – and that assumes that Santos and his fellow corruptocrats would “settle” for loans. It’s far more likely that they would ask for (and hope to receive) “grants” through some supposed “development agency.” Add to that the well-documented frequency with which such “loans” and “grants” do nothing but enrich and strengthen the rulers of the recipient nation.

     Yasser Arafat died a billionaire. There is no record of his ever having worked a day in his life. Bear that in mind when your “charitable impulses” toward the denizens of other lands rise to befuddle you.

---

     Donald Trump is not the sort of man who can be wheedled. Though his charitable impulses are notable and his charitable deeds are well documented, he can be guaranteed to see through an appeal such as that being presented by Santos. Atop that, the border wall is one of his foremost campaign pledges; he knows he must make good on it to validate his presidency.

     Should they try to “work” this president, the gimme-bodies of the so-called developing world, used to extracting American cash from such agencies as AID and the World Bank, are in for a surprise. That opens another possibility: that one or more might try subtle coercion. For example, Santos might hint that Colombia’s openness to American drug interdiction efforts is on the table. Alternately, he might suggest that he would deny the United States his support when the Trump Administration must deal with states such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia, whose regimes are overtly socialist. How Trump, who probably had little need to deal with threats of that sort in his business dealings, would react is hard to predict...especially with the pantywaists of the State Department counseling him to “be diplomatic.”

     My preference is for another approach to that sort of “diplomacy:”

     ...but that is another and much less pleasant subject.

Predictability: Threat Or Menace?

     Yes, the title is a counter-riff on this old National Lampoon cover:

     ...but what of that. Of course I’m thinking about the geostrategic value of predictability in a nation: the extent to which its responses to particular developments can be accurately forecast.

     And yes, the Syria matter is on my mind again.

---

     Many persons of high prestige study international relations. Unfortunately, most have large, double-edged axes to grind about international relations. It’s a difficult field for anyone interested in gathering unbiased opinions. It’s made opaque by the impossibility of experimentation, though in all candor, the notion of experimenting on nation-states causes me worse shudders than the impossibility of locating an expert on foreign policy who isn’t blinded by his own opinions.

     If there’s a central meta-question about international affairs, it might be this one:

Is it better to be predictable or unpredictable?

     ...where better should be taken to mean “favorable to one’s own national interests.”

     A nation that pronounces specific foreign policies will be deemed predictable if:

• Its actions consistently accord with those policies;
• It announces changes to them before acting on those changes;
• Such changes, if any, are gentle rather than dramatic.

     The inverse is also true. But which condition is more conducive to a nation’s own interests?

     As usual, the answer is: It depends.

---

     In peacetime, the importance of predictability is high. Nation-to-nation bargaining of all sorts reposes on an expectation of trust: first, trust that agreements will be kept; second, trust that changes in government will not automatically alter or nullify such agreements. A Darth Vader nation (“I am altering the deal, Calrissian. Pray that I don’t alter it any further”) soon discovers that no one is willing to negotiate with it.

     Indeed, even a very powerful nation cannot afford to be unpredictable in peacetime, for other states, large or small, will seek to avoid dependency on its actions. Trade relations, customs barriers, the policing of the high seas, and other matters that touch upon the international order will be arranged in such a fashion that the impact of any actions by the unpredictable state is minimized.

     The old diplomats’ definition of peace – “a state of tension that falls short of armed conflict” – acquires a particularly ironic force here, because as a practical matter, peace is always a matter of degree. As I wrote in the Foreword to Freedom’s Scion:

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no “super-State” to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.
     Yet individuals manage to move among them with a fair degree of facility and (usually) little risk. Cross-border trade is commonplace, in some places torrential. Though wars are frequent, they seldom result in major alterations to the overall political pattern. The uber-anarchy of Terrestrial society exhibits more stability than one would expect from two hundred well armed, quarrelsome States, each of which perpetually schemes at snatching some advantage at another’s expense.

     That condition practically guarantees that the “state of tension that falls short of armed conflict” will be decorated now and then with...armed conflict, albeit mostly of an intensity that doesn’t engage a national military in open combat.

     When “peace” begins to slide down the continuum toward open warfare between the militaries of nation-states, the value of predictability decays along with it.

---

     In warfare, unpredictability has a high value. What the enemy cannot predict, he cannot confidently prepare to counter. Major battles in all the wars of Westphalian society have hinged on surprise moves by bold commanders, whose opposite numbers were caught unprepared by them. The slow discovery of the great military value of surprise, whether strategic or tactical, has largely shaped the evolution of warfare since the Industrial Revolution.

     Broadly speaking, in warfare:

• You don’t want the enemy to be able to predict your moves, whether in initiative or on response;
• You don’t want the enemy to be well informed about your overall capabilities;
• You don’t want the enemy to know your strategic goals.

     But no more than peace is warfare a binary condition. International relations have often produced intermediate conditions – nominally peace, though substantial armed conflict is in progress – that require a sophisticated approach to predictability / unpredictability decisions. In the current circumstances, it behooves the United States to be reliably predictable about some things, but wholly unpredictable about others.

---

     As I’ve said more than once this past week, the United States has maintained a policy of deterring lesser states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and of punishing their use when it should occur. WMDs were unknown until fairly recently in historical terms. The first introduction of a WMD to the battlefield was Kaiserine Germany’s use of war gases – at first chlorine; later on phosgene – in World War I. The horror of that weapon was sufficient to include a ban on the use of war gases in the Geneva Conventions.

     Over the past thirty years there have been a few cases in which a state was suspected of having employed war gases. Saddam Hussein is believed to have gassed the Kurds shortly before the First Gulf War. Of course, the use of Sarin in Syria is at the heart of the current geopolitical foofaurauw.

     President Trump acted on that longstanding policy. If we leave aside the supposed uncertainty about “whose Sarin” it was, the subject of debate is the policy itself. Should the U.S. have such a policy? If the answer is yes, then should our response to the use of a WMD be highly predictable, or should violators (and uninvolved bystander-states) wonder what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it?

     For my part, I think the policy is wise. However, the response, inasmuch as it’s more likely than not to be military in nature, should be difficult to predict, so that a violator cannot know in advance what penalty will be imposed upon him. Such uncertainty tends to augment the deterrent value of the policy.

     Of one aspect of the retribution, predictability is essential: it should hurt the violator, and hurt him badly, but if possible without harming the uninvolved. Smith’s violation should not cause Jones to bomb Davis. That problem is what has evoked the use of human shields by gangster-states determined to avert the consequences of their aggressions.

     Which is part of the problem I visited in this essay.

---

     There are no provably correct solutions to the problem of aggressive violence by nation-states. As has been remarked many times, hindsight is always 20-20; armchair quarterbacks throw no passes and win no games. I expect the Tomahawk strike against Syria to be chewed over for years to come, whether or not there’s a major alteration of the Middle Eastern muddle any time soon. If there is, of course, politicians will scramble to take any available credit and avert any blame. That’s what they do.

Quickies: An America-First Foreign Policy

     One of the few things about Donald Trump’s candidacy that I wholeheartedly approve is his embrace of the “America First” attitude toward foreign interventions. Patrick Buchanan has a fine article on the subject at VDARE. Herewith, I present another statement of great merit, from a fictional future president at a time when the world is threatened with destruction by an implacable alien invader:

     “...the U.S. is not willing to defend others if they are not willing to contribute to their own defense. Nor is it willing to sacrifice its treasure and blood when other countries stand idly by, suppling materials for great cost, reaping the benefits of American sacrifice while enriching themselves....

     “At the end of this conference, I will announce that the U.S. is withdrawing from all standing mutual defense treaties. If the choice has to be made, the first choice will be to defend the citizens of the United States who are paying for that defense....

     “The world has become accustomed to the U.S. cleaning up its messes, defending it, stabilizing it and generally reaping the benefits of America’s commitment to democracy, free trade and freedom without incurring any of the massive cost involved. Now the world expects the U.S. to defend it again, reaping even more benefits while America bleeds.

     “Not going to happen,” the President said, looking around. “You can toss your ante on the table or you can damned well die. And that concludes my statement.”

     [John Ringo, Citadel]

     How about it, Gentle Reader? Had enough of playing unsalaried “world policeman” yet?

It’s Even Worse Than We Thought

     First we were told it was merely a “demonstration” over a YouTube video that got out of hand. Then we were told that there was no one to send to the rescue of the beleaguered Americans in Benghazi. Then we were told that in the “fog of war,” the order to go to their aid simply came too late. But none of that is true, and the evidence has just become irrefutable:

     The evidence is overwhelming that the United States had several rescue teams ready to go during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, but someone -- possibly the president himself -- prevented them from acting. So said Emmy Award-winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson to talk show host Steve Malzberg in an interview on Wednesday.

     This week on her show, "Full Measure," Attkisson looked into the aborted rescue mission in an in-depth two-part report, "Rescue Interrupted," which you can watch here and here. She spoke with a Green Beret commander who told her that there were actually Special Forces on their way to Benghazi who were turned back.

     Col. Andrew Wood had once commanded a Special Forces anti-terrorism team protecting Ambassador Chris Stevens and other diplomats in Libya. In October of 2012, Woods told Congress that one month before the attacks in Benghazi, his team had been removed from Libya by the Obama administration, despite the numerous warnings of impending terrorist attacks. Wood told Attkisson that Special Forces (the ones mentioned in the "spinning up" email from Jeremy Bash) were on their way to Benghazi, but were ordered to turn back.

     Please read the whole thing. Then go to Sharyl Attkisson’s site for her meticulous reports.

     Apparently, for American forces to cross a border into another country requires presidential authorization – and Obama was asleep. No one thought to wake him. Why not? Surely Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have grasped the necessity. Was she asleep too? Or was she too concerned with preserving the Administration’s fiction that all was well in post-Qaddafi Libya to have him awakened?

     Sharyl Attkisson, a reporter’s reporter, can delve into the objective events of that terrible time, but she cannot read minds. Concerning the motives of those in Washington who collaborated, actively or passively, in condemning Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty to death by abandonment, we can only speculate.

---

     Americans are generally disgusted with our political class, the game has been cleverly rigged to impede the removal of those persons by electoral processes, and there’s still no planetoid in sight. Meanwhile, not only does the Washington tumor on our body politic continue to grow and absorb our rights and property, decent, patriotic Americans are being abandoned to die merely to prevent its beautiful theories from being killed by nasty, ugly facts.

     We lost quite a few of our best and bravest in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, we’re still losing them. There appears to be no defensible aim behind their deployment. Why are they where they are? To be used as target practice by those who hate us? If not, why has the Administration refused to reinforce them or, failing that, to bring them home?

     Likewise Benghazi. Embassies and consulates are issued security detachments as a matter of course. Why, if not to protect the persons and information within them? That being the case, why would the Administration deny them additional aid when besieged? Is an explanation even possible, if not to cover up the failure of Obamunist foreign policy?

     Many Americans have argued against the wars in the Middle East undertaken by the Bush II Administration. There are arguments on both sides, though recently it’s begun to look as if the opponents of those wars have the better case, if only for reasons of political discontinuity and the concomitant changes in policy. But whatever one’s stance on the wars, one cannot help regretting the loss of so many brave Americans’ lives. If those losses are ultimately revealed as sacrifices to the vanity of Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, no degree of outrage will be sufficient. It will be impossible to mete out an appropriate comeuppance to those villains. Indeed, drawing and quartering them on national television would hardly suffice.

     This horror demands the minutest possible scrutiny from Congress and the press. Sad to say, it isn’t getting it from Congress. Apart from the irreplaceable Attkisson, who demonstrates to us day after day what a treasure she is, it isn’t getting it from the press, either.

Quickies: KISS Off Dept.

     The Wall Street Journal boasts some fine editorial work. However, even an insightful article can contain a clinker or two:

     Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.

     Because when Mr. Trump speaks about suspending Muslim immigration or “bombing the s—t” out of oil fields controlled by Islamic State, what supporters hear is this: I won’t let political correctness stand in the way of keeping America safe. And when Republicans respond by tut-tutting about how distasteful they find him—instead of showing why his argument is full of holes—they too come across as condescending, implicitly sharing the president’s belief that the knuckle-dragging American public just can’t handle the truth.

     That’s a pity, because as admirable as a lack of political correctness is in a dangerous world, it’s no substitute for a tough foreign policy. For the main weakness of Trump foreign policy is not that it’s “fascist,” “unhinged” or “outrageous.” It’s that it’s almost all seat-of-the-pants.

     “Seat of the pants” is a circumlocution” for “simplistic.” Herewith, a word of advice to every politician who aspires to national office:

Foreign Policy Can, Should, And Must Be Simple.

     A simple foreign policy would look like this:

• No foreign aid of any kind, for any reason.
• No alliances except for during a declared war;
• Well-controlled borders to assure national sovereignty;
• Free international trade except for state of the art military goods;
• An immigration policy that excludes persons from hostile regions or cultures;
• A strong military with a “reflex” component that can be anywhere in 12 hours or less;
• A policy of immediate reprisals for any harm done to Americans or Americans’ property;
• No “special relationships” that would compromise any of the above provisions.

     The above would say to the rest of the world: Show us your best and we’ll show you ours. But don’t mess with us, or we’ll stomp you – and we’ll laugh at your stupidity while we do it.

     Granted that we’re a long way from such a foreign policy now. We’d have to make quite a lot of changes to get near it. But simplicity, as delineated above, would guarantee that other nations could not fail to understand what we say and do – or to anticipate how we would react to this or that initiative on their part.

     A foreign policy must never encourage adventurism adverse to one’s own interests – and a complex, endlessly mutating policy that seems to be unanchored to any principle encourages that in quantity. Remember this bit of wisdom from Henry John Temple, better known as Lord Palmerston:

    "There are neither eternal allies nor eternal enemies. Only interests are eternal."

     There’s a reason Palmerston is regarded as the foremost statesman of his time.

Quickies: Words Fail Me Dept.

     Over the years, several persons have alleged, sometimes with evidence of variable quality adduced, that Barack Hussein Obama is actually a Kenyan by birth, and therefore ineligible to hold the presidency. Whatever the case, he’s not an American:

     President Obama may soon let the United Nations slap his own country for its Cuba embargo, which he dislikes....

     Monday, Cuban President Raul Castro insisted in his UN speech that all of America’s decades-old economic sanctions against Cuba be lifted. Actually, Obama did, too. And Obama’s objections to US Cuba policy came in the context of yet more complaints about America by the president — with the world spotlight on him....

     No UN diplomats can remember a case in which a country voted against its own policies, or abstained on them.

     Then again, few here can remember anyone using his UN speech to denounce his own countrymen or bash his domestic foes in front of other world leaders. These speeches, after all, are designed to present one’s country in the most favorable light.

     Yet on Monday, that’s just what Obama did. Again.

     What possible justification can there be for allowing this contemptible excuse for a human being, a man who openly despises his own country, has worked tirelessly to degrade it, and continues to do so as we watch to remain in the Oval Office, wielding all the powers of its chief of state? Indeed, what could anyone who voted for him in 2012 say for himself in light of the insults he’s allowed America to endure from other nations? Do you still think he’s preferable to Mitt Romney?

     A recent poll indicated that something like 40% of Americans could find it in themselves to support a military coup. Would anyone like to place a bet on which way that number will trend when word of this gets around?

The Old World Order

     In his book America Alone, Mark Steyn refers to the United States as “the non-imperial superpower:” the first nation to rise to preeminence among the nations that doesn’t attempt to use its military or economic supremacy for its own gain. Steyn notes, correctly, that this is a state unprecedented in the history of the world. It’s made still more striking by America’s frequent deployment of its military, entirely at its own expense, in “world policeman” duties and in succoring those of distant lands beset by natural calamities.

     Previous dominant powers never did such things, Instead they extended their borders, acquired distant colonies, and extracted tribute.

     Well, it appears we’re at the end of our run in that role. The enervation of our military by the Obama Administration – got to save the bucks for food stamps, sex-change operations, ObamaPhones, and Planned Parenthood, don’t y’know – coupled to The Won’s absolute unwillingness to use force in defense of American interests, much less in support of American influence in geostrategically critical regions, has reduced us to the level of a pre-World War I England or France: a non-negligible nation, but only one equal among others. We’re potentially capable of exercising might and influence, but only after surmounting some rather high hurdles, including the abjuration of our prior inanition.

     Time was, we could have avoided accepting the role of planetary guardian of justice. It would have required that we stay out of World War I. Indeed, in J.F.C. Fuller’s comments on that conflict, he quotes Winston Churchill, at the inception of World War I the First Lord of the British Admiralty, as saying that the U.S. should not have entered the conflict:

     Years later – in August 1936 – Mr. Churchill, in a statement to William Griffin, editor of the New York Enquirer, is reported by the latter to have said that “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse of Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

     Such a judgment, rendered in hindsight and premised upon an arguable selection of causal mechanisms and predicted outcomes, is always a matter for dispute. Nevertheless, it is plain that World War I was the necessary precursor to World War II. World War II was the event that gave us the bipolar world of the second half of the Twentieth Century. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Red China renounced Communist economics, the U.S. stood alone as the “hyperpower:” the nation at pinnacle of world power, upon whose approval the ambitions of other nations must depend. There is no route to that destination that wouldn’t have required our involvement in World War I.

     But what’s done is done. We took the mantle, and for a substantial term of years we wore proudly. We discharged the duties of the office fairly well, though it must be said in retrospect that we intervened in several conflicts in which our net contribution was not positive. What was unavoidable from that point forward was that were we ever to step down from the post, the vacuum that would result would draw powers far less benevolently inclined than are we. And so it is: the Old World Order, in which nothing but power is respected and no nation is inclined to serve any interests but its own, is upon us once again.

     Yesterday’s demonstration by Vladimir Putin of America’s flaccidity has ripped off the masks. The “hyperpower” is revealed to have grown soft in its middle age. It has been made aware of its inability to preserve a state of international affairs it favors. It has neither the necessary force nor the will to use it, while Putin’s Russia, expansionist Red China, and the emergent regional powers of the Middle East, eagerly move forward into the vacuum its retreat has created.

     Would a change in domestic Administrations bring favorable changes to the international situation? Probably; no previous Administration did half as much damage to American military might or international influence. However, it appears from history to be the rule that once a power is on the move toward expansion and aggression, only decisive military defeat can check its course. They who desire increased power over others are good at convincing themselves that “history is on our side.” Such notions are seldom disabused except at the point of a bayonet.

     Thus, even should the United States awaken from its slumbers, install a fresh and assertive Administration backed by a Congress completely in accord with it, make a complete turn-around militarily, and assert its weight in world affairs with all possible resolve, we’re unlikely to regain “hyperpower” status without first defeating the expansionist ambitions of Russia and China at minimum, whether by direct opposition of forces or through the exertions of American-backed proxies. Do we want unchallenged global dominance and the “world policeman” role back badly enough to do any of that? Will the 2016 elections bring about such a reversal in our public priorities?

     Don’t bet on it.

     More anon.

The Ceremony Of Innocence

     The slowly emerging details about the supposed “deal” with Iran over its nuclear program are becoming ever more incredible. Consider the following exchange between Senator Marco Rubio and Secretary of State John Kerry:

     The language Senator Rubio quoted does indeed seem to obligate the U.S. to assist in the defense of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Kerry, ever the prevaricator, tried to slide around the issue with a typically weasel-worded response about “coordinating with Israel.” Yet his mealy-mouthed assurances about Israel’s security being a paramount consideration cannot obscure the plain meaning of the words in the agreement presented to the Senate.

     Is it even thinkable that the Senate should ratify such an agreement?

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     It’s been said by many commentators, and once by me, that were Barack Hussein Obama an agent of an enemy power, his actions in office would not differ from what he’s done to date. The Iran “deal” nails it to the wall – and unless it’s somehow blocked, it will elevate Iran to the status of a nuclear power with the ability to threaten its neighbors with annihilation.

     Strictly speaking, the well-being of Israel is not a vital interest of the United States. Our longstanding alliance with Israel is highly useful to both countries, but were the Muslim states around it to succeed in destroying it, the impact on America would not be catastrophic, at least in the near term. However, the betrayal of our security guarantees to Israel would complete the loss of credibility of the United States in world affairs. Nation-states have long memories about such things.

     Americans tend to look first to domestic matters when choosing political sides. This is normal and natural; what’s near will always have more potential effect upon us than what’s far away. But when a president chooses to side with a declared enemy of this country in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, fully aware that at least one ally would thereby be placed under the threat of imminent destruction, it tends to get people’s attention. That includes the attention of the more farsighted strategists of the president’s party, who must surely be thinking about what the consequences will be for its electoral fortunes.

     Any smart Democrat should be thinking along those lines, even if he doesn’t give a hoot about the extinction of Israel.

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     There’s been some speculation that there just might be enough Senate Democrats with residual traces of conscience to block the agreement with Iran. Obama’s end run around the Senate, deliberately going first to the United Nations Security Council for its endorsement, has angered rather than mollified his co-partisans. The prospect of the U.S. actually training Iranian security forces, despite the ongoing chants of “Death to America!” and “Death to the Zionists!” heard in the streets of Tehran, might be the falling stone that looses the avalanche.

     The deal also frees Iran to pursue the acquisition of ICBMs. That factors in as well.

     Yes, the Corker bill has made it more difficult. Yes, the pusillanimity of the GOP caucus on Capitol Hill will be difficult to overcome. Yes, Congressional Democrats have displayed near-perfect party unity up to this point. Yes, yes, yes.

     There remains hope: the hope that Obama has at last gone too far, that he’s finally awakened the consciences of enough Americans – Democrat partisans included – to evoke firm, bipartisan opposition to his agenda. Whether that hope is substantial or slender, I cannot say. But absent a real, flying-lead revolution that concludes with The Won’s corpse hanging from a D.C. lamppost, it’s all we have.

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     It’s become very difficult to be sanguine about the future. Evil is surging around the world, while the forces of freedom and justice have been kept chained and enervated near to impotence. Millions of Americans have turned away from prospects of advancement and toward preparations for calamity. The youngest of us struggle to support themselves; the oldest huddle fearfully, wondering whether it will be an act of Islamic terrorism, the demise of Social Security, or an ObamaCare death panel that will finally get them.

     The “bullets, beans, and Band-Aids” futures are strong and rising.

     Yet which are the loudest voices in the national cacophony? The pettiest of the interest groups! The advocates for same-sex marriage, for government-funded abortions, for the elimination of every vestige of God or the Commandments from public spaces! The campaigners for the “rights” of the “undocumented!” The endless yammering of self-nominated “victims” of all varieties!

     When William Butler Yeats wrote, just after the conclusion of World War I, that:

     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
     The best lack all conviction, while the worst
     Are full of passionate intensity.

     ...he might as well have been thinking of our milieu.

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     There is no Last Graf. I’m not arrogant enough to imagine that I could compose a course of action likely to reverse the blood-dimmed tide and allow our ceremony of innocence to continue. I can barely imagine a course that might preserve what remains to us.

     What comes to mind as I write these words is a scene from Frank Miller’s script for the movie 300, as Leonidas prepares to meet Xerxes:

     King Leonidas: [on being told the Persians are coming to parley] Captain, I leave you in charge.
     Captain: But, sire...
     King Leonidas: Relax, old friend. If they assassinate me, all of Sparta goes to war. Pray they're that stupid. Pray we're that lucky.

     We need an act of the most vicious evil, the most arrant stupidity, by one or more of our enemies to awaken enough of us to matter. In which regard I can only echo Leonidas:

     Pray, my friends.

Quickies: The Deal And The Future

     Everyone and his halfwit cousin Harley has expressed an opinion of some sort about the “deal” with Iran, so I suppose it’s my turn.

     I haven’t read the proposed agreement, but sometimes you can reconstruct an object accurately merely by studying the shadows it casts. That’s what I’m about to attempt here.

     I’m inclined to believe what I’ve read and heard about the deal from other Rightward commentators. Add to that my knowledge of Barack Hussein Obama’s inclinations and past behavior, particularly toward the Islamic world and the state of Israel. Add to that the participation and adulation of the scrofulous John Kerry. Add to that the jubilation of the Iranian mullahs. Finally we have the apparent willingness of Senate Democrats to express doubts about whether the deal serves American interests. Oh, I don’t doubt that they’ll vote to approve it – the Corker legislation will grant them freedom from responsibility – but merely expressing doubt of the pact where others can hear puts them in danger of The Won’s disapproval, which recent events have proved a fearsome thing indeed. (Consider: to have a chance of being elected president, Hillary Clinton must run against Obama’s policies, yet she’s clearly afraid to do so.)

     Ergo, it’s a bad deal. It probably guarantees a North Korean denouement. It has certainly frightened the Israelis, who probably know more about the details than anyone in the U.S. Senate. Iran will get The Bomb, other regional states will pursue it in response, and Israel will need to decide whether to strike first or live in fear of nuclear annihilation by an Islamic neighbor.

     Consequences for the United States? There will be a few. I doubt that one of them will be a nuclear explosion on American soil; Iran’s mullahocracy is too focused on becoming regionally dominant and destroying Israel. Thus, if they develop The Bomb and decide to use it, their first target will be the Jewish state. Hopefully either Israel will have dealt with the problem for us, or by then we’ll have an executive administration that puts American lives, property, and interests above all other considerations.

     One consequence we cannot avert will be the complete loss of faith in America as an ally and the guarantor of global stability. A nuclearized Iran will endanger Europe, the Middle East, and western Asia. NATO cannot endure many more betrayals, and our relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and India are already tottering. The geopolitical axes will be reoriented toward those powers that have exhibited strength and resolve. The secondary consequences for American foreign relations and trade cannot be accurately gauged beforehand.

     If Obama is to have a legacy of any sort – here I’m assuming that he’s not impeached, convicted, and shamed into solitary disgrace between now and January 20, 2017, as he so richly deserves – this will be the largest facet thereof. This is what we have earned by promoting skin color and glamor above patriotism, wisdom, and competence.

     Yes, it’s one of the reasons I’m strongly considering relocating away from The Big Target Apple. Are you really surprised?