On MMO-C we learn that Anti-Fascism is locking arms with corporations, the State Department and agreeing with the CIA, But opposing the CIA and corporate America, and thinking Jews have a right to buy land and can expect tenants to pay rent THAT is ultra-Fash Nazism. Bellingcat is an MI6/CIA cut out. Clyburn Truther.
The problem is that the anti-establishment movements don't control remotely enough of the lever of powers. Barack Obama clearly wanted a downscaled US international presence compared to the 00s and 1990s, and tried to arrange for that. But he ran up against hard resistence in the House and Senate that kept giving him budgets to sign that did the exact opposite. And lo and behold, Obama is out a year and the very first Budget Deal that President Trump signs is the exact opposite of what Obama wanted, on steroids. Obama was President, but that wasn't enough to remotely reshape America's role in the world.
And that's true of Trump as well. For all the early hullaballoo about upending the post-World War II world order a year ago, he signs a budget deal that does the exact opposite, while proposing the opposite.
Case in point, the Trump Administration's FY2019 State Department budget cuts the budget by 25%. But he basically wasted everyone's time putting that forward, because under the 2 year budget deal that Congress agreed to before he put out the proposal last week, it would actually INCREASE by a few billion, like everything else.
The anti-establishment voice just isn't big enough. It's not even close.
It's actually ironic what the Trump Administration has brought about.
Donald J Trump is the weakest President since the 1880s, and that's especially true within his own Pentagon. He can talk about ISIS until the cows come home, but the three big documents the US Military has presented the last 3 months:
-The 2018 National Defense Strategy
-The Nuclear Posture Review
-The 2018/2019 Budget proposals (+the new 30 year ship building plan).
All of them say exactly the same thing - the terrorism is a fourth, even fifth place issue... after China, Russia, North Korea and destablization caused by misc factors (including climate change). The military is under Trump, ALL about confronting China and Russia (especially China). The Air Force and Navy especially. And this is a complete change from the Obama era, which tried to emphasis drones, and cyberwarfare and special operations. The Pentagon, now, is all about warships, bombers, cruise missiles, heavy brigades... with the drones and cyberwarfare stuff on top of (rather than instead of) it all.
So yes, there has been a change, but in completely the opposite direction that Trump's rhetoric would have you think it would be driven. And that's because Donald Trump is too weak and too stupid to stop it, and Congress is on board with it.
I'm going to make a thread, relatively shortly, about the 2018/2019 defense budget, because it's the foundation of probably the next 20 years of US defense policy, period. And while it does not address the political and social factors addressed in this thread's original post, it does address the military ones.
Well first I would not mistake anti-Trumpism with the left at all. America is still a center-right country. I will be voting Democratic down ballot for the first time in my life this election, as a matter of principle. Does that make mean I'm being more progressive? No. That means my revulsion to trump has created strange bedfellows because the left, unlike Trump, is not beholden to a foreign power and not quintessentially un-American.
As we saw with the budget deal though, defense spending is impossible to slash. Why? Look at where Representatives in congress voted.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2018/h69
Look at the Cartogram map. Notice the how all Connecticut Democrats voted for it and three Massachusetts Democrats did, while the rest were opposed? Because with respect to Connecticut, they're getting huge amounts of money for building submarines. With respect to Massachusetts, those are all the Raytheon / defense job districts in the state.
Money drives everything, not politics. Bringing home federal dollars is and remains a greater motivator than political beliefs, and few things do that like defense spending.
Even Liberal Democrats who want to impeach Trump voted for it:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/mem...l_green/400653
Why? Because Defense dollars. That's why. Had DACA been included, it would have probably passed with more than 370 votes, just like prior defense hikes.
Frankly, they don't need to be convinced. They just need to be out voted and have their districts incentivized to vote in favor of maintenance. The left has been talking about rolling back America's global presence since 1968, and they're actually further away from their goal now, then they are then. And that's because the above.
For most Americans, this big picture stuff is above and beyond them. It was that way during the cold war. Expecting an explict commitment from the American people to maintain our post-war hegemony is not and does not have to be a thing.
What SHOULD be a thing is a commitment to building up our institutions at home, following procedure, the law, tradition and setting standards. Or to put it another way day to day, Americans should not worry about the political situation in Asia-Pacific. Too abstract. Too far away. But they very much should worry about the ethical standards their elected officials are operating under at all levels. Proper execution of the latter feeds the former. A strong America internally is a strong America externally.
And a lot of that is blatnatly, Americans being spoiled so to speak. We don't know true hardship. We know relative hardship for sure. But compared to what most of the world has known within their life times? People in their 20s and 30s are the... what... fourth generation in a country of plenty, where we have successfully defined down "need" to be something that a century ago was not "need"?
A major war that America loses will certainly shake us out of our complacency. And, had this defense bill not taken important steps to avoid that eventuality, that was very likely in the cards in coming decades. But barring that, Americans need to start respecting the world for what it is, rather than what they want it to be.
Frankly, I think it starts with education. Most Americans just do not know enough about the world since 1913. For people in their 30s, 40s and 50s today, if they're against it, they'll likely remain against it. It's the children that matter at this point. The policy makers of the middle part of the next Cold War, right now, are in 5th grade. The Americans living now... we're like the generation that lived through World War I comparatively. We'll see the opening, and maybe first third of the US's Cold War with China for mastery of the international order. We will not live long enough to see its end.
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I've dismissed this fantasy list on repeated occasions, in detail multiple times. I will not repeat myself.
Your entire premise is wrong from top to bottom. It reflects your fundamental and stubborn misunderstanding of the world, not what is in America's interests.
My original post pretty much rebuts every aspect of this list, point by point.
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That's absurd. You're making the claim through this that the US not taking decisive actions to redress it's strategic shortfalls would not have an effect, when the given perscription, when done before in similar circumstances, already has.
The United States government, for example, spent a good 30 years after World War II scrubbing it and its industrial base of foreign influence, which collected before, during and immediately after the war. This hardened the US against foreign interference in strategic sectors of our politics and our economy. That was an explicit series of actions, not some hand waving thing, done by the FBI/DoJ, through the early 1980s.
And moving beyond that, the current state of US Counter-Intelligence, regarded by those in the know as something of a joke at the present, was not always so. It got to be like that because we started to decide that people dual hatting their interests while working for or with us, was not a big deal.
Or when countries like Russia violate international norms and treaties with us... during the Cold War we confronted them. These confrontations often lead to US gains in the Cold War, but at the very least reinforced US red lines. Rapidly. In the post-Cold War era, we've rolled over, and watch them chip away, further and further, banking on the fact that as a status-quo super power, for years on end. Not doing that - doing what we did decades ago - could have put a stop to things like Crimea or the South China Sea, or Russia's INF Treaty violation, years before they metastasized into the significant problems we have now.
I mean, the entire premise of your comment here is nonsense., pure and simple. It's basically claiming that letting problems fester yields the same outcome as confronting them directly, even though historically, we know that to simply not be true.
And at home, the modest list of things I proposed that are not defense in nature but more along the lines of policy and ethical behavior would have produced a far more hardened country than the one we have now.
Keep in mind Skroe, that realitytrembles has previously advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on China. He is a few eggs short of a basket.
You resist it because it would mean the end of a particular world set-up that you favor.
Skroe, I do not for one instant doubt that you love this country. As do I. We simply disagree on a direction for it.
Make no mistake, the US's "East of Suez" moment is coming. The common people of the US tire of and begin to question why it is that American blood and treasure are expended for an ungrateful, complaining world.The foreign policy consensus will not long survive politicians who fear an electorate enraged by the costs of empire.
You might counter that were a single Power to dominate Eurasia, the US would be drawn in. I say no; we could refuse.
And make it clear that whatever is done over there is none of our concern, unless the dominant Eurasian power brings their plots over here. Then they will face nuclear fire.
I repeat words of wisdom:
“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.” (John Quincy Adams, 1821.)
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Why do you think that? Skroe (while raising useless moral objections to my idea) himself conceded that it would work. There would be a United States afterward, and we would have no rival left.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
And because you're factually wrong in pretty much every conceivable way.
Your way is an utter disaster and there is ample historic precedent to prove it.
People have been saying this since after Vietnam, and the opposite keeps happening.
have you seen the 2018 and 2019 defende budget? or the National Military Strategy? Or the Nuclear Posture Review. yet again, the exact opposite has happened.
Your "East of the Suez" moment, is not coming. Period. We are paying for the exact opposite. Countries on the verge of East-of-Suez moments don't radically and rapidluy scale up their expeditionary military forces, as we are.
This is something I've been trying to say for about two days now. We can talk about what people would LIKE to happen. Insofar as what is ACTUALLY happening, that boat has sailed, and it is not remotely what you want.
And we will not, because as I wrote in post #1 in this thread, as our wealth grew, so did our interests and where "our border" was, which is the way of things with powerful countries.
Pure fantasy talk. Pure, pure fantasy. And not the first time you made it. You do realize that if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US (for example), it is far more likely the US responds with an overwhelming conventional strike than a nuclear one, right? The US has the most to lose by normalizing the use of nuclear weapons, and as such, will basically never use them. Which is why the Pentagon's 40 year crusade has been to make our nuclear arsenal the cheapest possible: so money gets spent on stuff we'll actually use, rather than stuff we won't.
If we won't nuke North-fucking-Korea after aiming a nuke at us, we're not going to be tossing "nuclear fire" around like your fantasy describes, period.
I won't even dignify this with a response anymore. You're blatantly ignorant on this.
Correct words for a broke, newborn country in the early 19th century. COmpletely obsolete in the industrialized and post-industrialized world.
The founders, including JQA's father, were also steadfastly against standing armies; something the US really didn't have until World War I. History has made it so that their perspective on that was obsolete within decades of their death. The founders also didn't even have Federal Income Tax, instead financing the US Government through tariffs.
They had most of the great ideas. But the country necessarily evolved since their foundation. It had to. The world changed.
I never did that. What's with people putting words in my mouth today?
Your ideas are nuts.
You type a lot of words for someone who says so little. In the end, you advocate us following the logical conclusion of the "End of History" thesis by Fukuyama without actually believing in it. Making your rantings nothing more than a bizarre hyped screed justifying Imperialism.
On MMO-C we learn that Anti-Fascism is locking arms with corporations, the State Department and agreeing with the CIA, But opposing the CIA and corporate America, and thinking Jews have a right to buy land and can expect tenants to pay rent THAT is ultra-Fash Nazism. Bellingcat is an MI6/CIA cut out. Clyburn Truther.
I said an incredible amount, in detail. You just have no counterpoint. Which to long time observers of your forum behavior, is the least shocking thing in this entire thread.
And if that's your takeaway, then your reading of both Fukuyama and my own writing is... how shall we say... decidedly lacking.
I mean I'll just throw this out here, but go through the prior 13 pages. What do you see? A lot of people saying "interesting post, what do you think about X Y and Z", and me answering.
Point is, other people got a lot from it and it stirred up conversations that participants found insightful. Hell, this thread was dead 2 weeks, and JUST REVIVED because it spurred some thoughts in some people.
That you didn't, Theo, at this point is a 'you' problem. I'm not going to wipe your ass.
You most certainly did. I recall distinctly that you said that a pre-emptive nuclear strike on China would destroy their missiles on the ground mostly. The rest would be caught by our ABM defense. I then said we could nuke their navy /air force out of existence. Your words were:
"Yes, we'd win. Yes, there would be a United States afterward. "
and then something about how the rest of the world would turn against us
I respect your obvious education on lots of subjects, Skroe.
However, on the policy question of how involved the US should be internationally, I must disagree.
Especially now, even. Technology has given us a method of destruction that no one wants to see used on the scale we could. We could leverage that to demand we be left alone.