Friday 29th of March 2024

it's far fetched... but is this fellow the joker?

joker

It's a long story...

 

It's total speculation. But imagine for a second that someone wants the US to have a war against Russia... One could write a novel about the machinations and the reasons to achieve this aim. Most of this "declaration of war" would have to be prepared and managed in the media from the onset. And many of the players in this intention of war would be manipulated to play a part, sometimes for or against the idea of war, but the momentum is to build a vision amongst the ordinary Americans and their allies that war is inevitable and that's the only way to protect "freedom", "national interests" and "democracy"... The media has to play a massive part in this deception. Some of the run-of-the-mill media would be itself deceived but some of the media would actually be part of the conspiracy — not so much the front line scribes but the owners would corral their editorialisers towards the notion of war.

At the same time, the pentagon/CIA machine feed its usual bullshit to the president who wants the bullshit, in order to beef up the troops and steam up the engines of war with his/her generals. The Pentagon/CIA machine also feeds exclusive information to some secret front-shops to the mostly reluctant part of the media. Exclusive interviews with defectors who will tell their story how the Russians are building up towards the invasion of Europe. Yep,  despite "frantic diplomatic efforts", war seems to become more and more inevitable.

It takes quite a few years to set up a sting on such global proportions.

Far fetched?

Well this is EXACTLY what happen in order to declare war on Iraq, 13 years ago. And now it is being repeated — this time towards Russia. Slowly but surely.

Remember the Project for the New American Century? Yes? This was full of the Neocons who led the push for the Iraq war: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc... Despite some people claiming that this PNAC had little influence on President's Bush policies, no less than TEN (10) people from this PNAC went to work for the Bush administration. And the PNAC had an array of subterranean connections to power. 

Now the same people who founded the PNAC (retired from service "after having achieved its goal" i.e. the Iraq war and a turdy Middle East) have a new (newish — founded in 2009) "think tank" called the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). The FPI is committed to robust support for democratic allies, human rights, a strong American military equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and strengthening America's global economic competitiveness...

I'll be damned. The same bullshit as with the PNAC but this time with a much bigger target: Russia.

And of course, The Joker (aka Bill Kristol — toon above) of the FPI think tank is not the only villain. There are countless thugs in this Gotham city, and they are not the ones we think...

Those like Donald Trump are being manipulated by serious forces, but to tell the truth, in his total boof-headedry, he thinks he is the master of his own ship... Deluded? of course.

More to come.

 

attaching wagons to the train of the "war on russia"..

Have you noted how the concept of "global warming" has often been linked to the "communists"? A plot by Russia to take over the world and make us rich countries pay for the poor to become less poor? Do you think that this is just a throw away line from desperate denialists who want to add to the sauce of doubt? 



Nah. It's done purposely, with a) the intent to make you disbelieve global warming and b) attack the Ruskies and their still communistic ways that are wrapped up under fake pseudo-capitalistic ways. "We hate Putin" is the mantra, in most sections of the Western community. That is step one... Unfortunately, Trump has been making noises to contrary. So Trump has had to mellow is presidential rhetoric to appear more like a US president who dislike anyone else but the US, in order to appease the hawks in the GOP. He even was discreetly set-up by the ultra-right wing (the Breibart News) press to be "a bit more careful" and less care-free. A bit of arm twisting going on... Some of this ultra-right wing press (the fellow in the toon at top — Kristol) is ready to give la Clinton the nod, should Trump be nominated as the final GOP candidate. But that was a threat which Trump-the-boisterous' advisors took note and got his lady to ask him to tone the verbiage down.

Nothing happens by "accident".

It is designed for the most gullible portion of our populations. It acts like a subconscious manipulator as it is reinforced by other "news" items that tag onto it like vicious bacterium.

Unfortunately, we are all part of this rigmarole as buyers and sellers. 

We "buy" news, like we buy houses. But would we decidedly buy a house full of defects and a dodgy land title? I don't think so, but we do so with our news, daily. Most of the reported "news" is inconsequential, unimportant, entertaining crap and accidental, but the news that matters is deliberately slanted to suit the system. It's managed deceit.

"Safe as houses" claims the front page of the DT (Daily telegraph 24/4/16) this morning. It's an exclusive about the way the Turnbull government will not change the negative gearing tax system. Yes, this tax evasion scheme where you can legally claim massive tax deduction on your property investments makes the Cayman Island tax haven look like a waste of space in comparison.

Then on the same DT, our Miranda Devine shouts something like: "Don't teach our boys to behave like girls" Yep...

You can see it coming. We need biffo-blokes who will be ready to play with trucks and cannons when war —our "just" war — breaks out. As usual, the other protagonists would have been demonstrated by our media deceit as the ones that started the biffo. 

No need for me to tell you that "effeminate" boys and blokes have been with us for millenniums, without having been educated to become woman-like. I might remind our deluded Miranda that her precious Catholic Church, used to castrate boys to keep their voice pure and golden pass their puberty. They were not called castratos for nothing... 

Same with those tom-boys girl who could drive a truck or become "dykes on bykes" and can cook a steak by squeezing it between their legs. That certainly happened because we taught these girls how to fix a tap instead of sewing crochet... Hello, take a cold shower Miranda.

Back to the media war on Russia.  More to come
Gus note: This section is the unedited chapter 23 in the book "The Age of Deceit". Hang on to your seat.

 

when the neocons were chased from the temple...

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was professor of economics in several universities and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was a member of the US-USSR student exchange program in 1961, and addressed the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1989 and 1990. His first book, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, was published in 1971. His website is www.paulcraigroberts.org.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/authors/paul_craig_roberts/#ixzz47X05w4In

 

 

When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev.

The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.
I know about this, because I was part of it.  I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpeona power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIA's claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIA's way of perpetuting the Cold War and the CIA's importance.

The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagan's promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East.

The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidents-George W. Bush and Obama-who followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world.

Thus was mankind's chance for peace lost along with America's leadership of the world.  Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existance over which American influence would have prevailed.

Instead the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting "color revolutions" in former Soviet republics. 
The consequence of this crazed insanity was to create an economic and military strategic alliance between Russia and China. Without the neocons' arrogant policy, this alliance would not exist.  It was a decade ago that I began writing about the strategic alliance between Russia and China that is a response to the neocon claim of US world hegemony.  The strategic alliance between Russia and China is militarily and economically too strong for Washington. China controls the production of the products of many of America's leading corporations, such as Apple.  China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. China can, if the government wishes, cause a massive increase in the American money supply by dumping its trillions of dollars of US financial assets.To prevent a collapse of US Treasury prices, the Federal Reserve would have to create trillions of new dollars in order to purchase the dumped financial instruments. The rest of the world would see another expansion of dollars without an expansion of real US output and become skepical of the US dollar. If the world abandoned the US dollar, the US government could no longer pay its bills.Europe is dependent on Russian energy. Russia can cut off this energy. There are no alternatives in the short-run, and perhaps not in the long run. If Russia shuts off the energy, Germany industry shuts down. Europeans freeze to death in the winter. Despite these facts, the neocons have forced Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia.

What if Russia responded in kind?

NATO, as US military authorities admit, has no chance of invading Russia or withstanding a Russian attack on NATO.  NATO is a cover for Washington's war crimes.  It can provide no other service.

Thanks to the greed of US corporations that boosted their profits by offshoring their production to China, China is moderinized many decades before the neocons thought possible. China's military forces are moderized with Russian weapons technology. New Chinese missiles make the vaunted US Navy and its aircraft carriers obsolete.
The neocons boast how they have surrounded Russia, but it is America that is surrounded by Russia and China, thanks to the incompetent leadership that the US has had beginning with the Clintons. Judging from Killary's support in the current presidential primaries, many voters seem determined to perpetuate incompetent leadership.

Despite being surrounded, the neocons are pressing for war with Russia which means also with China. If Killary Clinton makes it to the White House, we could get the neocon's war.

The neocons have flocked to the support of Killary. She is their person. Watch the feminized women of America put Killary in office.  Keep in mind that Congress gave its power to start wars to the president.

The United States does not have a highly intelligent or well informed population. The US owes its 20th century dominance to World War I and World War II which destroyed more capable countries and peoples. America became a superpower because of the self-destruction of other countries.
Despite neocon denials that their hubris has created a powerful alliance against the US, a professor at the US Navy War College stresses the reality of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance#mce_temp_url#.Last August a joint Russian-Chinese sea and air exercise took place in the Sea of Japan, making it clear to America's Japanese vassal that it was defenceless if Russia and China so decided.The Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that the joint exercise illustrates the partnership between the two powers and its stabilizing effect on that part of the world.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russian-Chinese relations are able to resist any international crises.

The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China.

This boils down to extraordinary failure. It is time to hold the neoconservatives accountable, not elect another puppet for them to manipulate. 

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do notnecessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.



Read more: http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160415/1038079532/us-neocons-hopes-d...

Note: The neocons came back with a vengeance and they fear Donald Trump far more than us, mere plebs... I have no idea if this text is from Paul Craig Roberts. If it is good on him for telling it straight.

 

and not a single russian in sight...

...

By David LaGesse, For National Geographic News
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2, 2012 On January 23, Bloomberg News reported Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), owned by his lucrative holding company Berkshire Hathaway, stands to benefit greatly from President Barack Obama’s recent cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.Feb 3, 2012

As a result, companies (BNSF and UP) have made massive investments in oil-related rail infrastructure in the past three years, including a dozen oil-loading terminals that serve the Bakken alone. They include the Bakken Oil Express, a complex of four long loops of rail. This allows 100-car trains, more than a mile in length and usually entirely dedicated to oil, to coil around compactly as they pass a loading station.

“These are very substantial investments. We expect rail to be a player for a long time,” said Steve Magness, the terminal’s general manager.

BNSF Railway ships the bulk of oil out of the Williston Basin, which holds the Bakken formation. Over five years, the railroad saw oil shipments soar 7,000 percent, to 88.9 million barrels, the company reported in September. Union Pacific (UP) and Canadian National Railway are other major beneficiaries.

Now in conclusion, if Billy Kristol, is given the go ahead by Philip Anschutz and Warren Buffett, to start a third and fourth party, America will never recover without God’s help! We, Americans will have 8 more years of Obama and Hillary economics, and liberal justices and prices of oil, gas and coal will be controlled by a liberal President and Billionaires that do not care about the American people! Therefore Billy Kristol, Philip Anschutz and Warren Buffett and his friend are out of touch with the American People and do not care about the middle class, period only profit! God and Mr. Donald J. Trump are our only hope!

By Johnnie Roy Maul

 

Read more:

http://www.themaulreport.com/2016/06/01/why-is-philip-anschutz-and-warre...

And do you think the billionaires are bothered by Trump being in charge? 

Philip Anschutz controls the Washington Examiner....:

Social media networks were thrown into an uproar after an American journalist advised Ukraine to blow up a recently constructed bridge between the Crimean Peninsula and mainland Russia.

As Russia celebrated the opening of a massive 19-kilometer-long bridge across the Kerch Strait, which now allows traffic to flow, American journalist Tom Rogan suggested in his article published by Washington Examiner that Ukraine should blow the bridge up.

According to the author, "Ukraine should now destroy elements of the bridge" because the structure is apparently "an outrageous affront to Ukraine's very credibility as a nation."

The journalist also insisted that the US should support Ukraine in this matter, promptly providing a link to another article of his titled "Don't Worry, the US Would Win a Nuclear War With Russia."

A large number of social media users, however, found Rogan’s vision shocking and wondered whether his proposal amounted to promoting terrorism.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201805171064534460-crimea-bridge-bombing-p...

Read from top...

 

See also: http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31873

 

Democracy? You're being drowned by the big guys in it... I mean it. Read article at top carefully. The Trump/Russia "Mueller inquiry" is part of the set up mentioned upthere... that is to demonise Russia (but not really demonise Trump) until...

 

For people like Philip Anschutz, war is an extension of sport... UGLY. 






Update: Johnnie Roy Maul, a supporter of Trump (and god) ISN'T RUSSIAN. HE IS A GOOD OLD MAD AHmerikan.
For people like Philip Anschutz, war is an extension of sport... UGLY.  Sport isn't philanthropy, but a business designed to lure the masses into believing in the "MERIT OF COMPETITION" and fighting for it... War, conflicts, biffo... you know the drill...

changing the perception of intent.

Robert Kagan, the subject of this column of articles was an integral part of the consPIRACY with Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who under the pretence of liberalisation of the world went and invented the war against Saddam, that has still strong repercussions today. The war against Saddam (Iraq) was a farce designed to destroy the buffer zone between the Shiites and the Sunnis in the Middle East and let these entities fight it out but by helping the Sunnis to the hilt — including the creation of ISIS. Here in an essay of The American Conservative, DANIEL LARISON, explains why Kagan is wrong about the critics of Donald Trump, who has not changed what the USA are doing to the world, but has changed the perception of what the USA are doing to the World by placing "America first". Same shit...

DANIEL LARISON:

Robert Kagan has written an even longer essay ridiculing critics of “liberal international order” mythology, but this one is no more persuasive than his op-ed warning about non-existent “isolationists.” Here is one of his complaints against Patrick PorterGraham Allison, et al.:

[Trump’s] boasting about American power put the world on notice that the United States was turning from supporter of a liberal order to rogue superpower. This breakdown may be our future, but it seems odd to choose that course as a deliberate strategy, as Allison and others seem to do [bold mine-DL]. Little wonder that they don’t wish to spell out the details of their alternative but prefer to carp at the inevitable failures and imperfections of the liberal world we have. 

The claim that the U.S. is only now under Trump turning into a “rogue superpower” is central to Kagan’s criticism of Trump and his defense of the “liberal order.” This is not the first time that Kagan has used this description. He writes this as if the U.S. hasn’t been behaving increasingly like a rogue superpower for at least the better part of the last thirty years. It is not an accident that the Iraq war is referenced only once in passing, and then only as part of the critics’ list of U.S. foreign policy failures. Kagan does not directly address the most egregious and obvious example of U.S. violations of international law in the post-Cold War era, nor does he address his support for that war, but sees fit to lecture others for their supposedly inadequate criticisms of “liberal order.” This is a recurring problem in many contemporary defenses of the “liberal order”: many of the people that are now its loudest champions have been actively undermining and destroying international order for decades. 

Kagan’s capacity for misreading the arguments of his targets is remarkable. None of the critics of the “liberal international order” mythology wants the U.S. to be a rogue superpower. On the contrary, these critics tend to agree that one of the big problems with U.S. hegemony in general and with Trump’s foreign policy in particular is that it means that the U.S. tramples on and disregards international law whenever it is expedient. Kagan’s attempt to conflate Trump and some of his loudest foreign policy critics is no more convincing than Hal Brands’ attempt to lump together Trump with antiwar progressives, and it stems from the same flawed assumption that they all want more or less the same things. Kagan writes:

They might not strike quite the same “America First” themes Trump struck during this week’s address to the U.N. General Assembly. But the realism they have in mind is much the same.

This is simply untrue, and any serious engagement with the arguments that these critics make would show just how silly this claim is. For one thing, Trump’s adoption of “realism” as part of his meaningless “principled realism” phrase just proves that the label is the most abused term in our foreign policy debates. These critics are not interested in Trump’s ignorant, militaristic unilateralism, and some of them have denounced it in no uncertain terms. The foreign policy Trump is conducting has little or nothing in common with the foreign policy that these people want to see. For Kagan, everyone that opportunistically claims the realist label must be a realist, and he doesn’t bother with the details of their preferred policies to see if it makes sense to treat them as being “much the same.” 

Some of these critics object to the ceaseless paeans to the “liberal international order” because the “order” has often served as an excuse for illiberal behavior and frequent violations of the rules. When they criticize the myth of the “liberal international order,” it is usually because they know that it has never really existed in the way that its boosters claim and because it has not been the reality for most nations in the world. Patrick Porter’s first main objection to “liberal order” nostalgia is that it celebrates something that never was:

They are, however, in the grip of a fiction. Liberalism and liberal projects abounded in the past 70 years. But the dream of a unitary, integrated global system organized around liberalism is ahistorical.

Porter is clearly not saying that the U.S. ought to become a “rogue superpower” or anything of the sort, but he is objecting to the gauzy fairy tale that ignores the real history of the last 70 years. He rejects the nostalgia that offers up a whitewashed, bowdlerized version that makes a real reckoning with the failures of the past practically impossible. That is one of the other major problems with the nostalgic enthusiasts of the “order”: they can’t and won’t grapple with its failings. Stephen Wertheim called out this tendency back in August:

Instead of recognizing past mistakes, the ad holds up the pre-Trump era as its lodestar. The old order, apparently, was not only acceptable but a world-historical triumph. We need to “preserve” it, not to confront its failings or build something better.

Porter notes that nostalgia for the “liberal order” is an attempt to evade responsibility for the consequences of U.S. foreign policy:

By reducing the issue to one of inadequate political will, and by blaming either elites or the public at large for failing to keep the faith, “liberal order” lamentations dodge the painful question of how such an excellent order could produce unsustainable burdens, alienate its own citizenry, and provoke resistance. 

Others criticizing the mythology are proposing that we acknowledge the limits and flaws of the so-called order so that we can understand it properly. Paul Staniland wrote this in his article from July of this year:

We need to understand the limits of the liberal international order, where it previously failed to deliver benefits, and why it offers little guidance for many contemporary questions.

In other words, don’t make the “liberal order” into an idol, and don’t treat as the answer to new problems that require different solutions that are appropriate to our own time. That sounds eminently realistic and sensible to me, but of course Kagan disagrees.

Kagan grudgingly allows that the “order” has its share of flaws and failings, but this doesn’t seem to have had any effect on how he thinks about the U.S. role in the world. He pays lip service to the idea that there have been failures, but shows no desire to learn anything from them. He admits that “[p]ower, coercion and violence have played a big part,” so he is conceding one the main points that Porter made in his essay. Porter also wrote:

As the ordering superpower, the United States did not bind itself with the rules of the system. It upended, stretched, or broke liberal rules to shape a putatively liberal order. 

This is very close to the following admission from Kagan:

This did not mean the United States always played by the rules. When it came to the application of force, in particular, there was a double standard. Whether they admitted it or not, even to themselves, American officials believed the rules-based order occasionally required the exercise of American power in violation of the rules, whether this meant conducting military interventions without U.N. authorization, as in Vietnam and Kosovo, or engaging in covert activities that had no international sanction. 

There is agreement that the “order” depends on coercion and that the U.S. has frequently violated the rules of that “order.” Where Kagan differs from the people he is criticizing is that he thinks illegal U.S. wars have been necessary, and he is on record supporting virtually all of them. The “liberal order” critics regard these wars as serious, costly errors that shouldn’t be repeated. Kagan’s strident defense of the “liberal order” and his record of supporting repeated U.S. violations of international law serve as a perfect example of the myopia that the critics of “liberal order” mythology are decrying.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-liberal-order-myth-a...

 

Confused? Same shit, different label...

 

Read from top.

 

uncle rupe's ugly former weekly tabloid is dead...

The Weekly Standard is no more. Its parent company is shutting the magazine down after 23 years. It is hard to imagine that the magazine that was the home to such greats such as Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, and Christopher Caldwell no longer exists. Those are the times in which we live. That’s quite a “Merry Christmas” from owner Philip Anschutz, a conservative Evangelical worth over $10 billion.

Last week, when word got out that this was probably about to happen, my old boss Daniel McCarthy, who was TAC’s editor for years, published a thoughtful analysis of the magazine’s demise. You may not know that the Standard began as a Rupert Murdoch* product, and was sold after a while to the Colorado billionaire Anschutz. This business model is different from the one behind National Review and TAC, as McCarthy explains. Excerpts:

The Weekly Standard’s value lay in the fact that it was an insider magazine. It was a top-down product — there was never an independent mass audience clamoring for a second National Review or for a specifically neoconservative publication. (Commentary, as a monthly, already served that market as far as demand could justify.) What was important was that the magazine be read not by a mass market but by Republican officials and their staff and various other influential persons, primarily in Washington, D.C. If officialdom read the Weekly Standard, then it was worth continuing to spend millions on it. In business terms as well as ideologically and literarily, the Weekly Standard had a lot in common with the New Republic, which for decades was dependent upon Marty Peretz’s singular financial support as owner of a magazine that touted itself during the Clinton years as the ‘inflight magazine of Air Force One.’

In Trump’s Washington, a conservative magazine that is robustly anti-Trump loses its practical value. Along these lines:

Beyond that, however, think about the brand itself: in the public mind, the name Weekly Standard is associated with one thing that’s unpopular with almost everyone (the Iraq War), and another that’s unpopular with its formerly intended audience of conservatives (opposition to Trump). The person most identified with the brand is Kristol, by far. He stepped down as editor at the end of 2016, but his public persona still defines the magazine: his bitter, flippant, or sarcastic tweets about Trump and Trump supporters are the Weekly Standard’s brand in the public’s eye. Few people look at the masthead of a magazine closely enough to realize when a prominent editor such as Kristol has been replaced by a less prominent once such as Steve Hayes — and because Kristol remains on the masthead as editor-at-large, ordinary readers have even more cause for confusion. (‘Editor-at-large’ sounds a lot like ‘editor’ to most people, but in fact usually means ‘ex-editor.’)

Fairly or not, Bill Kristol is the brand.

That’s simply the truth — and when Kristol did ugly, indefensible things, like accusing Tucker Carlson of defending slavery, it reflected on the magazine, even though he was no longer its editor. National Review even published a cover story denouncing Trump during the 2016 GOP primaries, but it has continued to thrive, in part because of its business model, and in part because it doesn’t have the branding challenge that the Standard has, or had.

I’ve read online some paleocon gloating over the Standard‘s end. You won’t find me doing that. Though I no longer share the magazine’s politics — the Bush years, especially the Iraq War, broke me of that — I retain affection for the Standard and its writers. Being away from the East Coast for so long has given me a spirit of genial ecumenism with regard to other conservative publications, even if I don’t agree with them on all things.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/weekly-standard-rip/

 

Read from top. Read also: war forever... in it's far fetched... but is this fellow the "penguin"?

* Bold by Gus.

smearing peace with kristol disdain...

 

Bill Kristol Takes Nasty Swipe At New Left-Right Project for Peace

It's his way of smearing anyone who questions endless wars as head-in-the-sand, let-Hitler-do-whatever-he-wants isolationists.

By ANDREW J. BACEVICH • July 2, 2019

 

News of the creation of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (with which I am affiliated) prompted an immediate response from the ever ebullient and bellicose Bill Kristol. The Quincy Institute opposes wars of no purpose that drag on endlessly. Kristol prefers to ignore those wars, especially the ones that he energetically promoted, promising easy victories that never came to pass. 

Yet his swipe at the Quincy Institute merits attention. It expresses in concise form the challenges facing anyone advocating a less militarized and more prudent approach to American statecraft. 

Rather than discussing the reality of the present, Kristol diverts our attention to a manufactured past. On Twitter, he offers his own version of the history: “75 years of a US-led liberal international order, based on a US forward presence and backed by US might, with regional and bilateral alliances and relatively free trade, has enabled remarkable peace and prosperity. But let’s go back to the 1920’s and 30’s!”

Now that jolly little narrative is chockablock with half-truths and outright evasions. (“Peace and prosperity” for whom, one might ask.) But it’s the sarcastic reference to the 1920s and 1930s that’s key. It’s Kristol’s way of smearing as head-in-the-sand, let-Hitler-do-whatever-he-wants isolationists anyone with the temerity to question the wisdom of engaging in endless wars. For those of Kristol’s ilk, Hitler is not yet dead. Or perhaps more accurately, there are always lots of Hitlers out there, perhaps speaking languages other than German, but keen to carry on the Fuhrer’s work. And according to Kristol, it is America’s eternal calling to stop them dead in their tracks.

I am, of course, caricaturing Kristol’s views, just as he caricatures anyone who suggests that the interests of the United States, and perhaps even of the rest of the world, might be better served by an approach to U.S. policy based on realism and restraint—not turning our back on the world but engaging it creatively, informed by an appreciation that the 1920s and 1930s are gone for good.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bill-kristol-takes-nasty-swipe-at-new-left-right-project-for-peace/

 

read from top.