Richard Stengel is a former under secretary of state for "public diplomacy" in the Obama administration and once the editor of Time. "Public diplomacy" is a euphemism for image promotion by a country for its benefit -- by as much as possible making friends through soft, cultural power.
Yes, just the sort of thing that the felonious Orange Toddler despises. Stengel has a harsh assessment of what the current president is doing to the USofA around the world.
... today’s unprecedented disengagement with diplomacy and our allies diminishes Brand USA. To call it a suicide pact is too strong, but it is a deliberate, conscious unraveling of the things that truly made America great.
What Trump is doing to America is a deliberate, slow-motion version of how Great Britain, one of the world’s great powers in the 20th century, became little England after the second world war. Within 15 years, an imperial hegemon became a medium-sized, more inward-focused European country concerned more with domestic economic recovery than foreign influence.
That is essentially what Trump is doing to America. Post-Trump, America will be a more domestic, inwardly focused nation, a country with fewer international connections and allies, but with an outsized, muscle-bound military, and always willing to do anything to make a buck. That is the fortress America of the 19th century, protected by two oceans and happily self-absorbed and insular.
No, we were never quite the shining city on the hill we thought we were. But, post-Trump, the United States will become little America. Smaller, meaner, less shiny.
I found informative Stengel's evocation of a US analogy to the shriveling of Great Britain as a world power after 1945. A US imperial denouement is even happening in the same part of the world; the Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the end of Britain's far flung order. In that military flare up, the US Eisenhower administration prevented the Anglo-French-Israeli alliance from humiliating a nationalist Egyptian government; by fiat, the US preserved Egyptian sovereignty over the vital Suez Canal and signaled the end of Britain's worldwide reach.
Might we now see China play some similar role in our current Strait of Hormuz adventure? A flailing TACO Trump could use an intervention to get him out of the crisis he has made for himself and us all. An anxious world wishes there were an adult to step in ...
There's a tongue-in-cheek joke that our wars are how Americans learn what little we know about global geography. Apparently the Orange Toddler's latest Middle East atrocity is going to teach us about fertilizer.
... War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.
... “It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”
... The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertilizer may be even more profound.
... Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertilizer producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.
... The situation is acute for American agriculture. President Trump’s tariffs had already raised the costs of imported fertilizer, forcing many farmers to hold off stocking up. The White House exempted fertilizers from its latest tariffs last month. But millions of tons of urea cannot quickly be summoned from points around the globe.
India is uniquely vulnerable, given that it traditionally buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from suppliers in the Middle East.
As the world seeks other sources, the most obvious alternative is China. But the Chinese government, seeking to cushion its own farmers from the very sort of geopolitical turmoil now at play, last year imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizers.
... A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.
... here’s the Guardian reporting on what that feels like to the people living there
Speaking
to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an
activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of
the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.
“The situation is
so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire
city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and
throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go
outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but
closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”
They also heard from a woman, Mehnaz, who wanted to flee after the initial strikes Saturday night.
Tehran
is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive
out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke
is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave
the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a
mask.”
Fire and fury indeed -- to distract from probable child rape in the Epstein files?
Our Trump regime's Venezuelan adventure has produced one of the most revealing paragraphs ever in the New York Times:
Ms. [Delcy] RodrÃguez, 56, arrives at the job of Venezuela’s interim leader with credentials of an economic troubleshooter who orchestrated the country’s shift from corrupt socialism to similarly corrupt laissez-faire capitalism. ...
Since corrupt capitalism is Trump's game, he likes that. And he clearly thinks he's won the chance to steal Venezuela's oil. We'll see how it goes.
Good riddance to Maduro. Pity the Venezuelans. Pity us. When legal restraint is swept away, we will all suffer. And pity any country cursed with "black gold" -- except maybe Canada.
In most of the European world, this day -- November 11 -- is Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. The event commemorated is the silence after four bloody years of the guns on the Western front ending combat there in what we call the First World War.
That First World War shaped and reshaped modern Europe, destroying empires and unleashing anti-capitalist, nationalist, and democratic forces that had been checked by old regimes. Those of us who observed the collapse of the Soviet Union have seen changes of somewhat comparable magnitude and import -- and those very changes were still part of the backwash of that First World War that is scarcely marked in the US today.
This informational plaque hangs at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, a remarkable institution which seeks to bring to life this formative history. Like the United States, Britain is a multi-racial and consequently multi-historical society where citizens with origins all over the (mostly imperial) world can strive to learn from each other's past.
Perhaps, as we live the collapse of the American world empire facilitated by our greedy madman of a President, we should pause to remember our ancestors who lived a similarly disorienting, murderous transition. It ain't easy or safe living in a collapsing empire ...
The Trump administration has accomplished something I didn't think would be where I'd dwell any longer -- thrown me back into my lifelong, all too familiar, posture of opposing a US imperial adventure. I was always a peacenik because our wars seemed so manifestly unjust -- until I saw a little country fighting for its very life against a relentless bully. I knew if I were a Ukrainian, I'd know which side I was on. And, I hope I'd be willing to take risks for my choices.
With the change of regime in this country, the United States is making itself a party to Putin's imperial war against Ukraine's freedom aspirations.
Phillips P. O'Brien is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a close observer of the Ukraine war. He writes:
Our Lady of Kiev
Trump Is Helping Putin Kill Ukrainians. The USA Is Running Down Ukrainian Air Defense in Coordination With Russia.
... Just in the last few days we have incontrovertible proof of how Trump is
helping Putin kill Ukrainians—both some now and many more in the
future. Its the combination of what the US will not sell Ukraine (even
though Ukraine has the money to buy them), the Russian missile campaign
against Ukrainian civilians, and how the two come together ...
... Ukraine is desperate to purchase Patriot anti-air missiles, as the
Ukrainians are running out of this vital system. These were provided
(too late) by the Biden Administration in 2023. From the moment they
appeared, however, they revealed themselves to be the most effective
air-defense weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal.
... Having Patriots allowed the Ukrainians to keep the power on
during the Russian Winter attacks in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. ... In sum, these are a very effective but expensive system. They have made Ukraine much safer than it would be otherwise. ...
... And the very effectiveness of the Patriots has provided Trump with a
weapon to help kill Ukrainians. Even being sparing in their usage,
Ukraine is running out. Patriots are an American system and the USA has
been the source of most of the missiles. Right now there is no new US
aid on its way to Ukraine. ...
... Trump, however, working hand in hand with Putin, is refusing to sell
them—even though that would benefit US workers and help the US economy.
Indeed, in the last few days he has started boasting about the fact that
Ukraine is desperate to buy more Patriots, and he is refusing to make a
deal.
... The USA (Trump is the duly elected president with the support of
Congress—so this is the official position of the US government) is now
working together with the Russian government to see more Ukrainians
killed. The USA is encouraging a Russian missile campaign against
Ukrainian civilians by letting the Russians know that the US will
deprive Ukraine of the means to defend those civilians and no longer
provide Ukrainian Patriots.
So, the next time a Russian missile
lands in a Ukrainian city and bodies litter the streets, realize this is
an act that is being encouraged and supported by the USA. The USA is no
longer a defender of democracy in Europe, it is an enabler of
dictatorship and death.
Phillips' post is much more detailed and unlocked. Take a look.
Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.
While
Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the
recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP
playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century.
He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the
1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada
into American hands.
Like
Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex
Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada
part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly
protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.
To
pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly
declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped
that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market,
would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs.
Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish
and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly
stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may
unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.”
Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the
sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying
the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to
President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would
“ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”
Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance.
Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react
forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with
high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain.
He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He
adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum
concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal
opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According
to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by
fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”
It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.
I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV.
Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events."
I bemoaned Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine and of this country last week. Our country is being disgraced by small empty men and the ignominy is just beginning.
Today I'll outsource commentary on the Trump/Vance boys bullying the brave Ukrainian President in the Oval Office to Phillips P. OBrien, an American historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Just Say Thank You and Shut Up
... The key theme throughout is that Trump is a great man who can
work with Putin, while Ukraine needs to shut up, show gratitude, and
take what is coming to it. Trump makes that clear when he criticizes the
Ukrainians for basically wanting to fight for their freedom and not
cave in to Putin, which he terms being “very disrespectful to this country” (this country being the USA—in other words, himself).
Then
Trump and Vance go on what can only be called the great gratitude rant.
Even though the USA under Trump has approved not a single new dollar in
aid for Ukraine, Trump and Vance want Zelensky to constantly say thank
you to them. Its, as always, an attempt to be humiliate a democratic
state and for Trump to take credit for something other people have done.
As Vance finally snaps. “Just say thank you.”
And
then Trump lets the cat out of the bag. This was not a meeting or
disagreement over the minerals deal. He was trying to pressure Zelensky
into agreeing a cease fire along Putin’s lines and Zelensky refused.
Trump comes out and says that explicitly at the end.
“You’re
buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers.
No, listen … And then you tell us, ‘I don’t want a ceasefire. I don’t
want a ceasefire. I want to go and I want this… You’re not acting at all
thankful. And that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest, that’s not a
nice thing.
So there we have it. Ukraine should shut
up and take Trump’s and Putin’s terms. It is not an independent,
sovereign, democratic state, it is a dictator’s plaything which should
be eternally grateful for the scraps from Trump’s and Putin’s table.
Thousands of Ukrainians didn't die for this -- and millions of Americans over three generations didn't fight fascism and for more complete democracy for this. As O'Brien goes on to say, it's now up to Europeans to step up and repudiate Trump's betrayal of all the European zone has stood for. Can they rise to their own defense?
European leaders
quickly pledged their continued support for Ukraine on Friday after
President Trump’s blistering criticism of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr
Zelensky, in a meeting at the White House.
Leaders
lined up behind Ukraine and praised its embattled president, the
statements coming one after the other: from France, Germany, Poland,
Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Norway,
Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Belgium, Lithuania,
Luxembourg and Ireland. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand leaders
added their voices to the Europeans’.
For once the paper got a headline right:
The Orange Toddler defends his only friend. What a gaping hole for a soul that monster in the White House reveals.
Every pundit around is summing up Joe Biden's accomplishments and failures. I want to play too. In a few days MAGA's merry band of saboteurs are going to preoccupy our attention. If I'm ever to unload these thoughts, today is the day.
I learned things I had not known from watching him stagger to failure.
There were times in the last few years when I considered Joe Biden the most successful occupant of the presidency for the majority of us that I'd seen since LBJ. New York Times business columnist Peter Coy (gift) summarized some of what Biden accomplished:
... he rose to the occasion of fighting the Covid pandemic and its economic effects. Although the recession was over by the time he was sworn in, the unemployment rate was still elevated at 6.4 percent. He had served as vice president during the feeble, “jobless” recovery from the recession of 2007-9, and he was determined to prevent a repeat of that slump.
Less than two months after taking office, Biden got Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included stimulus checks of $1,400 per person, extended unemployment insurance and a beefed-up child tax credit. That November, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized $1.2 trillion of transportation and infrastructure spending.
Those bills did what they were intended to do. They speeded the economic recovery and brought down unemployment, helping the poor and working class most of all. The expanded child tax credit alone cut child poverty nearly in half.
The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%. Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.
Observing these successes, I thought Biden's age gave him a secret sauce: his orientation to governing was formed in the years before Ronald Reagan's "revolution" dethroned the idea of an activist federal state that worked for the benefit of the people. Reagan and the GOPers sold an exhausted people on the hokum that "the best government governs least." This was always stupid and unworkable; today, the notion merely makes room for oligarchs to rob us blind.
Biden's basic orientation was toward building a more equitable state and economy. This enabled him to ally with Elizabeth Warren's technocrats on interventions that haven't yet been fully realized. I suspect that our new MAGA overlords will bluster and howl, but they'll also take credit as much of this survives and works out for their constituents.
Biden's deep experience of American foreign policy and influence in the world helped him at times and also left him up shit creek when he couldn't adjust to contemporary realities.
Ditching our failed state-building project in Afghanistan was unequivocally the right move. Twenty years of failure needed to be shucked off. And Trump had set Biden up to get out. But the mismanagement that killed US troops and left too many Afghans in the lurch was horrible and compound the ugliness of the whole misbegotten enterprise.
The Biden administration initially responded forcefully to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, then retreated to timidity when only an all-in commitment was going enable the Ukrainians to repel the invading imperialist power. The tragedy of Ukraine reminds me of the failure of the democratic states -- Britain, France, and the US -- to support the messy but legitimate government of Republican Spain in the mid-1930s against Hitler and Mussolini. We can only hope the consequence will not be similar, forcing the more law-abiding and democratic states to fight the authoritarian axis somewhere else if we're to survive. And now we've elected the modern America Firsters who always wanted capitulation to the dictators ...
And then there is Israel, the Palestinians, and the multiple oil autocracies of what Europe labels the Near East. Biden has been utterly clueless in this arena since October 7, 2023. His age and experience seems to have gifted him with completely the wrong lessons and, bluntly, the wrong racial and ethnic sympathies. His policies seem to assume that Palestinians are uppity natives to be repressed. His supine posture toward Bibi and enabling the demise of any chance for a decent order in the region has been nothing short of a clusterfuck, from day one.
All this was made more fragile and less understandable because aging Joe had lost any feel he ever had for communicating his aims to his riling constituencies. He was the president who wasn't there. And sending Kamala out to the rescue at the last minute couldn't save his legacy.
Jim Fallows is gentle about Joe. He's seen a few presidents up close.
Presidents obsess about their place in history, mainly because they can’t control it. Joe Biden must have dreamed of being seen as another FDR. His best chance now is to be seen as another Harry Truman or even Jimmy Carter—under-appreciated in his time and then gaining respect for the long-term effects of his work.
[in his final address] ... like Dwight Eisenhower before him, Biden was in fact honest. Brutally, unsparingly so. He was honest about who was causing problems: The modern versions of robber barons, and the politicians they had bought or intimidates. He was honest that citizens had to do something themselves if they didn’t like the trends, rather than waiting for someone to save them. He was presumably honest enough with himself to imagine the outrage and attacks the speech would certainly provoke. Honest enough to imply that some of the centrist reassurances of his career may have been naive.
Biden seemed a good and decent man trying to do a job he was too aged for and perhaps also a job that his experience had both suited and unfitted him for in contradictory ways. On to the next American misadventure ...
We're having gale force winds and intermittent outages this morning, so I am not going to try to write anything that requires coherent attention. Here I share a piece to ponder for the new year.
Author Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who specializes in Southeast Asia. Juan Cole passed this along by way of TomDispatch.
The End of the American Century
... let’s face it, Donald Trump’s second term is likely to mark the end of America’s near-century as the world’s preeminent superpower. After 80 years of near-global hegemony, there are arguably five crucial elements necessary for the preservation of U.S. world leadership: robust military alliances in Asia and Europe, healthy capital markets, the dollar’s role as the globe’s reserve currency, a competitive energy infrastructure, and an agile national security apparatus.
However, surrounded by sycophants and suffering the cognitive decline that accompanies aging, Trump seems determined to exercise his untrammeled will above all else. That, in turn, essentially guarantees the infliction of damage in each of those areas, even if in different ways and to varying degrees.
America’s unipolar power at the end of the Cold War era has, of course, already given way to a multipolar world. Previous administrations carefully tended the NATO alliance in Europe, as well as six overlapping bilateral and multilateral defense pacts in the sprawling Indo-Pacific region. With his vocal hostility toward NATO, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, Trump is likely to leave that alliance significantly damaged, if not eviscerated.
In Asia, he prefers to cozy up to autocrats like China’s Xi or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un instead of cultivating democratic allies like Australia or South Korea. Add to that his conviction that such allies are freeloaders who need to pay up and America’s crucial Indo-Pacific alliances are unlikely to prosper, possibly prompting South Korea and Japan to leave the U.S. nuclear umbrella and become thoroughly independent powers.
Convinced above all else of his own “genius,” Trump seems destined to damage the key economic components of U.S. global power. With his inclination to play favorites with tariff exemptions and corporate regulation, his second term could give the term “crony capitalism” new meaning, while degrading capital markets. His planned tax cuts will add significantly to the federal deficit and national debt, while degrading the dollar’s global clout, which has already dropped significantly in the past four years.
In defiance of reality, he remains wedded to those legacy energy sources, coal, oil, and natural gas. In recent years, however, the cost of electricity from solar and wind power has dropped to half that of fossil fuels and is still falling. For the past 500 years, global power has been synonymous with energy efficiency. As Trump tries to stall America’s transition to green energy, he’ll cripple the country’s competitiveness in countless ways, while doing ever more damage to the planet.
Nor do his choices for key national security posts bode well for U.S. global power. If confirmed as defense secretary, Peter Hegseth, a Fox News commentator with a track record of maladministration, lacks the experience to begin to manage the massive Pentagon budget. Similarly, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has no experience in that highly technical field and seems prone to the sort of conspiracy theories that will cloud her judgment when it comes to accurate intelligence assessments.
Finally, the nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already promising to punish the president’s domestic critics rather than pursue foreign agents through counterintelligence, the bureau’s critical responsibility.
By the time Trump retires (undoubtedly to accolades from his devoted followers), he will have compressed two decades of slow imperial decline into a single presidential term, effectively ending Washington’s world leadership significantly before its time.
If US imperial decline would be good for most Americans or most other peoples, one could applaud. But that's hard for me to believe, even though I've spent a life fighting American imperial impositions on the rest of the world. The imperial ambitions of the Russia, China, North Korea and Iran axis don't look benign. Hard times ahead and Mr. Trump is a fire accelerator.
I don't usually write here about books which I found grossly unsatisfying. Books with which I disagree? Often. Problematical? Sure. But badly constructed, argued without historical context, and poorly thought out? Very seldom.
As anyone who reads here knows, the history and practices through which we express our encounters with whatever we take as God or Ultimate Concern is one of my themes there. Because we are human, these are all within, and manifestations of, our cultures and societies. Therefore, our religious practices and institutions reflect our cultures; it would never occur to me to assume that they sprung full-formed like the goddess Athena from the head of a Zeus nor from the tablets of the law brought from the mountain by Moses. We make what we can with what we've received and do our best to treat it as sacred.
Kaylor and Underwood write with good intent. They seem to believe they are exposing novelties. But so many others, only glancingly acknowledged here, have mined this territory, often more deeply: scanning my own wanderings in this literature on this blog, I found such names of Robert P. Jones, Katherine Stewart, Randall Balmer, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Sarah Posner, Daniel Schultz, David A. Hollinger, Jemar Tisby, Esau McCaulley, Eddie Glaude, Kevin M. Kruse ...
Okay, this book wasn't written for me. I simply had read too many of its sources. Here's some of the blurb for Baptizing America:
How can Mainline Protestants spot [Christian nationalist] practices in their own activities? ... Christian Nationalism ... exists in sanctuaries where an American flag has been displayed for decades, when we pledge allegiance to one nation “Under God,” or when the U.S. is called a Christian nation. Baptizing America critiques the concept of civil religion, arguing that such expressions are far more dangerous than we realize. Mainline Protestant congregations will likely recognize themselves in the overlooked expressions of Christian Nationalism that pop up in the activities of both church and state.
And little as I like this book, the reaction of my church book reflection group to it taught me a lesson. Everyone doesn't notice that the words "under God" in the national pledge of allegiance, flags in the sanctuary, and patriotic hymns are not intrinsically Christian. Some were taken aback to see the secular nationalism of church customs called out. This book helped them to see habitual practices a little differently. That helps all of us focus more on whatever the message of Jesus' life and death might mean.
To me the Christian nationalist trappings of American Protestantism are simply the cultural detritus of the middle of the last century within mainline churches, a relic of when American empire was riding high. That time is long gone.
• • •
Donald Trump's first presidential inauguration in 2017 evoked a solid protest against Christian nationalism from the Rev. Gary Hall, the retired dean of what Episcopalians deem "the National Cathedral" which as been accustomed to figure in the festivities.
For more than a century, the cathedral has tried to stand in two worlds at once, attempting to be both a practicing Christian church and a gathering place for American civic expression. As the cathedral’s former dean, I believe that fidelity to the former role now requires rejecting the latter.
For much of its life, the cathedral experienced the tension inherent in playing two roles as creative but not potentially destructive.
But much has changed in American religious life over the past 110 years, and the cathedral has found it increasingly difficult to have it both ways.
After World War II, Christians began seriously to reflect on their relations with the prevailing culture. How could our religion square its validation of oppressive regimes (Protestants and Catholics in Nazi Germany, mainline Christians supporting segregation in the American South) with the principles of love and justice exemplified and articulated by Jesus.
Over the course of the past 75 years, it became impossible to see the church’s mission as compatible with its traditional role of endorsing the status quo. We began to see ourselves less as “Christendom” and more like the early church that stood up to Rome.
... I believe Trump’s election has proved that the cathedral’s attempt to continue this religious/civic balancing act is no longer tenable.
In his words and actions, Trump has shown himself to be outside the bounds of all mainstream norms of Christian faith and practice. His often-expressed xenophobia and misogyny, not to mention his mocking of the disabled and admission of abusive behavior, place him well outside the values of compassion and respect for human dignity that mark historic Christianity at its best. It is simply inappropriate to use a precious institution such as Washington National Cathedral to suggest that the church bestows its blessing on a leader so obviously beyond the pale of Christian thought.
The cathedral’s dilemma exemplifies this watershed moment in the Christian church’s role in American public life. The community that claims to follow Jesus must choose between its role as what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement” and its long-standing practice as the validator of the status quo. With Trump’s election we cannot, with any integrity, be both.
If the church is going to be faithful to Jesus, we must (as he did) stand as a force of resistance to unjust and oppressive civil authority. We cannot use the words, symbols and images of our faith to provide a religious gloss to an autocrat. ... I simply do not believe that the most visible symbol of compassionate faith in America should lend itself to endorsing or espousing their shrunken, fearful vision of our national life.
That was then. How much more so now. I doubt Trump will want to take his circus to that historic church this time, but who knows? A cursory search does not reveal plans.
Once upon a time, before we reverted to lusting after monarchism, we were part of this. No kings!
Q. What's the most common holiday in the world?
A. Independence from the British Empire day.
There is one somewhere in the world on average every 6 days.
Conservative Party British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has set a general election for July 4. (We'll be in that country floating the inland canal system on a narrowboat, so I may or may not see something of this.)
I had been holding Alex Massie's commentary on the contemporary United Kingdom for our visit, but Sunak's surprise move makes it worth publishing now.
There is much truth in the post-imperial line, “We are here because you were there” but even this undersells the real transformation of the British population.
To observe this is simply to note reality. There is nothing wrong or deplorable about any of this and I see no reason to regret it.
And, overall and with obvious counter-examples to complicate the picture, this transformation has been achieved with comparatively little trouble or fuss. That is not to downplay the experiences of black and asian Britons but, rather, to try and see the larger picture.
High-profile leadership positions are not everything but nor are they nothing. The prime minister is a Hindu whose parents hail from India, the mayor of London is the son of a Pakistani bus driver, the first minster of Scotland is Scots-Pakistani (and so is the leader of the Scottish Labour party), Kemi Badenoch, who may yet be the next leader of the Conservative party, was born in Nigeria, the next foreign secretary, David Lammy, is the son of Guyanese immigrants, and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, is a black man born in Zambia.
It is exaggeration to say that among western nations only the United States has political leadership of such diversity (and even then, some of that American diversity is a matter of political appointment rather than electoral success).
Ten million people living in Britain today were born overseas. The paradox of immigration politics in Britain is that politicians talk tough on immigration while presiding over a system of unprecedented liberalism. The rhetoric may sometimes be ugly; the reality is rather different.
Britain is no longer the quaint antiquarian museum of castles, cathedrals, and the slightly absurd monarchy of American imagination. Nor is it the land of a wondrous, universal national health system won by unionized labor. I am looking forward to a glimpse (only) of a more complex reality.
Strange as it may sound, the aroma of gluhwein [Ukrainian mulled wine] on Independence Square or hot tea that warms Ukrainian defenders at the front – these are our simple pleasures, the ones that help us understand what we’re living for.
In recent years, every Ukrainian has become dependent on one another. The front cannot exist without the rear, but without the front Ukraine’s distinct culture and society would be eliminated.
Since the invasion began, the holidays have taken on a whole new meaning for us. Now it's not just about drinking champagne while the bells ring, or opening presents.
For Ukrainians, Christmas and New Year is a time to thank every defender, a time to remember that it is only because of them that we sleep under warm blankets, to pay tribute to those who have died and those who are still in captivity, to think about those who are currently under occupation and cannot feel free on their native Ukrainian land.
St. Nick via Razom, people-to-people aid to Ukraine
• • •
The Ukraine war puts me in mind of another anti-colonial war, an analogy that I see raised very seldom in this country, yet which seems highly apt to me: the United States War of colonial Independence, 1775-1783.
A rag-tag band of colonials with sophisticated political ideas and mixed motives decided they were ready to throw off a constraining imperial power. The old power despised them as rude farmers and shop keepers. It took their revolt lightly, expecting a quick suppression. Ingenuity and determination among the colonials kept them in the fight and stretched the old empire's military resources. Other world empires propped up the revolt in order to weaken their competitor. There was nothing easy about the U.S. independence struggle, but the insurgent colonists prevailed and the rest is history.
When I think of Ukraine this year, I think of General Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 leading his ill-trained, under-equipped Continental Army to challenge the era's most imposing military.
Few observers would have expected that these improbable amateur troops could endure and win, but they did. Ukraine surviving Russian invasion makes no sense. But Ukraine still lives and carries hope of something better for its people and for all of Europe. I am grateful for the example, however tenuous and imperfect.
I guess you'd have to predict this guy couldn't just fade away. More than half a century of imperial promotion, torture, and war-making doesn't lead to a graceful exit.
In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner reminds us of centenarian Henry Kissinger's many contributions to the last eight decades of U.S. efforts to seize and hold onto global hegemony.
It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.
... Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.
... If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary. ...
a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco-Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam.
This Pulitzer Prize winning history is sweeping, thorough, fascinating -- and, perhaps most surprisingly, gentle. This is a sad narrative, but not, as it might have been, a catalogue of villains.
Logevall writes with empathy for most all the men (there were hardly any women who figure as actors) engulfed in the long running tragedy. He's particularly aware of slaughtered Vietnamese and French colonial draftees, but also of successive French and American officers and officials tasked by their countries with holding back the tide of history.
The American war in Vietnam was my backdrop growing up and coming into young adulthood. I sought then to understand the American war, tuning in to contemporary US journalism, which did convey very early on that this was a futile and probably immoral misadventure. I also dipped into alternative sources, mostly from the left, including the international relations Howard University scholar Bernard Fall and the anti-imperialist Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who reported from Hanoi. But like most engaged young anti-warriors, my real interest at the time was what this atrocious war was doing to my own country. Vietnam was a symptom of racism, and inequality, and hubris that had to be contested at home. So a very superficial narrative of what was going on in Indochina would suffice for many of us.
This book fills in background that was neither accessible nor seemed important to people like me at the time. Some random highlights, most all of which touch on points when the tragedy could have been, if not averted, played out to a different finish:
• Logevall suggests that if FDR had lived, the sort of instinctive anti-colonialism that was still part of the pre-WWII American mental furniture might have led him to try to keep the French from returning to make war on Indochinese nationalists. We didn't much hold with colonies in those days (while not admitting we'd seized a few from Spain at the beginning of the century.)
But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years.
• Ho Chi Minh, who had been jousting with French colonialism since the Versailles Conference in 1921 that concluded WWI in western Europe, saw the 1939 European war (WWII) and the German defeat of France as Vietnam's chance for independence. First the Vietnamese had to take on the Japanese; then expel the Europeans. The resurgent French wanted their colony back in 1945 and soon were fighting Ho's Viet Minh. Yet according to Logevell's account, Ho didn't give upon the hope that the Americans would let the French fail and not take up the war as late of 1949.
• John F. Kennedy toured French Indochina in 1951, seeking to burnish his foreign policy credentials. Even then, with French defeat and expulsion by Vietnamese nationalists still three years ahead, he saw where this was going in notes he wrote about the trip:
"We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people ... we will be damned if we don't do what they [the emerging nations] want."
• Yet by the time the Kennedy administration succeeded Eisenhower in 1961, the young president and his country had succumbed to the inertia of continuity that pervades our political system.
A White House aide of the time, when asked years later how the U.S. interest in Vietnam was defined in 1961, answered "it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned." The given was that Ho Chi Minh could not be allowed to prevail in Vietnam, that the Saigon government must survive, that failure to thwart the Communists here would only make the task harder next time.
And so the Americans replicated the terrible trajectory of the France's failing empire and tried to impose our own post-WWII imperium. It's a bit of an investment of time to read Logevall's whole story, much of it intricately descriptive of military folly in terrible jungles amid both bravery and stupidity on all sides. Mostly there was death -- but eventually (in 1954) there was pride in the new Vietnam in the north and determination to finish the job by winning national freedom in the south. And eventually the intruding Americans too were swept away, though it cost of at least a million Vietnamese deaths and 20 more years of suffering.
• • •
The Vietnamese siege of the French outpost at Dien Bien Phu was the first world event which stuck in my consciousness as a child. I had no idea what it was about, but I have vague memories of the 15 minute nightly TV newscast repeating day after day that the battle for this obscure jungle redoubt raged on -- and then it was over and the oh-so-foreign Vietnamese had prevailed. Reading Logevall's detailed account, I realized that I was being drawn back into my mother's feelings during that event.
She had been devastated in 1940 by what was called "the fall of France," the overrunning of that country by Nazi Germany -- she was among the relatively small contingent of Americans who had urged preparedness to fight on an isolationist United States. During WWII, listening to the war on the radio, she developed great affection for the Free French and its leader Charles DeGaulle. Some of that carried over into her reaction to France's colonial war in Vietnam. She worried about the French and was oblivious to the dignity of Asian colonial subjects. She conveyed that to me as we listened to "the fall" of Dien Bien Phu. Reading about Dien Bien Phu, I felt again her emotions, an odd sensation.
• • •
The title of Logevall's book derives from a remark by the journalist David Halberstam that the American war in Vietnam occurred "in the embers of another colonial war." Halberstam wrote his own account of America's Vietnam quagmire, appearing in 1972 when the war had not yet ended, The Best and the Brightest. Yes, I'm rereading that one ...
When I share domestic tidbits, I usually know where I think they lead. When it comes to the emerging 21st century global power configurations, I'm a bemused and helpless spectator. Here are some links, some with my commentary in italics.
Atrios: Biden's foreign policy leans towards do the right thing more than any president in my lifetime, as far as I can tell. I agree, feeling concern and consternation amid inevitable reservations.
John Ganz: I am overly given to viewing things in terms of grand clashes of ideologies and social forces to the point that I can sometimes lose sight of the two dominating spirits of world-affairs: stupidity and vanity. A useful caution ...
Nathaniel Rachman - marking Mikhail Gorbachev' passing How politicians deal with opposition, humiliation and defeat is one of the great tests of office. Now more than ever, those in charge of the world’s leading powers struggle to face it. In China, the leadership of the Communist Party has blundered into a disastrous Covid policy, unable to change course for fear of tarnishing its own image. In the United States, a former president has rejected his own electoral defeat, imperiling American democracy. And in Russia, Putin’s vicious resentment of Ukraine’s independence led to this year’s brutal invasion. Unlike Putin, Xi and Trump, Gorbachev’s was a model of leadership defined not by achieving one’s goals, but by accepting their rejection. He is a reminder that even those who fail spectacularly can redeem themselves by knowing how and when to lose. It is a shame so few leaders today seem ready to do the same.
Brad DeLong - the mysteries of British decline My view—which may be wrong—has been that Britain’s long relative economic decline since the heights of 1870 has been due to its persistent refusal to invest in its people and in its technology-driving industries. You can say that the first of these has cultural-ideological-political roots—Tories fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their betters, and Labour fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their parents—and you could be right. You can blame the second on the British Empire making it just too easy to to invest abroad and count on the power of the gunboats to make foreign investments safe. You can then say that those institutional habits persist to this day, and you could be right as well. Perhaps. ...
John Cassidy: In the past six years, the Conservative Party has jettisoned economic skepticism, and embraced wishful thinking and self-sabotage. Yes, the Tories suck. Or perhaps we see across the pond the natural trajectory of imperial decline?
Meanwhile the far-flung US imperial project grinds along:
Sarah Lazare: In September, the U.S. created a foundation that was supposed to unfreeze Afghanistan’s foreign assets. Yet, interviews with trustees reveal that, in three months, no funds have been disbursed—or concrete plans made—to help the Afghan people.
Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute: While MBS Undermines America, Joe Biden Has His Back on Yemen -- Few people noticed, but the United States Senate came very close to ending America’s complicity in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen earlier this week. But the very same person who had vowed to end that war intervened and stopped the Senate from taking action — President Joe Biden. The White House feared that the Senate resolution would have emboldened the Yemeni Houthi movement. But Biden may have instead signaled the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) that, even as he continues to undermine the United States, America still has his back. We're addicted to both fossil fuels and treating the people of the greater Middle East as pawns in American strategic games. You too Joe Biden.
And so to Russia's imperial dreams:
Someone using the handleDaragh at Crooked Timber: ... in many ways the Russian populace is much like the poor-white farmers of the antebellum south – hugely disadvantaged by the system themselves, but willing to support it because it puts them one or two steps up the ladder of oppression. Changing this mentality will be difficult work – potentially the work of generations. But it's work that needs doing if there is going to be a Russia that isn’t inclined to aggressive predation on its neighbours.
Greg Afinogenov: Unlike the American Baby Boomers, who have retained a vision of themselves as the protagonists of history since their teenage years, the utopians among the Soviet shestidesiatniki (“‘60s-ers”) became the occupants, if not of the dustbin of history, at least of its recycling bin. Too old when the USSR collapsed to forge new lives in its wreckage, they were also too young to have benefited much in its prime.
Ghia Nodia: An Imperial Mindset -- What the outcome of World War One was for Hitlerism, the outcome of the Cold War was for Putinism. ...A bigger problem is that, unlike Germany after World War Two, it will be very difficult for Russia to find a place in the world that would be acceptable for its national self-esteem. Before the war, Russia’s economy and institutions did not allow it to become either a true member of the global elite or an alternative center of power like China. It could only desperately punch above its weight—by invading Ukraine—without a chance of ever being truly satisfied. These underlying conditions will not disappear: in fact, they have been made worse as a result of the invasion. Russia will not become a true member of the international elite any time soon, though it may face a choice between being a poor relation of the West or becoming a junior partner of China. In either case, ressentiment will remain.
So to the Ukrainian people whose admirable, involuntary resistance to tyranny, we use to inspire ourselves:
Tom Nichols: This holiday season, many of us will seek peace and a reset heading into the new year by drawing closer to family, taking a break from work, and observing the rituals of our faith. We tend, during this time, to clear our mind of unpleasant things. But as Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine. A democratic nation is refusing to be conquered by a vengeful imperial power, and it is paying for it with the lives of innocent men, women, and children. As we celebrate the season, let us remember that the Russians have shown no intention of taking a holiday from murder.
I agree with Nichols here -- but seeking to use our wealth and privilege for peace is always a higher calling than victory, even when the struggle is just. I believe Ukraine's cause is necessary and just. And I don't want to forget that justice is not everything.
When I need to restore my soul, I've long watched massive numbers of these made-for-TV college athletic spectacles. There are something like 41 of them this year beginning December 16. Most are pedestrian, but a few are delights. All offer their moments and their quirks.
But the structures that set the terms for them have changed pretty radically since I last indulged one of these seasonal bowl binges. I thought I'd share some observations and definitions of terms.
Of course, Division 1 NCAA football has long been a business, a Darwinian contest among sports administrators to showcase teams that will excite alumni donors. For decades, that meant attracting promising high school athletes with "scholarships" which rendered them something like indentured peons under all-powerful coaches, subsisting on the favor of their masters (almost all men) -- and perhaps their talent. This might lead to a continued athletic career at the professional level for a very few. And college degrees for about 73 percent of high level players -- slightly higher than their non-athlete peers. These graduation rates are something like 15 percent higher for white players than for black ones.
Legal challenges during last decade have reduced the power of college athletic administrators to keep players in penurious servitude and allowed some direct compensation to athletes from the schools, but even more from booster collectives. But it's the conferences that control the TV money and rake in big bucks.
And it's the NCAA and the conferences that shape post season (bowl) play. Over the next few years, all the accreted anarchic bowls will be sucked into the College Football Playoff National Championship. Forget iconic bowls like the Rose Bowl serving as contests between regions of the country. Which schools play where will be determined by "national standings," not accidents of history. This may make economic sense and even for some less-mismatched, but more exciting, contests, but something is lost.
Something else that has gone bye-the-bye is the expectation that college football players will give their all for their schools in post-season play. Players with strong NFL prospects routinely choose not to risk injury (or have their weaknesses highlighted) by "opting out" of bowl play. Just about every bowl game I have watched this year has begun with a recitation of a list of absentees "preparing for the NFL draft." This is understandable; football is these guys' ticket, not that degree in sports management.
And besides, coaches are doing the same -- jumping to the next job before the post season finishes. This might be one of the most surreal outcomes I've run across:
Wasabi Fenway Bowl - Cincinnati vs. Louisville, December 16 Cincinnati: Head coach Luke Fickell left for Wisconsin and won't coach in the bowl. Kerry Coombs will remain on staff under new coach Scott Satterfield and is the interim head coach for this game. ... Louisville: The Cardinals lost coach Scott Satterfield and a couple of assistants to Cincinnati. Deion Branch will work as the team's interim coach for this game. ...
College football players, their peon status newly loosened, play their own game of musical chairs. In theory, the NCAA has long defined eligibility for its athletes as four seasons in their sport, plus a "red shirt" year when they play little or not at all. Teams red-shirt (hold out) players for development or major injuries and sometimes can squeeze an additional year out through administrative legerdemain; this is why I keep hearing of "six year players." Also why one hears that some athletes are in graduate school for academics while still playing undergrad college sports.
And currently the newly implemented "transfer portal" allows college football players to jump from one academic institution to another, perhaps for a better deal, or better TV exposure, or to follow a preferred coach who made a move. The portal is a database of athletes hoping to make a jump. Until this was put in place, transferring students had to sit out a year at their new digs. No longer. The transfer portal rules are somewhat intricate and evolving. Players who have entered the portal can play in bowl games with their old college, but mostly don't. That's another list of opt-outs announced at the beginning of this year's games.
There's a heck of a lot of money in college football and its post-season. And so long as we don't, as a society, conclude that American football is too lethal to continue to attract masses of customers, there'll be young athletes who want in. I will miss the less blatantly commercial version of the college football post-seasion. But the new one will undoubtedly put on a grand show. Guess I'll have to learn all the new rules. It's more fun when I understand them, at least superficially.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, like probably most people reading here, I had never heard of the city of Mariupol.
Only a year ago, someone made what I assume is a tourism-promotion video, celebrating a municipality that turned itself into a light show for Christmas. What is shown here is gone, blasted to bits, the survivors scattered, a city of about 400,000 people wiped away by conquest.
I am taking time to try to know more about this so-foreign part of Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder's fall lectures at Yale on The Making of Modern Ukraine are available in full and for free. In addition to being a language polymath, he's a charming lecturer. I highly recommend this series.
Putin's imperial war to conquer Ukraine could be the end of us all, so I can hardly ignore it.
George Packer, usually a pretty hard-boiled journalist, felt he had to see for himself. He questions his own objectivity. His story is worth reading in full.
Journalism that waves the banner of moral clarity makes me uneasy. Moral clarity can be blinding, and most subjects worth writing about are complicated. But a few things are morally clear: slavery, and genocide, and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine. ...
It’s absurd to approach this war from a position of neutrality. As a journalistic stance, neutrality is worthless, and usually spurious, because everyone is a partisan of some kind. Objectivity is different: the necessary effort, always doomed to fall short, of rendering reality exactly, like a carpenter striving for plumb, level, and square. What’s most crucial is independence: refusing to surrender your judgment of the truth for the sake of a political cause.
Journalism doesn’t require an anesthetized moral faculty. It ought to be possible to want Ukraine to win this war and still tell what you see and hear there honestly.
... Here was another motive [to go to Ukraine]—the strongest and most dubious of all. I wanted a gulp of Ukrainian air. I wanted to breathe its hope. What a thing to ask of people fighting for their lives.
...I don’t know if Ukraine can win this war, but I know it must. Putin’s Russia is committing crimes that have not been seen in Europe since Hitler and Stalin—leveling cities, terror-bombing civilian populations, creating millions of refugees, using rape and torture to break the will of those under occupation, separating families, detaining and interrogating at least 1 million Ukrainians and sending many to far-off internment camps, preparing to annex entire regions, erasing their language and culture, burning crops, using vital food and energy supplies to blackmail the world. If Western leaders are too afraid of Putin and their own voters to stop him and punish him for these crimes, he’ll know that the West is as weak and pleasure-seeking as he’s always believed. ...
Packer's full-throated endorsement of Ukrainians' struggle to preserve their country and future is wonderfully attractive. I share his moral enthusiasm; I think he's right. But I don't know how many of us that conclusion will leave unscathed.
• • •
Pundits struggle to discern whether Putin is wily and/or evil and/or simply has drunk a disorienting Koolaid. In this tidbit, Susan Glasser wonders ...
... There is also the matter of Putin getting the West wrong. We in Washington hardly have a monopoly on misguided assumptions being a driving factor in international affairs. Many indicators suggest, in fact, that they were a major reason why this war happened. Putin not only failed to understand that Ukrainians would stand and fight against his aggression; he also failed to foresee the U.S. and its NATO allies remaining united and funding the Ukrainian resistance. Moscow’s bogus annexations of more Ukrainian territory seems likely to produce only more Western sanctions—and the possible extension of the war that Putin looks increasingly like he is losing. “The problem is, of course, us misreading him, but also him misreading us,” [security analyst Fiona] Hill observed.
I'm Ukrainian. I have no children. I am not putting anyone in any danger. I can be useful to my country. I have a very close friend who lives in Great Britain. I had options to go to Poland. But if we all leave, who will defend the country? Who will support the economy? Who will sustain the belief that we will win? And who will make sense of the fact that we have had to endure it all? This is my home. I'm staying here.
• • •
This is still the disunited United States and there are millions of us who are suspicious of our country's repeated martial adventures. We've lived through decades of misbegotten imperial wars. Some caution about enthusiasm for our righteous endorsement of Ukrainian is certainly advised. Author Robert Wright brings a warning.
Yet many American elites—politicians, journalists, even “think” tankers—have been reacting to this war as if it were a football game or some other purely zero-sum contest. They’ve celebrated Ukrainian gains on the battlefield with no ambivalence, blissfully unaware that dramatic Ukrainian military success was always bound to encourage Kremlin risk taking, raising the chances of regional or even nuclear war.
Now, with Ukraine’s big battlefield success having been followed by Russian mobilization and Putin’s declared annexation, bliss will be harder to come by even if awareness fails to grow.
Wright published before Putin's current round of nuclear threats. I just know I don't know what to think, but I choose not to entirely look away.
President Biden: We all lost loved ones on September 11th and call upon you to return the Afghan Central Bank funds to the Afghan people. This is their money, not ours.
Their argument may not seem obvious, but certainly deserves consideration. Robert Wright and Andrew Day explain.
In February, Biden signed an executive order freezing $7 billion in assets owned by Afghanistan’s central bank. The order reserved half that amount for 9/11 victims’ relatives who had successfully sued the Taliban for damages years ago. But this week 80 other relatives of 9/11 victims urged reconsideration of the policy. In a letter to Biden they wrote, “Ninety-five percent of Afghans are impoverished, and nearly nine million are at risk of starvation…this money is theirs, not ours.”
These families argue the impounded assets never belonged to the Taliban.
This money does not belong to the Taliban. This money comes from Afghanistan’s central bank, and as such, it belongs to the Afghan people. Victims of terrorism, including 9/11 victims, are entitled to their day in court. But they are not entitled to money that lawfully belongs to the Afghan people.
Our government has never been much concerned with the rightful claims of ordinary Afghans, but Biden should not be compounding the evils left by this misbegotten imperial adventure.
