6 comments… add one
  • Ken Hoop Link

    The Brenner piece fills the scenario out. Let us all hope for a Eurasian bloc which eases the US out of Europe and plays a part in doing so from the Mideast.
    Exceptional country? If you like inept bulls in a China shop and the export of Coca Cola culture to the continent of Mozart.

  • Andy Link

    Can’t disagree much with Brenner. US FP is an incoherent mess.

  • sam Link

    The old man shifted on his stool as the news on the TV wrapped up with a fanfare. “Ya know,” he said to the shelf of bottles across from him, “mebbe we’re playin’ whatchamacallit rope-a-dope with them Ruskies over there. Waddayathink?”

    “Sure, Pat. That’s it. Wananother drink?”

  • steve Link

    The Afghanistan pice is also good. As to Syria, as long as we keep prioritizing the interests of the Gulf States/Turkey and those of Israel, we will have incoherent policy. We need to firmly identify our interests and adhere to them. Alas, “our” is so fragmented I am not sure we can do that. Even then, the alliances in the ME are so convoluted anything we do will be wrong in some way. I would vote for minimal intervention so that we at least don’t make things worse.

    Steve

  • TastyBits Link

    I would suggest that since the end of the Cold War the only goal of foreign policy has been trade related, and everything is treated as a trade matter.

    The people who are up in arms over China’s various transgressions have never suggested cutting trade ties with them, and I suspect that they would be the first to howl about free-trade if anybody did suggest such a thing. Chinese trade trumps US security.

  • michael reynolds Link

    When I see the word “disarray” I look for the “array.” But I never seem to find anyone who has a foreign policy prescription that somehow squares the circle in the middle east. I’d suggest that’s because sometimes there is no possibility of coherence. Facts on the ground can make policy impossible.

    Our foreign policy in the years preceding WW2 were in disarray – we were promising to stay out of the war while clearly preparing for war. We were equally opposed to fascism and communism yet in short order we would be shipping considerable resources to modern history’s second-ranked monster, Stalin. We were also opposed to imperialism, despite shipping war materiel to Britain, the great imperialist power, which materiel the Brits used in part to defend their empire against the rising Japanese empire.

    We were all over the map. FDR was lying to Congress and the American people. We were simultaneously defending empire while denouncing empire, using the hated communists to kill the hated fascists, neutrally funneling weapons to one side, supporting Britain by draining their treasury, denying any war-like intent while ramping up our military at a frantic speed, (we began work on the B-29, not exactly a defensive weapon, years before the war started for us) and when we finally got into the war (thank you, Japan) we fielded a racist army to fight a white supremacist Germany, while encouraging anti-Asian racism in defense of those poor Chinese. Disarray is the kindest description.

    When the world gets sufficiently weird, it’s silly to insist on a foreign policy that can be boiled down to specific, publicly-stated bullet points. The middle east is in a state of weirdness – even by their standards – and pretending that there is some way to make coherent sense out of ISIS, Assad, Putin, Iran’s factions, Iraq’s tribes, Yemen, the KSA’s leadership problems, our Bahrain base, Israel’s various factions, Turkey, the Kurds. . . and the list goes on . . . is dishonest.

    There are lots of ways to write a book, but the big divide is between those who plan and those who improvise. Both work. But improv works better with higher levels of complexity. You can plan well when you have a limited number of factors to consider. But if you’re sitting down to write a 1500 page or 3000 page or even 10,000 page series (all of which I’ve done) improv works better. Even Bobby Fischer could only see half a dozen moves ahead.

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