Firstly, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to Mona Charen for finally puncturing the bubble of "give Trump credit for China", which even smart Trump critics like JVL fell victim to at one point. The phrase "even broken clocks are right twice a day" isn't meant to give credit to broken clocks, and …
Firstly, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to Mona Charen for finally puncturing the bubble of "give Trump credit for China", which even smart Trump critics like JVL fell victim to at one point. The phrase "even broken clocks are right twice a day" isn't meant to give credit to broken clocks, and nobody should give Trump credit for redirecting his rhetoric against China (once again) out of political expedience when he needed a scapegoat for his COVID failures. As if he was somehow the first to recognize China's malign threat; the TPP was the product of *years* of negotiations whose express purpose was to counter Chinese economic influence. Trump's stance on China was like his attitude toward most things - mercurial, transactional, and rooted almost entirely in the present moment (as expected from someone ignorant of the past and indifferent toward the future). As with other world strongmen, he'd talk tough from a distance and be eating out of their hand after meeting in person.
Secondly, Brian Stewart's article nicely calls out the supposed anti-imperialists of the Left. I'm a progressive myself, so I think I have enough credibility to just come out and say it: if Ukraine was full of brown-skinned people, you'd be hearing a much different kind of rhetoric from our side. Probably still overly dovish, and still probably seeking to somehow lay the blame on the U.S., but one that would at least be forced to confront the malignancy of Putin's ambitions. The lack of an explicit racial dynamic to animate the far Left leaves the Left's foreign policy "realists" to fall back on myopic middle class anxieties about gasoline prices to argue that Ukraine isn't worth the effort.
The American Left's "anti-imperialist" mindset is an entirely passive one, utterly ignorant of the fact that it is rooted in a modern concept of national sovereignty that is made possible only through the American hegemony they so despise. For the foreign policy doves, it isn't that they're opposed to imperialism in general; it's an opposition to *us* doing the work of maintaining a world free from imperialist ambitions - reframing this work as imperialism in and of itself is what allows them to capitalize on the more race/culture focused anti-establishment tendencies of the far Left's culture warriors. In fairness, this is partly due to an understandable lack of trust in American judgment given recent past failures. But it's also due to a lack of commitment to American ideals and yes, some cowardice, borne of years of spoiled indifference to the ways in which our stake in world affairs underwrites our privileged lifestyle.
Some really good stuff in the Bulwark today.
Firstly, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to Mona Charen for finally puncturing the bubble of "give Trump credit for China", which even smart Trump critics like JVL fell victim to at one point. The phrase "even broken clocks are right twice a day" isn't meant to give credit to broken clocks, and nobody should give Trump credit for redirecting his rhetoric against China (once again) out of political expedience when he needed a scapegoat for his COVID failures. As if he was somehow the first to recognize China's malign threat; the TPP was the product of *years* of negotiations whose express purpose was to counter Chinese economic influence. Trump's stance on China was like his attitude toward most things - mercurial, transactional, and rooted almost entirely in the present moment (as expected from someone ignorant of the past and indifferent toward the future). As with other world strongmen, he'd talk tough from a distance and be eating out of their hand after meeting in person.
Secondly, Brian Stewart's article nicely calls out the supposed anti-imperialists of the Left. I'm a progressive myself, so I think I have enough credibility to just come out and say it: if Ukraine was full of brown-skinned people, you'd be hearing a much different kind of rhetoric from our side. Probably still overly dovish, and still probably seeking to somehow lay the blame on the U.S., but one that would at least be forced to confront the malignancy of Putin's ambitions. The lack of an explicit racial dynamic to animate the far Left leaves the Left's foreign policy "realists" to fall back on myopic middle class anxieties about gasoline prices to argue that Ukraine isn't worth the effort.
The American Left's "anti-imperialist" mindset is an entirely passive one, utterly ignorant of the fact that it is rooted in a modern concept of national sovereignty that is made possible only through the American hegemony they so despise. For the foreign policy doves, it isn't that they're opposed to imperialism in general; it's an opposition to *us* doing the work of maintaining a world free from imperialist ambitions - reframing this work as imperialism in and of itself is what allows them to capitalize on the more race/culture focused anti-establishment tendencies of the far Left's culture warriors. In fairness, this is partly due to an understandable lack of trust in American judgment given recent past failures. But it's also due to a lack of commitment to American ideals and yes, some cowardice, borne of years of spoiled indifference to the ways in which our stake in world affairs underwrites our privileged lifestyle.