Gilbert Doctorow, re criticism of Donald Trump’s first month in office:“That type of criticism and kind of ad hominem argument is not acceptable. It is a polite form of slander. Donald Trump is often seen by many, many people in the States, and abroad, as a buffoon, a superficial person, someone who really isn’t capable of serious politics. He’s a businessman. He’s looking for his personal interest in this or that deal.This is nonsense. In the last three weeks, we have seen Trump perform as one of the most skilled geopolitical actors on the face of the earth. He has been choreographing, or his people have choreographed for him the appearances of his most important and most capable assistants, like Rubio, like Witkoff, Hegseth.”A New World Order is being born, and Trump is the midwife.

I think the retreat from “idealism” is simply a tactical repositioning. Globohomo’s heart and soul is what it has always been. Given unlimited power, Globohomo would go back to its main mission and joy of exterminating the good, the beautiful, and the true.

I’m going to Estonia in June. Looks like I don’t have that big comfy GAE umbrella protecting me over there, anymore. Wish me luck lads!

“Up until now, policy was centered around moral claims about how the world ought to be ordered.” Those moral claims were fig leaf, prolefeed. It was material interest all along, but thinly camouflaged by sanctimonious pap. To the great credit of Trump, he has neither time nor patience for this empty posturing. He is more honest. Let the Europeans engage in this — they have a long history of doing so.

It’s interesting that Wilsonian Democracy arrived at the same time as the beginnings of the managerial class.

Does war cause more sober-minded thinking among the people in charge? It can, if those old men running it have some memory of war in their own lives. It’s when they don’t (and when a lot of those “men” making decisions are actually women) that we seem to get in trouble.There’s the story (apocryphal, probably) that when the War Between States was declared, guys were running around shouting: “This is it! We’ve got our war!” A similar phenomenon happened in Germany in the runup to the Great War. There’s that scene in “All Quiet” in which the starched-collared teacher is pouring all his patriotic fervor into the heads of the boys, happy that the enervation and weakness caused by a long stretch of peacetime is finally at an end.With the neocons, it’s even worse than with the clueless reb or yank ululating about how he’s got his war now, or the prim teacher with his pince-nez blathering about one’s duty to the Fatherland. These men and women (if Jennifer Rubin is one) are using war as a LARP, with the people actually doing it as surrogate onscreen avatars. They feel for the Ukrainians what the kids playing their multiplayer online games feel when one of their grunts gets squashed by an alien. Bolton, especially, has the look of a man who masks his lack of bravery with this vicarious larping. It’s all Risk to him; he very much has that vibe of Himmelstoss, the martinet corporal who berates Paul and the boys in “All Quiet” during basic training only to end up cowering in a trench when he gets sent to the frontlines himself.These people all claim to be historians but it’s a pity their historical memory only stretches back to World War Two. The entrenched stalemate in Ukraine has a lot of parallels with the Great War. A lot of death and a lot of losses of land, with no significant retaking of any lost lands. And they lack the excuse of those who got the world involved in the mass slaughter of the Great War. They weren’t sure at that time what exact effect industrialization would have on warfare (they still had horses and generally believed airplanes to be “amusing toys but of no great military significance”) for instance.We all know what nuclear bombs can do, and while we’ve only seen tests of the hydrogen bomb, we might get a chance to see it in the battlespace soon. A “limited nuclear war” strikes me as being similar to being, “a little bit pregnant.”

I don’t know if Trump is the one to try this. But the USA has to become accustomed to have international relationships with any country independent of the international media cartel and globohomo clown world politicians.Like normalize relationships with Russia where the Ukraine is just a point in the agenda. But we can also sanction Ukraine if it insists on a cruel war to the last soldier.The Ursulas Van der Clownish will reeee but that’s the point of going back to reality.The real issue is we cannot be the perpetual payers of clown world wars and as Vance pointed out our diplomacy has a cost to us when we cannot act in our own interest because some fake moral reason forces us to be enemies with a country we should not have any problem with.It is psychopathic of Zelenski to pretend we owe money for a war because the God demoncrazy demands it. Same for many other conflicts we apparently owe our money and lives to be sacrificed because the girl boss godesses demand it.

Theodore Roosevelt was an activist reformist President before Wilson without the Puritanism.With regard to Israel, etc: at the heart of Zionism and Judaism is the biblical sense that they are God’s Chosen People and the “ nations” can be dispossessed and if not tolerated, then destroyed as necessary.

Fantastic that actual realism looks to be supplanting dips*** American style “idealism” – it’s caused enough death and destruction around the world these past 107 (if not more) years.

If you want a good study of Washington, you can’t go wrong with Douglas Southall Freeman’s multivolume biography of the man. His style from the 1930s is a bit dated, and he, of course, didn’t have access to many primary sources we can access today, but that is counterbalanced by Freeman not actively hating his subject.

With the title of today’s post all I can think is that John Mearsheimer is feeling awfully vindicated these days.

Once the Cold War ended, it was like a hyperactive dog that got under the fence. I’d change that to “hydrophobic”.

Foreign Policy is the handmaiden of national economic interest. Zman tends to focus on moral and political vectors, but we have to consider the strong influence on policy of economic interests. We fought WWI largely because NY banks lent a ton of money to UK and France and we aspired to export more. The US did not have a meaningful manufacturing surplus until 1900, by which point our raw material trade surplus had shrunk to parity. Progressive politics predates our emergence as an industrial exporter and certainly predates modern scientific management (Taylor, Ford, Sloan, Emerson, Drucker). The Progressive movement was grafted on to US foreign policy as a tool for and justification of our economic expansion, not merely as vehicle for moral preening.

Enjoyed the show and would like more discussion of Thucydides. More specifically the “Thucydidian Trap” All the rage a few years ago in DC. Still relevant as the Blob just can’t wait to go to war with China.

Wilson did, however, fire all the negro employees of the USPS, a move opposed by both parties, and later negated by them…Wilson was nuts…

I would enjoy separate shows on Thucydides (I read the History of the Peloponnesian War in college) and Reagan. Making the case for Reagan either ending the Cold War or the Soviets collapsing largely on their own with a bit of a push (the so-called Star Wars wasn’t it).

Typical of the Jesuitical to elide the man from Hippo as he strikes you.

Saw your face for the first time on ramzpual. You look way younger than you let on brother. Always enjoy your content.

And I’m going to lay this out which won’t be popular. I despise Wilson’s sanctimonious moralizing as much as the next man, but you do have to take into account the historical context of the revulsion the Great War caused in the West among people with a 19th century concept of acceptable conduct of war, which the very brief (1914-1918) era of total industrial war, with millions of dead, was a shock that simply had no historical precedent, and the crowned heads of Europe, especially Victoria’s idiot grandchildren, mostly Wilhelm and Nicholas, were primary drivers of. The Germans did implement the first use of poison gas warfare, aerial bombing of civilians, and unrestricted submarine warfare, and did so in such a flagrant manner that it genuinely did violate civilized standards which, in conjunction with the very real self interest of the United States in curbing Imperial Germany’s global ambitions makes Wilson’s determination to end that horror somewhat understandable. We have all grown up in a world where Germany is a gelded eunuch for so long that we forget that they were rightfully regarded from 1885 on as a dangerous nation with a mentally unstable emperor, a ruthless army and a navy larger than the United States Navy.

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what’s the point? We all knew that Sri Lanka loving lesbian AFD leader isn’t right-wing, Trump is another Shabbos goy nothing gonna change, business as usual because white people are still the frog in the boiling pot Smash and grab should be engraved on constitution “We the people who are looting white people, in Order to form a more perfect Ponzi scheme…”