Monday, October 14, 2013
Expectations
In watching the familiar drama now underway in the American legislature, Talleyrand is reminded of the portrait drawn by Henry Fairlie in his superb book about the 1960s, The Kennedy Promise, and of the cycle of expectation and crisis which then dominated the country’s politics. It is summed up in this paragraph:
It is one of the uses of political activity that it enables us to listen to the conversation of a society. Part of the justification of politics, therefore, lies merely in the continuation of the activity itself, the carrying on of the conversation. These—the activity and the conversation—take place in the political institutions which are today regarded, not least by those who should know better, with an ignorance and an impatience which are unprecedented. The character of a political institution seems no longer to be comprehended. No matter that the draft of its keel is deep; people expect it—trade union or party or legislature or department—to respond to fashionable cries. But a political institution of true value does not answer to these ripples; it feels the tow of public opinion on great issues, slow and undramatic, beneath the surface. One cannot neglect the fact that the total effect of the political method of the Kennedys was to bring the political institutions of the country into disrepute by the promise to transcend them.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Bourbon Europe
It is a sign of today’s topsy turvy world that Western Europeans dismiss and debase the EU while Eastern Europeans clamor for it. It reminds Talleyrand of a certain line about learning and forgetting. The uprisings taking place now in Ukraine are sad mainly because they are so unnecessary. What will Vladimir Putin gain by having such people on his side of the ledger? More to the point, if the EU cares so much about Eastern Partnership, then why didn’t it offer the same to Russia? Even the architects of the Marshall Plan found it in their hearts to do so back when such inducements came in more sophisticated—and successful—packages. Today’s draftsmen of virtual borders should be careful. They may get much more than they wish for.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Predictable, and Predicted
The crisis in Ukraine has now become a tragedy. It probably will get worse. It is not too early to begin to examine the wisdom of the actions and policies of the country’s self-proclaimed allies.
The diplomacy of the EU and its 'Eastern Partnership' now appears to have been too little, and both too early and too late, not least according to the Americans, whose own contribution, leaked rhetoric aside, rates even less, and even later. If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna. Statesmen nowadays rely on something called 'people power' to do that. They have been, and will keep on, encouraging this, evidently, down to the last Ukrainian.
This is not the time or the place to denounce geopolitics; Talleyrand believes in little else, in fact, even when a concept like solidarity is tossed into the mix. The EU has been criticised therein for failing to put its money where its mouth is. So too have the Americans. It’s all very well to pass out cakes in the Maidan in a sad, singlehanded imitation of the Berlin airlift. But if solidarity really matters, where were the American do-gooders when so many uprooted Greeks, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish and other Europeans took to the streets in desperation during the past couple of years? 'F*** the EU' might have been taken more seriously there. Now it’s immaterial. The people of Kiev have begun to learn self-reliance the hard way.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Know Thine Enemy
A bit of historical empathy may be in order; or, as the Americans like to say, we need to stand in the other guy’s shoes every now and then.
When John Kerry accused Vladimir Putin of living in the 19th, not the 21st, century, he must have meant the early 20th. For the 19th century—at least up to the last Crimean War when, for a few strange reasons, Britain and France decided to terminate their half-century-long arrangement with Russia and switch sides—was a comparably peaceful and well-ordered period in Europe, when nearly every major, and even minor, power played by the rules.
Three times in modern history the powers of Europe were overtaken by passions and nearly committed continental suicide. Three times—in 1648, 1815 and 1945—their statesmen gathered to pick up the pieces by asserting a rather simple geopolitical principle: that borders should not be violated, least of all by passions. The final one, begun as it happens also at Crimea, took a while to set but finally, in 1975, did in something called the Helsinki Final Act.
Helsinki’s shelf-life was rather short. For the organization which underwrote it—the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe—gathered in Istanbul in 1999 and declared, in the words of a well- known Czech-American, that “human rights trump sovereignty.”
In the meantime the borders of Europe had moved. Putin is told again and again that the 21st century mind does not think this way, and that Europe—especially Europe—has progressed to a new era of human society where Machtpolitik is no longer waged with maps, armies and gold. He could easily reply that this is what European imperialists have always said to defend and promote their empires. A German hegemony underwritten by American nuclear weapons and Chinese consumers is no different. And every year it swallows even more territory.
Thus it may be reasonable to depict Putin and his country as stuck in a time warp, “on the wrong side of history,” etc. It may also be reasonable to draw analogies not to 1938-39 but to 1999 or perhaps to a year before the Helsinki Final Act, 1974, in a place not too far from Crimea called Cyprus. Putin may or may not be a “revisionist” on a rampage. Or he may just be fed up at being lectured to by people who can’t get their centuries right.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Priority
There is one question Western military planners should be asking now: how can the imminent war between Russia and Ukraine be "contained" to the eastern border regions of the latter?
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Conservative Idealism
Mr Andrew Sullivan, the popular Anglo-American blogger, has posted another small cri-de-cœur in favour of the retreat of US power which he calls hegemony. He makes a good case. The interventionists do sound like sad nostalgics by his account. How hard it is for them to give up the assurances they know so well, the standard operating procedure inbred over a half-century of world leadership…
Talleyrand worries that this will become the dominant view of the cognoscenti. For it is no less nostalgic, even romantic, about the use and responsibility of power. For all his sense of timing and fashion, Mr Sullivan sounds like a classic little Englander suffering from a higher form of knownothingism. It may not be fair to ask, but the reader wonders: to how many lands has he been? How many languages does he know? How much of the world, splendid window vistas notwithstanding, has he seen beyond what lies directly in front of his nose?
These things matter because he writes from the capital of the country which still runs the world’s biggest economy, has the biggest army, the world’s lingua franca, the legal, institutional, scientific, and educational infrastructure and human capital upon which much of the world still depends, the most to contribute to keeping the world as safe and as orderly as it can be, and the most at stake. There is more to that world that ‘troops on the ground’; there is more to it than slogans and admonitions. The world, the ‘real world’, as sceptical, self-identifying conservatives like to say, is not so divisible. It is not so far away, across wide channels or vast oceans. It is here; we are in it. All of us.
Mr Sullivan should read more history. He is correct; America is no longer a super-power. But it ought to be, and behave, like a great power. For its sake and the world’s, its polemicists should end their theoretical debates over whether or not it should wield its significant power, and instead educate themselves in the best ways to wield it in collaboration with others, and realise, after having been so fortunate as to be on the winning side of three world wars, that just walking away from its global responsibilities now is not an option. Indeed it as dangerous and delusional in the longer term as knee-jerk interventionism may be more immediately.
hursday, August 7, 2014
P.R. Laboratory
Over the years Talleyrand has developed a certain respect for the uncanny way Americans get what they want in the world. But he is wondering what it will take for them to stop treating diplomacy and statecraft as a branch of public relations. The last team that looked like they understood the job left office in 1992. Since then,
Mr. Clinton thought by saying all the right things, the world would get along. Then he changed his mind.
Mr. Bush (fils) thought he could say all the wrong things then shock and awe the world into doing his bidding. Then he changed his mind.
Mr. Obama thought he could say clever things and that the world would readjust to running itself on its own terms. Then he changed his mind.
Mr. Putin once said that Americans see the world as a laboratory. He had a point.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Ignominy
Disgrace, also known as adding insult to injury. From the ravaging of the Benghazi consulate to this, the occupation of the abandoned American embassy annex in Tripoli. It is not surprising that the promoters of the gratuitous overthrow of Gaddafi are now largely silent.
As Talleyrand pointed out at the time, their game in Libya was ill timed, not just for poor, tragic Libya but also for a much bigger fish: Syria. Anyone paying attention knew in the spring of 2011 that Syria could become the central theatre in the moment some were then calling revolutionary in the Arab world. And anyone who knows anything about diplomacy knew then that all the prestige and power of the West and the affected regional states (not to mention Russia, then menacingly desperate to be seen, however pitifully, as a great power) had to come together to prevent what is, to date, the largest state collapse in recent memory, with the most far reaching consequences. If anyone thinks the contagion will stop at the Tigris in Iraq, or wait for outside powers to come up with a “strategy,” he is surely mistaken.
A good deal was squandered in the Libya adventure. But remembering how close NATO came to screwing it up (in good part because of America’s visible ambivalence over the wisdom of doing it at all), it is worth posing the question: was Gaddafi’s head really worth it? Prestige, power and public will are fragile, and sometimes finite. The action in Libya militarized the Western response to the Arab revolution. Someday things may look very different. But for now it’s hard to say that this was not a tragic case of too little, too soon.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Brilliance
A remarkable admission buried in the usual self-righteous rantings of Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter.
At the end of paragraph eleven, she states baldly: “By toppling a government in Libya without any idea of what might come next.”
This was obvious at the time and even more obvious as time went on.
Who pray tell, was the director of policy planning in the American State Department at the time of planning said toppling? Who did more to urge Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, to advocate the overthrow of Gaddafi? Who encouraged Clinton to threaten resignation if the Libya adventure, promoted as a humanitarian action, did not proceed? Obama was correct in saying this was the biggest regret of his presidency. It was a rare moment when his courage flagged. He should have let Clinton go. Only idiots resign on principle.
As for Dr Slaughter, besides naked hypocrisy, she is guilty, at the very least, of utter incompetence in her appointed job.
Talleyrand will say so at the risk of repeating himself: This woman is a menace to her country. She should be silent.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Excess
The Democratic Party in the USA has just held its first debate for presidential candidates in Las Vegas, the gambling capital. It is notable that the frontrunner for the Republican Party is a casino magnate, and the Party's biggest donor, a Mr Adelson, another casino magnate, has just thrown his support to a different candidate, the son of a bartender in Las Vegas casinos.
Talleyrand doesn't shy away from the odd game of whist... but doesn't this casino business seem a bit excessive?
Being a gambling man, however, he is rooting for Jim Webb: the only apparently honest candidate in either Party.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Proxy War
The American president has gone out of his way to insist that his country and Russia are not about to have a proxy war over Syria. This is nice to hear. But it demonstrates a poor grasp of language. There has been a proxy war underway in Syria since 2012. It may not always be clear to outsiders or even insiders who is fighting for whom, but it is certain that the majority of the warring parties are not fighting exclusively for, or by, themselves.
What Mr Obama meant to say was that neither his country nor Russia has an interest in seeing this particularly nasty proxy war worsen into an international civil war. Even if it were confined somehow to its own region, as Afghanistan's war was for the most part, it would not be in anyone's--or at least any major power's--interest for it to escalate in this way.
Unfortunately, the sloppy language suggests a lazy, perhaps even careless, attitude toward what is a very dangerous conflict--precisely the kind of civil war that becomes something much worse when loose rhetoric guides strategy and not the other way round.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Legacies
The American president, who counts himself an author, delivered an eloquent speech the other day. It is said to be his final "state of the union" address so he most likely meant it for the ages--for every author wants his words to last, even more than he wants them to sell.
Yet barring any major intervening events, Mr Obama has one more opportunity to make his mark in this way. This is his Farewell Address. The first and most famous of these was George Washington's, in which he asked his countrymen, among other things, to adhere to a strict policy of neutrality in their dealings with other nations.
Mr Obama would do well to have a look at the classic little book by Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address. He might then consider a similar address: less preaching to his fellow citizens about how they should think and act than asking them to imagine a different world, one in which independence and neutrality may still be possible, but without distance or duplicity. That is, as in one of Mr Obama's more notorious exchanges, how to be both exceptional and unexceptional at the same time in relation to the wider world.
We know this is what he and they need to do. The question is how. He has a year or so to figure it out
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Barack Obama: “History Will Absolve Me”
The legacy machine is now running strong on the last days of Barack Obama’s “transformational” presidency. Talleyrand is fortunate, not only to have perfect historical hindsight but also to have a hidden crystal ball. He sets it to 2020 and it tells him the following:
For all that a few wags touted Obama as the American Gorbachev—pushing his country in a direction of necessary “reform” before it was ready for it, and, rather than persuading people that it was right, insisted that they comply because his judgment was better than theirs—Obama has proven them wrong. For one thing, the United States—that great modern imperial experiment—has not dissolved. No territory has seceded. There is no Commonwealth of American States. And, apart from the occasional Shays-style rebellion out West, no Chechen wars. Peace, harmony and union remain intact and in force.
Obama’s signature domestic achievement—imposing a requirement upon all Americans to purchase expensive health insurance—remains the law of the land. Many Americans are a bit healthier, if only more than a bit poorer.
His other domestic priorities—harmonious relations among the races; a more civilized and civil level of political discourse; an end to “gun culture” and a steep decline in the murder rate; a fair immigration policy; an even fairer justice system; greater economic opportunities for everyone; and a serious commitment to reversing the damage from climate change—have all come about. America in 2020 now ranks one notch below Norway and two notches about Sweden, Japan and Germany in all these areas.
His priorities in foreign policy also show remarkable prescience, patience and success.
--China has got the message of his “pivot to Asia” and has decided at long last to be a good neighbour to everyone, even the Vietnamese and Filipinos, has dismantled North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and has even signed a collective security treaty with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Russia. The American mantra of “win-win” now tops the charts of fashionable mottoes in Beijing.
--The European Union—minus the UK, Greece and Spain, and the Euro, alas, but now with an independent Scotland and Catalonia—survives and promises the world to thrive under renewed German leadership.
--Vladimir Putin and his clique have been hounded from power by an emboldened democratic movement, which has speedily restored the Crimea to Ukraine and disavowed any further “revisionist” moves by Soviet nostalgics. The reformed Russian Federation has begun membership talks with the EU following a joint initiative with Germany.
--The Middle East has reached the limit of its bloodthirst, as Iran, Saudi Arabia and their respective proxies have called off their rivalry after faced with a unified NATO-Russia ultimatum in Syria, Yemen and everywhere else. The region’s two leading powers are now cooperating with Egypt, the Gulf States and every other presumptive regional power for a peaceful, stable and even democratic future. This new trend has even persuaded the Israelis to make nice to the Palestinians, and to offer them in good faith the viable state they have so long coveted.
And so, at long last, the United States and its friends and allies around the world can look forward to a future cultivating their own gardens first, without having to worry or wring hands about interventions hither and yon. For the rest of the world is cultivating the same, as it should be doing, in the ideal, just and sensible realm of our imagination, as it has learnt to do, under the deistic hand of the Americans. It just took a bit of patience, luck and faith in the “fierce urgency of now” to get us there.
Hope, it is said, is the last thing to die.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Ruling Women
Talleyrand is delighted by the prospect of three of the world's biggest powers--Germany, the UK, and the US--being led simultaneously by women. One probably has to go back to the second half of the eighteenth century to find another so splendid an age. Long may they live.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power has denounced the "point-scoring" of the Russians about Syria.
Fair point. But tell it to those dying at this very moment in Aleppo and elsewhere.
Her boss, Barack Obama, makes another point. He asks, what could he have done differently in Syria? He says the question "haunts" him -- as though it's the first time anyone has asked it.
Talleyrand remembers different. There was more at stake than a speculation about how many people might have been killed in Benghazi; more than whether Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were owed a favour or two in agreeing to this gratuitous intervention; more than whether it was worth humiliating the Russians (again) at the UN for supporting a Western initiative; more, even, than whether it was worth risking Hillary Clinton's resignation as Secretary of State, which she threatened so as to give herself just one "foreign policy achievement," which she later summarised (cheerfully) as, "we came, we saw, he died."
No, what was at stake--which was hardly mysterious back in 2011--was whether the Arab Spring would continue largely peacefully, or whether it would be militarised, and whether the world's major powers could muster the will to come together in order to nip a much larger, and far more menacing, conflict in the bud in Syria.
The Libya adventure settled it in the negative; the subsequent breakdown of diplomacy among the Western powers (and between them and Russia), the dismal performance of NATO during and after the adventure, the blindingly superficial and amateurish quality of diplomacy at the UN, (starting with Ms Power and her predecessor, Ms Rice) and the emergence of a predictable and predicted multinational proxy war, should give the American president some things to think about. Or he could just as well go back and read the advice that was given to him, advice he rejected so that he could score on "the right side of history."
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
"Stop Whingeing"
Barack Obama has told Donald Trump to stop complaining about a rigged election. One cannot help sense the president's satisfaction that the object of his taunts is the gift that keeps on giving. But Obama forgets a cardinal rule of politics: in victory, magnanimity.
The American president's competitiveness, seen by many of his supporters as the source of his strength and success, is also his Achilles heel. He can't resist the petty jibe, the bit of relish. His obsession with winning also makes him shy away from risks--real risks--even when taking them is certainly the right and just thing to do. He may be the most popular late-second term president in a long time; but, for the above reason, that probably won't last.
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Professionals
The new president-elect of the United States is busy choosing his cabinet. Most of the appointments are quite conventional, and appear to be in accord with the wishes of his Party, which makes sense if the nominees are to be confirmed. It is also notable that Mr Trump so far is adhering to a rather rigid professional categorical imperative: his appointee to head the Commerce Department is a businessman; the man to head the Treasury Department, a banker; the woman to head the Transportation Department, a former administrator in the Transportation Department (among other things); and the rumoured heads of the Health Department and the Defence Department, a doctor and a soldier, respectively. So, Talleyrand is bound to ask: why are the four finalists for Secretary of State clearly amateurs: a former mayor and high-priced consultant; a disgraced former soldier and spook; a former governor and defeated presidential candidate; and a Senator and former builder of shopping malls?
Why not nominate a diplomat?
A professional diplomat to run the State Department would be a rarity, no doubt. There has been only one in recent memory: Lawrence Eagleburger... and he got there only by chance. But Mr Trump was elected, so it is said, to shake things up. Better to shake in this instance than to stir.
Monday, January 23, 2017
Freedom Party
Talleyrand generally avoids interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries, but he cannot resist passing the following comment about the United States.
After having squandered much of the goodwill it had earned around the world during the 20th century, it probably makes sense now for the USA to become lean and mean. There are plenty of vultures salivating over the behemoth. A majority (at least an electoral majority) of the American people know this. And many toes will hurt.
It is remarkable, then, that the defeated Democratic Party has not already begun to reinvent itself along an obvious track. That is not in the direction of an American labour party.
Instead, it should look to Woodrow Wilson, who, a century ago, stole the progressive thunder from the Republicans with something called ‘the New Freedom’. Today’s Republicans have asserted ownership over the ‘f’ word for some time, which is only fair, perhaps, given the origins of their own party in the Free Soil movement and party of the middle 19th century.
That movement’s slogan was ‘Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Men’. Today’s Democrats would do well to borrow and update it, in keeping with today’s economy, by replacing ‘soil’ with ‘minds’ and with today’s society, by replacing ‘men’ with ‘people’.
A new freedom party, standing for the freedom to live, work, travel, think, spend, and speak one’s mind, without prejudice or penalty, is the obvious antidote to what Democrats have described as an authoritarian, fearmongering, nasty party in power.
How long will it take for them to realise it?
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
War Clouds
Colin Powell's old plan to fight two regional wars at once may need to be dusted and taken off the shelf if the daily rumours are true. Fortunately, the two adversaries it was long presumed to feature -- North Korea and Iran -- are again the most likely candidates. Which raises an obvious question: what have the Americans and their allies been doing for the past twenty years?
Thursday, September 14, 2017
The Long-Jumper
In anticipation of Theresa May's upcoming speech in Florence, Talleyrand would recall another speech there about Europe that became rather famous -- by Roy Jenkins, nearly forty years ago: https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2010/11/15/98bef841-9d8a-4f84-b3a8-719abb63fd62/publishable_en.pdf
'I believe that a new, more compelling and rewarding but still arduous approach is necessary. We must also change the metaphor. Let us think of a long-jumper. He starts with a rapid succession of steps, lengthens his stride, increases his momentum, and then makes his leap'
Bonne chance, Madame May.
Sunday, September 3, 2017
Korea
North Korea's regime now claims to have tested a hydrogen weapon. It has recently tested more missiles than it has in a long time. Yet, the consensus among the world's experts is still, after some two decades, that the North Koreans are extortionists who can be alternately browbeaten or bought off, and the status quo ante will resume.
Talleyrand knows very little about these odd people. But he has asked a number of times -- eg here and here -- for evidence of the inner thoughts of the North Koreans. What if they are not extortionists but have some other aim besides 'regime survival'? Or, what if their definition of extortion is not the same as others'?
Governments that do not wish to fear the worst from North Korea need to determine a collective aim and then determine what each is prepared to do to achieve it. Even then, it may too late to impose a unified front against this menace of a regime, and succeed. But if there is to be any aim achieved that is not exclusively North Korea's, then certainly it will follow from a policy that is not based upon wishful thinking or upon any other speculation over what Kim Jong Un wants and will do, but upon what his adversaries want and need in this region.
The foregoing is not rocket science [sic]. It is, going by recent comments of senior American, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and South Korean officials, not unfamilar. The question now is not whether or not it is being acted upon. One way or another, there will probably not be an undramatic denouement to this crisis. The question is whether its nature, scale, and scope will be decided by North Korea or by its adversaries -- in unison, or not.
Friday, September 1, 2017
Perfidious Albion
Well, perhaps not perfidious, but certainly odd. After three rounds of negotiations and more than a year since their bizarre vote to leave the European Union, the UK is still pretending to whistle in the wind about 'Brexit'. Somebody, soon, needs to re-educate the British on the basics of diplomacy, starting with the definition of 'demandeur'. The British people have a good deal at stake, however much their government has been unserious, or worse.
Monday, November 6, 2017
Too Much Zeal
The stirring moves in Saudi in the past several days suggest haste and poor planning. It is hard to believe they will succeed in their aim. What if they do not? A reversal, most likely, perhaps in the form of a coup. How much and how far the violence would spread should worry many people now.
Monday, December 11, 2017
Kicking the Afghan Syndrome
Vladimir Putin’s triumphant arrival to Syria today reminds one of the moment in 1991 when the US President George H. W. Bush declared that he and his country, because of its quick victory in the Gulf War, had kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all. In retrospect the diagnosis is rather debatable, after what his son and others managed to do in the same part of the world.
One wonders also whether the Russians will experience the same feeling now. In contrast to their humiliation in Afghanistan some thirty years ago, and to a lesser extent in Chechnia, their work in Syria – with roughly the same goal as the US had in Vietnam, that is, propping up an ally in the midst of an insurgency to the point that it could declare ‘victory’ in being able, at least ostensibly, to defend itself – has been achieved.
But also like Indochina and Afghanistan (and Chechnia, for that matter), Syria is a hard, messy place, and not much celebrated for gratitude or absolution.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Taiwan Crisis
The passage of the Taiwan Travel Act by the US Congress and its signature into law by the American president have happened without much notice outside Taiwan and the PRC. Don't be surprised if that changes. Korea won't stay in the headlines forever. A new and dangerous Taiwan Strait Crisis may well take its place.
Friday, December 7, 2018
Presidential Shorthand
Much has been said about the ‘awkward’ group in the front pew at George H. W. Bush’s memorial service the other day. Talleyrand thought it was more telling than awkward. The facial expression of each former president was almost a caricature of his reputation, viz:
Carter: dreamy
Clinton: depraved
Bush W: confused
Obama: arrogant
Trump: petulant
Who can say whether that was intentional. It does make one’s mind wander, however, over the reasons why leaders with particular personality traits tend to succeed those with others. For example, if Obama was America’s Gorbachev (as some wags liked to say), then Trump is, in some buffoonish way, similar to Yeltsin. Who will be the American Putin? A silly, but not entirely implausible, question.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Democrats
In surveying the mood of the American Democratic Party, Talleyrand is again reminded of the election of 1912. Then the prevailing view was, vote for Roosevelt, pray for Taft, but bet on Wilson. Today it appears to be, vote for Bernie, pray for Buttigieg, but bet on Biden (or Biden/Harris).
Much may change between now and voting day, of course.
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Srebrenica on Steroids
It was not too long ago that this phrase was touted by the Barack Obama administration to defend a preventive military action in Libya, one that prefigured, however, a civil war – not only in Libya but also, with steroids applied, in Syria. A similar pattern, or moniker, at least, appears in the offing in Sudan. An internationalised civil war there probably won't exceed in carnage the war in Syria, but it may well spread in directions the latter civil war did not. Everyone should pray that the most recent effort to forestall that outcome succeeds.
Friday, December 20, 2019
Schmitt Era
The people who sought after the Cold War, and again after September 2001, to resurrect the ideas of Carl Schmitt had a point. The problem throughout the world, specially in the most advanced countries of the world, is now worse than a collective narcissism; it is an overpowering self-absorption in which the me-generation, enjoying its last hurrah in power, has substituted ‘with us or against us’ for ‘with me or against me’, everywhere, all the time. Barring a major intervention of some kind, such a pathology will only bring about a collective suicide.
Monday, April 6, 2020
Rough Seas
The speech by the American Acting Secretary the Navy on board the aircraft carrier whose captain was recently dismissed immediately brought to mind the Kiel mutiny. One wonders how many people remember it. They should.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Accelerated History
The Americans have remakably held off waging two regional wars simultaneously for some 25 years, when they began planning for that possibility. At long last war with Iran and North Korea – the first by choice, the second by accident – appears more likely than it has done for a long time. It's not difficult to guess who will benefit most by that turn of events in the near term.
Friday, October 16, 2020
Prediction
In spite of accurate predictions during the last few elections, Talleyrand is, as usual, reluctant to venture another. One must preserve one’s options. But there is one thing that’s fairly certain: if the received wisdom is again wrong, and the American incumbent somehow wins, the rapidity with which his public enemies switch sides will boggle the mind. It is often said that great wealth enables a certain independence. That is not true. Those who think they have the most to lose are the quickest to turn.