“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion! Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25…
Tag: Fred Kaplan
Daniel Larison reads the Washington Post editorial page so I don’t have to. Fred Kaplan has to ask, what’s it all about, anyway?
And thank God that Dan does read the Post for me, because if I did have to read it myself I’d have the shakes even worse than I’ve got ‘em now. In his excellent substack site Eunomia, Dan alerted me to the Post’s most recent eruption, taking them to task in his post China Hawks…
Donald Trump tries to do something right. DC aghast.
Yes, you read that right: Donald Trump is trying to do something right. Not only is he trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Iraq, he’s trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan as well! Effectively ending America’s only official shooting war! Almost as if we weren’t, you know, in…
Daniel Drezner, you shall not escape my wrath!
Well, you won’t, Dan. Just because I’m painfully slow and stumbling off the mark, and not much better down the stretch, you thought you could slip a few fast ones by me, but nuh-uh. I’m onto your game, and you’ll pay the price. The first of Dan’s “curve balls” (to vary the metaphor) came a…
Neocons suffering withdrawal symptoms in Afghanistan
There are about 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now that number is coming down to about 8,600. Yet from the growls n’ howls emitted by unrepentant neocons like Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, writing in the anti-Trump Dispatch—“No Deal Is Better Than a Bad Deal”—and Iranian-born Shay Khatiri, writing in…
Cutting Ike’s pages, and cutting Ike’s prose
I recently read a new book by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (if a webpub can be said to possess a man)—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War—which is an interesting read, though I wouldn’t call it “definitive”, unless perhaps when Fred says he’s giving us the “secret history” he implies that he’s…
Fred Kaplan says it’s time to worry about war with North Korea “again”. Why?
Why indeed? But it’s not just Fred, though I think Freddie was first off the mark with “It’s time to worry about war with North Korea again.” (Dec, 17), but his shrill concerns have been ably amplified by none other than the totally unbiased New York Times “U.S. Braces for Major North Korean Weapons Test…
Some conservatives starting to show some signs of some capacity for self-awareness and self-criticism. This is encouraging! Somewhat!
The recent, totally unsurprising news that President Donald Trump is wont to discuss official business in a totally unprofessional way over totally unsecured private cellphones that could be easily monitored by the intelligence services of unfriendly nations, done on purpose, moreover, so that his staff won’t know what he’s been up to, has been met…
Jay Nordlinger, conservative with a conscience
It seems like every day—because it is every day—that Donald Trump will say something so gross and offensive that one wants to say—and should say—“if a Democratic president had said that, the conservative media would have exploded in outrage and disbelief, following which they would have immediately demanded impeachment.” Of course, no one wants to…
China could be as bad as the U.S., Fred Kaplan warns
Well, it’s true. Over at Slate, the rarely Trumpian Fred Kaplan says that Trump’s ban on purchases of equipment from giant Chinese telecom firm Huawei using federal funds makes sense: The problem is that those wares are also potential backdoors for Chinese intelligence. If Huawei gains a foothold in the burgeoning market of 5G networks…