Fred Kaplan, who writes for Slate and whom I sometimes praise and sometimes ridicule, has a new post, with the disappointing subhead “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”, causing me to post a long comment, which was so eloquent, and so unlikely to read by anyone, that I decided to post it here. Because it’s my goddamn blog.
Fred continues to see nationalists like Vladimir Putin and the leaders of China as monsters. They aren’t. They’re nationalists. Vladimir Putin is not going to invade Poland. If Hillary Clinton had not felt called by God to drive Putin out of Ukraine, Putin would not have invaded Crimea and financed the rebellion in eastern Ukraine. We never should have expanded NATO in the first place. We should, largely, leave central and eastern Europe to Germany and Russia. I know that doesn’t sound optimal to the folks who live there, but it isn’t our job to make life optimal for them. And when we try, we make things worse.
We don’t need to “maintain our role” in Asia. In 20 years time, China’s economy will be significantly larger than ours. Their population, of course, is three times ours and more. And, if Fred will look at the map, he will see that China is in Asia, while the U.S. is on the other side of the Pacific, about 6,000 miles away. Does Fred want to fight an Asian land war, not against the Viet Cong but China? I don’t like those odds.
American leadership was during the Cold War was “feasible” because so many nations were menaced by communism and actively feared communist takeover. That same fear does not exist today, nor do we have a real enemy, to the despair of the right and the embarrassment of “leadership liberals” like Fred, who are forever looking for instances of “genocide” to justify U.S. military action.
Obama’s great error was not that he did too little but rather too much. If the U.S. had not connived in the invasion of Libya, another excursion in genocide prevention gone wrong, Hillary Clinton, God bless her interventionist heart, would be president today.
