Lawrence Freedman—or “Sir Lawrence” as they call him at Kings College in London, where he is Emeritus Professor of War Studies—has an interesting blog, “Comment Is Freed”, and an interesting post at that blog, Assessing the Assessors What did analysts get wrong about the Russian invasion?, which considers a recent paper, The Russia-Ukraine War: A…
Tag: foreign policy
Samantha Power, powerless in Gaza
One would have to be cynical indeed—and I am not such—to enjoy the dilemma of Samantha Power, who once advocated U.S. intervention to avert whatever even looked like genocide at the drop of a hat, and who is now, as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, presiding over what looks an awful lot…
Shorter Jamie Dimon: You’re calling me a “whore”? I prefer the term “businessman”.
Sorry, Jamie, but even by “businessman” standards—if they still exist—you’re a whore, and a pretty goddamn big one too. Here’s Jamie talking to CNBC about the state of the world, after meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Ukrainian spelling as per Wikipedia): But, you know, my heart goes out to the guy. I mean, people…
Dan Drezner Impresses Me!
Damn straight he does! I’ve often been awfully hard on Dan, but, well, when Dan changes, I change too, and Dan has, in my opinion, served up a real stunner, bouncing off a recent piece by Paul Krugman, The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana, something I did too, but Dan and I bounce differently,…
Stop the world. I want to get off. Immediately.
If you think the news from the Middle East couldn’t get any worse, well, wait ten minutes. This once inconceivable sequence of horrifying events seems destined to rumble on until, well, until it stops. I am generally a fan of finger pointing, but this constant barrage of disasters is, naturally, spawning an orgy of outrage…
The Coalition of the Swilling
Here are two questions that few today can answer, to wit: “During the Vietnam War, what could you buy in a Filipino PX that you couldn’t buy in an American PX?” “Johnnie Walker Black Label and Chivas Regal.” “What else could you buy in a Filipino PX?” “Nothing.” After Lyndon Johnson sent American ground troops…
Shorter India: “The United States of ‘America’? Isn’t that one of those little western countries?”
That’s the perspective from New Delhi, Varanasi and Chennai, as reported by NYT guy Roger Cohen in his long post, Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World, suggesting that the Biden administration’s moralizing attempt to turn the current world situation into Cold War II isn’t playing too well beyond the Atlantic community of nations, almost…
Yo, Francis Fukuyama! Righteous rage may be hazardous to your health! And mine too!
Francis Fukuyama, who is probably my most favorite living neo-Hegelian, has sadly gone off the rails more than a little with this ecstatic, triumphalist treatise, Why Ukraine Will Win, which sounds to me a lot like the late Charlie Krauthammer on steroids and scotch circa 2004, rejoicing over the new American empire, on which, he…
Memo to Peter Beinart: Physician, heal thyself!
AV fave rave Daniel Larison has a post up1 quoting Peter Beinart from an interview Pete did with John Glaser of the Cato Institute as follows: We also don’t have…we don’t really have a learning process that I think then shapes the public debate. So one of the things that’s really frustrating to me, and…
Shorter Nancy Pelosi: I cans so be dumber than Joe Biden!
What is the deal with Nancy Pelosi? Is she thinking “Well, I’ve fucked up domestic policy, now I got foreign policy to deal with”? She’s already visited Ukraine (“They gave me a medal! That’s how important I am!”) and I guess maybe she’s expecting to get one from Taiwan, though, really, no one seems to…