Well, in case you were wondering, we now know why Danielle Pletka, distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, hasn’t been found in an alley with a bullet in her head: she isn’t important enough to kill! Because murder works! Okay, Danielle isn’t quite that brazen. In her recent, unfortunately (or not) paywalled article…
Tag: foreign policy
Socio-political notes from all over
God Bless Niall Ferguson! (Pretty much) It’s hard to think of anyone I have trashed so consistently and so contemptuously as Niall Ferguson, whom I once grudgingly praised with a thoroughly uncivil leer as a Thelonious Monk-loving slimeball, while also urging readers not to read his then most recent book, whose title will go unmentioned…
What if they gave a Cold War, and nobody came?
I spend a lot of time grasping at straws these days, and Politico has kindly sent a couple wafting my way of late, viz., The U.S. Can’t Force the Rest of the World to Support Ukraine. Here’s Why. and A Forecasting Model Used by the CIA Predicts a Surprising Turn in U.S.-China Relations, said surprising…
Joe Biden likes being a Cold War President
It is common wisdom that presidents tend to concentrate on domestic policy when first arriving in office and then pivot to foreign affairs, where they can act without having to worry, too much, about the reception their ideas will receive on Capitol. It can be said of Joe Biden that he’s making the switch in…
Dan Drezner, last seen regressin’ to the mean like a motherf*cker
O rare Dan Drezner!1 Oy vey, Dan Drezner! Just last week I was falling all over myself with praise for Dan’s all too acute post The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone, which Dan then followed up with another depressingly acute corker, What is the plan behind sanctioning Russia?, pointing out that the…
Moral, moral, who’s got a moral? Well, Daniel Drezner has one, and I think it’s depressingly accurate.
I so often disagree with Dan that I sometimes try to apologize for it, but his recent post, The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone, is depressingly spot on. Dan ends his incisive piece with the following grim paragraphs: We have entered a new Cold War, which is not something I say lightly….
Anne Applebaum sees so much, and misses so much
I originally planned to respond to Anne Applebaum’s new article in the Atlantic, The Bad Guys Are Winning with a super-snarky post, snappily titled “The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum Reupholstered,” bouncing off a long-ago post of mine, The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum, written back in 2008, when she came back from Afghanistan, telling…
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…
America’s latest “Forever War” not finding too many recruits
I have frequently—frequently—and loudly—loudly—complained about the compulsion of America’s foreign policy “Blob” to find a replacement for everyone’s favorite multi-trillion-dollar arms race, the late great Cold War, centering, of course, on China, but eagerly tossing in Iran, Russia, and even Venezuela, for good measure. The problem is, not everyone seems to be as afraid of…
Terrible Dan Drezner. Terrible Dan Drezner!
Hey, I promised, and a blogger always keeps his word—well, within the limits of reason, of course. And, anyway, Dan is at his terrible worst in this one—his terribleist, one might say—in an abysmal missive abysmally titled The progressive case against NATO is weird. When a pundit, particularly a scholarly one such as Dan, uses…