U da Man, Fareed! Yeah, a couple of months ago I made fun of Fareed, who was then singing those “Why can’t we be more like China?” blues, claiming that “With an absent United States, China marches on”. According Fareed, while Uncle Sam sits on his ass, “China marches forward, except now it is not just building its economy but also a new geopolitics in Asia.”
Fareed quoted another expert/Moanin’ Minnie, the aptly named David Shambaugh, to “prove” that China’s economic outreach dwarfed even the fabled Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after WWII, an “argument” that I basically crushed, even before, as I gloatingly noted in an Update, the collapse of China’s once-booming stock market and subsequent economic stumbling guaranteed that China’s new Long March had just come to an abrupt halt.
Well, I don’t know if Fareed read my post (probably not), but, with or without my prompting, he seems to have loaded up on the smartness pills, because his latest—“Stop swooning over Putin”—is his greatest. As Fareed points out, the last time Russian troops went out to fight Muslims, in a place called Afghanistan, things didn’t work out too well.1
But suppose Vladimir gets lucky? “[I]f Russia and Iran win, somehow, against the odds, they get Syria — which is a cauldron, not a prize. The United States has been ‘in the driver’s seat’ in Afghanistan for 14 years. Has that strengthened America?”
Fareed is so mean that he even makes fun of Henry Kissinger, noting that Henry first made a name for himself back in the fifties and early sixties by demanding a wildly aggressive foreign policy, advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons (more as a way of showing the Soviets that we weren’t afraid to use them than to achieve a tangible goal). In 1961, with both the United States and western Europe and Japan far outstripping the Soviet Union in economic growth, Henry, sounding very much like Barry Goldwater or Robert Welch2 (or John F. “Missile Gap” Kennedy), warned that our strength had declined so greatly since World War II that “Fifteen years more of [such] a deterioration of our position in the world would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.”
Yes, the West is always in danger, but not that much. And much, much less than it used to be. Let’s hear for masterly (or even just cautious) inactivity!
- At the time of the USSR’s excellent Afghan adventure, noted military non-expert George Will intoned that Afghanistan would not be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. The Soviets, George explained, were not hobbled by fatuous Western notions of morality. The Afghans would be crushed, and crushed quick. In fact, the Soviets pulled out after losing 14,000 lives, compared to the 58,000 the U.S. endured in Vietnam, and surely spent less than a tenth of what we did. ↩︎
- Welch was the founder of the still notorious John Birch Society, which even Barry had to admit was a little off—most notably because of Welch’s famous claim that Eisenhower was a “more or less conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy.” Barry was clearly pained to disown Welch, because so many of Barry’s best friends were Birchers. ↩︎
