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The Geopolitics of it all

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Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has now pledged to have the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill on the statute book “within a matter of weeks”.

The new law would surely have escaped international attention had those riots not happened, but Dublin’s eagerness to regulate hate speech has, as internet parlance puts it, “gone viral”. Now the whole world knows that Ireland is poised to pass one of the most draconian pieces of legislation in modern times, which will see Irish people facing potential jail sentences of up to two years for the possession of literature “likely to incite violence or hatred” against others on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, including race, gender and sexual orientation.

The police and courts will not even need to demonstrate that the material in question was intended to be distributed to anyone other than the owner. It will be “presumed, until the contrary is proven” that it was. It’s reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where having copies of literature banned by the state, known as “samizdat”, was enough to fall foul of the KGB.

To make matters worse, the Irish government has not actually defined in the bill what “hatred” is, saying that to do so could “risk prosecutions collapsing”. Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, continues to insist citizens will be able to speak freely, but a senator for the Green Party, one of three parties in the governing coalition, let the cat out of the bag: “We are restricting freedom,” Pauline O’Reilly said, “but we are doing it for the common good.”


Ireland, sadly, has a long tradition of censorship. There was once a body with a wonderfully evocative name, the Committee on Evil Literature, which recommended banning publications deemed harmful to the newly independent nation’s Catholic values.

The country prides itself on having come through that dark time, but all that’s actually happened is that the term “evil literature” has been redefined to suit contemporary values. They haven’t stopped enforcing orthodoxy. They’ve simply found a new woke dogma to enforce. No one is writing novels about that. After all, owning such a book could land you behind bars soon.


Ireland and Quebec share a common history.
 
Disruption and Destabilization

Finland will close its entire border with Russia on Wednesday night after accusing Moscow of orchestrating a surge of asylum seekers.

Prime minister Petteri Orpo said the last remaining open border crossing at Raja-Jooseppi in the far north will shut for two weeks until 13 December.

“This is an organised activity, not a genuine emergency,” interior minister Mari Rantanen said.

The closure comes after weeks of rising tensions between the countries after more than 1,000 migrants were given bikes and scooters by Russia to cross Finland’s 830-miles border without a visa since August.

Finland has steadily closed its border crossings in protest against the increase in migrants, most of whom are from Africa and the Middle East.

Russia warned of “counter-measures” when Finland joined Nato in April.


Hybrid Warfare. Grey Zone. Call it what you like.
 
The underlying theme of all of these articles ....

The goal of our adversary (edit: The Chinese Communist Party) is to wear us down gradually, to strain our systems, exhaust our people and budgets, and, most of all, erode the norms, until it is the incursion zones that become the new borders.
 
The Wilsonian strain of American foreign policy would astound George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams: three of our nation’s greatest foreign policy practitioners. As Angelo Codevilla explained so brilliantly in his last book America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations (2022), Washington, Hamilton, and Quincy Adams all pursued “America First” foreign policies. They eschewed sentimental attachments to other nations and sought to avoid foreign entanglements that could lead the country to war. America’s early “ruling class” promoted America’s true national interests instead of global crusades for democracy and human rights. With Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, America’s new ruling class, “the Progressives,” premised foreign policy on the idea that America’s “primary concern must be with mankind as a whole, and with America only incidentally and derivatively.” Looking only after America’s interests would be too parochial for progressives who appear to view themselves as “citizens of the world” rather than American citizens.



or as I would see them, the State Department Party, with acolytes in every western establishment.

Britain set itself the moral mission of stamping out slavery. America set itself the moral mission of spreading democracy. In both instances they went from leading by example to coercion and in both cases ended up creating more enemies than friends.
 
Conservative liberals.... liberals who crave the way things were supposed to be.

There is a certain kind of commentator – liberal, centrist and oh so certain – who specialises in explaining why things cannot change. From the economy to immigration, higher education to human rights laws, rather than justify why they believe in the status quo, their arguments are about why things cannot be different. Confronted by crises and change, they mistake their own passivity for wisdom.

 
Meanwhile there is activity back in Chindit country.

The KaChin have managed to secure 250 Myanmar Junta bases in Northern Burma - the country between India and China and stomping ground of Wingate and Stilwell.



A band of young Myanmar resistance fighters hide in a muddy ditch and hook up a stick of dynamite to a slingshot. “Hide, hide. Ignite it. Provide wind protection. Son of a bitch, it’s exploded,” they shout in nervous excitement as it launches.

The rapid disintegration of the junta’s grip on the strife-torn country since a coordinated mass counter-offensive began in October is laid bare by an audio recording of a young officer’s final moments in his besieged base in Rezua, Matupi Township.

The desperation in 2nd Lieut Ye Myint Zaw’s voice rises as he pleads with a junta commander in central Myanmar to urgently send air power and save his isolated outpost from a fierce assault by resistance fighters.

“They’re already in our base and they’re going to shoot us. Send reinforcements and a fighter jet quickly, Aba,” he says, using the word for father to address his superior, Lt Gen Ko Ko Oo.

Bursts of gunfire become louder throughout their half-hour call as rebels from the Chinland Defence Force and Chin National Front draw closer to conquering the base, in western Chin State, even as Lt Gen Ko Ko Oo repeatedly promises that a helicopter gunship is on its way.

But after 37 torturous minutes, 2nd Lieut Ye Myint Zaw lets out an agonised dying moan. Then there is a triumphal shout over his radio. “Your base is now under our control. Your lieutenant is dead.”

Myanmar’s tipping point​

Operation 1027, which started in northern Shan State with an insurgent coalition called the Three Brotherhood Alliance, has now snowballed across the country.

Overstretched by multiple battlefronts and unprecedented cooperation between armed ethnic resistance groups, Myanmar’s military, which launched a coup in 2021 and violently suppressed dissent, is now running out of cash, resources and manpower – leaving it vulnerable even to ragtag rebels armed with slingshots and dynamite.

While analysts do not predict the regime’s imminent demise, many say Myanmar has hit a pivotal moment that could be a pathway to restoring democracy after power was snatched from elected rulers by junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing.

“We have reached a tipping point in the history of the country. The military never felt threatened like this before. They never thought they will be defeated,” said Dr Sasa, the international co-operation minister in the National Unity Government (NUG) – a shadow government, many of whose members are in exile.

The operation, which has now overrun more than 250 military bases and captured strategic border crossings with China and India, had been planned for more than 12 months, he told The Telegraph.
 
How the hell is Turkey a NATO member?
Right??

During the Cold War, it made sense to bring them into the fold. A long history of animosity with Russia (then the USSR, during the Cold War years) allowed the US to secretly place Jupiter missiles in Turkey, in violation of various treaties and agreements made

They also have (on paper anyway) one of thr largest and best equipped militaries in that region, by far. How much of that is actually operational, I have my doubts...



Now? I have no idea why they are still a member of NATO other than we need to appease Turkey so they don't open the floodgates altogether and drown Europe with even more of a migrant crisis...

But between buying oil from ISIS, facilitating the shipping of arms to Libya during a NATO embargo (even turning their weapons on a nearby French navy ship that wanted to inspect) and President Ergoden's clear false flag coup...I agree...why is Turkey even in NATO??


(Pain in the butt now...more of a pain in the butt is kicked out. Plus they seem to have resolved a lot of tension that existed between them and Russia, so that would most likely backfire on us in the long run...)
 
Right??

During the Cold War, it made sense to bring them into the fold. A long history of animosity with Russia (then the USSR, during the Cold War years) allowed the US to secretly place Jupiter missiles in Turkey, in violation of various treaties and agreements made

They also have (on paper anyway) one of thr largest and best equipped militaries in that region, by far. How much of that is actually operational, I have my doubts...



Now? I have no idea why they are still a member of NATO other than we need to appease Turkey so they don't open the floodgates altogether and drown Europe with even more of a migrant crisis...

But between buying oil from ISIS, facilitating the shipping of arms to Libya during a NATO embargo (even turning their weapons on a nearby French navy ship that wanted to inspect) and President Ergoden's clear false flag coup...I agree...why is Turkey even in NATO??


(Pain in the butt now...more of a pain in the butt is kicked out. Plus they seem to have resolved a lot of tension that existed between them and Russia, so that would most likely backfire on us in the long run...)

One million friendly troops can’t be bad:

The Turkish Armed Forces is the second largest standing military force in NATO, after the U.S. Armed Forces, and the thirteenth in the world, with an estimated strength of 1,000,000 military, paramilitary, and navy personnel in 2023.

Turkish Armed Forces - Wikipedia
 
Right??

During the Cold War, it made sense to bring them into the fold. A long history of animosity with Russia (then the USSR, during the Cold War years) allowed the US to secretly place Jupiter missiles in Turkey, in violation of various treaties and agreements made

They also have (on paper anyway) one of thr largest and best equipped militaries in that region, by far. How much of that is actually operational, I have my doubts...



Now? I have no idea why they are still a member of NATO other than we need to appease Turkey so they don't open the floodgates altogether and drown Europe with even more of a migrant crisis...

But between buying oil from ISIS, facilitating the shipping of arms to Libya during a NATO embargo (even turning their weapons on a nearby French navy ship that wanted to inspect) and President Ergoden's clear false flag coup...I agree...why is Turkey even in NATO??


(Pain in the butt now...more of a pain in the butt is kicked out. Plus they seem to have resolved a lot of tension that existed between them and Russia, so that would most likely backfire on us in the long run...)

Because they own access to the Black Sea. And NATO needs to be able to influence that.
 
That's what I mean - it's better to have them on our side than not on our side.

I seriously doubt a lot of their military capabilites, and think they are perhaps more of a paper tiger than an effective military force in some ways...their use of extremist militias to combat extremist militias a few years back wasn't a great image to project...



But for all of their differences with almost every other NATO country, best to stay on friendly terms with them (their efforts to design and build their own kit is commendable, to be fair)
 
Washingtonian realists and Wilsonian neo-conservatives.

Jackson often gets the credit for the isolationism attributed to Trump. But Washington was the first to counsel against foreign entanglements.

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world."

FAREWELL ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1796​


Revisiting a left-wing review of US history 20 years later.


Twenty years ago, John B. Judis, then an editor of the New Republic, currently the editor-at-large of Talking Points Memo, and one of the few remaining sensible thinkers on the left of the American political spectrum, wrote The Folly of Empire, which traced the intellectual origins of America’s post–Cold War foreign policies to the Utopian worldview of Woodrow Wilson. It was an early, prescient, and devastating attack on the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration — a book that predicted the then-emerging quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan and that placed the blame on the neoconservatives, our modern-day Wilsonians.

Judis had previously written an insightful biography of William F. Buckley Jr. and Grand Illusions: Critics and Champions of the American Century, which critically but respectfully analyzed the foreign policy thinking of, among others, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, and Richard Nixon. In The Folly of Empire, Judis perceived two factions that vied for control of foreign policy: the “nationalists” or realists, who only supported interventions abroad when it “met a strict test of national interest,” and the neoconservatives, who “strongly advocated using America’s military and economic power to transform countries and regions in America’s image.” The neoconservatives were and are the intellectual descendants of Wilson.

Wilsonianism, Judis wrote, was an abandonment of the foreign policy realism of our nation’s founders — especially George Washington and later John Quincy Adams. The Spanish–American War was a turning point because it gained for the United States significant overseas possessions and territories. In the late 19th century and early years of the 20th century, thinkers and doers like Theodore Roosevelt, Brooks Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred Thayer Mahan recognized that the world was growing “smaller” due to the industrial revolution and technological and scientific advances. But these men were realists who were less interested in shaping the world in America’s image and more interested in the global balance of power. Roosevelt, to be sure, was an early proponent of American imperialism, but as president his enthusiasm for overseas intervention diminished. Judis characterizes him as “extraordinarily sober in his judgments” who tempered his idealism with a “strategic grasp” of the realities of world power. He became, wrote Judis, a “champion of the balance of power,” as evidenced by his role in ending the Russo–Japanese War.

Woodrow Wilson, however, brought the abstract ideas of a professor and intellectual to American foreign policy at a time when the world was lurching toward war. Wilson intervened in Mexico to, in Judis’ words, “install[] . . . a government of which the United States approved.” Although at first reluctant to enter the First World War, once events forced his hand, he enthusiastically embraced the war as a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” After committing Americans’ blood and America’s treasure to the conflict among Europe’s great powers, Wilson at war’s end sought to transform international relations. “With Wilson,” Judis wrote, “the American ideal became defined as democracy, and America’s goal abroad became creating a world of democracies.”

Franklin Roosevelt was an intellectual disciple of Wilson’s (he served as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy during the war). As president, Roosevelt, like Wilson, at first sought to stay out of the gathering storm in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, but his administration was filled with idealists (and quite a few communists) who were eager to fight the evils of fascism and Nazism (especially after Hitler broke his pact with Stalin). FDR, never one to get ahead of public opinion, feigned non-interventionism while looking for ways to get the United States involved in the war. True to his Wilsonian roots, Roosevelt placed his hopes for a peaceful postwar world in an understanding with Stalin’s Soviet Union and his updated version of Wilson’s League of Nations. Harry Truman, fortunately for the West, had a group of mostly realist foreign policy advisers, including George Kennan, John McCloy, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson, who helped save Western Europe from communism, but failed to save China. The Truman Doctrine, however, was a rhetorical recipe for foreign policy interventionism, as the columnist Walter Lippmann pointed out at the time.

Eisenhower was a consummate realist who was way ahead of his time in warning his fellow citizens about the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower used covert operations instead of military interventions to advance and protect U.S. interests abroad. John F. Kennedy, on the other hand, recklessly used Wilsonian rhetoric and in amateurish fashion moved from crisis to crisis from Berlin to Cuba to Indochina. The Johnson administration, meanwhile, rode the massive Vietnam intervention to its political grave.

Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, returned to realism by ending the Indochina misadventure and skillfully crafting a triangular foreign policy that upheld the global balance of power even as America’s relative power declined. Their hard-headed detente was criticized by the rising neoconservatives even as Jimmy Carter substituted “human rights” for geopolitics as the governing principle in U.S. foreign policy — with disastrous results. Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War with a combination of military strength and economic and political warfare, but his interventions abroad were minor and limited.

Judis writes that it was in the immediate post-Cold War world — after the realist-dominated George H. W. Bush presidency — that Wilsonianism triumphed. First, the Clinton administration set about to “enlarge” democracy around the world. Clinton championed the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and intervened in the Balkans for primarily humanitarian reasons. This was, Judis writes, “entirely consistent with Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy.” With George W. Bush, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Wilsonianism reached its apotheosis. The neoconservatives around Bush and their policy wonk supporters — David Frum, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others — responded to the 9/11 attacks by promoting a “global war on terror,” which included an element of nation-building that sought to remake Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Arab nations of the Middle East in America’s image. But Bush went even further, arguing that America’s security depended on a democratic world. This was Wilsonianism on steroids. Judis quotes Bush: “[A]s the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom . . . That is what we have been called to do.”

Twenty years later, it is evident that Judis was right. The folly of empire is manifested in America’s military graveyards, mental health wards of military hospitals, post–Afghan/Iraqi War suicides among servicemen and women, the many thousands of wounded warriors, the waste of American treasure and resources, and the decline of American influence in the Middle East even as China’s influence there and elsewhere rises. Judis ended The Folly of Empire by paraphrasing John Quincy Adams: “When America goes out alone in search of monsters to destroy — venturing on terrain upon which imperial powers have already trod — it can itself become the monster.”

There are constant threads, not just through American history.
 
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