Category Archives: Foreign Policy

UPDATED (1/1/021): Syrians, Kurdish, Turkish Realignment: Regional Conflicts Require Regional Solutions

America, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Military, War

The Syrian, Kurdish, Turkish realignment is not “a moment of geopolitical whiplash.” But rather, a return—we hope—to regional politics in the Middle East.

America thinks that it must and can be a decisive force for good in the Middle East. However, the region’s players march to their own drumbeat. Always have.

in fact, the move had been in the works for more than a year. Fearing U.S. abandonment, the Kurds opened a back channel to the Syrian government and the Russians in 2018, and those talks ramped up significantly in recent weeks, American, Kurdish and Russian officials told The Associated Press.

[Via AP]

In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to show that, “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.” The trend continues.

Keep it regional. The Kurds are safest aligning with regional power players against Turkey.

* Image courtesy of VOA.

UPDATED (1/1/021):  Bashar al-Assad is one wise Alawite traditionalist. But America’s foreign policy and Pentagon primitives are forever striving to remove him and install a less traditional, more democratic man of the people (namely an Islamist Jihadi).

Assad on neoliberalism:

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POTUS On Heartbreak At The Dover Air Force Base

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Military, War

President Trump spoke movingly and poignantly today about comforting families waiting on the bodies of their dead boys at the Dover Air Force Base. POTUS mentioned Eisenhower’s prophetic warning against the power of the military-industrial-complex to launch and sustain wars.

In 2013, I wrote about the achingly beautiful ceremonies at Dover:

Watch this ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base. Soldiers receive the coffined body of a slain comrade on its arrival in Dover. They handle it with exquisite care, hands clad in white gloves. What a stark, pathos-filled, sad ceremony, every move so tender and respectful.

Yes, “every move so tender and respectful.”
And every death so futile.

UPDATED (10/9/019): Tucker On Withdrawing Troops From Syria

Foreign Policy, Middle East, Nationhood, War

Tucker Carson gets it mostly right. He’s wrong about who the Kurds are as a people; they are just about the only inspiring, proper nation in the region. But Tucker inches closer to the truth regarding the need for the Kurds to align with Syria (or, hint-hint, other regional powers).

There is no longer a mission in Syria, says Tucker. ISIS no longer controls major cities in Syria, which remains a dangerous place for Americans. Yet in Washington they declare it immoral and tantamount to a betrayal to leave Syria, because of the Kurds, about whom the cable cretins know nothing.

Republicans like Ben Sass, Pat Toomey, Mitch and Mitt united with the left—and with professorial neocons like David Frum, Lindsey Graham, and Nikki Haley (who were all especially apoplectic)—to hammer home the message: American troops belong in Syria in perpetuity.

“Tucker: You’d think withdrawing troops from Syria would be celebrated”

UPDATE (10/9/019):

As I wrote in “Masada On Mount Sinjar,” in 2014, “The Kurds have been loyal to Israel and vice versa. Unlike the US, Israel has long since been vested in an independent Kurdistan.” Let Israelis pick up the slack in their neighborhood. We’re effing tired.

NEW COLUMN: Rift Between Dems And Israel Is Delicious … For Deplorables

Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Nationalism

NEW COLUMN is “Rift Between Dems And Israel Is Delicious … For Deplorables.” Read it on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

“A toxic rift opens between Democrats and Israel,” blared a Washington Post headline. This, “after the nation refused entry to two members of Congress.”

The two members are representatives Rashida Tlaib, Democrat from Michigan, and Ilhan Omar, Democrat from Minnesota.

And the “rift” is toxic only to Democrats—and to the many neoconservatives and establishment Republicans who’ve aligned with them against Israeli nationalists and Trump nationalists.

Properly distilled, the divide is between hardline nationalists (Israeli and American) and the globalists (Democrat and Republicans). Liberal pro-Israel groups were likewise exposed for their disdain for any Israeli display of sovereignty.

For Deplorables, this division is delicious.

First: There was nothing wrong with the Israeli government’s refusal to allow the two entry into its country.

Similarly, there would be nothing amiss if the American government refused to welcome into our own country a party of agitators with terrorist sympathies. (The “Miftah group that planned the Tlaib-Omar Israel trip once referred to suicide bombing as sacrifice ‘for the cause.’”)

But apparently, there are only a vanishingly small number of committed sovereigntists in D.C., hence the divide over the rights of an ostensibly sovereign country.

The excursion was a show and sham staged by Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber against Israel, to be carried out on Israel’s turf. The Chutzpah!

Tlaib and Omar intended to agitate against the Jewish State. Why would the Israeli government be obligated to facilitate their agitprop-packed itinerary, which would have invariably devolved into promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel? It isn’t.

Like a lot of good blowups, this one began with President Trump. POTUS asked that Israel not let the two frightful members of Congress into the Jewish State. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obliged.

But then, Israel’s interior minister, Aryeh Deri, delivered the one-two punch to Tlaib. …

READ THE REST. … NEW COLUMN is “Rift Between Dems And Israel Is Delicious … For Deplorables.” Read it on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.