Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Analyze This: On ‘The Factor,’ Psychologizing Passes As Analysis

Conservatism, Democrats, English, Foreign Policy, Reason, Republicans, Russia

Bill O’Reilly, star of Fox New, has this Pavlovian response to any suggested comparison between Russian and American military bellicosity: he foams at the mouth. Why is it absolutely verboten, on The Factor, to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on?

You’re in for a treat. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison—for decades the US has been far more aggressive than Russia in its foreign policy—don’t expect argument from Bill, Juan Williams and the gang. What you get is a form of ad hominem, or psychologizing.

President Vladimir Putin, said (today, Monday, March 3) Bill, is a thug. That’s why he can’t be compared to “a good country” like the US. (Childish doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.) Apparently Bush and Obama are never to be called thugs.

Why, Billy? Because they’re American?

The other “argument” for the lack of validity of said comparison was that Putin seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire (my usage; Bill and the gang did not use that word. Read about Bill’s valiant but botched attempts to promote English). Bill has read Putin’s mind, and knows he wants Russia to be an empire again. Hence we cannot compare the actions on the ground of the two countries.

If ever you doubted that liberals and conservatives are situated on the same foreign-policy continuum, listen to the prescriptions for Ukraine of leftist Juan Williams. On the same silly segment, the Fox News “analyst” recommended that the US freeze the assets of individual Russians, stateside and abroad, expel visiting Russians and stop Russians from traveling to the US, all in retaliation for the presence of Russian forces in Crimea (which is dominated by a Russian-speaking population). Williams, naturally, also wants to see economic sanctions placed on Russia.

Williams is an “analyst” in the same way Bill O’Reilly is a thinker.

Blood Brothers, The Ukraine And ‘The Enduring Schism’

English, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Russia

Blood brother is a perfectly good, if colorful, phrase to denote fealty between like-minded men. Yet in the land of the terminally stupid, linguistic flourish can become a liability; the use of a phrase “proof” of a Nazi mindset, whatever that means.

Hush. Don’t tell our deracinated neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, stateside, but “blood brother,” a perfectly proper appellation deployed by Ted Nugent to describe his affinity for “Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful Greg Abbott,” works as well to explain many a conflict in Europe (and the US).

What I take away from Nebojsa Malic’s fascinating historic insight into the complex dynamics that undergird “present-day trouble in Ukraine” is that it stands in stark contrast to the simplistic paradigm with which Anglo-American neoconservatives rape the same reality.

Malic, who is now at the The Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies, Writes:

… can be traced back not to the Mongol invasion that destroyed the first Russian state, but to the 1595 Union of Brest – when, under tremendous pressure of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, some of the Orthodox clergy decided to submit to Rome. These “Uniates” have been the driving force behind the creation of a separate, anti-Russian, “Ukrainian” identity at almost every point in history since. They allied with Poland during the civil war that brought the Bolsheviks to power and reorganized the tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union; likewise, they allied with Hitler in 1941, and were sheltered by the British after 1945 as “good Catholics and fervent anti-Communists” (see here). Since Ukraine became an independent state in 1991 (following Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of the USSR), they’ve sought to dominate its politics, which culminated recently with the “Maidan” coup. …

… While other factors – such as Islam, or geopolitics – have certainly played a role, the millennium-long history of Catholic hostility towards the Orthodox is the key to understanding the conflicts in Europe’s East. Not surprisingly, it is also the explanation least mentioned and examined. It doesn’t take a genius to see why.

MORE.

UPDATED: The Empire’s ‘Mad Meddlers’ And Even Madder Heroes

Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Military, Neoconservatism

Our friend, historian Nebojsa Malic, updates us as to the status of the “the supposedly ‘independent’ and ‘popular’ leaders of the Maydan rebellion,” in the Ukraine:

Not two weeks after Imperial diplomats were caught in flagranti trying to order them around, the supposedly “independent” and “popular” leaders of the Maydan rebellion have responded to a general amnesty by the government with – armed rebellion. A number of government buildings were stormed by “peaceful protesters”, including an armory in Lvov (Lwow, Lviv, Lemberg) near the Polish border.

So, according to the Empire, armed neo-Nazis, soccer hooligans, a variety of militant separatists, looters, arsonists and cop-killers are “peaceful protesters”, whose demands for the government’s unconditional surrender and a rewriting of the Constitution are a desire for more “democracy.” Meanwhile, the president who has tried every form of appeasement towards the protesters, including a general amnesty, is a “despot… abolishing democracy.”

This is absurd. There is not a shred of logic in any of it, aside from the “who-whom” relativistic logic, according to which the designated villain can do no right, while the designated victim can do no wrong.

Malevolent Spite

The simmering resentment of the Imperial press against Russia over the past decade or so has flat-out exploded in 2014. As Chronicles’ Eugene Girin dared notice, the US media (though the Brits and the Canadians haven’t been far behind) have begun to write about Russia with hate:

“As if on cue from the White House, the American media started an anti-Russian campaign the sheer malevolence of which was only rivaled by the orgy of Serbophobia in the 1990s.”

In a follow-up article, he noted that, “unlike the old Soviet Union, which was treated respectfully, if not reverently by the mainstream networks, Russia is portrayed as an object of scorn and ridicule: a failed, menacing, disagreeably exotic country.”

Menacing to whom? Georgia, which attacked first? Ukraine, which Russia bailed out and subsidizes with cheap gas? Latvia, where SS veterans march proudly every year? The globalist banksters, who lost the ability to loot Russia they had under Yeltsin? …

MORE.

UPDATE: “Ukraine, Crimea, and Washington’s Pointless Geo-Political Contest With Russia” by John Glaser:

… telling Russia to behave itself has about zero chance of helping the situation. “Russian leaders believe, rightly or wrongly, that the West drove events in Ukraine to the brink of collapse to secure geopolitical advantage over Moscow,” Trenin and Weiss say. “Thus, Western appeals for Russian restraint in the event of a crisis over Crimea are unlikely to resonate.”

But the eagerness in Washington to steer events in Ukraine and beat out Russia in some pointless geopolitical game has not yielded. In this Daily Beast report, Republican leaders Buck McKeon and James Inhofe berate Obama for being too soft on Russia; they both express a deep longing for the Cold War era when it was easier to justify any reckless military action abroad on the grounds of opposing Soviet designs.

David Rhodes, a Reuters columnist, quoted former Romney adviser Nile Gardiner as reiterating Romney’s 2012 line that Russia is America’s greatest geo-political foe and arguing that “an ‘ideological war’ was underway and Putin is winning.”

Gardiner then worries that Washington’s inability to force Russia to lay prostrate at the feet of American power is encouraging other countries to defy their American master: “Putin is viewed by American adversaries and competitors as someone who has stood up to American influence and gotten away with outflanking the United States. Adversaries take note of this and they sense weakness and that’s dangerous. Dissidents also take note. …”

Continued.

Libertarians And The Sin Of Abstraction

Foreign Policy, libertarianism, Objectivism, Political Philosophy

On EPJ, “Presstitute-Cultivated Ignorance On Ukraine” has elicited one particularly typical libertarian response that demanded a reply. Here is the letter. My response follows below.

TonyFebruary 21, 2014 at 11:09 AM

I like the article overall, but there is too much government-concept worship.

Examples:

“Revered in the US, Pussy Riot is a punk rock Russian band of feminists, whose forté is breast-baring, defiling places of worship, punching the air while shrieking, “F-ck you Putin,” and participating in public-orgy protests and other criminal acts.”

Most of these would not be CLOSE to being “criminal acts” in a libertarian society. And they should not be considered such (by libertarians) in a statist one, with the exception of defiling places of worship.

“The “occupation of government buildings in Kiev and in Western Ukraine”

Oh so what…

“Having flouted America’s national interests and squandered Russian good will—the ignoramuses of the Beltway will have no place in this grand geopolitical realignment.”

There are no such things as “America’s national interests” within libertarian thought. It is a nationalist and collectivist concept.

MERCER Reply:

Nonsense. The article deals in reality, not in pie-in-the-sky libertarian theory. The sin of abstraction is just that: a grave sin. The article, moreover, is for adults, not for the childish libertarian who wishes to remain suspended forever in never-never land. The Pussy Riot retarded sisterhood defiled private property. They copulated in a public setting, paid for by taxpayers. Only a bad writer does a discursive detour into the various contingencies that would apply if we lived in a private-property anarcho-capitalistic society. We don’t! Grow up. Has nobody taught you kids how to stay on topic, or write without flights of fancy? I guess I’m old enough to remember being taught such discipline and learning it from my betters. Does one effect a realistic analysis, which entails the concept of the national interest (peace with Russia, non-interventionism, in this case), or does one twist into ideological pretzels in order to come down on the side of politically proper libertarianism? This column deals in reality. So should you. Deal with real life!