Why The Neutralist? The term Isolationist implies a narrow Fortress America outlook and is used as an epithet. The term Neutralist does not indicate someone hiding out from the world. No one calls the Swiss isolationists. The Wilsonian world view is old, tired and wrong. Our interventions have been less and less successful and now the failure can no longer be covered up.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Read Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at Responsible Statecraft to understand how the big guy and girls think of you.

The article, What foreign policy elites really think about you, is a good analysis of how you are thought off by your betters.

 

Actually, lumpen America comes off better, and rightly so, as you read it, as I guess the lady intended,

 

She notes, “These ham-fisted approaches befit the neoconservatives who wield them, as they did the same in the Global War on Terror, and to a great extent, worked to keep the Iraq War going for almost a decade and the war in Afghanistan shambling on for a full 20 years.

 

In addition to the destruction of two countries, trillions of dollars, a massive refugee crisis, a new generation of U.S. veterans dependent on lifetime assistance, and countless dead and wounded, these “elites” are in great part responsible for the mistrust of Washington that has eaten away at the culture and politics here to the core.”

 

Yet they are at it again with the same know nothing arrogance. Is there no Talleyrand to inform them “they learn nothing and forget nothing.”

 

From neocons, these have to be maybe the stupidest lines ever:

 

"In war, from a purely political perspective, it’s usually safer for politicians to stay the course.

 

Perhaps this is why democracies’ track records of playing the long game in armed conflicts is actually pretty good. From the ancient Athenians during the Peloponnesian War on through to the present day, democracies have not usually been the fickle, shrinking violets their detractors make them out to be."

 

Maybe the authors, Gentile and Cohen, should look up the Battle of Aegospotami to get an idea of how Athenian tenacity worked out.

 

The neutralist gets a couple of takeaways from Ms. Vlahos piece.

1.     The arrogance of the blob.

2.     The second-rate level of thinking.

 

 

 

 

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