Welcome to the 24th edition of this newsletter. Below we have some more talk about the current situation with Russia and why you should care about it. But first, some housekeeping stuff. The publication of this newsletter on a weekly basis is unlikely to continue on a regular basis going forward. I may still publish it from time to time or I may just post standard articles to this account, but I have things in my life that will likely take my time and attention away from this. Now without further ado, the news for the week of December 26-January 1
Yes, Conservatives Should Care About Foreign Policy
Josh Hammer had an observation on Twitter on Sunday when he observed that he and his fellow travelers do not care or have a hard time caring about foreign policy when the country’s internal problems are what they are.
Responding to the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, Hammer followed up with seemingly straight forward question to prove his point:
But, this is a rather silly question for it assumes one can not walk and chew gum at the same time, but of course the answer is woke ideology. And it will be right until it is not and then it will be Russia and everybody will agree and unironically lament “I can’t believe we didn’t see this coming.”
This is because while Hammer may not care about foreign policy, foreign policy cares about Hammer. Nobody cares about foreign policy until some terrorists fly planes into some buildings or some communists start a global pandemic that shuts down the global economy or the Japanese bomb you on a clear Sunday morning in December. Then everybody cares, but since Russia did not invade Estonia yesterday, will not invade Estonia today, and probably will not invade Estonia tomorrow, that means Russia will never invade Estonia, right? Of course not, but convincing yourself it will never happen is the first step on the road to Russia invading Estonia.
Another problem with Hammer’s critique of focusing on foreign policy is that he presents it as a new thing that all good conservatives should agree with, but lay people have always been disconnected from foreign policy.
If things seemed different in the past, that is because the nature of the enemy was different. Communism and radical Islam were ideologies that conservatives who hold on to the idea of a Judeo-Christian country can see as an ideological threat and therefore as part of a larger culture war against atheism or Sharia Law.
This sort of ideological dichotomy is also present in a lot of domestic politics. Elections are dichotomous, either the Republican will win or the Democrat will win. Either Critical Race Theory will be taught in public schools or it will not. Either abortion takes an innocent life or banning it is an infringement on women’s rights.
Foreign policy, on the other hand, is messy and when we try to communicate complex ideas to lay voters we typically end up in undesirable places. We talk about peace and diplomacy versus war or strength versus weakness, which leads to narrow mindedness, which leads to bad decisions, which leads to distrust of foreign policy elites, which leads to apathy among people like Hammer. Still, these mistakes are why we need to take foreign policy more seriously, not less, so we can have an informed electorate and politicians who do not repeat the same worn out clichés and ham-fisted analogies to July 1914 or Munich.
We need to teach kids about geography, because absent an enemy with a definable ideology, geography is how we determine threats. Domestically, Vladimir Putin is not all that ideological. He is your standard authoritarian kleptocrat. Internationally, he is not a communist retread or radical Islamist, he is just a good old-fashioned Russian nationalist who views himself as a sort of Stalin or Peter the Great bringing glory and prestige (back) to the Motherland. Xi Jinping is much the same. Although more ideological than Putin, he is not an orthodox Marxist seeking to spread worldwide revolution, internationally he is a Chinese nationalist who seeks to bring glory and prestige to China after centuries of “shameful humiliation” by the West.
Putin and Xi cannot be co-opted in the culture war like Stalin, Mao, or even Bin Laden. Both seek to promote authoritarianism abroad, but non-descript authoritarianism does not get the same emotional reaction out of people like Hammer that communism would. But, if Putin ever sets his eyes on Estonia or Xi sets his on Taiwan then you better believe you will care about foreign policy because if they get their way on those issues, then we could very well be living in a world run by them and if you think wokeism is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet if those two get their way.
Speaking Of Which
…let us talk about Russia some more. We already know that Putin finds it offensive that Ukraine exists as an independent country. Related to that is the biggest blind spot in Moscow’s strategic-security culture, which is the inability to see small and medium-sized countries as not just independent of Moscow’s orbit, but also having agency. They simply cannot wrap their heads around the fact that Ukrainians (and other Central and Eastern Europeans) view them as the enemy and it is not because the Americans played some sort of Russophobic Jedi-mind-trick on them. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the quiet part out loud, recently in an interview, “NATO has become a purely geopolitical project aimed at taking over the territories orphaned by the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation and the Soviet Union. This is what it is doing now.”
Everybody knows the United States has made its fair share of mistakes over the past several years and decades, but one we have managed to avoid is pissing off our neighbors to the extent to they feel their survival is tied to securing a mutual defense treaty with Russia or China. It helps that we do not refer to other nations of the Western Hemisphere as “orphaned territories” that exist solely for larger powers to lord over.
Still, here we are. Moscow has put itself in a predicament, likely on purpose. It either invades Ukraine and suffers the consequences of that which includes everything from sanctions to NATO moving forces east (the exact opposite of their stated goal), to a guerilla war or it backs down and risks losing face.
It would be easy, therefore, to say that Putin is in the wrong here and therefore Washington should say to him “you’ll get nothing and like it,” but in the interest of trying to be peacemaker, the U.S. and Russia will meet in January to discuss European security and I have a proposal to avoid war, because guerilla wars notwithstanding, Russia could still crush the conventional Ukrainian military like a grape if it wanted to, which is why Putin is doing this now, before Kyiv’s conventional military power can advances to the point where Kyiv’s Westward shift can be solidified forever.
I propose that we, the U.S./NATO/Ukraine, agree to a ten year moratorium on new NATO members and that in the meantime no U.S. missiles or combat formations will be deployed to Ukraine. These were never happening anyway, so conceding it would not be that big of deal. If this offends your moral sensibilities, just remember, facts don’t care about your feelings any more than they care about some lefty snowflake’s and I am only the messenger. The moratorium allows us to say that we did not allow Putin to dictate NATO’s membership, but also removes what Putin claims is his biggest beef with NATO. We can spin the moratorium as a time for “trust building.”
This is contingent on Russia withdrawing from Eastern Ukraine, allowing Ukraine put down the separatist movement in that part of the country, join the European Union, and allowing NATO members to train Ukraine’s military and sell it arms including ships, aircraft, and air and costal defense missiles in the same way we sell arms to non-NATO countries like Finland. If Putin says no to this, then we have no reason to believe he is not just using this to leave Ukraine naked so he can invade it at some point in the not-so distant future.
The West should make clear that they take Russia’s security concerns seriously given its history of being invaded from the Mongols through Hitler, but we also do not give one single damn about “historical Russia.” If Putin accepts this offer, then great, if he rejects it, the U.S. should listen to a counteroffer, but with one foot already out the door.
Biden Does A 180
When talking about COVID on Monday, President Biden said, “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level.”
This is a complete 180 degree shift from his campaign and it is nice that he finally realizes that the president does not have god-like powers to stop a respiratory virus (now if only liberals could learn from this and apply its logic to Florida governors), even if he only came to this conclusion because his hubris caught up with him. Being in the Big Chair does tend to change a person, but now Biden needs to take this to its logical conclusion by ending all federal COVID-related mandates.
The CDC shrinking the quarantine length for asymptomatic people from ten days to five is a start, but it should be zero. It is January 2022, not March 2020, we have vaccines and treatments now. If you are sick, you should stay home. If you are not, you should live your life.
Early on in the pandemic it was heavily implied, if not explicitly declared, that if you got COVID it was because of some great moral failing on your part. The wages for your sin was that either you would die, your loved one would die, or that somebody else would die. Some people still believe this, despite all the medical advancements and more contagious variants and it is going to take some time to shake it out of them. This process should have started months ago, but there is no reason it can not start today. We cannot go into year three of this with people believing that normal life equals the stuff of death cults.
Some Other Things
Amidst an energy crisis and a deepening dependence on Russian energy while Russia threatens European security, Germany will shut down all six of its nuclear power plants by the end of 2022.
Liberals act as if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leads some sort of death cult, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants you to take her seriously, so if you point out that AOC is a hypocrite for vacationing in DeSantis’ Florida, she will call you sexually frustrated.
ICYMI
Weekly Randomness
What is this?
Some New Year’s trivia:
Looking Forward to Celebrating…
National Trivia Day on Tuesday, January 4