I think that the current period has a great trouble defining a direction. It’s very responsive to the emotion of the moment… We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to… How to marry our military capacity to our strategic purposes and how to relate those to our moral purposes—it’s an unsolved problem.”
Henry Kissinger says Western foreign policy is a bathetic mess
The elites in the USA want another war with the Russians, just like the last one which was great fun. Not certain about the Chinese though. They are supposed to just make cheap stuff.
Israel is breaking up with us. They are in the process of normalising their relationships with Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Jannie: Kissinger talks about equilibrium. You can’t achieve that when people like Putin aren’t interested. The US response to China is somewhat predictable, if also impractical. But, like the Russia issue isn’t really a question of what the US does so much as what China really wants.
Henry Kissinger is right that current foreign policy is a mess … he would know, because a good part of what went wrong was a direct consequence of his own actions.
https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2006/09/10/henry-kissinger-on-vietnam/
I don’t think Putin is interested in False Equilibrium.
For one very good article on not just how the West got into a Mess on Ukraine but with excellent analysis on the whole foreign policy shambles it now is in.
Attribute: Claremont Review Of Books via Powerline blog.
I agree with all of that but I would add that the US isn’t interested in equilibrium either – which is why it engineered a Fukuyama return match with Russia from 2014 onwards.
I think his realpolitic played out during the Cold War as a ruthless hemispheric interventionism (rationalised as US national interest writ large). Now he seems to see realpolitic as requiring flexibility in relation to those other superpowers which cannot be confronted or proxy-warred away. This is more or less the West’s policy in relation to China anyway and has been for a long time. Western leaders are simply panicking now because Ukraine made them contemplate an imminent (rather than endlessly conjectured) war over Taiwan. They’re stuck between Wilsonian ‘normalcy’ and ‘standing up to China’ (hard to do when you need the Chinese to have a national economy).
Kissinger’s linkage of moral purpose with strategic purpose – and the lack of the former rendering the latter insipid (and unsaleable to domestic constituencies) – was something I essayed at length in ‘Occident & Emergency.’
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Apologies: tried to remotely update this post with a par comparing Kissinger’s views with a Tony Abbott speech but I see the post has reverted to the original iteration.
Tony Abbott’s speech to the Henry Jackson Society in London on Tuesday…
All Endless War boilerplate and some of it pretty loopy…
Their finest hour. Another thousand years to go. Tony seems to be seriously impressed by some kind of war machine, and endless war with Russia is easy. Could there be some other way than this endless killing. It was von Runstedt who said “make peace you fools”.
Tony Abbott one of our worst PMs and poorest intellects.
He said islam need their reformation. So said the man who rejected THE reformation.
He was always loopy.
Non Mentis
Were you ever a Rhodes scholar? Abbott was, as was Hawke.
Like most human beings (yourself excepted, of course), he made mistakes, but he also did many good things.
Back to pre-school for you, to learn to read words of more than one syllable.
Yeah he was so much of a rhodes scholar he tells muslims they need a reformation which he rejects it himself.
As for Hawke Keating had the intellect.
now go back and tell everyone how the BLM organised demonstrations in Portland 4 years before they are an organization.
What a boof head
Hawke took a pissant B.Litt. at Oxford.
More or less a certificate of attendance.
If you mean, as a Catholic, he rejects the Scripture-doctoring and theological baloney of the fraudulent German, sure. All Catholics do.
Abbott’s remark* was stupid but not for the reason you think.
It was stupid for two reasons: first, because Christianity didn’t need Luther’s “reformation” either.
Second – and more importantly – Abbott doesn’t get it that “Western civilisation” is no longer uncomplicatedly superior to other cultures and that is becoming a huge problem. Interestingly, a major reason for that is the ongoing atomisation of the truth in the West which is partly traceable to the “reformation.”
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*
Mentis gets the truth from the ABC and says that people who disagree with him are stupid, lazy and bad. He himself is intelligent, diligent and morally superior, but yet still a hapless victim of the deplorables he seeks to dominate. It’s a form of cognitive dissonance.
Non Mentis
now go back and tell everyone how the BLM organised demonstrations in Portland 4 years before they are an organization.
Please keep continuing to display how ignorant and ill-informed you are. From Newsweek, 2/4/2021:
The cleaning and repair bill for federal buildings in Portland damaged during protests in the city last summer exceeded $2 million, Oregon’s attorney has revealed. Portland saw widespread protests beginning in May following the killing of Black man George Floyd while in police custody.
Still, I can understand your confusion. Riots in DemonRat run west coast cities happen so often, it is easy for the ill-informed to become confused. Portland, Seattle, San Fran, La, so easy to get mixed up.
PS, that cost is only for Federal buildings. Isn’t attacking Federal buildings an insurrection?
And don’t forget the other delights of DemonRat run west coast cities.
Camps of vagrants, living, pissing, shitting, taking drugs, doing deals in the streets. Law officers who decline to enforce the law, even against violent offenders.
There is so much more, but that should be enough to convince any reasonable person (which excludes Non Mentis) that they are indeed Paradise on earth. //sarc (For the benefit of the village idiot.)