Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to A.G. Hodge, April 4, 1864:
"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."
I am at a loss for trying to correlate Mr. Deis' discussion of Harold Rood's interest is expanding strategic freedom of action in FP with the concept (which I buy) of the importance of the character of a nation in assessing the merits of John Yoo's argument.
At some point, I hope that John lays out the vision or framework on which he predicates his assertions. Thus far he has endeavored (with some success) to poke holes in some of the arguments, but to win the argument, he has to stop counterpunching and go for a TKO.
1 - As a mere country yokel unschooled in academic political science what I get from this argument is that NATO has run its course and should be radically restructured or abandoned. As in duh! and see also my fulminations on peace in the Ukraine at paul530.substack.com .
2 - I think there's an argument to be made to the effect that all the contributions here have, at least so far, missed a big part of the issue - specifically that American foreign policy differs from the European tradition in one very fundamental way: before Clinton, American policy was seen as operating largely for the benefit of Americans while European policy is best understood in terms of struggles between elites in which "the people" are mere pawns of little or no intrinsic value to the players and nationality a kind of catchment area for money and control.
The Bush people straddled, I think, this fence; the Obamacon went all out for the European approach (which is why they unanimously adopted the names of (primarily English) noble families for their email pseudonyms - effectively imagining themselves playing at "great house" al la Europe, Dune, or Game of Thrones); while Russia, more recently, has been moving away from this and toward a more nationalist approach to foreign policy as intended to benefit the country (i.e. both players and pawns).
As Vance explained, the whole point of NATO is moot if Western Europe abandons Western values.
Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to A.G. Hodge, April 4, 1864:
"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."
I am at a loss for trying to correlate Mr. Deis' discussion of Harold Rood's interest is expanding strategic freedom of action in FP with the concept (which I buy) of the importance of the character of a nation in assessing the merits of John Yoo's argument.
At some point, I hope that John lays out the vision or framework on which he predicates his assertions. Thus far he has endeavored (with some success) to poke holes in some of the arguments, but to win the argument, he has to stop counterpunching and go for a TKO.
Two responses:
1 - As a mere country yokel unschooled in academic political science what I get from this argument is that NATO has run its course and should be radically restructured or abandoned. As in duh! and see also my fulminations on peace in the Ukraine at paul530.substack.com .
2 - I think there's an argument to be made to the effect that all the contributions here have, at least so far, missed a big part of the issue - specifically that American foreign policy differs from the European tradition in one very fundamental way: before Clinton, American policy was seen as operating largely for the benefit of Americans while European policy is best understood in terms of struggles between elites in which "the people" are mere pawns of little or no intrinsic value to the players and nationality a kind of catchment area for money and control.
The Bush people straddled, I think, this fence; the Obamacon went all out for the European approach (which is why they unanimously adopted the names of (primarily English) noble families for their email pseudonyms - effectively imagining themselves playing at "great house" al la Europe, Dune, or Game of Thrones); while Russia, more recently, has been moving away from this and toward a more nationalist approach to foreign policy as intended to benefit the country (i.e. both players and pawns).