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Javier E

The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntal-changes-to-the-world.html

WWI effects analysis history war

shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.
  • “The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals.
  • Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939, when restraint was costly, and miss the lessons of 1914, when restraint could have avoided the war? Continue reading the main story Recent Comments AR 3 hours ago So exactly 100 years ago Baghdad and Damascus were sleepy, almost forgotten provincial cities of the Ottoman Empire. Too bad they didn't... AHS 3 hours ago Thanks for this thoughtful and challenging article. We Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the context of our lives and politics... Kevin Cahill 3 hours ago World War I showed that politics doesn't always work well. Vietnam and W's invasion of Iraq showed that it often doesn't work well. See All Comments Write a comment
Javier E

The House Is On Fire - Accepting the Truth of the Trump Revolution - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-truth-of-the-trump-revolution

trump racism white supremacy revanchism crisis

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Of course, he’s a racist. But that doesn’t tell us enough. Lots of people dislike blacks or Jews, don’t want to live near them, etc. But many, likely most with racist attitudes, do not embrace a politics driven by racial grievance. Trump’s politics are about racial grievance. It’s not latent or peripheral but rather central. That’s different and it’s worse.
  • We can infer what stands behind a person’s public statements if we’ve seen them enough, under different pressures and in different contexts. Trump’s repeated expressions of sympathy for racist activists, refusals to denounce racist activists, coddling and appointments of racist activists can only really mean one thing: that he instinctively sympathizes with them and indeed is one. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 80 million times, I need to seriously consider what the fuck is wrong with me.
  • With Trump, he has a revanchist racist politics because he is a revanchist racist. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The simpler explanation that accounts for all the available facts is not always right. But as Occam noted, it is always to be preferred. What we need is a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Trumpism, or at least some of us need it. The breakthrough for Copernicus was in positing the unimaginable, indeed the terrifying possibility that the Earth is not the center of the universe but rather a peripheral, secondary celestial body. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.
  • What we have in this Times article is the more direct evidence, a confirmation of what we should already know. His advisors know this is what he thinks. They apparently hear it frequently. They were shocked to here him say in public “opinions that the president had long expressed in private.”
  • What we’ve seen over the last five days is sickening and awful. The house is on fire. But it was on fire a week ago. It’s been on fire since November. The truth is indeed unimaginable and terrifying. But we need to accept the full truth of it if we are going to be able to save our country.
Javier E

Bill Clinton: I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629499

clinton russia foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst.
  • Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.
  • As United Nations ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeleine Albright, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion. So were Secretary of State Warren Christopher; National Security Adviser Tony Lake; his successor, Sandy Berger; and two others with firsthand experience in the area:
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  • When my administration started, in 1993, no one felt certain that a post–Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable, and democratic.
  • in my view, whether it happened depended less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts, or seek to re-create a version of its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military?
  • In 1994, Russia became the first country to join the Partnership for Peace, a program for practical bilateral cooperation, including joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries.
  • Beginning in 1995, after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War, we made an agreement to add Russian troops to the peacekeeping forces that NATO had on the ground in Bosnia. In 1997, we supported the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs, and supported Russia’s entry to the G7, making it the G8. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces.
  • Throughout it all, we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin.
  • Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.
  • Big questions remained about East Germany’s integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans, and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against the threat of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders.
  • Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary
  • The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for Central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go-it-alone strategy of militarization.
  • Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO
  • As Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December 2021, “It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go West.”
  • Or as Havel said in 2008: “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.” To reject Central and Eastern European countries’ membership into NATO simply because of Russian objections would have been doing just that.
  • Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliance’s then-16 members; two-thirds consent of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate; close consultation with prospective members to ensure that their military, economic, and political reforms met NATO’s high standards; and near-constant reassurance to Russia.
  • Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine
  • She understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic, and other tribal divisions that threatened it. She used every item in her famed diplomat’s toolkit and her domestic political savvy to help clear the way for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO in 1999.
  • The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever-larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security.
  • At the time I proposed NATO expansion, however, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side.
  • Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil.
  • And it is the strength of the NATO alliance, and its credible threat of defensive force, that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe.
  • Anne Applebaum said recently, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years … We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn’t done it.”
  • The failure of Russian democracy, and its turn to revanchism, was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin.
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