Tuesday 28 August 2018

Will the passing of John McCain mark the end of American interventionism?

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The Wall Street Journal:
The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.
This is an interesting non-eulogy of John McCain, who died on Saturday, by Tom Woods.
McCain’s preferred foreign policy has yielded death, displacement, and regional chaos on a massive scale, not to mention a huge shot in the arm to the very Islamic radicalism he assured us he was fighting against.
He thinks the media falling over themselves to mourn McCain 'Orwellian'  and compares McCain the Establishment figure with Pat Buchanan, a true maverick.

Pat Buchanan's piece on McCain attributes to him the victories of Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016. It continues:
“Take away this pudding; it has no theme,” said Churchill. Britain has lost an empire, but not yet found a role, was the crushing comment of Dean Acheson in 1962.

Both statements appear to apply to U.S. foreign policy in 2018.
We are bombing and fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, partly John McCain’s legacy. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has sent a virtual ultimatum to Iran. We have told North Korea, a nuclear power with the world’s fourth-largest army, either to denuclearize or the U.S. may use its military might to get the job done. 
We are challenging Beijing in its claimed territorial waters of the South China Sea. From South Korea to Estonia, we are committed by solemn treaty to go to war if any one of dozens of nations is attacked. 
Now one hears talk of an “Arab NATO” to confront the ayatollah’s Iran and its Shiite allies. Lest we forget, ISIS and al-Qaida are Sunni.
John McCain liked to rebel against his party and people who like people who rebel, as I do, like him for that. However, he was a man with a very vicious temper who would have been unfitted to be President, which is the reason (apart from wanting a black man to be President) that I wanted Obama to beat him. 

He was also the war candidate and favoured an immigration amnesty, before he ran for President and had to drop that idea. Even in the 00s that was a terrible idea.

This is a catalogue of his outbursts of insane bad temper. The worst one I knew of is this

After he returned from Hanoi he immediately cheated on and then left his wife, who had been been faithful to him while he was a prisoner and who had been meanwhile horribly disfigured in a car crash. He had his good points too, and stood up to terrible torture by the Vietcong (whom the American left supported), but eulogising him is a means of attacking Donald Trump, like half the stuff in the press these days.

2 comments:

  1. I think that actually the passing of McCain represents the death of the anti-war left. The only people eulogising this warmongering maniac are the liberal and left-wing. The real key takeaway here should be that the antiwar left has completely collapsed. Just as there is no left that seriously cares about economic issues. The Occupy movement was a damp squib. The left is now purely about destroying white men and de-Europeanising America as fast as possible, and they are willing to do whatever they have to do to get that job done.

    What that means of course is that there is no more “white” Left. The “white” left pushed anti-war, pro-worker trade policies. These are now all Trumpopulist issues. The Democrat Party is now solely the party of the super rich, blacks, jews, hispanics, unmarried white women and LGBTQs

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