George Kennan had a very great mind. He was one of the very, very few genuine conservatives that America ever produced. He was the American diplomat who invented the doctrine that the Soviet Union had to be contained when in February 1946 he sent an 8,000-word telegram to the State Department known as the Long Telegram. Soviet policy, Kennan argued, was “neurotic,” rooted in Russian insecurity, Communist ideology, and the need to sustain “dictatorship.” Because of their “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy,” the Russians would manufacture enemies and act aggressively. That's still true. Resisting Russian“expansion” and “aggression” was a necessity, he said - that was true then and now.
But he did not support the cold war, as it was waged at least, opposed the arms race, opposed the Vietnam war and vehemently opposed extending Nato in the 1990s, predicting that it would lead to war which would make people say we were right to expand Nato when in fact the reverse would be true.
The three most important things now in world politics are to end the war in Ukraine as fast as possible before Ukraine is wrecked, to contain Russia without a cold war or arms race and to avoid a cold war with China.
For all his great faults and failures. Donald Trump is the only candidate for the American presidency I can imagine achieving these three.
Some will say Ron DeSantis might - I think he is a 'movement conservative', meaning a fiscal and patriotic conservative, not much of a conservative at all really, part of what Donald Trump calls the Swamp.
He was, after all, a protege of Paul Ryan, the classic establishment Republican.
Will Mr. Trump be the Republican candidate? I'd imagine so, probably. Will the bipartisan establishment let him win again? They'll try very hard indeed to stop him and use a lot of dirty tricks. The suppression of the Hunter Biden story will seem like nothing.
British historian thinks he will win. He wrote in the Spectator just a day ago,
'Everyone knows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line from the end of his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ But Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about second chances. He meant that, unlike in a traditional play – where Act I presents a problem, Act II reveals the complications and Act III resolves it all – Americans want to skip Act II and go straight to the resolution.
'The more I think about it, the more I think the Joe Biden presidency is Act II – and Donald Trump is not the last tycoon. He’s Act III. He’s the next president.'
Niall Ferguson is not necessarily reliable. I am told by another historian, James Palmer, that everything he wrote about Chinese history is wrong. I think the return of President Trump is possible and depends on whether the woefully incompetent current US administration can broker a peace in Ukraine. In other words, dish the war party, the Neo-cons and the Atlantic Council types who want a worldwide crusade against autocracies, except autocracies they like.
Peace in Ukraine is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans — Ukraine places about 999 in their list of priorities.
ReplyDeleteThat's probably true.
DeleteFerguson enthusiastically supported the Iraq war, at least at the beginning. I don’t remember if when things began to go pear-shaped he changed his tune, as so many supporters of that misbegotten campaign did.
ReplyDeleteVery good point. People who supported that unjust and disastrous war should say so ever time they utter anything about foreign policy. I don't think Robert Kaplan has ever apologised not his wife Victoria Nuland whom some say caused the war in Ukraine. NF also opposed Brexit but came round to it after the referendum and opposed Donald Trump, but at least said he was not a fascist or comparable to Mussolini, a comparison Andrew Roberts made.
DeleteAll I know about Russian 'neurotic' insecurity is what I've read in Tim Marshall's *Prisoners of Geography*. In the past 500 years they've been invaded repeatedly from the west, and they've been "fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years". As for their aggressiveness, he puts that down to Ivan the Terrible. Over-run by the Mongols in the 13th century, the Russians had relocated from Kiev, but ended up in the indefensible flat territory around Moscow. So Ivan developed the concept of attack as defence, and the expansion provided a buffer zone. Under Peter the Great, Russia acquired the protective ring of territories that continued as the USSR. So Putin's 'tragic' break-up of the USSR puts Russia back to a position before the achievements of Peter the Great.
ReplyDeleteI agree. AJP Taylor argued that Russia was trying to defend herself and had no natural defences. After all Sweden, France and Germany twice tried to conquer her in modern times. The contrary view is the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor. There are strong arguments on both sides. I see her as always deeply viscerally afraid of aggression but apt to get her retaliation in first.
DeleteIf Trump hadn't been robbed of the 2020 election there wouldn't be war in Ukraine. However war makes money so he was reviled by the media and disrespected by other world leaders. Now we're facing nuclear annihilation in Europe.
ReplyDeleteI don't see the evidence that the election was stolen, though the people who really rule America fought very dirtily indeed, but yes they cause terrible wars and facilitate the "great replacement " and yet he is extreme!
DeleteIf you rely on Twitter, any potential evidence to election shenanigans was hidden (including footage of alleged ballot stuffing). If you only rely on primary sources, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruling of a lower court's decision is in the public domain, and it shows that vote counting was not conducted in accordance with established observation rules (with observers being essentially denied the ability to see what was going on). None of this proves fraud, of course, the votes could have been counted correctly in that jurisdiction (in Philadelphia), even in the absence of Republican-affiliated observers. Biden won the Philadelphia region by about 470k voters and the entire state of Pennsylvania by about 80k votes.
DeleteInteresting - how Orwellian Twitter was before Musk and to some extent still is.
DeleteThe US has its problems but is not yet Turkmenistan. For all his accusations of a rigged election, Donald Trump was not robbed of his self-declared entitlement to the presidency.
ReplyDeleteAmericans don’t like that entitled attitude. Just ask Hillary Clinton.
The US voted for Joe Biden by a fairly convincing margin, although it is now having second thoughts about that choice.
And we are not on the brink of nuclear war and widespread death in Ukraine. It’s yet another unpleasant and unnecessary conflict that will grind on without resolution for a long time and that the world will learn to live with.
Another fine mess that America has got the world and especially the Ukraine into. I say that while completely opposing and condemning what Russia is doing.
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