Nicole Hemmer, Partisans

At Amazon, Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

A Manifesto on National Conservatism

This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist"). 

Some parts are just okay, though. 

The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts. 

The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.

See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

RTWT. 

Norman Podhoretz Interview at Claremont Review: 'The Rise of the Anti-Ameican Left'

At the Claremont Review of Books, "Present at Creation. Norman Podhoretz on the Rise of the Anti-American Left":

Anyway, what’s going on now with “anti-racism” is really different from the past, because it’s one of the main, or perhaps the main, weapon of attack on America. What’s happened today is that the gloves are off, the disguises are off, the leftists, black and white, talk now publicly the way they only used to talk privately, it’s out in the open and there is a tiny bit of resistance being mounted recently, but only a tiny bit so far. So, it is worse and a lot of people are now saying, “We are in a cold civil war.” And we were not in a civil war yet in those days, in the 1960s. We were so to speak in the 1840s or early 1850s, not in the 1860s. But we’re there now (except, thank God, for the guns). I don’t know how this divide is going to work itself out, but I consider it evil because I still believe, and I believe in a way more than ever, that this country is not only a force for good in itself and in the world at large, but one of the high points of human civilization...

RTWT.

The Price of Hegemony

It's neoconservative author and columnist Robert Kagan (who is married to Victory Nuland, part of the "neocon cabal" Glenn Greenwald's been wailing about), at Foreign Affairs, "Can America Learn to Use Its Power?":

For years, analysts have debated whether the United States incited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine and other neighboring countries or whether Moscow’s actions were simply unprovoked aggressions. That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia’s sphere of interest, and that U.S. policies created the feelings of insecurity that have driven Putin to extreme measures. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the anti-interventionists and shut down the debate over whether the United States should have entered World War II, Putin’s invasion has suspended the 2022 version of Americans’ endless argument over their purpose in the world.

That is unfortunate. Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact.

For critics of American power, the best way for the United States to cope is for it to retrench its position in the world, divest itself of overseas obligations that others ought to handle, and serve, at most, as a distant offshore balancer. These critics would grant China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia and Europe and focus the United States’ attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans. But there is a core of unrealism to this “realist” prescription: it doesn’t reflect the true nature of global power and influence that has characterized most of the post–Cold War era and that still governs the world today. The United States was already the only true global superpower during the Cold War, with its unparalleled wealth and might and its extensive international alliances. The collapse of the Soviet Union only enhanced U.S. global hegemony—and not because Washington eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Moscow’s weakness. Instead, the collapse expanded U.S. influence because the United States’ combination of power and democratic beliefs made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy. The United States is therefore an imposing obstacle to a Russia seeking to regain its lost influence.

What has happened in eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality. Washington did not actively aspire to be the region’s dominant power. But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence. Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades—or, in some cases, centuries—of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed. Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join NATO and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow’s attempts to corral them back into its sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get. And Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior, simply because the country was strong enough to attract eastern Europeans.

Throughout their history, Americans have tended to be unconscious of the daily impact that U.S. power has on the rest of the world, friends and foes alike. They are generally surprised to find themselves the target of resentment and of the kinds of challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and by President Xi Jinping’s China. Americans could reduce the severity of these challenges by wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively. They failed to do this in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan to go unchecked until it resulted in a massively destructive world war. They failed to do so in recent years, allowing Putin to seize more and more land until he invaded all of Ukraine. After Putin’s latest move, Americans may learn the right lesson. But they will still struggle to understand how Washington should act in the world if they don’t examine what happened with Russia, and that requires continuing the debate over the impact of U.S. power.

BY POPULAR DEMAND

So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin? One thing needs to be clear: it was not by threatening the security of Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed greater security than at any time in recent memory. Russia was invaded three times over the past two centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually ready to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed unprecedented security on its western flanks, even as NATO has taken in new members to its east. Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance: a reunified Germany. When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev favored anchoring it in NATO. As he told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany “contained within European structures.”

Late Soviet and early Russian leaders certainly did not act as if they feared an attack from the West. Soviet and Russian defense spending declined sharply in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s, including by 90 percent between 1992 and 1996. The once formidable Red Army was cut nearly in half, leaving it weaker in relative terms than it had been for almost 400 years. Gorbachev even ordered the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland and other Warsaw Pact states, chiefly as a cost-saving measure. It was all part of a larger strategy to ease Cold War tensions so that Moscow might concentrate on economic reform at home. But even Gorbachev would not have sought this holiday from geopolitics had he believed that the United States and the West would take advantage of it.

His judgment was sensible. The United States and its allies had no interest in the independence of the Soviet republics, as U.S. President George H. W. Bush made clear in his 1991 speech in Kyiv, in which he denounced the “suicidal nationalism” of independence-minded Ukrainians (who would declare independence three weeks later). Indeed, for several years after 1989, U.S. policies aimed first to rescue Gorbachev, then to rescue the Soviet Union, and then to rescue Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the period of transition from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Russia—the time of greatest Russian weakness—the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration were reluctant to expand NATO, despite the increasingly urgent appeals of the former Warsaw Pact states. The Clinton administration created the Partnership for Peace, whose vague assurances of solidarity fell well short of a security guarantee for former Warsaw Pact members.

It is easy to see why Washington felt no great compulsion to drive NATO eastward. Few Americans at that time saw the organization as a bulwark against Russian expansion, much less as a means of bringing Russia down. From the U.S. perspective, Russia was already a shell of its former self. The question was whether NATO had any mission at all now that the great adversary against which it was aimed had collapsed—and given just how hopeful the 1990s felt to most Americans and western Europeans. It was thought to be a time of convergence, when both China and Russia were moving ineluctably toward liberalism. Geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics, the nation-state was passing away, the world was “flat,” the twenty-first century would be run by the European Union, and Enlightenment ideals were spreading across the planet. For NATO, “out of area or out of business” was the mantra of the day.

But as the West enjoyed its fantasies and Russia struggled to adapt to a new world, the nervous populations lying to the east of Germany—the Balts, the Poles, the Romanians, and the Ukrainians—viewed the end of the Cold War as merely the latest phase in their centuries-old struggle. For them, NATO was not obsolete. They saw what the United States and western Europe took for granted—the Article 5 collective security guarantee—as the key to escaping a long, bloody, and oppressive past. Much like the French after World War I, who feared the day when a revived Germany would again threaten them, eastern Europeans believed that Russia would eventually resume its centuries-long habit of imperialism and seek to reclaim its traditional influence over their neighborhood. These states wanted to integrate into the free-market capitalism of their richer, Western neighbors, and membership in NATO and the European Union was to them the only path out of a dismal past and into a safer, more democratic, and more prosperous future. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin loosened the reins in the early 1990s, practically every current, and soon former, Warsaw Pact member and Soviet republic seized the chance to break from the past and shift their allegiance from Moscow to the transatlantic West.

But although this massive change had little to do with U.S. policies, it had much to do with the reality of the United States’ post–Cold War hegemony. Many Americans tend to equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. Imperialism is an active effort by one state to force others into its sphere, whereas hegemony is more a condition than a purpose. A militarily, economically, and culturally powerful country exerts influence on other states by its mere presence, the way a larger body in space affects the behavior of smaller bodies through its gravitational pull. Even if the United States was not aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, and certainly not through its military, the collapse of Soviet power enhanced the attractive pull of the United States and its democratic allies. Their prosperity, their freedom, and, yes, their power to protect former Soviet satellites, when combined with the inability of Moscow to provide any of these, dramatically shifted the balance in Europe in favor of Western liberalism to the detriment of Russian autocracy. The growth of U.S. influence and the spread of liberalism were less a policy objective of the United States than the natural consequence of that shift.

Russian leaders could have accommodated themselves to this new reality. Other great powers had adjusted to similar changes. The British had once been lords of the seas, the possessors of a vast global empire, and the center of the financial world. Then they lost it all. But although some were humiliated at being supplanted by the United States, Britons rather quickly adjusted to their new place in the firmament. The French, too, lost a great empire, and Germany and Japan, defeated in war, lost everything except their talent for producing wealth. But they all made the adjustment and were arguably better for it.

There were certainly Russians in the 1990s—Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, for one—who thought that Russia should make a similar decision. They wished to integrate Russia into the liberal West even at the expense of traditional geopolitical ambitions. But that was not the view that ultimately prevailed in Russia. Unlike the United Kingdom, France, and to some extent Japan, Russia did not have a long history of friendly relations and strategic cooperation with the United States—quite the contrary. Unlike Germany and Japan, Russia was not militarily defeated, occupied, and reformed in the process. And unlike Germany, which always knew that its economic power was irrepressible and that in the post–World War II order it could at least grow prosperous, Russia never really believed it could become a successful economic powerhouse. Its elites thought that the likeliest consequence of integration would be Russia’s demotion to, at best, a second-rank power. Russia would be at peace, and it would still have a chance to prosper. But it would not determine the fate of Europe and the world...

Keep reading. 

 

Biden, Blinken, Nuland Have Led Us Into a Dead-End Crisis

The dreaded neocons. 

It's David P. Goldman, at Pajamas, "Putin Won't Go, Russia Won't Collapse — So What Will Biden Do About Ukraine?"

PREVIOUSLY: "'So Clearly There's an Intention for the United States to Be in Ukraine...' (VIDEO)," and "Victoria Nuland, Biden's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Claims Ukraine Has 'Biological Research Facilities' (VIDEO)."

History Is Speeding Up: Vindication for Neoconservatism

An amazing essay from John Podhoretz, at Commentary, "Neoconservatism: A Vindication":

In 2022, the idea that Vladimir Putin’s Russia would actually roll the tanks and march the soldiers across the border into Ukraine seemed so irrational and peculiar to the Western consciousness that most of us—and in that “us” I would even include the heroic Volodymyr Zelensky—were living in a kind of weird haze of disbelief and denial that it could even happen.

Then it did.

And the surprise Jimmy Carter had felt in 1979 was as nothing compared to the shock wave across Europe in 2022. It took the United States three years to double its defense budget after the Soviet invasion. It took Germany three days. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country would increase its defense spending from 47 billion euros to 100 billion euros 72 hours after the Russians crossed the Ukrainian border.

History. Speeding up. And rhyming.

Will this be a hinge moment in history as well? If so, the rhymes of history may be heard in the surprising present urgency of neoconservatism.

Throughout the 1970s, the band of writers and thinkers who came to be known as “neoconservatives” had taken defiantly unfashionable positions when it came to matters of defense and foreign policy. The neoconservatives opposed negotiations and treaties with the Soviet Union, which they considered a great evil. They reviled the United Nations for its “Zionism is racism” resolution at a time when the UN was almost sacrosanct (millions of little boys and girls across America, including me, had proudly toted orange tzedakah boxes on Halloween to raise money for UNICEF). And they feared that the United States had, in the wake of Vietnam, undergone what a 1975 symposium in this magazine called “A Failure of Nerve” that would have global consequences.

The general opinion among the American cognoscenti was that the neoconservatives were hysterics and vulgarians incapable of seeing shades of gray. A more mature sense of the world’s complexity was supposedly represented first by the hard-won realism of the establishmentarians who had embraced the policy of détente with the Soviet Union—and second, by hipper foreign-policy thinkers whose worldview was encapsulated by Carter’s May 1977 declaration that America had gotten over its “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Then came 1979. The year began with the Iranian revolution engendering an oil crisis. By the end of the year, Iran’s fundamentalists had taken 52 American diplomats hostage as crowds chanted “Death to America” in the greatest public humiliation the United States had ever experienced as a nation. A thousand miles from the U.S. border, Nicaragua fell to a puppet guerrilla army of the Cubans and the Soviets while a similar puppet force was threatening to do the same in El Salvador—thus potentially creating a Soviet-friendly anti-U.S. bloc on the American subcontinent.

Suddenly the vulgarity of the neoconservatives didn’t seem quite so vulgar. But they remained prophets without much honor in the quarters in which they had traveled for most of their adult lives. Both the old and new establishments were largely impervious to the way history was vindicating their warnings and fears.

Thus began the integration of the neoconservatives into the conservative movement and the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan, who became the dominating figure in both in the 1980s. What they brought to Reaganism was one simple policy approach: deterrence.

This magazine was the epicenter of foreign-policy neoconservatism. Irving Kristol’s magazine, the Public Interest, was dedicated to domestic-policy neoconservatism. COMMENTARY hammered home the flawed ideas of the prevailing consensus on world order. The Public Interest did the same on matters ranging from housing policy to urban policy to energy policy to criminal justice. What they had in common was this: Neoconservatives believed that the purpose of government was both to defend and protect our liberties from threats at home and abroad. How could this best be effected? Deterrence.

If the greatest threat to our liberty abroad from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War was the Soviet Union, the best and only effective way to face it down was to work to deter its ambitions and its influence. You could not do so by entering into agreements with it. You needed to match its aggressions with countermeasures that would make those aggressions costly.

If they invade Afghanistan, you arm the Afghan rebels. If they seek beachheads in the Americas, you arm the Nicaraguan rebels even as you support the El Salvadorean government against their Communist rebels. Install medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe to counteract the huge Soviet military presence in the East. The ultimate move in this regard was the Strategic Defense Initiative, which sought to use American ingenuity and scientific knowhow as a countermeasure against the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

These policies were wildly controversial, even though their aims were actually rather modest: Pin the bad actors down and raise the cost of their bad conduct to unacceptable levels. But for those who believed the best way to deal with the Soviet Union was to imagine that it was not an enemy or even an adversary but simply a nation with a different approach to things with which we could still do business, the neoconservative notion of matching Soviet moves pawn by pawn seemed openly belligerent and crazy.

Domestically, deterrence was achieved by countering the worst human impulses through the proper use of defensive protocols that would prevent the bad behavior from taking place. Contain the impulses and you could let everybody go on with their lives. In practical terms, that meant eyes on the street and cops on the beat.

There had been a policy revolution in the 1960s known as “911 policing” that essentially changed the nature of policing—cops were to respond to crimes after they happened, to wait for the call after the violence had been done. It was the domestic neoconservatives who laid the groundwork over more than 20 years for the crime drop that changed America for the better beginning in the early 1990s. Every one of the ideas they presented—broken-windows theory, COMPSTAT-driven deployment of police forces—was designed to enhance deterrence. So too with the way America dealt with wrongdoers: It criticized the movement toward more lenient sentencing because it limited the deterrent effect of punishment, even going so far as to say it would be dangerous to eliminate the death penalty because without the ultimate sanction all other forms of punitive incarceration would gradually be compromised.

Deterrence in domestic matters went beyond crime. The general proposition that good policy largely involved containing dangerous human impulses meant also grappling with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned social policy gone awry—as when cradle-to-grave welfare made it a benefit to be a single parent. The problems brought about by welfare policy also led to revolutionary changes no one really believed would ever take place, such as the welfare reform Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996—just as no one really believed the Soviet Union would collapse or that crime would drop by 80 percent.

It turned out that deterrence was not only simple but very powerful. And very practical...

Still more.

 

Institute for the Study of War

It's like these cats were put in deep-freeze since the surge in Iraq. And now? A go-to resource on the "Russian Campaign Offensive."

If there are "neocons" pushing for war in Ukraine, it would be these people. Yet besides daily updates on the Russia's campaign --- which are being cited by the New York Times, of all outlets --- there's been no Kaganite pro-war media blitz to plant U.S. forces in Lviv.

Nope, now Glenn Greenwald's warning against the "Bush/Cheney" cabal reincarnated in --- David Frum? Okay. *Shrugs.*

In any event, from ISW: 

NEW: Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial #Russian campaign of this war. Its culmination is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of #Ukraine.

Read the latest Russian offensive campaign assessment from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats: https://t.co/EtMCrMbAjO pic.twitter.com/4XrCCj5Gnj

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 19, 2022

'So Clearly There's an Intention for the United States to Be in Ukraine...' (VIDEO)

Following up from last week, "Victoria Nuland, Biden's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Claims Ukraine Has 'Biological Research Facilities' (VIDEO)."

Here's Glenn Greenwald on Tucker's: 

Victoria Nuland, Biden's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Claims Ukraine Has 'Biological Research Facilities' (VIDEO)

Nuland, whose husband is neoconservative author and columnist Robert Kagan, is a well known as Ukraine's lackey at State. (Lee Harris wrote about it last month.)

See, "Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has 'Biological Research Facilities', Worried Russia May Seize Them":

The neocon's confession sheds critical light on the U.S. role in Ukraine, and raises vital questions about these labs that deserve answers.

Self-anointed "fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? — but nonetheless they invoked their characteristically authoritative, above-it-all tone of self-assurance and self-arrogated right to decree the truth, definitively labelling such claims false.

Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry this month claimed: "The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone.” The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials: namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to declare such claims "disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

But Rubio's clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:

Keep reading.

The Dangerous Allure of the No-Fly Zone (VIDEO)

From Mike Pietrucha and Mike Benitez, at War on the Rocks:

A press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson captivated the world when Daria Kaleniuk, a Ukrainian activist, implored him and other Western leaders to set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine to shelter its people from Russian aircraft. The tragedy of the current situation, the sincerity and sadness of the activist, and prime minister’s delicately worded but practical response — in which he told her that there would not be a no-fly zone due to the risk of a NATO-Russian war — made footage of the press conference go viral.

The internet has since buzzed with the question: Why hasn’t a coalition established a no-fly zone?

Contrary to what so many in the commentariat seem to believe, a no-fly zone is not a military half-measure. It is a combat operation designed to deprive the enemy of its airpower, and it involves direct and sustained fighting. The fact is, a general European war has not started, and we must do everything we can to ensure it does not. That means that a no-fly zone should be off the table. Part of the reason that no-fly zones keep being brought up as solutions is that the nature of airpower is so poorly understood. Advocates have trumpeted airpower as a strategic and tactical shortcut for nearly a century — the way to win battles and even wars without the messy complications inherent in the operations of other military arms.

After the rise of airpower in World War II, it was invigorated by the lopsided victory in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm and propagated through repeated limited military air-centric actions. These conflicts reinforced the notion that airpower is the solution to all military challenges overseas. The problem with this view is that it is not supported by a century of evidence. Although airpower can prove decisive and has even been used as the primary method of settling conflicts, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Air campaigns, just like naval and ground campaigns, must be carefully tailored to political and military objectives, the adversary, the environment, and the prevailing conditions. Unfortunately, a byproduct of a generation of low-intensity operations has only reinforced this evolving political infatuation with two pillars of what we term political airpower: airstrikes and no-fly zones. While each can be effective, neither is a shortcut around a need for a comprehensive strategy — both are merely elements of one...

More.

 

How the War in Ukraine Could Get Much Worse

From Emma Ashford and Joshua Shifrinson, at Foreign Affairs, "Russia and the West Risk Falling Into a Deadly Spiral":

During the first week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian leaders repeatedly raised the prospect of a nuclear response should the United States or its NATO partners intervene in the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded his speech announcing war in Ukraine by warning that “anyone who tries to interfere with us … must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.” He subsequently emphasized Russia’s “advantages in a number of the latest types of nuclear weapons” while ordering Russian strategic nuclear forces on alert. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned to this theme a few days later, noting that a third world war would be a nuclear war and urging Western leaders to consider what a “real war” with Russia would entail. The message was crystal clear: nuclear escalation is possible should the United States or its NATO partners intervene in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Observers have expressed shock at the notion of a return to Cold War nuclear brinksmanship. The U.S. government even tried to reassure Moscow by postponing an intercontinental ballistic missile test planned for early March. These steps are clearly for the best; no one wants a nuclear exchange. Yet the heavy focus on nuclear escalation is obscuring an equally important problem: the risk of conventional escalation—that is to say, a non-nuclear NATO-Russia war. The West and Russia may now be entering into the terminal stages of an insecurity spiral—a series of mutually destabilizing choices—which could end in tragedy, producing a larger European conflagration even if it doesn’t go nuclear.

Indeed, the coming weeks are likely to be more perilous. The United States should be especially attuned to the risks of escalation as the next phase of conflict begins, and should double down on finding ways to end the conflict in Ukraine when a window of opportunity presents itself. This may involve difficult and unpleasant choices, such as lifting some of the worst sanctions on Russia in exchange for an end to hostilities. It will, nonetheless, be more effective at averting an even worse catastrophe than any of the other available options.

Observers have expressed shock at the notion of a return to Cold War nuclear brinksmanship. The U.S. government even tried to reassure Moscow by postponing an intercontinental ballistic missile test planned for early March. These steps are clearly for the best; no one wants a nuclear exchange. Yet the heavy focus on nuclear escalation is obscuring an equally important problem: the risk of conventional escalation—that is to say, a non-nuclear NATO-Russia war. The West and Russia may now be entering into the terminal stages of an insecurity spiral—a series of mutually destabilizing choices—which could end in tragedy, producing a larger European conflagration even if it doesn’t go nuclear. Indeed, the coming weeks are likely to be more perilous. The United States should be especially attuned to the risks of escalation as the next phase of conflict begins, and should double down on finding ways to end the conflict in Ukraine when a window of opportunity presents itself. This may involve difficult and unpleasant choices, such as lifting some of the worst sanctions on Russia in exchange for an end to hostilities. It will, nonetheless, be more effective at averting an even worse catastrophe than any of the other available options.

TIT FOR TAT

In the parlance of security studies, an insecurity spiral ensues when the choices one country makes to advance its interests end up imperiling the interests of another country, which responds in turn. The result is a potentially vicious cycle of unintended escalation, something that’s happened many times before. For example, Germany’s attempt at the turn of the twentieth century to build a world-class navy threatened the naval power on which the United Kingdom depended; in response, London began to bulk up its own navy. Germany responded in kind, and soon, the scene was set for World War I. The origins of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union share a similar genesis, as both sides sought influence throughout the world and engaged in an arms race. In each case, a tit-for-tat spiral drove states toward conflict.

Today, the United States and Russia have already taken steps to shore up their real or perceived sense of insecurity, spurring the other side to do the same. As the scholars William Wohlforth and Andrey Sushentsov have argued, the United States and Russia have been engaged in a slow-motion spiral throughout the post-Cold War era as each sought to refashion European security to its liking and tried to limit the other side’s inevitable response. Recent events highlight the trend: the 2008 Bucharest summit, at which NATO pledged to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, was followed by Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. A 2007 dispute over the Bush administration’s plans to base missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic was followed by Russian violations of related arms-control agreements. In 2014, the EU’s offer to Ukraine of an association agreement precipitated the Maidan revolution in Kiev, heightening Russian fears of Ukrainian NATO membership and prompting the Russian seizure of Crimea that year.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, has dangerously upped the ante and accelerated the spiral’s pace. In response to Moscow’s wanton and illegitimate aggression, the United States, NATO, and EU member states have sent Ukraine significant quantities of lethal weapons, placed draconian sanctions on Russia’s economy, and launched a long-term military buildup. Currently, Moscow sees the United States and its partners threatening to make Ukraine into a de facto ally—a situation Moscow’s own aggression helped cause—whereas the United States sees Moscow threatening the core principles undergirding peace in Europe...

Still more.

Ukraine, the New Right, and Defending the West

 From Ben Domenech, at the Transom:

What we see illuminated in the rapid shift of Americans on Ukraine is actually the pathway toward a moderate, realist, interest-based American national-security approach that falls into neither the cul de sac of the New Right, nor the dead end utopianism of neoconservatism. An America that has no messianic mission, does not automatically assume that it can do anything, and also possesses the self-confidence and competence to act as a force for good in the wider world, is an America that reflects what Americans actually want. It is an America where a real discussion of the national interest can be had, without the obscuring and distorting priors inflicted by neocons and New Right alike...

RTWT. 

Wow! Tulsi Gabard: Washington Neocons/Warmongers Leading the U.S. Relentlessly to War in Ukraine (VIDEO)

She's wild. 

The neocons/warmongers have spent years stoking the new cold war with Russia and have now brought us to the brink in Ukraine—this serves their own interests, and lines the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex with trillion$. Let’s not be sheep. pic.twitter.com/jgZEKgtyLT

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) February 12, 2022

Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back

At Amazon, Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. 

Irving Kristol

This is really good.

At National Affairs:

Wonderful essay. Have a soft spot for Irving. He was kind to me when I was young, and his writings were always so reasonable. When he "became" a neo-conservative, it wasn't so much his thinking that changed but the culture around him. https://t.co/53gKgwsnqx via @NationalAffairs

— Bill McGurn (@wjmcgurn) September 24, 2019

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History

At Amazon, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History.

The Republican #WalkAway Movement.

This is really well done.

From Troy Worden, at American Greatness:

My latest for @theamgreatness, criticizing the Republican #WalkAway Movement. I'm looking at you, @JRubinBlogger, @MaxBoot, @BillKristol, @TheRickWilson, @davidfrum. https://t.co/kIXkP6hXKf

— Troy Worden (@TroyWerden) October 17, 2018

Battle for Conservatism

This is good, from Jacob Heilbrunn, at the New York Review, "Donald Trump’s Brains":

A battle for the future of conservatism is being fought. Jacob Heilbrunn pays a visit to the pro-Trump camp associated with the Claremont Institute. https://t.co/qC0iw8aEoi

— The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) December 13, 2017

The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom
by Thomas G. West
Cambridge University Press, 420 pp., $99.99

American Greatness: How Conservatism Inc. Missed the 2016 Election and What the D.C. Establishment Needs to Learn
by Chris Buskirk and Seth Leibsohn
WND Books, 272 pp., $25.95

Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump
by Laura Ingraham
All Points, 307 pp., $27.99

How the Right Lost Its Mind
by Charles J. Sykes
St. Martin’s, 267 pp., $27.99

The Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World
by Thomas O. Melia and Peter Wehner
56 pp., available at gwbcenter.imgix.net

Among the many anomalies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been the near invisibility of institutions that for many years served as a bulwark of Republican policymaking. Though many on the right like to quote Ronald Reagan’s assertion from 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” his administration in fact began its bold work with a comprehensive playbook—the twenty-volume Mandate for Leadership, published by The Heritage Foundation. It contained a variety of proposals for slashing federal income taxes, boosting defense spending, and rolling back business regulations. It was widely seen as a blueprint for the administration, and Reagan gave a copy to each member of his cabinet. A redacted paperback version even became a best seller. “Of a sudden,” Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, “the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

In subsequent years, Heritage and other conservative think tanks continued to formulate sweeping proposals. It is well known that the Affordable Care Act, so reviled by Trump and other Republicans, emerged from a market-based model that was developed by Stuart Butler, the director of Heritage’s Center for Policy Innovation, and adopted in 2006 by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. During the George W. Bush presidency, foreign policy experts at the American Enterprise Institute, such as Richard Perle, a Defense Department official in the Reagan administration, helped shape Bush’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including, most notoriously, the war in Iraq.

Under Trump, however, these institutions are struggling to adjust. Though Heritage has played an important part in recommending nominations to the judiciary, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, its actual influence on policy seems negligible, and its members have conflicting views of Trump’s nationalist agenda. Something similar can be said about a number of other conservative think tanks in Washington, including the American Enterprise Institute, which has a number of fellows such as Jonah Goldberg who are highly critical of Trump.

The result is that many neoconservatives and establishment conservatives—ranging from Eliot A. Cohen, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to David Frum, author of the new book Trumpocracy, to Stuart Stevens, the campaign strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012—have vociferously united in their loathing for Trump. They see him as a sinister mountebank who is destroying true conservative principles from within the GOP and who, incidentally, threatens to exile them to the political wilderness.

A battle for the future of conservatism is in effect being fought between these anti-Trump conservatives and pro-Trump conservatives associated with the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank based in California, which for years has been discussing the Federalist Papers, the dangers of progressivism, and, above all, the wisdom of the German exile and political philosopher Leo Strauss, who taught for several decades at the University of Chicago. For some both in and out of government, the Trump presidency is a deliverance—or at least offers tantalizing promises of an audacious new conservative era in domestic and foreign policy...

Keep reading.

Valerie Plame Apologizes for Tweeting Anti-Semitic Article Blaming Jewish Neocons for America's Wars

I'm not linking directly to the vile Unz Review. You can click through at Memeorandum if you want, "America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars."

No one would have seen this except loads of Jew-hating leftists if it weren't for the idiot Valerie Plame tweeting it. She's apologized now, after taking enormous flak.

At the Daily Caller, "Valerie Plame Wants to Warn You About the Jews."

And at Mediaite, "Ex-CIA Officer Valerie Plame Apologizes for Promoting Article Blaming ‘America’s Jews’ for War."

OK folks, look, I messed up. I skimmed this piece, zeroed in on the neocon criticism, and shared it without seeing and considering the rest.

— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017

I’m not perfect and make mistakes. This was a doozy. All I can do is admit them, try to be better, and read more thoroughly next time. Ugh.

— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017

Apologies all. There is so much there that’s problematic AF and I should have recognized it sooner. Thank you for pushing me to look again.

— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017

I missed gross undercurrents to this article & didn’t do my homework on the platform this piece came from. Now that I see it, it’s obvious.

— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017

Tucker Carlson Takes on Max Boot (VIDEO)

I've been meaning to get to this, as well as Tucker's exchange with Ralph Peters, a portion of which is excerpted in the introduction.

Max Boot's scurrying away with his tail between his legs, if his response at Commentary is any clue. See, "Useful Idiocy: 'Realists' will take what they can get."

And actually, I think Ralph Peters is great. Max Boot, not so much.