Conservatism and me, part two: The structural seeds of destruction

Earlier I wrote about Allen West and the fundamental historical ignorance of his ilk regarding progressivism and its Republican roots. I only touched briefly on that topic because to go further would veer off from the specific point I was trying to make in that essay. Now, I'd like to elaborate on that point because the almost insurmountable problems facing the United States are political (as opposed to purely economic) in nature and they have their roots in the progressive era.

Because they proudly have no idea what they're talking about, West, Glenn Beck and the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members equate early 20th century progressivism socialism and communism. This couldn't be more ironic in so far as the institutions that allowed for the rise of the Tea Party were created by those very progressives a century earlier. Without the progressives, the modern populists would have been crushed in the gears of the political machinery that governed the United States at the time.

As much as populists love talking about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, they don't understand either very well. For example, the Second Amendment was written the way it was (beginning with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") because the Founders were unanimous in their belief that the new nation shouldn't have a standing military. This comes up several times in the Federalist Papers.

Being isolationist, they understood that a nation cannot have a standing army without deploying it on a regular basis. They created the United States as a retreat from the rest of the world, not as a military competitor in it. For that reason, the people would be armed and loosely organized in militias that could respond to any threat and disband when the crisis passed.

Aside from being isolationist, the Founders weren't especially democratic. They were all classical scholars and had studied pure Athenian democracy, ultimately finding it unworkable. For those reasons, they created a number of significant checks on the will of the people, including but not limited to, a division of powers between the political branches, the establishment of an independent judiciary and a Senate that was appointed by the state legislatures. In the strictest classical definitions of the words, they were republicans, not democrats.

Of course, there's no telling any of this to your average Tea Party member or Sean Hannity fan. Their famous love of tri-corner hats aside, they actually know very little about the political and constitutional history of the country they can't stop proclaiming their love of.

If you read the Constitution very closely, you'll notice that political parties aren't mentioned. This is because that some of them, most prominently George Washington, loathed the idea of what he called "factions", which impeded and retarded a republic as much as a standing army did. It was only after Washington retired to Mount Vernon for the final time that the first permanent political parties were established.

Because the Constitution didn't envision permanent parties, the parties were able to master the political machinery that the Constitution created and use it to their own ends. The parties themselves weren't any more democratic than were the Founders. Nominations to lower offices were handed out in the famous "smoky back rooms." Presidential nominations were taken care of national conventions, the delegates to which were controlled either by the state legislatures or the party "machines" that controlled a given city or state. In either event, "the people" were several steps removed from the process when they were involved at all, which wasn't often.

In the early twentieth century, the progressive movement began to change that. As I mentioned earlier, the progressives were generally Republicans. The GOP constituted much of the support for the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements and sought to bring more popular democracy into the political process than had existed at any time before in America. The Democrats entrenched as their machines were in the Deep South and urban centers like New York City and Chicago, liked things just the way they were. The progressives and the Democrats despised one another with an intensity that would shock people today.

The ridiculous and borderline retarded assertions of Allen West and Glenn Beck to the contrary, Woodrow Wilson was not a progressive. He was a creation of the Democratic political machines in New Jersey and New York. Unlike both Roosevelts, who came to power in spite of the Democratic and Republican machines, Wilson became governor and later president because of them.

The progressives began to change things before Wilson ran for office. First, created the primary system, in which the people were given a role in the nominating process for the first time. Different factions could challenge the party machines for the first time, although without much success. Until around 1960, the primaries were beauty contests that the mandarins and power brokers in both parties ignored. But during the first half of the twentieth centuries, the primary system spread across the country.

What broke the control of the party machines wasn't the primaries. It was the New Deal. There had been major reforms to the federal civil service in the late nineteenth century, but it didn't apply to the states or the cities. Nor was the government in the welfare business at any level before 1933. Both patronage and welfare were handled by the party bosses. If you or a family member needed food or a job, you went to your local party boss, who would arrange it in return for service to the party machine. When the Roosevelt administration established federal welfare programs, the influence of the party bosses (who FDR hated throughout his career) began to rapidly break apart and, outside of the Daley machine in Chicago, never recovered.

It was only after the breakdown of machine politics that the primaries took on any importance (albeit over the course of several decades.) The primary system, combined with redistricting, played a massive part in bringing America where it is today.

The Constitution gave the power to draw federal House districts to the state legislatures, who also elected U.S senators prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment (which was another gift from the progressives.) Unsurprisingly, the parties made deals with one another to draw the safest districts possible, which continues to this day. But because the nominations and not infrequently the election of candidates to office were controlled by the party machines, there wasn't much in the way of a challenge to the status quo, the progressives themselves notwithstanding.

The conquest of the primary system over the machine politics of old changed that, and activists in both parties slowly took control; the Democratic activists took over their party in 1972 and the Republican activists won theirs in 1980.

Because the system of redistricting made the overwhelming majority of congressional districts "safe" (there are currently maybe 50 truly competitive districts out of 435), the activists in both parties were able to nominate progressively more ideological candidates without fear of losing.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that this has had the effect over time of depressing voter turnout because ideologues rarely represent the interests of the broader - and more centrist - electorate.

One of the dirty secrets of politics, is that political professionals prefer low voter turnout. You can't predict or control what a large number of centrist, unaffiliated voters are going to do. But when an election relies on little more than turning out your activist base, it becomes much easier to predict and control a given race. It makes governing easier too, if only because once elected, you only have to work on behalf of that base.

Without the progressives creating the primary system and the New Deal destroying the party machines, the Tea Party wouldn't exist. Throughout 2009-10, the Tea Party existed only to challenge the institutional power of the Republican Party establishment, taking out as many veteran figures as it could and replacing them with lunatics like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. That wouldn't have been possible before. Had the historic power of party machines been available to it, the Republican establishment would have crushed the Tea Party insurgency into dust. Allen West would be selling life insurance somewhere were it not for the progressives.

It was only after the activists took over the parties that silly issues began to drive the national agenda. For example, neither Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford so much as mentioned Roe v. Wade in public while they were in office. After 1980 you couldn't get Republicans to shut up about it. Even with the American economy headed toward President Reagan's famous "dustbin of history", the GOP has spent the last two months howling about birth control.

Party insurgencies were also made easier by campaign finance reforms, such as McCain-Feingold, which eliminated the soft money the parties needed to maintain their relevance and even the appearance of control. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United effectively replaced the national parties with Super PACs, thereby liberating candidates and officeholders from any party discipline whatsoever.

Having said that, the rise of Super PACs are eventually going to destroy the influence of the activists. Without the national parties are moderating influences, the corporate and union donors that most benefit from Citizens United are going to give only to candidates that serve their interests. And because activists tend to be populist, the interests of corporate and union PACs are eventually going to collide with those of the activists in both parties. Who do you think is going to win that fight?

West and Beck are right, the progressive legacy is ruining America, but they're too dumb to understand that it is doing so principally because it allowed people like Beck and West to exist in the first place. Too much direct democracy was injected into a system that wasn't constitutionally designed to accommodate it, and the structures that were designed to contain it were destroyed over time.

Conservatism and me: What went wrong and where I stand; part one of a series

You might have noticed a theme running through my writing over the last nine years. I'm giving to writing about why everything - but the United States most specifically - is doomed. Given the sheer volume that I've published, there's no shortage of ways to move that theme along. I'll also admit that it's both fun for me and goes a long way in clarifying my thinking.

I thought that I'd take this time to clearly spell out what I think the problems are and where I stand on them. Because I intend to lean heavily on history, I obviously won't be able to do it one post. Also, complicated problems almost never have simple answers. One of the primary threats facing us is that modern politics doesn't allow for recognizing that. Bumper sticker slogans that are supposed to pass for solutions have accomplished nothing other than accelerating the downward spiral.

This will very probably become a multiple-part series that I write over the course of several days or weeks, depending on how busy or lazy I am. My long-time readers will note that I have said much of what I intend to say here before. But I think that putting it all in one place will make things easier for those who have come here more recently.

I'll focus most heavily on American politics generally and the Republican Party specifically. This is because they provide the clearest examples of what went wrong. Furthermore, the transformation of the GOP served as a guiding light for first the Reform Party, and then the Harper Conservatives. Most likely, I'll give some attention to Reform because they reinvigorated populism in Canada at the expense of conservatism.

By no means is the Republican Party solely to blame for the catastrophe that is dragging America into irreversible decline. In fact, until the second Bush administration went about destroying everything in sight, I was a strong supporter of the GOP, although I diverged from them on social issues, which a truly small federal government should have nothing to do with. You cannot believe, as most Republicans do, that the federal government can't deliver the mail but should be a moral example, protect marriage and save people from themselves. Well, you can, as we've seen, but you look like an idiot in the process.

If you read my stuff from 2004 and 2005, you'll find that I broke with the GOP over their endless deficit spending, poorly thought out military adventurism and the strange case of Terri Schiavo. By the spring of 2005, it was clear that those people weren't serious about anything but getting elected, making them no different than the Democrats. In several respects, they become more dangerous than the Democrats.

In my own country, I highlight the fact that most conservative post-war government we've had was that of Jean Chretien. In terms of austerity, balancing the books and avoiding wars that no one has any intention of winning, Chretien's Liberal government was more conservative by several degrees than the current Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which spent money in ways that would make social democrats like Pierre Trudeau smile. Liberals hate it when I point that out, but it is an inescapable truth.

I'm often called out for exclusively "picking on conservatives", but those who have done so don't understand my motives. I tend to leave liberals alone for the simple reason that liberalism is already mostly discredited. In fact, the liberalism of the 1960s through the late 80s no longer exists in any real way. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien moved the left to the center and, while more leftist voices are still out there, they're mostly marginalized within their own parties.

The NDP didn't rise to Opposition in Canada because Canadians necessarily agree with their socialist positions as much as we wanted an opposition party that will actually oppose things from time to time. The Liberal Party of Canada hasn't existed for any reason other than electoral positioning and bloody infighting since the 1970s. They only won in the 1990s because the Progressive Conservative coalition fractured nationally and split the vote.

But when the Conservatives reunified in 2002, the Liberals were buried under an avalanche of their own self-aggrandizing stupidity and fratricide. As we've seen in four successive elections, even most Liberals are exhausted by and disgusted with the Liberal Party. While everything the NDP believes is wrong, they at least believe in something. In their thieving arrogance and electioneering fiscal ineptitude, the Harper Conservatives have essentially become the Liberals, thereby helping the NDP fill the vacuum the Grits left behind.

I believe that conservatism is the answer. I only differ in what conservatism has become. When the mainstream left moved to the center, the right responded by veering into a fantasyland, largely abandoned its traditional principals and took to their bosoms the worst aspects of populism and liberalism. After the 1992 defeat of George Herbert Walker Bush by Bill Clinton, the GOP stopped being the party of traditional conservatism and instead became a collection of revolutionary populists that presidents like Bush, Reagan and Eisenhower wouldn't recognize.

When Newt Gingrich heralds himself as the intellectual father of the modern conservative movement, he isn't at all wrong. And that, I believe, is one of the central problems facing both conservatism and the United States. Gingrich was among the first modern conservatives to adopt a populist platform and revolutionary rhetoric. And for all of his self-celebrated credentials as a historian, he still doesn't seem to understand that populist revolution is incompatible with what conservatism was for 200 years, nor is it easily adaptable to either a republican or parliamentary form of government.

Gingrich is every bit as important and transformative historical figure as he thinks he is, but for very different and, ultimately negative, reasons. His bad joke of a presidential campaign and his monumental self-regard shouldn't obscure that.

One of the things I should also point out is that many of the negative things that I said about the second Bush administration were echoed five years later by the Tea Party, although they had a far different understanding of where things went wrong than I did. Despite my recent focus on the Tea Party and the invective that I regularly throw at them, they aren't responsible for the drift of conservatism. That started well before the famous (and hypocritical and nonsensical) Santelli rant and the rise of Glenn Beck.

This may only be interesting to me. If so, I apologize in advance. On the other hand, you might learn something or even change the way you look at things, if only a little. Stranger things have happened.

Let's see what happens.

James Clapper is Right. Everyone Else Deliberately Dumb. Any Questions?

Historically, there have been several American foreign policies. One of the main reasons that the world has so many issues with the United States is that their official policy can, and frequently does, fundamentally change without warning.

Prior to the First World War, the United States was mostly (although not entirely) isolationist outside of what it deemed to be its sphere of influence under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Life sucked pretty bad if you were from Latin America, but if you lived in Europe, Asia or Africa, you heard almost nothing from Washington.

Then President Wilson changed everything overnight in 1917. Henceforth, the United States would "make the world safe for democracy" and took an active part in redrawing the map at Versailles in ways that still haunt us today. After the Treaty of Versailles' defeat in the Senate, American policy immediately reverted back to staunch isolationism, where it remained until December of 1941.

World War II forever shattered the Congress of Vienna system of multiple spheres of influence and the world was essentially divided between the United States and the Soviet Union. American policy was suddenly everywhere at once, picking and choosing the leadership of even the most strategically insignificant backwaters lest the communists do it first. America sponsored horrid regimes throughout the world, but particularly in the Middle East, in ways that we'll probably be seeing the consequences of for several decades. Anyone who believes that you can transition from Mubarak or Gaddafi to instant democracy is probably delusional.

Most observers thought that the end of the Cold War would bring an easing of American power. Instead, the reverse was true. President Reagan, contrary to current popular Republican opinion, only resorted to military force three times in eight years. Since 1989 however, the U.S military has been in a state of constant combat deployment. Washington has been bombing somebody somewhere for almost twenty-two years now.

This has been problematic in that the application of force has been so arbitrary. The United States had "no opinion" on Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait, for example, until it did. The Reagan administration could tell Saddam Hussein through Donald Rumsfeld that it did not want Iraq's use of chemical weapons or its nuclear program to be an impediment to better relations. But the first and second Bush administrations could cite those very actions as justifications to attack Iraq militarily, again through the good offices of Mr. Rumsfeld. Genocide was unacceptable in the Balkans, but easily overlooked in Rwanda.

There was an even more fundamental policy shift after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Prior to 9/11, there had to at least be an overt act that would provoke the application of American might. That changed with the 2002 National Security Strategy paper, which said that the United States would engage in preemptive (although it was really preventive, and there's a significant legal difference) war to protect its interests. Moreover, it became the official policy of the United States to impose democracy by force wherever possible, regardless of the national history, geographical position or demographic make-up of the targeted country. The Bush Doctrine was little more than musclebound Wilsonianism.

Worse still, the definition of what constitutes an "existential threat" has been stretched to the realm of the ridiculous. Terrorism, for example, is a tactic. It is not itself a threat. And even if you assume the most hysterical possibilities to be an imminent reality - such as seventh century nostaligists acquiring and being able to utilize nuclear weapons - that does not, in itself, pose an existential threat. One bomb in a cargo hold (assuming that one could be deployed and triggered by a non-state actor, a dubious proposition at best) would not end the existence of the United States. It is therefore not an existential threat as the phrase is understood by anyone who speaks English as their language of choice.

This thinking is strategically dangerous, in that when you treat everything as a potential existential threat, you wind up defending nothing. No matter how strong a given country's economy is, its resources are always limited in terms of money and manpower. And the American economy, for a number of reasons, has been in slow decline for nearly forty years. We're only just now beginning to see the almost apocalyptic possibilities of it. The United States is entering the same situation that collapsed the Soviet Union and the British Empire before it: being militarily rich, but cash poor.

That being the case, Americans need to begin a sober analysis of what the existential threats it faces really are and how they might be properly addressed. That should be easy, but it is actually impossible in the hyper-partisan, hysterical and deliberately ignorant atmosphere of modern American politics.

It was into this cesspool of stupidity that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, this week waded.

China’s nuclear arsenal poses the most serious “mortal threat” to the United States among nation states, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate on Thursday.

In candid testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Clapper said he considered China the most significant threat among nation states, with Russia posing the second-greatest threat. He later clarified the comments by saying he did not assess that China or Russia had the intention to launch an attack on the United States.

The testimony contrasts with statements by Obama administration officials who have sought to highlight the dangers of Iran and North Korea while paying less attention to China and Russia.

Mr. Clapper said he does not assess that North Korea and Iran pose greater strategic threats because they lack the forces that Russia and China have that could deliver a nuclear attack on the United States.

All of that is so pedestrian that I can't believe that anyone finds it to be controversial in the slightest, which is a pretty good indication of how naive I can be when I really put my mind to it.

North Korea has tested at least twice a multistaged long-range missile capable of hitting the United States. On Tuesday, Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, told a conference in Washington that analysts estimate that Iran would be able to deliver a payload by missile to the U.S. East Coast by 2015.

Senator Inhofe has built himself a rather storied career of being skeptical about everything while actually knowing nothing. Unless, of course, the issue involves freaking everybody out about incredibly implausible threats, then he's every bit as panicked as the global warming alarmists he routinely ridicules are and his skepticism vanishes. It's a truly magical thing to witness and I one day hope to bring it to Broadway.

The fact is that the Iranians haven't yet been able to produce enough enriched uranium for a single deployable warhead despite years, if not decades, of trying. And developing a warhead is the easy part of a weapons program. A serviceable, even halfway accurate, intercontinental ballistic missile is technically challenging and extraordinarily expensive. This is why so few countries have ICBMs. Having said that, India plans to develop both ICBMs and SLBMs (submarine launched ballistic missiles), despite having no current strategic adversaries beyond the range of its current medium-range arsenal.

The idea that Tehran will have both a warhead and a delivery system capable of striking the United States in just four years is nothing short of a fantasy, and somebody should check Inhofe for a fever for suggesting otherwise. If you're going to say that in public, you may as well assert that Ayatollah Khamenei is 47 feet tall and farts processed plutonium. The two things are about equally true.

But let's assume that the senator is right. There is still absolutely no historical evidence that the mullahs of Qom are determined to commit national suicide to fulfill some undeclared strategic objective. And being one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations, there should be lots to choose from. Yes, I suppose that you could bandy about some of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's more bewildering public statements, but it's just as plausible that he's playing to the rhetorical cheap seats every bit as much as Jim Infofe is.

If Tehran was so enamoured with the idea of bring back Glenn Beck's beloved 12th Imam, it has had years of opportunity to do so by launching the chemical weapons that they already have at either Israel or American forces in the region, of which there is currently no shortage. Doing so would invite an immediate nuclear response, which should bring the "hidden Mahdi" out of his well post-haste. That notably hasn't happened, and there's no logical reason to believe that it would with the fewer than ten ICBMs that Iran isn't even likely to obtain in the near future.

The same is true, although to a much lesser extent, of Pyongyang. The purpose of the North Korean program is different in that the most imminent danger to that country is internal - the final collapse of the economy that takes the Kim regime with it. The regime has therefore used its atomic capability to wring concessions from the world community, specifically South Korea and China, to prop it up and avoid an unending exodus of starving refugees across their borders. The nuclear program is being used as a bargaining chip to prevent the collapse of the regime, not to precipitate it. North Korea is basically Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles.

On the other hand, as charter members of the fabled Axis of Evil, both Tehran and Pyongyang were witnesses to fate of their supposed confederate, Saddam Hussein. They understand that Saddam was deposed and executed over weapons that he did not have or was unwilling to use, the logical extrapolation of which is that having said weapons and demonstrating the willingness to deploy them will prevent them from sharing his fate. Unlike the paranoid and mystical scenarios coming out of Washington and Jerusalem, that actually does make some semblance of sense.

Of course, you can always just assume without evidence that the Iranians and North Koreans are a combination of insane and not especially smart, despite them both having run circles around the U.S government for decades now. This is what passes for the conventional wisdom in policy circles, the Goddamned Liberal Media, and the halfwit blogosphere.

That brings me to Russia and China. More specifically, it brings me to Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. Both were brutal and deviant paranoids who between them presided over the deaths of well over a hundred million of their own citizens. Both pursued aggressive foreign policies and were capable of bringing ruination to the world well beyond even the most fevered imaginations of anyone in Iran and North Korea. It was the declared policy of the United States that the acquisition of atomic capability by either was "unacceptable", meaning that something would be done about it.

Guess what? Both did and Washington didn't. And everything was just fine. As a matter of fact, Richard Nixon was able to play Beijing and Moscow against one another, which more than anything else was what brought about the downfall of European Marxism. The Kremlin, as it happened, could prepare to defend against a resurgent America or an antagonistic China, but not both.

However, both countries remain great powers and they have strategic interests of their own. China, in particular, sees itself as an emerging superpower and has begun to assert its interests in its own region. Of course, with the United States maintaining a dominant role there, the potential for conflict is heightened, particularly given Washington's policy of "strategic ambiguity" regarding Taiwan, which even the staunchest Republicans regard as a renegade province of China and have for forty years. Beijing is, as it always does, preparing for such an eventuality by expanding its nuclear forces and heightening their capability.

No one should be surprised to see Russia reassert itself after the humiliation of the Cold War's end. They are an extremely proud people and have survived wars with monsters far greater than anything the United States will ever be capable of producing. Even the worst conceivable American president couldn't compare with Napoleon or Hitler, the protestations of your average Tea Partier notwithstanding. Most Americans can't stop beating their chests about the 400, 000 troops lost in both theatres of the Second World War, but are willfully ignorant of the fact that the Russians saw 25 million die on the Eastern Front and were more responsible than anyone else in destroying Germany as an imperial power once and for all.

Amazingly, the strategic encirclement of Russia wasn't relaxed after the fall of communism. It was instead tightened further by an extremely reckless policy of NATO enlargement, growing even into the former Soviet republics on Russia's borders. As we learned during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this is something that the United States would never tolerate and would risk a nuclear holocaust to prevent. During the Yeltsin and early Putin years, however, the Kremlin wasn't in the economic shape to do anything about it.

That's not true now. Worse still, NATO has expanded well beyond the ability of the organization to protect itself short of nuclear war. That's fine, so long as you have the demonstrated political will to make the commitment, which NATO doesn't. While the member states might have been willing to lose Chicago or London to protect Berlin, no serious person suggests that they would be willing to do so for, say, Estonia. That might be a hard truth for some to accept, but it doesn't make it any less of a truth.

Not only is it natural for Moscow to test NATO's resolve, it is something that should have been expected. When Vladimir Putin saw NATO extend the possibility of membership to Georgia, he invaded and caught the Bush administration inexcusably by surprise. That, combined with NATO's continuing political and military debacle in Afghanistan, undermines the alliance's credibility and makes war more likely, not less, as Russia returns to its historical place in the world order.

Arms treaties are all well and good, but they do not supersede national interest, as was decisively demostrated when the United States abrogated the ABM treaty to begin development of its missile defense shield. In fact, that could have been another provocation in the eyes of the Kremlin.

All things being equal, there is absolutely nothing controversial about General Clapper's statements yesterday. China and Russia are, in fact, the most significant existential threats to American security. Moreover, both could rapidly become immediate threats if the relationships with them aren't managed in a way that understands and respects the vital national interests of everyone involved.

That can't be said of Iran or North Korea in the short or medium term, and anyone who knows anything about anything - which nicely excludes folks like Senator Inhofe and his amen choir at Fox News - knows it. Neither is capable of challenging American interests in a way that can lay the United States to waste and they won't be for decades, if ever. And that assumes that both regimes survive the next decade, which is unlikely, if for different reasons.

Having said that, the outrage about Director Clapper's analysis might be more dangerous than anything else.

First, if I were Moscow or Beijing, I would very much want the U.S government focusing their time, energy and resources on threats that barely exist in pissant sinkholes like Iran and North Korea. Whatever is directed there logically cannot be devoted to countering their growing power in a strategically smart way. And remember, the U.S might not be able to keep the lights on much longer. You may not have heard this, but they're $14 trillion in the hole already, in large part because they've spent the last half century thinking that everything everywhere is an existential threat.

Second, it diverts the attention of the American people from threats that have always existed and likely always will to fantastic bogeymen that cannot currently inflict much damage on them and likely couldn't be stopped even in the event that they had such a capability. After all, you're never going to stop a person or a state from committing suicide to kill you 100% of the time. In the case of a truly suicidal country (assuming that one even exists), I'm not sure that you can stop them at all.

Great powers, on the other hand, can be deterred. History teaches us this repeatedly. Stalin and Mao, despite the contemporary American rhetoric that they would willingly turn their nations into radioactive ash in the pursuit of their ideological fantasies, were deterred, and rather easily at that. I suspect that Putin and Hu are no different.

But that relies on knowing what the threats are, concentrating a political consensus on them, and clearly communicating what each side can get away with and what they can't. The United States was incredibly lucky to survive the potentially disastrous and wildly mishandled Cuban crisis. Counting on being that lucky twice is folly. And small misunderstandings about the other side's intentions have a historical tendency to rapidly grow into ruinous wars. That's exactly how the First World War started. Nobody thought that the assasination of some Austrian nobody would cause the greatest war the world had ever seen. Everybody was counting on the other guy to blink, and nobody did.

In closing, it might be a good idea to remember that if you focus all of your attention on the things that can't kill you, the things that can probably will. It might also be a really good idea for the American people to stop electing stupid people to high office. It was cute for awhile, but it's starting to get more than a little dangerous.



Hey, you know what? Writing this was more fun than most of what I've done in a long time! I know that it was really long - and I appreciate those of you who made the effort to get through it - but topics like this can't be coherently addressed in three paragraph posts, as people like Erick Erikson and his friends regularly prove, if only unintentionally.

I'm thinking of making this a regular feature, even with the amount of work it involves. And I might even write about people that I actually agree with most of the time, which I bet most of you didn't even think existed. I have some ideas about a recent op-ed by Michael Scheuer that I'm kicking around. I just don't know if I'll have enough time to do it while it's still somewhat fresh.

Anyhow, thanks to those of you who made it through a post this long and involved.