I spend too much time these days listening to my podcasts where I keep up with events in the Middle East, Asia, and the NATO war. I have a number of potential essays swirling around in my head, but cannot seem to bring any of them together. Perhaps as I am winding up the semester, my attention is directed to more mundane affairs. And so, I decided to just list my talking points, as they were. These will, no doubt, make my sentiments clear enough.
I find myself in opposition to conventional thinking in all three areas. My bugaboo is, as always, the American Empire Project, which continues on regardless of the administration. I do not expect any outbreaks of sanity—we have charted our course and will have to weather the consequences. I decided to limit each point to a single sentence, no matter how tortured the construction.
Gaza, Israel & the Middle East
The automatic linkage of opposition to Zionism with antisemitism is a cynical and increasingly threadbare debating tactic that precludes any criticism of the Israeli state; indeed, an unserious tactic to which critical thinkers need no longer acquiesce.
If a Christian does not have a religious heritage with a theological descent from the 19th-century British Plymouth Brethren and/or Charles Darby and his eschatological speculations (and I most certainly do not, neither in my Protestant affiliation of 25 years, where we rolled our eyes at such Premillennial enthusiasms, nor as I transitioned into Orthodoxy some 20 years ago and discovered that the historic church is silent as the grave on that sort of thing as well), then we are in no way morally obligated to ascribe to Evangelicalism’s Christian Zionist predilections, with their requirement of the Jews returning to the Holy Land and the rebuilding of the Temple, and something about a red heifer, etc. ad absurdum.
I believe there are no unfulfilled real estate promises made to the descendants of Abraham that required modern implementation.
Lots of peoples deserve homelands: Kurds, Palestinians, Hawaiians, soon-to-be Armenians again, I am afraid, to name a few; but none of them deserve it if it involves using somebody else’s land.
Expulsion of the Palestinians has always been a feature, not a bug, of Zionism.
America has no foreign policy of its own in the Middle East; but meekly submits to Israeli use of the projection of American hegemony to accomplish their particular aims.
Yes, the Israelis have a right to “defend” themselves; indeed just as much right as any nation, but not more; and not if it requires its supporters to be sickeningly complicit in genocide.
While they could not exist one day without our support, Israel is neither friend nor ally to the United States, if those two words have any meaning left.
There is no action, no matter how controversial, that Israel takes that the U.S. government will not ultimately support.
Iran is Persia, a nation proud of its 2,500 year-old history, and should be seen in that light over and above its adherance to Shiite Islam.
The American government is about a generation behind the sentiment of the American public regarding Israel, but this in no way means that they will chart a different course.
After having read, many years ago, Sir Steven Runciman’s magisterial three-volume treatment of The Crusades, I have been unable to view Israel, at the end of the day, as anything other than a modern-day Crusader State, with a similar fate awaiting it.
Southeast Asia
I see no valid reason, either moral, historic, political, or economic, for us to consider the Chinese our enemy, other than a childish obsession with eliminating threats to our hegemony.
China has centuries-old local Asian concerns that are exissential in nature to them, and should therefore be inconsequential to us.
Chinese naval activity in the South China Sea should concern the United States about as much as American naval activity off Key West should concern the Chinese.
Any American argument promoting our brand of “democracy” in opposition to Chinese authoritarianism will be increasingly hard to maintain, at least with a straight face.
Chinese civilization is 3,000 years old, dating back to a time when our forebears were placing rocks in a circle.
We have supported a One-China policy for over fifty years.
Chinese goals are economic and cultural, not “imperial,” or necessarily territorial.
China is replacing the U.S. as the favored friend of the developing world.
North Korea is a useful proxy for China and Russia; a proxy that might be far less useful were the U.S. to pursue normal relationships with competing powers, thus deflating the influence of Kim Jong Un.
The NATO War against Russia
American Russophobia runs deep and wide, but pales in comparison to British Russophobia in particular, and European Russophobia in general.
NATO is not a benign organization; it is a projection of American power, and as such has always been directed at Russia, Soviet or otherwise.
Russia, whether Soviet or afterwards, has always known this.
Russia learned that the West could not be trusted the 1990s; first with the expansion of NATO eastward, and later during the genocidal bombing of Belgrade.
Russian opposition to NATO expansion to its borders, as a threat to its national integrity, has been clearly and consistently stated, over and again, since the 1990s.
The United States and its European supplicants did not care that they were in danger of destablilizing Russia; indeed, this was the very goal of NATO expansion.
The invasion of hapless Georgia, which had foolishly listened to George W. Bush, was directly a result of 1) Kosovo, and 2) Bush’s insistance of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
The current war started in 2014, with the engineered Maidan coup and the actions taken against Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
The Russian invasion of February 2022, however ill-advised, was a response to the de facto creeping NATOization of Ukraine.
This government of Ukraine is no shining beacon of democracy, but rather a kleptocracy of the worst sort.
For better or worse, the Russian people are overwhelmingly supportive of Vladimir Putin.
But for the U.K. and the U.S., a negotiated settlement could have been put in place in March 2022.
The war cannot be won by Ukraine/NATO, yet their refusal to consider any negotiated settlement puts the onus on them for the continuing carnage.
While a truncated Ukraine may have a future as a non-aligned neutral country, Ukraine as such will never be a member of NATO, despite the continuing assurances of NATO officials, the Zelensky government, and a host of European and American leaders.
Ukraine suffered from bad advice: a) from extremists largely from the western part of the country, and b) from its erstwhile supporters, who will ultimately abandon it.
The war is another proxy war of the West against Russia; to whom the specific Ukrainian claims are of little importance.
The U.S./NATO will ultimately prove to be a feckless ally.
The longer negotiations are rejected, the less likelihood that the future Ukraine will have need of a navy.
Since a negotiated settlement is the only way forward short of an absolute Russian victory, this course of action is not to be considered by the West, or at least not before the November elections.
The addition of Sweden and Finland does nothing to strengthen NATO as it adds much more territory to defend, and increases the possibility of friction with Russia.
NATO provides a forum for its smallest members (such as Latvia), to roar like Grand Fenwick, and make inflammatory, ill-advised and foolish pronouncements.
NATO, upon losing this war, will be a diminished though still necessary organization, if only to preclude the re-armament of Germany, or the little Napoleonic pretensions of the French.
The U.S. and the Global Majority
The U.S. is “too big to fail,” though this does not mean that our role in the world will not be redefined.
The U.S. will not break apart, as some catastrophists predict; though in the grand scheme of things one wonders if it would not, in fact, be for the best, as our size and power has been our undoing.
The world of American hegemonic supremacy began to crack in 2014-first with the Russian response to events in Ukraine, and later Russian suppression of the American attempted coup in Syria.
The U.S. will continue to talk and act as the world’s unipolar power long after the multi-polar world has become the established model.
The BRICS nations are the future; charting a course free of American dominance.
American leaders will rant and rave until the present generation passes from the scene, but perhaps we will, in time, learn to be a partner, rather than the CEO of the global community.
Your points are well made and your knowledge of the world nations history amazes me .