I was reading this document suggesting a Republican foreign policy alternative to Joe Biden's foreign policy from this new Republican think tank called the Forum for American Leadership which is supposed a fusion of "traditional" Reagan Conservatives along with Trumpers. Anyways I thought the document on "10 Principles for Europe" was quite interesting for the fact that three words are never mentioned Macron, Paris and France while words like Greece, Poland, and Northern Ireland get multiple mentions.
Somewhat more interesting is one of the key people who runs the Forum for American Leadership a former George W Bush administration official in her personal capacity named Kristen Silverberg(also a former Ambassador) also has another fulltime job as Executive VP of the Business Roundtable. I guess this would not be that big of a deal except the Chair of the Board of the Business Roundtable is one Jamie Dimon CEO of JP Morgan but also quite chummy with a certain Head of State named Emmanuel Macron.
So I have to wonder given Macron's personal relationships with people like Jamie Dimon at the US Business Roundtable was a decision made on the part of this new Forum for American Leadership which I highly doubt has any love for Macron or his policies has taken the adage that if you have nothing nice to say it is better to remain silent. Remember, that document published contains numerous attacks on Brussels and Berlin but again omits any mention of Macron or France. Which gets to what I am really trying to bring up is there is awfully little press coverage in the US of Macron's close relationships with American captains of industry like Dimon and Bank of America's CEO Brian Moynihan. Much of the anti American left in France assumes that Macron's relationships with these people somehow make him a fifth column for America in France but what if it is the other way around that Dimon and Moynihan(a dual Irish national) are in fact a fifth column in the US for Macron and Macron's European agenda.
I am curious if anyone has any thoughts on the increasing discussion about Finland joining NATO. Also interesting is there are certain voices in the UK I noticed like James Rogers on Twitter who want to reject Finnish membership in NATO for no really good reason it seems like other than Finland is in the Eurozone. You have to wonder is money changing hands between some of these folks in the existing NATO countries suddenly having huge objections to Finland possibly joining.
Still getting my bearings here, but the book club book and recent posts set off this train of thought:
The "enemies of humankind" (however conceived) are happy to see us demoralised. Are we right to be demoralised? Are we so far gone, our ground so collapsed that rebuilding morale is impossible? This led me to recall Kant's question "What may I [we?] hope?" (not that I know his answer or mine).
All of which is to say I'm still looking forward to your article about the background to the word "Cosmopolitan"
There are three questions here: Are we right to be demoralized? Can we rebuild our morale? And what is the background to the word "Cosmopolitanism?"
As for the former, I think there are grounds to be demoralized, certainly, but the demoralization swiftly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As you can see, our demoralization thrills our adversaries, and the more we languish in our demoralization, the more weak we appear to them. This is obviously profoundly dangerous: a weak giant is a tempting target. We've been behaving in a way that, to put it bluntly, makes war against us inevitable. Every revisionist power sees that we're entirely self-absorbed, isolationist, riven by domestic conflict, physically and emotionally sick, and going broke fast. We don't call these powers "revisionist" for nothing: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all wish to rearrange the world so that it's no longer organized around the US. Americans for the most part haven't thought about what this would really mean. But it would mean accepting a vastly diminished role in the world for the US and reduction to the status (and probably the living standards) of Brazil. It would mean Europe's subordination to Russia; the whole of the Pacific's subordination to China; God knows what fate for South Korea; the Middle East's subordination to Iran (and the eradication of the State of Israel); and probably a global war that we would, inevitably, find ourselves forced to join despite any initial resolution to stay out of it--and we would not win. That war might very well become a nuclear war.
Then we'd *really* have something to be demoralized about.
The more we broadcast our divisions, internal chaos, and unwillingness to fight to maintain our primacy, the more we tempt the world's revisionist powers to think the moment is right for them to join forces, attack the US or its allies, and remove the West from its perch, once and for all. The more Americans demonstrate that we don't understand the stakes or care about events overseas (by, for example, electing leaders who don't), the more we diminish our own deterrence and make this more likely.
As for rebuilding morale, I just don't know. I would have thought a pandemic that killed a million Americans would have caused us to wake up, become serious, and demand more seriousness from our government. To my astonishment, it's had the opposite effect.
We can't simply say, "Let's all pretend not to be demoralized because it's dangerous to appear so vulnerable." We have to fix the problems that are causing such demoralization. Unfortunately, societies rarely reform as much as ours needs to reform absent a massive catastrophic--and the pandemic wasn't enough of one. I don't know what would be.
I included the Army Cyber Institute graphic novel because that's a key element in this story. An information war against us is already well underway, and we appear to be completely incapable of recognizing or combating it. If we were to focus on that, it's possible we could reduce the number of people in Western societies who believe outright lies, which might help to reduce our chaos and ungovernability.
So that's the first two questions. I'll leave the third for the article.
I am going to suggest that the "West" outside of the US relative to the US has been getting its act together slowly over the past few years and months which is a good reason for optimism. This is not just a France/Macron story but one that includes the likes of the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Finland, and some others(I am still in wait and see mode on Germany). I do think a very important discussion needs to be had though about what a "Western" world lead less from Washington and more from Paris, Brussels, and Tokyo means for example for Israel. While I don't believe that French policymakers would be content to see Israel wiped of the mat anymore than they were to see Kuwait wiped off the map in 1990(Which France went to war to stop) it is simply a fact that France along with the rest of the EU has a different type of relationship with Israel than the US does. This is also somewhat true of the Gulf States especially Saudi Arabia.
Taiwan is another complex story but I would point out that France has in the past engaged in significant arms sales to Taiwan and I could see them doing it again especially under current circumstances.
I was reading this document suggesting a Republican foreign policy alternative to Joe Biden's foreign policy from this new Republican think tank called the Forum for American Leadership which is supposed a fusion of "traditional" Reagan Conservatives along with Trumpers. Anyways I thought the document on "10 Principles for Europe" was quite interesting for the fact that three words are never mentioned Macron, Paris and France while words like Greece, Poland, and Northern Ireland get multiple mentions.
https://forumforamericanleadership.org/10-principles-for-europe
Somewhat more interesting is one of the key people who runs the Forum for American Leadership a former George W Bush administration official in her personal capacity named Kristen Silverberg(also a former Ambassador) also has another fulltime job as Executive VP of the Business Roundtable. I guess this would not be that big of a deal except the Chair of the Board of the Business Roundtable is one Jamie Dimon CEO of JP Morgan but also quite chummy with a certain Head of State named Emmanuel Macron.
https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us/board-of-directors
(Picture of Macron and Dimon)
https://www.nippon.com/en/ncommon/contents/news/846179/846179.jpg
So I have to wonder given Macron's personal relationships with people like Jamie Dimon at the US Business Roundtable was a decision made on the part of this new Forum for American Leadership which I highly doubt has any love for Macron or his policies has taken the adage that if you have nothing nice to say it is better to remain silent. Remember, that document published contains numerous attacks on Brussels and Berlin but again omits any mention of Macron or France. Which gets to what I am really trying to bring up is there is awfully little press coverage in the US of Macron's close relationships with American captains of industry like Dimon and Bank of America's CEO Brian Moynihan. Much of the anti American left in France assumes that Macron's relationships with these people somehow make him a fifth column for America in France but what if it is the other way around that Dimon and Moynihan(a dual Irish national) are in fact a fifth column in the US for Macron and Macron's European agenda.
I am curious if anyone has any thoughts on the increasing discussion about Finland joining NATO. Also interesting is there are certain voices in the UK I noticed like James Rogers on Twitter who want to reject Finnish membership in NATO for no really good reason it seems like other than Finland is in the Eurozone. You have to wonder is money changing hands between some of these folks in the existing NATO countries suddenly having huge objections to Finland possibly joining.
Still getting my bearings here, but the book club book and recent posts set off this train of thought:
The "enemies of humankind" (however conceived) are happy to see us demoralised. Are we right to be demoralised? Are we so far gone, our ground so collapsed that rebuilding morale is impossible? This led me to recall Kant's question "What may I [we?] hope?" (not that I know his answer or mine).
All of which is to say I'm still looking forward to your article about the background to the word "Cosmopolitan"
There are three questions here: Are we right to be demoralized? Can we rebuild our morale? And what is the background to the word "Cosmopolitanism?"
As for the former, I think there are grounds to be demoralized, certainly, but the demoralization swiftly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As you can see, our demoralization thrills our adversaries, and the more we languish in our demoralization, the more weak we appear to them. This is obviously profoundly dangerous: a weak giant is a tempting target. We've been behaving in a way that, to put it bluntly, makes war against us inevitable. Every revisionist power sees that we're entirely self-absorbed, isolationist, riven by domestic conflict, physically and emotionally sick, and going broke fast. We don't call these powers "revisionist" for nothing: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all wish to rearrange the world so that it's no longer organized around the US. Americans for the most part haven't thought about what this would really mean. But it would mean accepting a vastly diminished role in the world for the US and reduction to the status (and probably the living standards) of Brazil. It would mean Europe's subordination to Russia; the whole of the Pacific's subordination to China; God knows what fate for South Korea; the Middle East's subordination to Iran (and the eradication of the State of Israel); and probably a global war that we would, inevitably, find ourselves forced to join despite any initial resolution to stay out of it--and we would not win. That war might very well become a nuclear war.
Then we'd *really* have something to be demoralized about.
The more we broadcast our divisions, internal chaos, and unwillingness to fight to maintain our primacy, the more we tempt the world's revisionist powers to think the moment is right for them to join forces, attack the US or its allies, and remove the West from its perch, once and for all. The more Americans demonstrate that we don't understand the stakes or care about events overseas (by, for example, electing leaders who don't), the more we diminish our own deterrence and make this more likely.
As for rebuilding morale, I just don't know. I would have thought a pandemic that killed a million Americans would have caused us to wake up, become serious, and demand more seriousness from our government. To my astonishment, it's had the opposite effect.
We can't simply say, "Let's all pretend not to be demoralized because it's dangerous to appear so vulnerable." We have to fix the problems that are causing such demoralization. Unfortunately, societies rarely reform as much as ours needs to reform absent a massive catastrophic--and the pandemic wasn't enough of one. I don't know what would be.
I included the Army Cyber Institute graphic novel because that's a key element in this story. An information war against us is already well underway, and we appear to be completely incapable of recognizing or combating it. If we were to focus on that, it's possible we could reduce the number of people in Western societies who believe outright lies, which might help to reduce our chaos and ungovernability.
So that's the first two questions. I'll leave the third for the article.
I am going to suggest that the "West" outside of the US relative to the US has been getting its act together slowly over the past few years and months which is a good reason for optimism. This is not just a France/Macron story but one that includes the likes of the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Finland, and some others(I am still in wait and see mode on Germany). I do think a very important discussion needs to be had though about what a "Western" world lead less from Washington and more from Paris, Brussels, and Tokyo means for example for Israel. While I don't believe that French policymakers would be content to see Israel wiped of the mat anymore than they were to see Kuwait wiped off the map in 1990(Which France went to war to stop) it is simply a fact that France along with the rest of the EU has a different type of relationship with Israel than the US does. This is also somewhat true of the Gulf States especially Saudi Arabia.
Taiwan is another complex story but I would point out that France has in the past engaged in significant arms sales to Taiwan and I could see them doing it again especially under current circumstances.