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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
Breaking The Cycle: The Need For A Sustainable, Long-Term Policy In The Middle East
The inability of the United States, in cooperation with like-minded nations, to implement a consistent policy toward the greater Middle East and North Africa region (spanning Morocco in the west to Iran in the east and encompassing the northern countries of Syria and Iraq to the southern countries of Sudan and Yemen) has contributed to the extent of the region’s unravelling, diminishing American influence there. Taken together, the policies of recent administrations were consistent with America’s tendency since World War II to engage the Middle East episodically, pursuing short-term solutions to long term problems. But since 2003, many Americans have become frustrated with long, costly, and inconclusive wars and now view the region as a mess to be avoided. But disengagement from the Middle East would make a bad situation worse, with negative implications for Americans as well as the peoples of the region. It is time for a reappraisal of what is at stake in the region as the basis for creating realistic objectives. Whatever administration charts the future course of U.S. Middle East policy, the President and cabinet officials will have to make the case to the American people as to why the region matters to them and how it is possible to make progress towards those objectives at an acceptable cost.
Mr. Magoo In Turkey
Even a kerfuffle can reveal a strategic blunder. In December 2019, the New York Times editorial board taped an interview with former Vice President Joe Biden. A segment dealing with US-Turkish relations did not make the final cut, but eight months later, on August 15, 2020, it surfaced on the internet and sparked outrage in Turkey. Biden was especially critical of Turkey’s policies towards the Kurds and Russia, for which, he insisted, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan must “pay a price.” The United States, he continued, should cultivate “elements of the Turkish leadership” in order to “embolden them…to take on and defeat Erdoğan.” Biden’s words evoked images of an American-sponsored coup d’etat, though he hastened to clarify that he was calling for the Turks to remove their president through an “electoral process.”
Russia And American Power In The Middle East
Nothing is stranger than the notion, widely held, that Russia is a newcomer to the Middle East. After extending its rule to what is now called southern Ukraine in the late eighteenth century its territories bordered on the vast Ottoman Empire. Conflict with the Ottomans, never dormant, broke out into war in the mid-nineteenth century when the ambition of Russia to act as protector of all Christians in the Holy Land provoked the British and French to rescue the Sultan’s position by sending expeditionary forces to Crimea. The Ottomans took the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War One, and the Russians in turn opened a southern front against them. The October 1917 Revolution shook the kaleidoscope of international relations. For a while the Soviet government in Moscow had little opportunity to interfere in Middle Eastern affairs except in the form of its communist propaganda. But World War Two gave the kaleidoscope another shake by hugely increasing the USSR’s global influence. From the late 1950s, a succession of countries – Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Libya – became Soviet client states. In 1979, Moscow invaded Afghanistan.
The Middle East And The Major World Powers
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Russia And American Power In The Middle East
Nothing is stranger than the notion, widely held, that Russia is a newcomer to the Middle East. After extending its rule to what is now called southern Ukraine in the late eighteenth century its territories bordered on the vast Ottoman Empire. Conflict with the Ottomans, never dormant, broke out into war in the mid-nineteenth century when the ambition of Russia to act as protector of all Christians in the Holy Land provoked the British and French to rescue the Sultan’s position by sending expeditionary forces to Crimea. The Ottomans took the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War One, and the Russians in turn opened a southern front against them. The October 1917 Revolution shook the kaleidoscope of international relations. For a while the Soviet government in Moscow had little opportunity to interfere in Middle Eastern affairs except in the form of its communist propaganda. But World War Two gave the kaleidoscope another shake by hugely increasing the USSR’s global influence. From the late 1950s, a succession of countries – Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Libya – became Soviet client states. In 1979, Moscow invaded Afghanistan.
The Middle East And The Major World Powers
At this disrupted time centered around the COVID-19 pandemic affecting all parts of the globe might there be a way to assess the relative standing of national regimes and the geographical regions as fields in which their interests may compete? A distinguished American thinker on matters of philosophy and governance recently described the American problem: “The United States may retain a material capability beyond other nations, but it has lost much usable power owing to its catastrophic loss of authority."
The American public has grown war weary, with no enthusiasm to return to a grand agenda for the Middle East. This reluctance is the major constraint on future policy, and it has multiple causes. Foremost among them is the length of the war in Afghanistan and the costs in lives and resources. Add to that the recalcitrance of the problems in the region. Israel and the Palestinians give us a never-ending story, and the human suffering in Syria is enormous, while Lebanon remains mired in corruption, not to mention all the other problems that stretch across the region. There is no policy that can promise a definitive victory, a V-E day in the Middle East, and this prospect of interminability contributes to the lack of public enthusiasm for this post-modern war, with no straight-forward narrative and no resolution in sight.
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from National Review RIGHT BIAS
Watch Trump’s approval polls that are ever so insidiously rising. Even in the predominately left-wing orthodox surveys, they begin to near 46 percent. That suggests the rope-a-dope strategy is now inert and that Biden must leave the basement and play for a time the centrist role of a Hubert Humphrey or Bill Clinton, and he may even have a scripted Sister Souljah moment. At some point, Biden and his handlers will finally conclude that Kenosha was not an outlier but a symptom and that, as the memory of George Floyd fades, and as the mobs of the nocturnal rioters erode, we are getting down to the proverbial Weatherman-like hardcore agitators. And that means the diminished but more venomous Antifa and BLMA remnants will try to up the ante and torch, loot, shoot, maim, and wreck all the way to the suburbs.
The problem: “Anti-racism” is often little more than a crude bit of rhetorical flim-flam, akin to that unlovely old Southern habit of rechristening the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” In fact, much of what passes for “anti-racism” is a poisonous exercise in rank bigotry — especially when applied to education. The healthy impulse implied by “anti-racism” has been coopted by ideologues. While there are serious, practical issues to tackle, the “anti-racists” have instead declared war on the intellectual traits that equip students for personal and civic success.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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from Summit News
QUESTIONABLE SOURCE, Extreme Right, LOW, Banned on Facebook
Trump Chides Media For Misreporting Murder of Aaron Danielson
President Donald Trump accused the media of misreporting the murder of Aaron J. Danielson in Portland and failing completely to highlight how Antifa leftists celebrated his killing.
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QUESTIONABLE SOURCE, Extreme Right, LOW, Banned on Facebook
Trump Chides Media For Misreporting Murder of Aaron Danielson
President Donald Trump accused the media of misreporting the murder of Aaron J. Danielson in Portland and failing completely to highlight how Antifa leftists celebrated his killing.
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