A change of direction.

Posted by Pointman on October 18, 2019 · 7 Comments 

When I was in my schooldays, I had a younger brother in the same school who quite frankly had a big mouth which he tended to use recklessly on the wrong people. It often resulted in some sort of altercation with me galloping to his rescue, and oft times receiving a few lumps for my troubles. In the end, the penny dropped – he was indulging in that behaviour simply because he was relying on me to come to his rescue.

I was getting nothing but bruises out of that arrangement, while he was running no risk at all, so I stopped being the 7th Cavalry. Pretty soon after I’d left him alone to extricate himself from such self-created jams, he stopped creating them. The lesson he learnt was if you go out of your way to pick a fight, don’t expect everyone else to rush to your rescue. Conversely, the lesson I learnt was that in a situation where someone, family or not, had knowingly and against your counsel created their own problem, then I was under no obligation to unfuck that situation.

That’s a common experience most people have had at sometime in their life. It’s not that you’ve become selfish, it’s that you’ve learnt to be more prudent about what situations you will allow yourself to get sucked into, and especially those ones where you felt you were being emotionally blackmailed into getting involved. It’s a case of tough love at times.

Post WWII and up until the Wall came down, American foreign policy was mainly concentrated on containing the expansionist ambitions of an aggressive Soviet Russia, which it did, but while there was always a lot of weaponry to fight off any direct incursion by Russia into American spheres of influence, it wasn’t weaponry that decided who the eventual winner was to be.

It was simple economics which in the end won the Cold War.

Marxists-Leninists used to go on and on about the inevitability of history and Communism’s unstoppable triumph over Capitalism, but what they missed, as did every single one of the so-called far-left political intellectuals in the West, was that inevitability of history they were so fond of talking about was a two-edged sword.

Wherever they’ve been tried, and without exception, Communism and its thinly disguised bastard child Socialism, have resulted in static or contracting standards of living for the general population and the implosion of economies to a point where any central governance became impossible. The latest example of that inevitability of history would be Venezuela, which inside twenty years has gone from being arguably the most stable, prosperous and resource-rich country in South America, to its starving population fleeing the shithole it’s become in the thousands to escape raking over rubbish dumps to find discarded scraps of food.

Something that was called the Domino Theory became intertwined with the contain Communism foreign policy. Simply put, the theory was that if one country fell to Communist subversion, then that would lead on to the country beside it, or others, being next in line to fall, and so on. It’s a self-evident truth that where the overwhelming mass of people in a country are happy with their level of prosperity, security and freedom, any sort of subversion of the state, whether internal or external, finds it almost impossible to grow and become effective.

The Communists, being well aware that subversion is a seed best planted on fertile ground, therefore only tried it in countries where a large proportion of the people were fundamentally and justly aggrieved with a government that only ran the country to enrich themselves, and to hell with the peasantry. If you pick the wrong ground, any subversion is doomed, as can be currently seen in America where far-left political attempts to overturn not just a legally elected President, but the Constitution and the Rule of Law are all failing miserably. It’s going nowhere despite fake news and Hollywood cheering it on, and using street thugs like Antifa to intimidate ordinary people.

Put yourself in the place of the decadent ruling elite of some country who suddenly had the seed of Communist subversion being implanted in the great unwashed whose neck your boot was previously jammed down hard on. Whadda you do, call Ghostbusters? Nope, just call Uncle Sam and plead to have him ride to your rescue from Soviet/Chicom sourced revolution. It worked of course, though Uncle Sam wasn’t quite that gullible.

Sure, Uncle would supply the blood and treasure to stave up a thoroughly corrupt regime, but at the same time he’d occasionally attempt a push for fundamental domestic reform, even to the extent of deposing the ruling elite as was done in Vietnam by the usual unholy alliance of the State Department and the always deniable CIA, but that couldn’t remove that local systemic culture of corruption and endemic nepotistic favour. For every tinpot despot, it became the strategy to run against Uncle, to the point where it became a knee-jerk foreign policy on both sides.

Let’s not be simplistic here, Uncle knew what the local despot’s game being played was, but at the same time, Uncle was playing his own game against the bigger global players around the table, the Soviet union or its Chinese offspring. Fifty thousand dead GIs later and twice that wounded, never mind the aftermath casualties that won’t ever get their fucking names chiselled on some wind-blasted war memorial in the town centre of Muskogee, deep in Okieland. Add in an estimated two million dead slopes, and who gives a damn anyway.

It all came down to a pissing contest, the message of which was we’re prepared to fight you to a standstill, even if we know we can’t win, but what was being pissed up against the wall was the patriotic Okies from Oklahoma who’d believed all those stories from politicians. They just knew they were doing the right thing for America, and anyway, they’d all been to see that John Wayne movie about the Green Berets, so that was all good enough for them.

The other, much more poisonous and unquestioned vine that wrapped itself tightly around American foreign policy, was the notion that America was somehow the world’s policeman, but also a policeman who had to walk very very carefully lest he should tread on other people’s oh so sensitive toes. To add to that burden, was that America would also foot the entire bill.

With the advent of the Trumpie monster, all those tired and blood drenched notions have been scrapped.

You’re some crackpot dictator with delusions about yourself and your importance in a grander scheme of things? Go ahead, make your move, but the monster looks at the situation and despite all the horrified pearl clutching of the commentariat, asks himself is this worth a single drop of a good GI’s blood? He’s strictly America first, so you’re on your own Kiddo.

Erdogan, another run of the mill tinpot dictator, decides on an opportunist invasion of northern Syria and the monster tells him via Twitter to go ahead, but he adds he doesn’t care who comes to that failed state’s defense, not even the Russians. Within twenty-four hours, the tinpot is on the blower begging for a negotiated solution to the problem they’ve created. End of story.

At last, an intelligent foreign policy with some bollocks attached.

©Pointman

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