Does Joss Whedon have the solution to the West’s demographic issues? I have some evidence that indicates a connection.
Tom posted this at 2:47 PM EDT on Monday, October 27th, 2008 as Nerdom, I bid you stand: Men of the West
October 27th, 2008
Buffy & Fecundity
August 12th, 2008
I Wish I Were That Smart
One of the more amusing trends in recent years is the Anti-Neo-con: The man who is so smart about foreign policy that he doesn’t need simpleton notions like good and evil, right and wrong; instead, he’s always able to look at the world with a calculating eye and figure out what’s in our “interests,” which never, ever, involve the freedom of foreigners. The reason this trend is so amusing is that it doesn’t take much analysis to see through such people as a bunch of hindsighted poseurs, making up crap on the fly and pretending it makes them look smart.
Exhibit 1 for today is Fred Kaplan at Slate, who, evidently, is so smart that he’s always known those morons in the Bush administration would cause a war in South Ossetia.
Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally…
Um, I dunno…maybe he was thinking that it would be better if we had allies helping us? This is a bizarre question in light of the criticisms of Bush’s go-it-alone strategy of recent years. Now the coalition of the willing included one country too many.
…and receive tactical training and weapons from our military.
So Kaplan think this is what sent Russia over the edge? There are lots of countries that border Russia that we help out militarily. Would Georgia be in a better position now if they had not received American training and military aid?
Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West?
I’m counting three NATO members who border Russia, two of which were “former provinces of the Russian empire” who joined in 2004. But we’re not dealing with an invasion of Estonia or Latvia right now. Putin seems to be letting those two border states slip away to the West quite nicely. So let’s see. On the one hand we have former Russian territories who were offered admission to NATO and are presently not in a war with Russia; on the other, we have a a former Russian territory that, despite Bush administration efforts, was not offered admission to NATO and is in a war with Russia. One day I hope I’m as smart as Fred Kaplan so I can understand how Bush administration overtures to Georgia caused this war. To an ignorant neocon like me, it might appear that NATO membership deterred Russian aggression.
Moreover, given a fledgling democracy perched precariously on the border of Russia, looking to join the free world of the West, were we to spit in their faces? I’m here getting distracted with that whole morality thing, though. I guess Kaplan would have had us tell them that it’s hopeless and they should just rejoin Russia rather than resisting it in search of pesky notions like freedom. I mean, did they really think that Putin was going to let them slip from his grasp? What do they think they’re doing, running a sovereign country and searching for their own path? They should have talked to a Realist™ before trying something that risky.
Bush pressed the other NATO powers to place Georgia’s application for membership on the fast track. The Europeans rejected the idea, understanding the geo-strategic implications of pushing NATO’s boundaries right up to Russia’s border. If the Europeans had let Bush have his way, we would now be obligated by treaty to send troops in Georgia’s defense.
Ah, those wise Europeans. Because “pushing NATO’s boundaries right up to Russia’s border” would obviously result in war. Oh, wait: those three again! And isn’t it nifty how Kaplan just presumes that this entire war would have progressed exactly the same if Georgia was a NATO member? In my wildest dreams I can’t imagine how Georgia having a binding military alliance with America would have altered Russian strategy. Because historically Russia has been pretty quick to attack American allies. It’s happened, nine, ten times, right? No? Zero? Huh.
Kaplan’s then so generous with his wisdom that he outlines a few lessons for the next president (as though The Holy One needs lessons!):
First, security commitments are serious things; don’t make them unless you have the support, desire, and means to follow through.
Like here, where we didn’t make any security commitments to Georgia. Woops, guess that makes this lesson irrelevant. We actually can’t say what would have happened if we did make a security commitment to them; it may well be that even the thinnest commitment would have deterred the Ruskies. Instead we left the Georgians without anything.
Second, Russia is ruled by some nasty people these days, but they are not Hitler or Stalin, and they can’t be expected to tolerate direct challenges from their border any more than an American president could from, say, Cuba.
Remind me to send Fred Kaplan a map of NATO. I’ll draw the Russian border in glitter for him, and color Latvia and Estonia with very bright shades so perhaps he’ll quit forgetting they exist. Awfully inconvenient for his argument, those two.
Third, the sad truth is that—in part because the Cold War is over, in part because skyrocketing oil prices have engorged the Russians’ coffers—we have very little leverage over what the Russians do, at least in what they see as their own security sphere.
Well, we could take countries from their security sphere and make them part of ours. Like…dare I say…Latvia and Estonia [and Lithuania, though it doesn’t border Russia proper]. True, in a situation like this we can’t do too much. But preemptive alliances have done wonders for us in the past.
If a newly expansive Russia is worth worrying about (and maybe it is), then it’s time to bring back Washington-Moscow summitry. Relations have soured so intensely in recent years and over such peripheral issues (such as basing a useless missile-defense system in the Czech Republic)
Hah hah ha! Wow, I have got to stop dropping acid while reading Slate. I could have sworn that just a few paragraphs ago he was telling the next president that security commitments are serious things, and that Russia is a country that may get aggressive around the borders. Obviously that was an hallucination, otherwise he wouldn’t now be mocking our installation of a defense system that will protect our European allies from Russia’s most destructive weapons.
So there you go with the new Realist™ foreign policy: no new allies if it offends others, no defending present allies if it offends others, and everything is always - and I mean ALWAYS - the fault of George Bush and the neocons. And the Baltic States don’t exist.
Apollo posted this at 2:35 AM EDT on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 as Those Wacky Foreigners, Running with the antelope, I bid you stand: Men of the West
May 10th, 2008
A Modern Crusade
Reading the horrific stories from Burma this last week, I’m completely shocked at the world’s deference to the power-mad dictatorship that rules over this people.
A thousand years ago Christians from western Europe went to Jerusalem on an armed pilgrimage. If any non-Christian military forces stood in their way, which, by happenstance, they did, then it was a good thing the Christians brought along their weapons.
I can’t help but think that the appropriate response is for the West to organize an armed humanitarian mission. If those worthless no-goodniks in the Burmese government wish to oppose us handing out food and medical care, then it will be a good thing that our relief forces took with them companies of Marines, SAS, KSK, and Foreign Legionnaires.
Of course, I speak of a West long past, a West that was confident of its moral superiority and military prowess. That West, I fear, died in the trenches of western France in 1915. Tens of thousands of Burmese will die because that West no longer exists.
Apollo posted this at 12:15 AM EDT on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 as I bid you stand: Men of the West