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Spengler takes a surprising and ruthlessly pragmatic view of foreign affairs and where the US should direct its attention.
…The Pentagon, as I noted two weeks ago, views with realistic horror the possibility that Israel might exchange military technology with Russia and India. An immediate concern is the Russian-Indian joint venture to produce a fifth-generation fighter, but drone, anti-missile, and other technology are also a concern. That, there is reason to believe, explains why the US administration abruptly dropped its demand for a complete Israeli freeze on settlement construction and accepted the Israeli offer of a freeze on acquiring new land, once 3,000 homes at present under construction are complete. …
…Israel’s contribution might be decisive in a number of fields, for example avionics and especially drone technology. Among the million Russians who emigrated to Israel during the breakdown of the Soviet Empire are more than 10,000 scientists, including some who designed Russia’s best weapons systems. Moscow’s impulse to reunite the old team is understandable. Throw Israel into the briar patch, and America might not like the result. …
…China is the fulcrum of American strategy. The world’s two largest economies have a natural self-interest in strengthening each other. Francesco Sisci and I proposed an economic alliance between America and China in this space a year ago (see US’s road to recovery runs through Beijing Asia Times Online, November 15, 2008). …
…Russia is a spoiler, but a bargainer. America has no interest in color revolutions in the Russian “near abroad” (just what is the strategic significance of the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrzgyzstan?). Georgia and the Ukraine are respectively last and second-to-last in the world fertility tables and will cease to exist as national entities by mid-century. Why should America make commitments there? …
…I have maintained that Iran faces internal implosion, not only because of the disaffection of its educated youth, but because it will run out of young people and run out of oil at roughly the same time, that is, about 20 years from now (see Why Iran will fight, not compromise Asia Times Online, May 30, 2007). Iran is in a position similar to that of the Soviet Union in 1980: it must break out, or break down. …
…America requires the cooperation of other countries, and in different ways. China is crucial to economic and monetary success; Russia is crucial to containing nuclear weapons; and India has a key role to play in deterring potential terrorists, including (as my Asia Times Online colleague M K Bhadrakumar has suggested) training and arming Afghanistan’s northern tribes against the Taliban.
In lean times, even hyper-powers cannot indulge themselves in the sort of luxuries that feed their sense of moral superiority, or coddle their squeamishness: for example hosting the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer or the Dalai Lama, or helping brave little Georgia stand up to nasty big Russia, or promoting color revolutions in odd fragments of the former Soviet Union.
We have to focus on core interests and concentrate on those countries that have the competence and will to assist us in pursuing our core interests. Most of the world will ruin itself quickly enough without our help. Our attention should abide with those countries that demonstrate long-term viability.
David Harsanyi pinpoints the heart of the political struggle we are in.
…The angry-hard-right-radical-insane (etc.) conservative base has hijacked the Republican Party, and in the process, further alienated a beleaguered nation — a nation that is apparently hankering for tripling deficits and government takeovers of the health care, energy, banking and car industries.
Like Democrats, I too hope Republicans suffer. By focusing on needless culture wars, nurturing government centralization and growth, and spending without restraint, the GOP has downgraded fiscal conservatism to nothing more than election-time rhetoric over the past decade. And, not surprisingly, Republican identification is also at an all-time low.
So how is it, some wondered, that a recent Gallup poll claims that “conservative” remains the dominant ideological group in this nation — with between 39 percent and 41 percent voters identifying themselves as either “very conservative” or “conservative”? …
…In the real world, I imagine many non-ideologically inclined voters tend to see themselves as conservative as well. And with a president who has yet to meet an industry he doesn’t believe needs to be managed by the loving, but firm, hands of Washington, this must increasingly mean fiscal conservatism. …
…In fact, as Arthur C. Brooks, American Enterprise Institute president, summed up, “There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.” …
We’ll do this more thoroughly at the beginning of next week, but for now, let’s hear about the election from Peter Wehner. He closes reminding us of Dem triumphalism just a few months ago.
… “Today,” proclaimed the Democratic strategist James Carville earlier this year, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” Added Michael Lind after last November’s campaign: “The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.” That 40-year, beginning-of-the-Fourth-Republic reign on power seems to be in a good deal of trouble after only nine months.
Democrats still hold power, however, and Republicans still have ground to make up for. Things can change quickly again. Nothing is set in stone. Still, last night was a significant political moment, one that might be a harbinger for much worse things for Obama and Obamaism.
Democrats have reason to be afraid, very afraid.
In the National Review, Conrad Black explains that the liberals’ fear that Afghanistan will turn into another Vietnam is unjustified.
…If the Democrats will not fight in Afghanistan, it is hard to imagine a campaign they would support. In Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq, the United States has serious allies and a multilaterally (NATO and the U.N.) approved mission. Unlike the Vietnam intervention, it has been properly endorsed by Congress, and the governing party was elected promising a decisive and escalated prosecution of the war. There is not the slightest doubt that this conflict is morally justified, and unassailable in international law, and that it involves the national security of all countries that have been attacked by Islamist terrorists, or might be, including Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. And there is little doubt that it is winnable; a military plan has been put together by the world’s foremost authorities in antiterrorist and counterinsurgency warfare, American generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. …
…There are about 20,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan; the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had over 600,000 exactingly trained and heavily armed soldiers and guerrillas. The allied casualty rate in Afghanistan, even in October, the costliest month in casualties thus far, is about 4 percent of what the U.S. casualty rate was through most of the Vietnam War.
…This isn’t the attempted “occupation” of Afghanistan; it is counterterrorism, not nation-building. It is assistance to a crudely legitimate government in resisting a barbarously primitive movement that enjoys almost no spontaneous popular support, while the civilized world attacks the principal infestation of terrorists in the world. …
David Warren waxes eloquent in discussing the environmental damage wrought by the first renewable energy source that big government fell in love with: hydroelectric power. His overarching points on renewable energy are as follows:
Will technology solve our energy problems? This seemingly fatuous question is actually stupider than first appears. For we already have the technology to power anything within reason, with minimal if any environmental fallout.
Yet under the inspiration of the Green Zeitgeist, I cannot go into a magazine shop without finding some science-lite cover story on new prospects for harnessing solar, thermal, wind, tidal, or whatever “renewable” forces. There is an immense credulous audience out there, willing to be entertained by such nonsense.
No one with a grasp of high school physics should take any of these schemes seriously. In each case, we are looking at a crank idea from the hippie era, which has not since been significantly improved, because it can’t be. …
…Moreover, we can know that the environmentalists who demand these things will turn on them as soon as they are built. They are, as all utopians, not people who can be satisfied, and it makes sense to frustrate their ambitions decisively — before, rather than after, their tyranny has been consolidated. …
Thomas Sowell states that when you don’t pay the cost of medical services, you pay in consequences.
…There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor’s office and more in taxes — or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.
Costs are not reduced simply because you don’t pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past. …
…Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors’ income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences. …
Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, writes that health insurance companies aren’t making the obscene profits that liberals rail about.
…For all the impassioned talk about obscene profits and bodies piling up, reports AP’s Calvin Woodward, “health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent’’ of revenue, a return “that’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries.’’
On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was a mere 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals, which showed a profit margin of 19.3 percent, railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which showed a profit of 5.4 percent. “That’s a less profitable margin,’’ AP noted, “than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.’’
For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. Makers of software applications, by contrast, are pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent. Strangely, however, MoveOn and the Democrats aren’t demanding a “public option’’ to compete with Oracle and Adobe to drive down their “immoral’’ profits. …