An interesting piece on the Milley-Li call.
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The cultural and operational outlook you would hope to see, in a war-games-only military, is caution: We’ve never done this before. We don’t know how much we don’t know. Let’s proceed with care.
Another term for this is, the capacity for tragic imagination. What if things don’t go as we planned? What might we regret? Or wish we’d re-thought?
The reaction I most dread, from the Chinese side, is the opposite. It is the paradoxical (but real) combination of arrogance and insecurity that characterizes many “rising powers” and has marked much of China’s dealings with the world in the Xi Jinping era.
-Arrogance: What could go wrong! Let’s teach a lesson to these paper tigers, with their rotting empires. It’s our turn now.
-Insecurity: We have to be on hair-trigger. The enemy is encircling us and could strike at any time.
The encirclement view is long-standing and powerful among China officials. Recently I mentioned that about a dozen years ago, at the Chinese counterpart of West Point, I heard a detailed lecture on how their country was being surrounded by U.S. forces. The illustration below, from a Western think tank, gives the idea. (Though the maps I saw were more lurid, with big red arrows showing possible attack routes into China, and little American-flag icons marking places where U.S. and allied aircraft, ships, or troops could be based.)
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a tip of the hat to Jim
the remorseless, even jubilant subversion of principles
Brian Beutler on what to do about the post Trump GOP. Well written with suggestions on fixing things, but most seem impossible at this point. Worth the read.
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Some amount of lying, and even more hypocrisy, is inevitable in politics. The Democratic Party isn’t immune. But it would be a mistake to confuse the acts of bad faith that have saturated Republican conduct for garden-variety hypocrisy or lying. These contradictions don’t point to a lack of self-awareness or passing acts of shame-faced expediency. Republicans and professional conservatives revel in double standards because by embracing double standards they claim power over their opponents. The Republicans have become a party that celebrates rulebreaking, because they have come to see rulebreaking as a show of strength. Their moral compass, inverted by their single-minded pursuit of self-interest, now points south.
Conservatives will attempt to muddle this distinction, but it’s an important one, and we can actually distinguish acts of deception from programmatic bad faith pretty easily. A hypocritical politician might preach the virtues of monogamy only to be caught in an affair. A lying one might deny the affair, only for evidence (of his deception and his hypocrisy) to surface. In all this disgrace, though, a liar and a hypocrite might still govern without corrupting his office, let alone his entire party.
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a tip of the hat to Jim
07:38 in Current Affairs, General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)