Saturday roundup

Wonderful tribute to geostrategy scholar Robert Kaplan by Thomas MacKubin Owens at the Claremont Review of Books. 

Kaplan describes himself as a realist, arguing that realism is a “sensibility” rooted in a “mature sense of the tragic.” The realist recognizes that he must work with the elemental causes of war identified by Thucydides—honor, fear, and interest—rather than against them. His books are part travel narrative, part geopolitical treatise, combining remarkable observational talents with strategic insights. His method for understanding the world is captured by a diplomat’s comment that Kaplan noted in The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1993): “Read, travel, read, travel, that’s the way to go.” Kaplan not only travels through the world’s regions but also “travels” through scholars’ ideas, testing his own concepts against theirs. One sees this in his essays on such exemplary realists as Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer.

Kaplan is the contemporary heir to Herodotus, the great observer of human affairs. While Herodotus is described as the first historian, the correct translation of the title of his work, The Histories, is Inquiries. Herodotus the Greek was inquiring into the ways of the other peoples with whom the Greeks were in contact, especially the Persians, Scythians, and Egyptians. One result of his inquiries was the conviction that each of these peoples was shaped to some degree by its territorial setting. Kaplan, following Herodotus, understands that cultures and civilizations continually interact in time and space and are therefore shaped by geographic realities. He explicitly acknowledges Herodotus in The Revenge of Geography (2012), which includes a tour d’horizon of the works of earlier geopolitical thinkers, especially Marshall G.S. Hodgson and William H. McNeill, who challenged Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler’s belief that separate civilizations pursued their destinies more or less independently of one another.

Kaplan is definitely of the school asserting America's indispensability:

Although Kaplan does not use the term, he advocates in effect “hegemonic stability,” the international relations theory which holds that free and open international trade—globalization—requires more than simply a global invisible hand. Instead, it needs a hegemonic power willing and able to provide the world with economic stability and international security. During the 19th century, Great Britain functioned as the hegemon; since World War II, the United States has fulfilled this role. Despite the attendant burdens, hegemony is a win-win, beneficial to the hegemon and the world at large. Conversely, a decline in relative American power could create a more disorderly, less peaceful world. As the late Samuel Huntington wrote in his essay “Why International Primacy Matters”:

A world without U.S. primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country in shaping global affairs. The sustained international primacy of the United States is central to the welfare and security of Americans and to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.

Kaplan’s realism is not indifferent to such liberal principles as human rights and free trade. On the contrary, his style of realism makes defense of those principles possible in the first place. The realist knows, declares Kaplan, “that order comes before freedom, and interests come before values. After all, without order there is no freedom for anybody, and without interests a state has no incentive to project its values.” 

Which is why it's scary to have a guy like the Very Stable Genius at the helm:

President Donald Trump appeared to overrule his own Treasury Department on Friday and withdrew new sanctions aimed at North Korea because, the White House said, the president "likes" the reclusive country's leader, Kim Jong Un.
Treasury officials announced Thursday they were sanctioning two shipping companies based in China that have helped North Korea evade international sanctions. The U.S. has been increasingly pressuring Chinese firms doing businesses with Kim's regime.
Less than 24 hours after those sanctions were announced, Trump abruptly announced on Twitter that he had ordered the withdrawal of "additional sanctions."
"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump posted on Twitter. "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

Can't announce something like that without the exclamation marks! There's sure to be some head-scratching. In fact, the face-palming has already begun:

. . . the decision to abandon the sanctions so quickly after they had been proposed drew surprise from experts. 
Harry Kazianis, director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, has been generally supportive of Trump’s engagement with Kim. But he expressed disbelief on Friday with Trump’s decision to rescind the Treasury sanctions.
“What are we doing on #North Korea?" he tweeted on Friday. "Help.”
Kazianis said in an email that Trump's move may be an appeal to Kim not to abandon the denuclearization negotiations.
"No matter what happens now, you can bet the North Koreans will only want to deal with Trump from now on considering this action,” he said, a reference to the harder line that Trump's advisers have taken in the negotiations.

Speaking of leaders abruptly reversing course on established policy, here's Tammy Bruce on Gavin Newsom's U-turn on the death penalty in California:

During the past eight years, California voters have twice reiterated their support for the death penalty by defeating propositions seeking to overturn it.

If anyone was confused about Californians’ understanding of the death penalty representing an important part of justice, in 2016 they even passed a proposition calling for the speeding up of executions by shortening the decades-long appeals process.

In other words, Californians want the death penalty, and they want to it happen faster and more often.

Last week, despite this undeniable demand by the voters, California’s new Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a “moratorium” on the death penalty in the state, effectively granting a reprieve to the 737 condemned killers on California’s death row.

The Bakersfield Californian issued an editorial blasting the governor’s move:

“… If opponents want to abolish the death penalty, they must convince voters. They must clear up judicial concerns over these executions. They must find ways to deliver assurances that people who commit some of the worst crimes will legally and humanely receive the worst punishment. Although Newsom long has publicly opposed the death penalty, he pledged during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign to ‘respect the will of the voters.’ He lied. Just three months into office, he has signed an executive order reprieving -- or halting -- the death sentences of all 737 inmates on death row. …” 

In typical Democratic fashion, when Newsom was running for governor back in 2016, he indeed misled everyone about his anti-death penalty intentions. After all, the ends justify the means. In the aftermath of the governor’s action, the San Francisco Chronicle reminded readers, “But when The Chronicle asked candidates last year for their views on capital punishment, spokesman Dan Newman said Newsom ‘recognizes that California voters have spoken on the issue and, if elected governor, he’d respect the will of the electorate by following and implementing the law.’ “

Yeah, well, not so much.

Matthew Walther asks, at The Week, why are 2020 Democrats so weird?

Why are Democrats so weird? Only a few days after his long-shot candidacy had begun to attract some interest from the mainstream press, Andrew Yang came out strongly against circumcision, surely one of the most pressing political and social issues of our time. He even doubled down on this by agreeing on Thursday to debate right-wing WunderkindBen Shapiro on the subject. Last month Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) told a painfully obvious lie about listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac while smoking weed in college (she graduated many years before either of them released their debut albums). Even her own father told her to cut it out. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (Mass.) insistence on releasing the results of a DNA test in the hope of vindicating her past claims of Native American heritage was one of the most bizarre events in recent political history.

Meanwhile, there is Beto. I don't particularly care that in 1988 the young Robert Francis O'Rourke posted some erotic verses about cows ("Oh, Milky wonder, sing for us once more, / Live your life, everlusting [sic] joy" is one of the only bits I can quote on this family website) online. I didn't even know until yesterday that there was such a thing as "online" in 1988. Nor am I going to get all worked up about his weird murder spree fantasy story, which is the kind of thing stupid teenagers write every day. But what I do want to know is whether he actually took a handful of green feces, put it in a bowl, and served it to his wife once, telling her that it was avocado. Asked by a journalist recently to confirm the anecdote, which had been reported by a supposed friend of the candidate, he responded that while he didn't remember this happening it "sounds like the kind of thing I would do." Come again? If you fed excrement to the mother of your children, I feel like you would recall. I almost certainly think she would. If there was ever something to lie about as a politician, this is it.

Jonah Goldberg's G-File at NRO this week takes up the broad and grim subject that informs everything here at LITD. He's basically imploring us, "Please, fellow Americans (post-Americans?), it's very late in the day and the rot is very advanced. Let's get a grip and reverse it."

Sumantra Maitra at The Federalist on the Freedom-Hater position on the Electoral College in the context of the overall FHer agenda:

This is not a single, specific issue taken up only after Queen Clinton didn’t get the throne. The trend lines are far deeper.

The current Democratic front runners, including Robert Francis O’Rourke, have argued for not just open borders, but tearing down the existing border fences. Others have argued for abolishing the Senate, calling it undemocratic, and lowering the voting age to 16.

All these trends cannot be just coincidence. The fundamental aim is to replace and control the demos, in the name of democracy—add more people who are traditionally Democratic voters, and who are young, naïve, and impressionable, more easily swayed by charismatic charlatans and soaring rhetoric. There’s a reason the rush is always to nominate one who’s charismatic but vacuous. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama followed the pattern, which Hillary Clinton, naturally awkward, couldn’t manage.

The final obstacle is the Electoral College. Even here, with the shockingly low standards of civics education in America, and deliberate partisan misinformation from both print and television media, means much of the American population lives not knowing why the Electoral College was made part of the nation’s system in the first place, and how it is the last bastion against majoritarian tyranny.

Barbara Streisand on the revelations about just how much of a perv Michael Jackson was:

The legendary singer and actress said that Wade Robson and James Safechuck — whose allegations against the late King of Pop resurfaced in the recent documentary “Leaving Neverland" — “were thrilled to be there” and that what allegedly happened to them “didn’t kill them."

And, at the risk of letting this brief take on the overall subject of Michael Jackson turn into an essay worthy of a full-length post (it's after 11, and I have to get to the bank before noon), let me say that I had absolutely no use for any of his post-Jackson 5 output. I suspect that Quincy Jones, one of the most accomplished producers and arrangers the music business has ever known, approached his work on stupid albums like Thriller opportunistically. I mean, who's not going to take a call from the King of Pop? I could be wrong; maybe he saw something in the thin material, most of it funk- and disco- based and heavy on minor pentatonic structure - that is to say, not all that distinguishable from a lot of early-80s R&B output - that I am missing. But then there are the videos, particularly the one for the title cut, which struck me as having a Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe that should have been our cue that Michael had a real reluctance to grow up.

Okay, that is all. I really have to get going before the urge to really pontificate in the matter gets the better of me.