So Vance, Kushner and Witkoff return empty-handed from Islamabad, the Very Stable Genius orders a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz (and I'm not the first to point out the absurdity of the US closing the strait that is already closed by Iran, and which was open to all the ships of the world prior to the VSG starting the current war), Israel is on the same footing it went on prior to previous attacks on Iran, polls in Hungary don't portend an Orban win, despite the blatant endorsements of Vance and Trump, and the VSG spent last night enjoying himself at a UFC fight. Marco Rubio was in attendance, too.
For that matter, I don't think I've seen the VSG congratulate the Artemis II crew. If he has, he was low-key about it.
I came across a National Review article this morning that made a compelling case for widening one's scope beyond this panoply of developments:
There is a comfortable orthodoxy settling over editorial boards, university seminars, and policy conferences from Ottawa to Brussels. It goes something like this: Donald Trump broke the international order, the United States is an unreliable partner, and the remedy is diversification — toward China, toward the BRICS bloc of emerging economies (including players like Brazil, Russia, and India), toward anyone who is not Washington. This narrative is not merely incomplete, it is dangerously wrong, and the countries indulging in it are squandering what little time they have to prepare for a world that is about to change in ways that ...
The author, an expatriate American living and teaching in Japan, says the bigger dynamics we ought to consider include AI, and the sclerotic regulatory climate in Canada and Europe.
I respect his perspective, but, as is so often the case with a certain kind of sober-analysis piece I run across, it underestimates the impact of the VSG on post-American politics, the shaping up of new dynamics on the world stage, and the setting of precedents that future generations will take for granted at its own peril.
The guy is so clearly out of control, and his contempt for the rest of the West is getting increasingly egregious. His ha-ha-you-don't-know-whether-I'm-kidding-on-the-square-or-completely-serious style of posting on Truth Social or bloviating to reporters has the rest of the world, malign and good-faith alike, shaping events without waiting around for post-America.
Europe appears determined to sidestep the US in the effort to tailor its defense apparatus to 21st-century needs. Ukraine has already proven itself as a solid vendor of drones to several Mideast nations.
I pray, of course, about the current state of affairs. There are signs, such as the aforementioned polls in Hungary, that the good, right, and true can prevail over the bad, wrong and false, but I'm not counting on post-America to be a needle-mover, at least on the side of the former.
