Post-America has opted to be one of the world's bad actors

 I decided LITD was the appropriate place for this rant. Perhaps some nuggets from it will find their way into a Precipice post, or two or three. 

But I'm not ready yet to frame my reaction to recent events in a nicely laid out argument with a singular theme and perhaps some clever metaphors.

No, presently, I'm horrified and enraged. 

There's no longer any question that the United States, under its current "leadership," has rent asunder not just the transatlantic alliance but the commonly held notion of Western civilization.

The Very Stable Genius imposes a ten percent tariff - that's ten percent above and beyond present tariffs - on any nation that doesn't back the VSG's insane designs on Greenland. 

So the European Union - and this is a good move, but it's sad that it's come to where it became necessary - has forged a free trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc - Argentina, Brazil. Paraguay and Uruguay (and probably new bloc member Bolivia. Europe now views post-America as the kind of nation around which it should do an end run, rather than embrace as a partner.

In Copenhagen,  the normally unruffled Danes made a statement:

The crowd, which included parents with small children as well as older Danes, wore hats in the style of Trump’s MAGA caps but scrawled with “Make America Go Away,” and waved Greenlandic flags and signs saying, “Hands off Greenland.”

And check out how this country is reacting to these tariffs:

 Russian officials welcomed U.S. President Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs on NATO allies over Greenland, with Kremlin economic negotiator Kirill Dmitriev claiming on Jan. 17 that the move signals the "collapse" of the transatlantic alliance. 

Trump earlier said that Washington would impose 10% tariffs on NATO allies — France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Finland — until the U.S. reaches a deal to buy Greenland. He has threatened to acquire the island "one way or the other."

"The transatlantic alliance is over," Dmitriev wrote on X, mocking European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and urging European leaders not to "provoke" Trump.

And now - sheesh - we're back to sending hints about Canada:

 President Donald Trump is privately ramping up his focus on another target in the Western Hemisphere, increasingly complaining to aides in recent weeks about Canada’s vulnerability to U.S. adversaries in the Arctic, according to two U.S. officials, a senior administration official and three former senior U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

As Trump’s advisers work toward his goal of acquiring Greenland, the president has privately grown more exercised about what he sees as Canada’s similar inability to defend its borders against any encroachment from Russia or China, specifically arguing Canada needs to spend more on defense, the officials said. They said his push has accelerated internal discussions about a broader Arctic strategy and potentially reaching an agreement with Canada this year to fortify its northern border

The VSG is also creating a "board of peace" to oversee Gaza reconstruction. In a characteristically self-aggrandizing move, he'll be the chair. 

If a country wants to sit on the board more than three. years, it will have to pony up to the tune of a billion dollars.

And into what kind of fund or account will this bit of lucre be deposited?

The draft also reportedly suggests that Mr Trump would control the money himself, and that it would allegedly go towards rebuilding Gaza.

And it seems this board's scope of mission will be more broad than just Gaza:

. . . the text of its charter, which does not mention Gaza but stresses the need for a “more nimble and effective international peace-building body”, suggests its scope would be far broader, and that the body — which will be chaired by Trump himself — could be used as a rival to the UN.

“The Board of Peace is an international organisation that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict,” the charter says, according to a copy seen by the Financial Times.

“Durable peace requires pragmatic judgment, common sense solutions, and the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed.”

On the home front, so far, it's been what we'd call federal agents, employees of the Department of Homeland Security, that have been sent to post-American cities, but now we're talking soldiers:

Some 1,500 active duty Army paratroopers have been put on alert for a potential deployment to Minnesota, according to two defense officials.

The soldiers are from the 11th Airborne Division, based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, one of the Army's premier infantry formations and a frontline force in the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, positioned to help deter China. The division is also the military's leading formation for Arctic warfare.

One official said the president had not made a final decision on whether to deploy two battalions. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Don't get so overwhelmed by the momentum-gathering cascade of events that you become inured. 

Fully let in, as painful as it might be, that post-America is one of the world's bad guys now. 

So what is to be done? 

I really have nothing concrete beyond not acquiescing. Resist what the country has been transformed into. It's not going to get easier to do so. Quite the contrary. It's going to require an increasing amount of courage.

Okay, that's pretty much it for right now. 

For one thing, I just ate lunch and I don't want to lose it. 

 

 

 

China, Russia and the nature of their alliance / understanding

 A year ago, the Putin regime made up its mind that it would embrace pariah status. What would be required to restore Russia's ability to be accepted in polite company on the world stage is pretty much inconceivable. 

China is every bit as much of a rogue nation as Russia, but Xi's savvy and energetic diplomacy moves have positioned it better strategically.

Russia goes more for in-your-face belligerence:

Russia could have its most powerful and quiet nuclear attack submarines on persistent patrols off either U.S. Coast in the next two years, the head of U.S. Northern Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

In response to questions from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on the threat of Chinese and Russian cruise missile submarines operating close to the U.S., NORTHCOM commander Gen. Glen VanHerck said that the deployments of the Russian Yasen-class nuclear cruise missile attack boats have been deploying more frequently.

“[The risk is] absolutely increasing. Within the last year, Russia has also placed their [Yasens] in the Pacific,” he said.
“Now not only the Atlantic, but we also have them in the Pacific and it’s just a matter of time – probably a year or two – before that’s a persistent threat, 24 hours a day. … That impact has reduced decision space for a national senior leader in a time of crisis.”

Also known by their NATO reporting name Severodvinsk class, the 13,800-ton Yasen-class attack boats are among the most capable submarines in the world. In particular, the three current boats in the class are capable of a special quiet operations mode that make them difficult to detect in the open ocean. In 2018, the lead boat in the class, Severodvinsk, evaded U.S. efforts to find it for weeks, according to press reports.

Navy officials have told USNI News that the service has become increasingly concerned with the efficacy of the Russian submarine force.

The growing ability of Russian submarines to operate undetected in the Atlantic pushed the Navy to reactivate U.S. 2nd Fleet and create a command for anti-submarine warfare across the Atlantic in 2018.

The Russian Navy has planned to build ten Yasen-class attack boats, with the fourth to commission later this year, according to Russian press reports.

Medvedev further ratchets up the rhetoric:

Dmitry Medvedev, the 57-year-old deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council chaired by Putin, said in video remarks to reporters that Russia’s relations with the West have hit an all-time low.

Asked whether the threat of a nuclear conflict has eased, Medvedev responded: “No, it hasn’t decreased, it has grown. Every day when they provide Ukraine with foreign weapons brings the nuclear apocalypse closer.”

 

Russia can still count China among its friends. What is each side getting from it? China procures energy from Russia, and Russia pockets cash:

Russia will increasingly be a commodities warehouse for China as Moscow grows more economically dependent on Beijing, a source close to the Kremlin told the Financial Times.

That unequal partnership was on display this week as Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, marking their first summit since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

After Putin launched his war, the West largely cut off Russia from the global financial system and shunned its energy exports, forcing it to reroute its oil and gas to China and India.

Indeed, Chinese purchases of Russian energy jumped 54% to $81.3 billion last year, accounting for 40% of the Kremlin's budget revenue. And in January, Russia exported 2.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China, becoming its top supplier, according to data cited by the FT.

"The logic of events dictates that we fully become a Chinese resource colony," the source told the FT. "Our servers will be from Huawei. We will be China's major suppliers of everything. They will get gas from Power of Siberia. By the end of 2023, the yuan will be our main trade currency."

Russia sees its economic ties with China as the key to winning the war in Ukraine, the source said, adding that Beijing is crucial to weathering Western sanctions while Russian natural resources help lock in China's support.

Because Xi has laid diplomatic groundwork, China can still court Europe while allying itself with Russia:

Part of Xi’s calculation, sadly, is that he can get away with his support for Russia without losing European trade. Europe humiliates itself by kowtowing to Beijing despite its insouciant support for Putin’s hostilities on the EU’s eastern doorstep. The actions of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron make this abundantly clear. Visiting China last November with German car manufacturer executives, Beijing's Global Times newspaper saluted Scholz. It observed that the chancellor's "pragmatic approach will surely bring [German businesses] more dividends of China's development, which will help them get a head start in competition with other foreign investors in China."

Russia is handy for China with regard to hegemonic designs in the Pacific, too:

As the People's Republic of China approaches its 100th anniversary in 2049, the existence of Taiwan will transition from being a bleeding stain on the CCP's credibility to that of an arterial hemorrhage. Xi has told his People's Liberation Army to be ready to seize the island nation by 2027. The Russian alliance helps significantly in this plan. 

Russia now regularly deploys its navy alongside China’s in exercises around Japan. These displays of raw military power allow China to put pressure on the U.S. and its allies while also presenting China's aggressive intentions toward Taiwan as having multilateral support. While the Russian navy struggles with maintenance and readiness, it has experienced crews in command of advanced weapons systems, especially its submarines, which are highly competent and capable of evading even the U.S. and British forces.

Russia having opted to ensnare itself with an invasion of Ukraine, China is able to play the architect of a new, multipolar world-stage arrangement, as exemplified by its role as broker of re-established ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran. 

That move really served notice that China doesn't accept a US leadership role in the Mideast:

China has been pushing to challenge the U.S. role as the world’s superpower for years, and their success in securing the agreement weakens the U.S. position in the region. 

The United States has had longstanding but recently tense relations with Saudi Arabia, especially since the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who criticized the Saudi regime. U.S. intelligence assessed in 2021 that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation to kill or capture Khashoggi. 

The U.S. has had fraught relations with Iran for decades since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, making it likely impossible for the U.S. to arrange such a deal between the two Middle Eastern powers. 

China has meanwhile bought substantial amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia and stayed close to Iran. 

Some international affairs experts have said the agreement signals China is getting more involved in diplomatic engagement of the Middle East. 

“It should be a warning to U.S. policymakers: Leave the Middle East and abandon ties with sometimes frustrating, even barbarous, but long-standing allies, and you’ll simply be leaving a vacuum for China to fill,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative for the Atlantic Council, in a Friday analysis. 

And Xi even felt emboldened to send a reminder to Putin which country is the alpha dog in their alliance right after their summit:

China's leader, Xi Jinping, has called a meeting of former-Soviet Central Asian countries, in an audacious power play in Russia's backyard the week of his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Xi invited the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to the first China-Central Asia summit on Wednesday, the AFP news agency reported. It remains unclear whether Turkmenistan has been invited.

The states are all former members of the Soviet Union, and Moscow has long regarded them as being in its sphere of influence after the Russian Empire conquered them in the 19th century.

So these two expansionist rogue states understand each other, shall we say. Whether their alliance would withstand any real stress tests or hair-raising near-mishaps better than a Five Families agreement remains to be seen.

But they, and the rogue states within their collective orbit, such as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Nicaragua, harbor no love for the rest of the world's notion of a stable and productive world order. They're driven by an entirely different set of values. 

 

 

 

 

 

Barney & Clyde - Episode 17

Here it is. 

Welcome back to the Libation Station! Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a bar-stool, and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. Specifically: 1 - He's Not Playing 5-D Chess... The Very Stable Genius's recent doozies 2 - When a Lefty Leader gets a clue and it doesn't go over well... Ecuadoran unrest in the wake of President Moreno trying to claw the country back to solvency 3 - Madam Bleachbit Unfiltered... How's that again, Hillary? 4 - Corporate America's left turn... the NBA kowtows to China and the Business Roundtable whets Fauxcahontas's appetite! Send your feedback to barneyandclydeshow@gmail.com Comment here or at: https://www.facebook.com/barneyandcly... Please consider supporting us! https://www.patreon.com/barneyandclyde Links we referenced in this episode: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.p... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

Tuesday roundup

Who is offering an incisive, perfectly articulated refutation of the idea that there is anything different about the border detention centers now from how they were during the Obama era?

The DHS secretary from that era:

“Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on January 20, 2017, okay?" Johnson said during an interview at the Aspen Institute. 

Johnson was asked about a photo taken in 2014. It shows the former Secretary touring a border detention facility in Arizona when the unaccompanied minor and family unit crisis actually began. Most of the media started paying attention to the issue, while expressing outrage over the Trump administration's response to it, only recently.

"The photograph you're referring to was a facility in Arizona. I recognize the photo because Governor Brewer was with me and it was during the spike. We had a lot of unaccompanied kids, we had a lot of family units and under the law one they're apprehended by the Border Patrol, within 72-hours we have to transfer unaccompanied children to HHS and HHS then puts them in a shelter and find placement for them somewhere in the United States," Johnson said. “But during that 72 hour period, when you have something that is a multiple, like four times of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You cant just dump seven year old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso. And so these facilities were erected and that one I think was a large warehouse and they put those chain link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men, kids from adults, until they were either released or transferred to HHS.”

El Salvador's new president is demonstrating a level of clarity that has long been absent from the immigration discussion:

The new president of El Salvador on Monday took responsibility for the June deaths of a father and daughter who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in a bid to reach the United States, saying the onus is on his government to make the country a safer place -- and one where migration is "an option, not an obligation."

A photograph from the Mexican side of the river showing the body of Oscar Martinez and his daughter, Valeria, lying face down with Valeria's arms still wrapped around her father’s neck shocked the world late last month amid an already heated debate about illegal immigration in the US.

President Nayib Bukele, who took office a month ago with the promise of making El Salvador a safer and better place, told the BBC in an interview published Monday his country is to blame for the deaths. He said his government is responsible for fixing the problems that have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee in the first place.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to, people flee their homes because they feel they have to,” Bukele told the BBC. “Why? Because they don’t have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don’t have basic things like water, education, health.”

He continued: “We can blame any other country but what about our blame? What country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador, they fled our country. It is our fault.”

Bukele is one to watch. Born in 1981, when the Salvadoran civil war was red-hot (and was a proxy war in the Cold War), to a Palestinian Muslim father and a Christian mother, he was a rising star in the FMLN (the Marxists in the aforementioned civil war; the "FM" in the acronym stands for Farabundo Marti, a 1930s Salvadoran Communist party leader) until the party ousted him. Not that he holds any affection for ARENA, either. Claims to belong to a "new ideas" movement.

How come Eric Swalwell and Andrew Yang were both able to name Andy Ngo in their condemnations of Ngo's beating, but unable to mention Antifa by name?

This is two and a half years old, but it I just ran across it today on Twitter and found it highly  relevant. It's a Gospel Coalition essay called "What We Need to Learn From the Early Church."  Author Tim Keller points out how subversive the church was in its days as a nascent movement:

The earliest Christians were widely ridiculed, especially by cultural elites, were excluded from circles of influence and business, and were often persecuted and put to death. Hurtado says Roman authorities were uniquely hostile to them, compared to other religious groups.

Why? It was expected that people would have their own gods, but that they’d be willing to show honor to all other gods as well. Nearly every home, every city, every professional guild—including the empire itself—each had its own gods. You couldn’t even go to a meal in a large home or to a public event without being expected to do some ritual to honor the gods of that particular group or place. To not do so was highly insulting, at the least to the house or community. It was also dangerous, since it was thought that such behavior could elicit the anger of the gods. Indeed, it was seen as treason to not honor the gods of the empire, on whose divine authority its legitimacy was based.

Christians, however, saw these rituals and tributes as idolatry. They were committed to worship their God exclusively. While the Jews had the same view, they were generally tolerated since they were a distinct racial group, and their peculiarity was seen as a function of their ethnicity. Yet Christianity spread through all ethnic groups, and most believers were former pagans who suddenly, after conversion, refused to honor the other gods. This refusal created huge social problems, making it disruptive and impossible for Christians to be accepted into most public gatherings. If a family member or a servant became a Christian, they suddenly refused to honor the household’s gods.

Christianity’s spread was seen as subversive to the social order—a threat to the culture’s way of life. Followers of Jesus were thought to be too exclusive to be good citizens.

He says the three reasons Christianity so quickly became a civilizational powerhouse are that Christians were called into a "social project that either offended or attracted people, that it offered a direct relationship - with a foundation of love - between the Creator God and people, and if offered an assurance of eternal life.

The lesson for today? It is that if what you are offering is available from many other sources, you'll become irrelevant:

 If a religion isn’t different from the surrounding culture—if it doesn’t critique and offer an alternative to it—it dies because it’s seen as unnecessary. 

Worthy read at The Other McCain entitled "LGBT Ideology As Pathological Narcissism." Some wild and woolly examples of just how exotic the little pieces of turf claimed by each subgroup within that ideology can get.

In the wake of Nike folding like a cheap card table when vulgar grandstander and race-baiter Colin Kapernick called the just-rolled-out Betsy Ross flag shoes racist, Arizona governor Doug Ducey has said (in essence) to the footwear maker, "Forget that deal we were going to enter into with your cowardly asses."

Josh Hammer at The Daily Wire brings together all the grotesque forms that the Democrat party's exponentially unprecedented leftward lurch has taken of late and concludes, as you will, that the party is fundamentally unfit to lead the country.

Two things going on simultaneously as I write this: Vladimir Putin has cancelled his schedule for today to have an urgent meeting with his defense minister, and, over here in the US, Vice President Pence's plane has turned around and headed back to DC.  Big deals or no? We shall see.

Nicaragua: following Venezuela into the depths of ruin

Hugely important article right now at National Review by Jay Nordlinger on the current state of society, culture and politics in Nicaragua.

Actually, there are two NRO Nordlinger pieces about this published so far this month.

A key figure in both of them is Felix Maradiaga, whose personal story is as compelling as anything I've come across in some time:

Felix Maradiaga was born in 1976, three years before the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. His family was like the country at large in that it was split, politically: Some were pro-Sandinista, some were anti-. “My mother was very resentful of the revolution, particularly in its attack on the private sector and private property. She was a schoolteacher but also an entrepreneur. My father was an idealist” — someone who had suffered under two dictatorships: that of Somoza in his home country, Nicaragua, and that of Pinochet in Chile.

He died in 1985, in an accident. Then, the Sandinistas took away the family’s property. When Felix was twelve, he was confronted with a choice: join the Sandinista army or join the Contras. Either way, he was going to be conscripted into the country’s civil war. At this point, his mother made the most difficult decision a mother can make, as Felix says: She sent him away.

Twelve-year-old Felix joined a group of Central Americans traveling north. In Texas, he asked for asylum. He was placed with a foster family — Nicaraguan Americans — in Florida. They cared for him for two years. In 1990, when democracy came to Nicaragua, he went home. And he wanted to do whatever he could to ensure that Nicaragua never experienced civil war again.

He studied political science. In due course, he was at Harvard and Yale. When protests broke out in Nicaragua last April, the regime made a bogeyman of Maradiaga: He was the mastermind, he was a CIA stooge, he was causing all this disruption and destruction. Maradiaga dodged a few assassination attempts. Then, along with some colleagues, he was beaten to a pulp by an orteguista gang. He had his teeth knocked out, for example. He could not stay alive in Nicaragua much longer. So, with great reluctance, he joined the 80,000 others in exile.

He's not alone. The Ortega regime is doing a lot of this kind of thing:

Paramilitaries roam the country, looking for enemies of the state. These thugs are, if anything, worse than the “official” thugs. The Sandinista Youth are a particular menace. We have seen these situations in other times, in other places, such as the Duvaliers’ Haiti and the Castros’ Cuba.

The Ortegas and their lieutenants routinely denounce their opponents as “bloodsuckers” and “vampires.” (Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela, uses just this language, especially “vampires.” In Cuba, the Castroites have always called their opponents “worms.”) They also denounce reports by human-rights groups as “noticias falsas,” or “fake news.”

Another key figure in Nordlinger's latest piece about this is Edepcia Dubon:

. . . [She is] a former legislator. “I never thought I would be an exile,” she says. Last May, she traveled to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. On her way, she stopped in Miami and met with her fellow Nicaraguans. She also gave interviews, including to CNN. This got the attention of Laureano Ortega Murillo, the singer, who issued a tweet. He called Dubón an enemy of the state, basically — which made it too dangerous for her to return home.

She was born in the 1980s and named after one of her grandmothers (now deceased). Is there another Edipcia in the world? Edipcia Dubón does not know of any. Politically, her family was split, just like the country at large: Some were pro-Sandinista and some were anti-. Her father was pro-. He had come from a humble background. Was Edipcia herself pro-? “Sí, claro,” she says — “Yes, for sure.” Her uncle was a Sandinista soldier. The Sandinista soldiers who came to visit the Dubón farm were very kind to her.

“When I was little,” says Edipcia, “I slept in a T-shirt that had a heart on it and said, ‘I love Daniel Ortega.’” The memory of it makes her weep. We stop talking for a bit.

Young Edipcia, her dad, and many others had great hopes for the Sandinistas. The poor needed a fair shake. They needed literacy and opportunity. They had been kept down for so long. But Ortega’s government turned out to be a corrupt dictatorship — yet another one — and Edipcia and her dad both fell away.
In college, she studied economics, because she wanted to attack poverty: Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. She joined a party called the Sandinista Renovation Movement and ran for office. She was elected a deputy in the National Assembly. She would serve less than five years.

Defeated? Not exactly. In July 2016, she and other deputies met with Luis Almagro, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States. Their purpose was to discuss the breakdown of democracy in Nicaragua. In a speech, Ortega called them “rats.” Ten days later, Dubón learned from television that she and 25 other deputies had been expelled from the Assembly. Just like that.
She was subject to physical attacks and death threats. As we talk in Mexico City, she notes that something has changed in Nicaragua (one of many things): Women are being targeted, as never before. Among the hundreds of political prisoners are at least 77 women.

“It’s like there’s a war,” says Edipcia, about the situation overall. “But there is no war.” Every day, there are murders, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torturings — the whole repertoire of a tyrannical regime. Nicaragua is a theater of violence.

Some background is in order. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in 1961 by Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge. As a teen in 1957, Fonseca had won a scholarship from a leftist organization to visit the Soviet Union. He came back singing its praises, Walter Duranty-style, as the model for humanity's future. The group started staging guerrilla attacks and attracted two young brothers, Daniel and Humberto Ortega.

The FSLN was explicitly Marxist-Leninist from the outset. All its official documents from 1961 onward make that plain.

Resentment built in Nicaraguan society over the years toward the regime of the Somoza family, which had ruled the country since the 1930s. (The 1930s rebel who was the FSLN's namesake, Cesar Augusto Sandino, was assassinated by the Nicaraguan National Guard during a politically tumultuous period during which Juan Batista Sacasa was president and Anastasia Somoza was head of the National Guard.) 

In 1979, a broad-based coalition of forces including the business community (represented by Adolfo Calero and Alfonso Robelo), the conservative wing of the Catholic church, and the FSLN toppled the then-current president, a Somoza. The non-Sandinista elements of this coalition tried to maintain equal weight within the new government, but were quickly elbowed aside. Comandantes of the FSLN flew to Cuba and then the USSR, making clear to the world what their foreign-policy alignment was going to look like.

The FSLN also quickly lent its support to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, which was waging civil war against that country's succession of unstable governments.

How do I know all this arcane history?

It figures into my personal conversion story.

In the mid-1980s, I was a silly young man, running a manufacturing company that my father had founded. It was a position for which I was completely unqualified. I'd majored in English in college, and I was basically a dope-addled hedonist, stuffing my regret at not seriously pursuing my musical aspirations.

I was aimless. The argument could be made that I was a poster boy of privilege.

I was attending the local Unitarian "fellowship." (The Unitarians don't call their congregations churches.)

We didn't have a minister as such, and so we brought in speakers from various community organizations to indoctrinate the attendees in various facets of social justice.

A guy from the local "peace fellowship" had just returned from a "fact-finding mission" to Central America. I forget who sponsored his little sojourn. Anyway, he gave the spiel you'd expect. "I was there. I met with peasants. I can tell you the Reagan foreign policy is imperialistic and immoral."

I'd started reading the op-ed pages in theWall Street Journal and the Indianapolis Star, which led me to check out the book-length works of some of the columnists I was encountering (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak), which led me to the book Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. 

So by the time I heard the peace-fellowship guy's presentation, I knew enough to know the was peddling lies, and I called him on it during the Q&A. 

I astonished myself. I was defending Reagan's foreign policy. 

But something had been stirred within me. There was no turning back. 

I eventually left the manufacturing world, got a master's degree in history and became president of the Indiana Council on World Affairs. I also, through some tangential connections I was making, had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Soviet Union in 1990. 

But my main purpose in bringing up all this backstory is to point out the spiritual rot in American leftism. 

The impetus driving that peace-fellowship guy is still at work, causing Democrats like AOC to obfuscate when called upon to unequivocally denounce the despair that characterizes present-day Venezuela. 

And I'd bet you a dollar to a doughnut that the likes of her would also waffle if pressed about what's going on in Nicaragua. 

The Left is comprised of two basic levels: those who want to believe in "the vision" so badly they will swallow all manner of outrageous lies about everything, and the stratum that knows it's all a lie, but knows that those lies are how it gets and maintains power.

It's how leftism works in Venezuela, Nicaragua, post-America, and wherever you live. 

Mr. Maradiaga and Ms. Dubon can tell you all about it.

International-incident roundup

Ukraine's president is demanding the return of sailors and ships that Russia seized in a standoff near Crimea.


The EU likes the terms of Theresa May's Brexit-deal offer, but will the UK Parliament? 

Good on ya, Mexico:

Mexico’s interior ministry says the government will deport nearly 500 members of the Central America migrant caravan who tried to storm the U.S. border Sunday.

In a statement, the ministry said the mob was detained after attempting to cross the border “illegally” and “violently.”

But how will the incoming Lopez Obrador administration deal with it? 

The world is beginning to react to the VSG style - by looking at how to proceed without US leadership

I wonder if this will spur the VSG to get a clue:

The EU and Japan just signed a trade agreement, while the U.S. sat on the sidelines. This was a bad move on America’s part, because latecomers will ultimately find themselves with no option but to accept the terms of the deal.

How do we know this? It was America’s own strategy with the postwar General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) itself. With those agreements, the United States set parameters and precedents that have become the backbone of the global market. But now, the European Union — with an economy similar in size to America’s, at 25 percent of global GDP — has teamed up with Japan, which produces another 5 percent of global GDP, to take the lead.

So why was the U.S. missing from the table? First, because we abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which included Japan and a dozen other countries from around the Pacific Rim, covering over 40 percent of the global economy. Second, because we demanded renegotiation of key agreements such as NAFTA on terms that would raise barriers to trade, in effect backing away from our own approach to trade. Third, and more recently, because our use of unilateral tariffs and other trade obstructions represents an embrace of protectionism that has isolated us from partners and competitors alike.

The EU–Japan deal sends a message that while the U.S. is pulling back from the global economy, other countries are not afraid to step forward. The agreement removes tariffs from imports and exports such as wines, cheeses, cars, and electronics. As Japan’s markets open, EU companies will save a little more than $1 billion a year. EU manufacturers and farmers will receive a massive tax cut — not to mention better access to the Japanese market than their U.S. counterparts enjoy.

This will very quickly reduce U.S. market share and sales. But the long-term effects are worse. The EU and Japan, for example, are not home to the global leaders in film and music. Their approach to trade will not protect those copyrights to the extent we would insist on. Film and music producers will quickly find it harder to assert their ownership of those rights and the revenues they produce. 

Then there's the security-arrangement level. So far, it's true, it's playing itself out mostly on the level of attitude - as the excerpt below asserts, there's really no getting around the fact that only the US has there resources at present to address the looming Russian presence - but there's not much in the way of team spirit:

Deeply alarmed at President Trump’s attacks on NATO and the transatlantic relationship, European governments are rethinking their reliance on the United States as a strategic ally against Russia, but they are unlikely to make regional security arrangements independent of Washington.

Trump has forced the reassessment in recent days by calling the European Union a “foe,” expressing reservations about defending other NATO members, and blasting Germany and other allies — comments he said were aimed at strengthening the U.S.-European alliance but that raised concerns across the continent.

"We can no longer fully rely on the White House,” Heiko Maas, Germany's foreign minister, said Monday, a position echoed by other senior European officials and diplomats. "The first clear consequence can only be that we need to align ourselves even more closely in Europe."

But European allies bewildered by Trump’s seeming hostility for NATO must confront a sobering reality: They have few good alternatives for protecting themselves against Russia or other potential adversaries.

Historical cycles are indeed discernible phenomena, but they don't just happen because the calendar says it's time for one. There is nothing inevitable about the upending of the 70-year postwar order.

Our big-mouth president is forcing the issue by his spontaneous style for doing - well, everything.

We've all seen the literature on effective leadership. It may be that your email inbox, like mine, is inundated with come-ons from motivational and "coaching" gurus touting their personal spin on the subject. But the basics they peddle are nonetheless true. A real leader inspires those he wishes to lead. He inspires confidence and group cohesion. He imbues followers with a sense of their own potential greatness.

The Very Stable Genius may occasionally utter things having some faint taste of this, but his endless flow of randomly generated outbursts is just as likely to produce something demoralizing or indignation-engendering.

This is not to say his past, say, three predecessors were great at leadership - especially the most immediate past guy. But none of them employed the kinds of rhetorical blunt instruments we witness regularly from the VSG.

What concerns me is that, if he can be said to demonstrate any leadership qualities, it's the example of his boneheadedness, which is certainly showing up in European politics, but also in Latin America. In Brazil, it's taking the form of far-right presidential aspirant Jair Bolsonaro and in Mexico in the form of far-left president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Both have outsized personalities and brash rhetorical styles.

It appears we're entering an age of national leaders quick to get their feathers ruffled, who see themselves as populist champions constantly on the outlook for those offering "bad deals."

The hothead era. All together now: "Yee-haw!"

 

Nicaragua appears to be going the way of Venezuela

Usurping democratic institutions, snuffing out political opposition, paramilitary gangs associated with the ruling party, economic activity in the capital city grinding to a halt . . . sound familiar?

But this isn't about Maduro and Caracas. This is Nicaragua in June 2018:

A surge of violence has snuffed out economic activity and dimmed prospects to peacefully resolve a political crisis here that began as a protest against tax increases and turned into a revolt against Nicaragua’s longtime leader Daniel Ortega.

Since mid-April, more than 100 people have been killed in confrontations with police during mass protests and what human-rights groups say are paramilitary gangs aligned with Mr. Ortega’s government.

Among them were 15 people killed at a peaceful Mother’s Day protest march last month in Managua and 11 people by paramilitary groups and police in the predominantly indigenous city of Masaya this past weekend, including a 15-year-old protester who witnesses say was executed by a policewoman. 

On Tuesday, violence flared in the quaint colonial city of Granada, home to hundreds of American retirees.

“We are going through very dark days,” said Humberto Belli, a former education minister. “The people are out in the street demanding that Ortega leave, but he has shown an unexpected ability to kill. We see more blood every day—three, four, five people killed on a daily basis. This has no end.”

The upcoming generation is not pleased:

. . . many Nicaraguans say they are fed up with Mr. Ortega and his wife, the unpopular Vice President Rosario Murillo, who they say have usurped democratic institutions and snuffed out political opposition. Government plans to confiscate large tracts of land to build a commercial waterway to rival the Panama Canal have cost the Ortegas rural support.

“Managua and the country are no longer calm. Ortega has to go now,” said Claudia Guillén, a 19-year-old university student.

And Managua apparently is nearly a ghost town:

The country’s capital of Managua, a sprawling city of modest malls, street vendors and office towers mixed with open pastures, is now largely deserted. Shops are closed and vandalized. Few people venture out at night. Walls are covered with graffiti calling Mr. Ortega a murderer. A group of police officers stand guard by a monument to the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, erected by Mr. Ortega, after protesters tried to knock it down during recent demonstrations.

Throughout Nicaragua, barricades have sprung up, blocking roads and snarling traffic, and making the key Pan American highway that links many of the country’s cities impassable. Tourism has been hit hard, hotel managers say, with occupancies at major hotels plunging and some international airlines paring back flights. 

“Economic activity has plummeted. People fear leaving their homes,” said Pamela Vanega, a waitress at a restaurant in one of Managua’s largest malls. 

Analysts say the surge in violence has set back any hope of a peaceful resolution. A dialogue between Mr. Ortega’s government and the opposition, sponsored by the influential Catholic Church, has been shelved. Nicaragua’s business class, which until recently worked closely with Mr. Ortega, is demanding new elections.

“My sense is that the situation will continue to deteriorate and the government will continue its repression,” said Eric Farnsworth, who heads the Washington office of think tank Council of the Americas. 

This is the second go-around for tyranny and economic ruin under Ortega. He was the most visible face among the nine members of the Directorate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a hardcore Marxist-Leninist party / guerrilla force founded in 1961. The FSLN staged attacks of various kinds throughout the next 18 years. By 1979, it was part of a broad coalition of forces, including the business community, the Chamorro family that ran La Prensa, the most prominent newspaper in the country, and the Catholic Church (at least that part of it that wasn't ate up with liberation theology), that opposed the regime of Anastasio Somoza.  The FSLN quickly broke its good faith with the coalition's other elements and usurped the revolution that toppled Somoza. After seizing total power, the new government quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union and Cuba. It never was able to win majority support - in fact, the country was wracked by civil war throughout the 1980s - and Ortega lost to Violetta Chamorro in a presidential election in 1990.

But now, even former fellow Sandinistas are chafing at what Ortega is doing. Even his own brother. And Ortega's wacko wife seems to be playing an outsized role in the deteriorating situation:

Four former top Sandinista generals have been prominent participants in the anti-Ortega marches. Mr. Ortega’s brother, Humberto, a former Sandinista defense minister, has publicly expressed concern about how Mr. Ortega is managing the crisis.

Last month, the spokesman for Nicaragua’s army told news agency AFP that the army “would not repress” antigovernment protesters. 

The crisis comes just weeks before Mr. Ortega is scheduled to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. The reclusive Mr. Ortega usually gives a speech as tens of thousands of Sandinista supporters march in a parade.

Ms. Murillo is widely believed to be the power behind the throne in Nicaragua. Analysts say she has alienated many of Mr. Ortega’s old Sandinista comrades who resent her sway over him. Ms. Murillo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

An esoteric poet and believer of mystic spiritualism and religious syncretism, the eccentric Ms. Murillo always wears a multitude of turquoise rings. She is responsible for putting up about 140 “Trees of Life”—metal structures painted in vivid colors which light up at night across Managua. 

The structures, derisively called “Chayopalos,” slang for “Rosario sticks,” have become a favorite target of protesters. Many have been torn down or burned over the past two months.

“What has become clear is that the Ortegas highly personalized brand of governance has served to focus the personal repudiation and deep frustration of various sectors with them,” said John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama. 

So now we have yet another Latin American basket case in our neighborhood.

The Most Equal Comrade's worldview, unfiltered

Here's what the totalitarian son of a bitch told a group of Argentine students:

“So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical, and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works.”

Of course, that's just one piece of a Latin American junket that included doing The Wave with Raul Castro at a Cuban exhibition baseball game,  the photo op in front of the Interior Ministry building (the Cuban government department that harasses and arrests dissidents) sporting a giant Che Guevara mural, and the tango video. All while a multiple-site, well-coordinated ISIS attack rocked Brussels and a separate such attack was thwarted in Paris.

What a steaming chunk of dog vomit.

An ever-queasier feeling about Pope Francis

Dennis Prager at NRO on the acceptance by Francis of a very provocative gift:

Last week the Marxist quasi-dictator of Bolivia, Evo Morales, presented Pope Francis with a gift — a carved wooden hammer-and-sickle cross on which the figure of Christ is crucified. The Vatican announced that the pope had not been informed in advance about the gift. And some commentators said that photos of the pope and Morales show that the pope was actually offended. That was a false — probably wishful — interpretation. The pope himself later announced that he was keeping the hammer-and-sickle crucifix and taking it home, saying, “I understand this work. For me it wasn’t an offense.”

More troubling is the context.  The pope is but a symptom of what the rot of the West.

It also reconfirms what is probably the single most important development one needs to understand in order to make sense of the contemporary world: The most dynamic religion of the past hundred years has been leftism, not Christianity, not Islam, not any other traditional religion. Indeed, regarding traditional religions, leftism has influenced them — particularly Christianity and Judaism — far more than they have influenced the Left. Mainstream Protestant Christianity, much of Catholicism (especially in Latin America, where Pope Francis lived his whole life before becoming pope), and most of non-Orthodox Judaism have become essentially liberal/Left movements with religious (and in the case of Judaism, ethnic) identity. 

So very late in the day.