One of the interesting things about the shift in foreign policy initiated by the Trump administration is that it is a break from what has been policy for a century. This sudden lurch into realism is a departure from Wilsonian democracy. Trump wants to center policy on the material interests of the country. Up until now, policy was centered around moral claims about how the world ought to be ordered.
Through the Cold War it was assumed that pragmatism was the rule because of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The better way to view it is that Wilsonian democracy was on a leash for forty years. Once the Cold War ended, it was like a hyperactive dog that got under the fence. The last thirty years has been an explosion of Wilsonian democracy playing catchup for lost time.
Even during the Cold War, American policy makers and politicians had a fondness for moralizing about the world. There were endless debates over the morality of dealing with dictators who happened to be anti-Soviet. This was finally resolved in the 1980’s with the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian. The former was a temporary compromise, while the later was a forever enemy.
Once totalitarianism ended, then it was a race to go around the world addressing the temporary tolerance for governments not up to American standards. Now it seems this has run out of road and necessity is once again forcing a return of realism in the foreign policy realm. That is the show this week. It is a general primer on realism versus the idealism that is now being abandoned.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- Foreign Policy: How Nations Behave
- Just War
- Wilsonian Democracy
- Liberalism
- Thucydides
- Realism
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It’s interesting that Wilsonian Democracy arrived at the same time as the beginnings of the managerial class.
Managerial class = feminism. Women love process, men prefer results. Wilson was a moralizer – but his wife was acting president for half his term.
As our esteemed host has so brilliantly stated, “Progressivism was created to give moral agency to managerialism”.
Wilsonian Democracy was the export of progressive managerialism to the entire world.
Yes. Wilson’s chief advisor, Col. E.M. House, wrote a “fictional” book entitled “Philip Dru, Administrator” which basically outlined his plans for progressive managerial control of society. Wilson went to Versailles with a bunch of academics called “The Inquiry” who were “experts” on how to re-draw the map of Europe. They were the ones who created countries like “Czecho-slovakia,” Poland, and “Jugo-slavia.” We all know how well that worked out in the long run, LOL. The the progressive-managerial revolution has been so successful and so total that people tend to forget that the country existed without it before 1912. In 1912… Read more »
what’s the point?
We all knew that Sri Lanka loving lesbian AFD leader isn’t right-wing, Trump is another Shabbos goy
nothing gonna change, business as usual because white people are still the frog in the boiling pot
Smash and grab should be engraved on constitution
“We the people who are looting white people, in Order to form a more perfect Ponzi scheme…”
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Gilbert Doctorow, re criticism of Donald Trump’s first month in office: “That type of criticism and kind of ad hominem argument is not acceptable. It is a polite form of slander. Donald Trump is often seen by many, many people in the States, and abroad, as a buffoon, a superficial person, someone who really isn’t capable of serious politics. He’s a businessman. He’s looking for his personal interest in this or that deal. This is nonsense. In the last three weeks, we have seen Trump perform as one of the most skilled geopolitical actors on the face of the earth.… Read more »
It looks like the media is already making up the poll numbers to try to claim he is “underwater” and “slipping.” None of the articles that talk about this explain how his approval ratings are tanking even though Americans support DOGE, support the way he treated the surly dwarf, loved his SOTU speech, support his border and immigration actions, etc. The media is trying to tell us that Americans support what he is doing and rate his presidency negatively. How stupid do you have to be to believe this?
I think it’s psychosis much more than stupidity, genes that could result in that level of stupidity would almost certainly be lethal in gestation.
On that Memeorandum site, they have an article from the NYT “Trump’s Policies Have Shaken a Once-Solid Economic Outlook”. The kooks still think they can sell the idea that Bidenomics was working great, 6 months after Trump gets put in largely as the result of Bidenomics. True detachment from reality
Big Media is shameless. The more they’re caught lying, the more they lie. They just can’t help themselves.
The good news is we have seen their zenith. Every day they are less influential
When the truth does not serve your purpose, lie. MSM 101. There are plenty of people who no longer know the difference, but do prefer a sweet lie to a harsh truth. And that’s not even a slight solely against the hard Left. It is a human insight. Many in the “Right” column are also guilty. The truth is overwhelmingly that— whereas Trump shows “great” promise in his first days in office—his ultimate accomplishments will/must be judged in a longer timeframe than a couple of months. Hard days lie ahead. Human nature dictates that those who are now his die… Read more »
Many white people, certainly not all, are a disadvantage because we instinctively dislike lying and it’s hard for us to imagine that others would lie so easily without shame. We’re forever being surprised.
Our love of truth is probably the reason that we developed science but it puts us at a serious disadvantage in a world of shameless liars.
“…his most important and most capable assistants, like Rubio, like Witkoff, Hegseth.”
Zionist, Jewish Zionist, Zionist.
A New World Order, alright.
Do-oh-oh-unnnt for-or-or-ge-ta-ta-ta our-ur-ur Sec-ec-ec-rit-it-itary of-uv-uv-uv Hell-ul-ulth:
Anti-Semitism – like racism – is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence. Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect, based on speech freedom and open debate.
Make America healthy (and love Jews) again!
Yes, he belongs on that list. Also Bondi. Quite a few others too.
Sigh.
The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend—yeah, a Jew said that recently. I rarely comment in this area, but when I see protests in the streets where the main contingent of the protestors are “Islamic”, I say a pox on both their houses. We’d don’t need either of them *and* their politics here.
For now, we have to accept that MIGA isn’t going away. The question is whether we can move forward on other fronts. We can circle back to Israel later.
But look how far we’ve come. The voices are getting louder and more frequent. We’re tired of that little postage stamp country.
All I ask for is not to have to hear about that stupid little country numerous times a day every single day of my life.
Let’s have a week of Israel free media. Then, like alcoholics, we can do the one day at a time thing. Maybe 2 weeks without hearing about them, then, a month, 6 months … And maybe one day we can forget about them completely.
The ability to talk about the Israeli lobby is remarkable and, I hope, be the first step in a long fight to get some balance. Jews won’t ever quit, but we can contain them. This is a start.
I wish I could share your optimism, truly. I just can’t. Been watching this for too long.
I’m not optimistic. I’m assuming Jews will hold a grip over Congress for a long time to come. I don’t like it. In fact, I hate it. But we’re moving forward on other fronts, so I’ll enjoy those victories. That said, the country at least now talks about the Israeli lobby and its power. That’s a huge change. Acknowledging the problem is the first step in solving it. There’s also the issue that Jews seem to have figured – finally – that importing a ton of brown people who hate them isn’t exactly “good for the Jews” so Jews aren’t… Read more »
Trump’s pro-Zionist is going to be the massive black mark on his record, no matter what else he achieves. However, it shouldn’t surprise. He only got back in because of the backing of the Zionist lobby.
“his people have choreographed for him”
I think this is a key point. As good as Trump is, I doubt all of this genius is coming from him. He’s got the right instincts and the pushy personality to make sure things get done, but other people are doing all the grunt work.
This time he managed to pick the right people. Except for that b*tch, Bondi.
As I understand Gilbert, he himself is a businessman and speaks mainly for the economic interests within Russia. I’ve detected a segment of the pro-Russian commentariat that is more than willing to forgive the US in hopes getting back some Western markets. They’re the ones that speak most glowingly about Trump and his team. They also try to shift as much blame as possible for the Ukraine fiasco onto the shoulders of the Europeans.
Theodore Roosevelt was an activist reformist President before Wilson without the Puritanism.
With regard to Israel, etc: at the heart of Zionism and Judaism is the biblical sense that they are God’s Chosen People and the “ nations” can be dispossessed and if not tolerated, then destroyed as necessary.
Fantastic that actual realism looks to be supplanting dips*** American style “idealism” – it’s caused enough death and destruction around the world these past 107 (if not more) years.
“Up until now, policy was centered around moral claims about how the world ought to be ordered.”
Those moral claims were fig leaf, prolefeed. It was material interest all along, but thinly camouflaged by sanctimonious pap. To the great credit of Trump, he has neither time nor patience for this empty posturing. He is more honest. Let the Europeans engage in this — they have a long history of doing so.
It’s not the Europeans who lecture the rest of the world about the rules-based order, or democracy or being the last great hope of mankind.Shining city on a hill.LOL
Even as you Americans run away from another conflict you are trying to claim the moral high ground with Zelensky. You are doing it personally by trying to imply the Americans are just too honest to make false claims unlike those evil Europeans.
Really is an obnoxious part of your national character; although of fading importance as the white part of your country becomes a smaller and smaller minority.
“as the white part of your country becomes a smaller and smaller minority”
I’m not sold that this is going to be the end result. Once you’ve got Latin American assimilation, they become White, or at least white enough. Like Italians and all the rest of the Euro kNyghhers like me.
I see all the downvotes here. I don’t know where you’re all coming from. If you’re trying to go back to a WASP country, that ship has sailed. That’s a lot of people to throw out. If you’re going to go back to lynching us Southern Europeans, I don’t think that’s going to have a lot of popular support either. The Mexicans and a lot of Latin Americans who come here aren’t that much different. Similar cultures (based in southern Europe), not to mention that Latin America is full of real Europeans too. If Southern Europeans can assimilate, so can… Read more »
You are so off in this assessment I don’t where to start. Italians, Irish, Greeks though once snubbed at the end of the day are European to the core of their being. Those little goblinas and mestizos are genetic aliens who ape the culture and try to claim it as their own. Latino? Really! It’s in the NAME. Latin from whence did this language or any associated culture originate? Pro tip- it’s not even close to Guatemala. I just recently visited the Ferrari museum and a Lamborghini museum in Italy. We going to see any El Salvadordean super car factories… Read more »
We don’t need to lynch anyone. You’re just being dishonest here. Almost all of the mestizos in the US are citizens of their own country. They are not a stateless people without the US. They walked here and they can walk their asses right back to where they came from. There is a tiny minority of mestizos who we inherited a long time ago. They aren’t a big problem.
I’ll grant that mestizos are preferable to africans, if one must choose, but that’s a rather low bar
It’ll come down to religion, i.e., Protestant/Catholic— PROVIDED, Protestants find religion again, which I’m guessing they will, in some way.
White used to equal Protestant, when you think about it, but this was happening as Protestants were secularizing. How did Italians, even Irish, become white? They did like the Protestants, and secularized. America was WASP, probably still is, seeing how it’s falling apart without that identity.
I’m guessing the old lines make a comeback in some form, and things get interesting. Or America continues going away. White ain’t going to save the place.
Our immigration demographics is better than Europe’s, and more assimilable. TempoNick, despite apparently being Italian, is correct. At least we get a large share of Hispanics that could pass for Greco-Italian. The women are better looking, too. I’ll take this over Muslims and Africans any day…If there are only two choices, which there are.
There are many good Latins, honest, hard-working, and functionally Christian. The best of them can form a buffer state to the south of whatever European polity arises in North America after the last twitching death throe of the GAE. However, their higher quality than baseline mesoamerican peasantry does not make them European. Modest admixture simply make them a new kind of people, not a European kind of people. They still have mores, extending from their genome, which are incompatible, different preferences for how organize themselves socially, politically, and economically. There are 200 million unbroken Europeans in North America. We need… Read more »
Yeah, you are touching on an area of dispute. Obviously, you and I agree, if there is race mixing then not all non-White races are of equal effect.
Most of the Limeys–I assume you’re a Limey–who post here sure do have little man syndrome. And like a banty Mick with too much whisky in him, you wave your shillelagh around trying to pick a fight with guys who just want to be left alone.
Frankly, we’ve got no quarrel with Europe. We just want to get free of the Occidental tar baby and let you guys take care of yourselves for a change. Time for y’all to stop wearing diapers and put on a pair of pants.
Many of the people who post as ostensible Limeys are actually south Asians – actual English don’t care for American braggadocio, but it’s the south Asians that have the massive chip on their shoulders.
As expected, downvotes. But I read and reread your comment. It is fair in nature, whether agreed to or not. The conflict we “run away from”, however is one that was embraced by an old form of “interventionist” policy that has been disputed in this country for generations starting at least to the aftermath of the Vietnam war (my era). As with any democratic elected society, changes in administrations portend changes in policy. Ukrainian intervention, or even membership in NATO is under consideration every term of years. You are naive to imagine otherwise. As to the quip, “…of fading importance… Read more »
I cannot agree. The BFE didn’t fly perv pennants outside every one of its embassies because it was trying to free up capital for Black Rock. Ideology is a huge part of the BFE’s machinations, probably coequal with capitalistic greed. The BFE, up until the Trumpening anyway, was the greatest crusader state the world has ever known. And ideology (or religion) is the crusader state’s fuel.
Does war cause more sober-minded thinking among the people in charge? It can, if those old men running it have some memory of war in their own lives. It’s when they don’t (and when a lot of those “men” making decisions are actually women) that we seem to get in trouble. There’s the story (apocryphal, probably) that when the War Between States was declared, guys were running around shouting: “This is it! We’ve got our war!” A similar phenomenon happened in Germany in the runup to the Great War. There’s that scene in “All Quiet” in which the starched-collared teacher… Read more »
The pro war attitude of the western “intelligentsia” towards Ukraine is a direct result of the GAE’s learned adaptation of fighting wars with other country’s soldiers. This is precisely why that adaptation was made. If it was 1,000 American/British/French casualties daily, none of these blithely pro war attitudes could exist. Except perhaps for Bolton’s. I doubt there is any amount of dead, from any country, that could deter his bluster.
If it were 1,000 Blue-Eyed Ice Devils coming home daily in body bags, the NYT would cheer with a blood-curdling roar. If that thousand were Hutus, the NYT would agitate for burning Staten Island down to the studs.
NYT’s support for war depends entirely on which party occupies the WH
it used to, back when the generals did have that memory or would go to the front line themselves (and send their sons out of a sense of duty). It hasn’t been like that for a while though. The W misadventures were plagued by magical thinking, thinking we could turn Afghanistan into a feminist paradise and Iraq into a free market wonderland, Houston-on-the-Tigris.
Come to think of it, Houston is looking more like Baghdad all the time
I was just going to reply! Houston proper was officially 40.82% White in 2024; I think that includes a lot of larping “whit” mestizos, plus various Arabs. Harris County as a whole (including all of Houston’s sprawling suburbs) is only 27.6% White.
Last I checked, which wasn’t long ago, inside the Houston city limits it is 20% white. Greater metro Houston 47%
Not sure how true it is, but it’s definitely a theme in the literature: The European nations’ entries into WWI were celebrations—expressions of ecstatic relief. Waiting for the war is over! Of course rallies can be arranged for the press to exaggerate, and men to whom death isn’t real can become grandiose about it, etc., but there seems to have been some real mass hysteria. (The fashion when I was in school, during an earlier iteration of “wokeness” (the “postmodern” one), was to blame that hysteria on modern art. Yes, the same old stuff conservatives hate: cubism, dada, Pierrot Lunaire,… Read more »
I don’t know if it correlates to WW1, but we see the search for meaning, the need to be part of something larger and more meaningful than one’s self, over and over (in people who lack any other source of spiritual meaning). Just 5 years ago (how the time flies), I saw media characterizations of the plandemic as “our generation’s WW2.” Remember that? By wearing that mask and taking that jab, you were doing your part to win WW2! Same thing now with putting a Ukraine flag in one’s social media profile. These people don’t have anywhere else to find… Read more »
With the title of today’s post all I can think is that John Mearsheimer is feeling awfully vindicated these days.
But he’s still flummoxed by the extent to which the Israel Lobby controls American foreign policy.
It’s a huge problem for the theory of “Realism,” which holds that nations pursue power politics and follow their own interests. Mearsheimer says that the U.S. Israel relationship is actually counterproductive to U.S. interests, yet no one in the foreign policy establishment or the Congress even questions it.
If you want a good study of Washington, you can’t go wrong with Douglas Southall Freeman’s multivolume biography of the man. His style from the 1930s is a bit dated, and he, of course, didn’t have access to many primary sources we can access today, but that is counterbalanced by Freeman not actively hating his subject.
I’m going to Estonia in June. Looks like I don’t have that big comfy GAE umbrella protecting me over there, anymore. Wish me luck lads!
Stout fellow!!
There’s some number—the news always says a thousand or so, but who knows—of British troops deployed there as part of NATO’s enhanced forward presence against Russia. (Purely defensive.)
I hear they get in a lot of car accidents in the down time between “mock” border incursions. (Defensive incursions.) So, 10 and 2, eyes on the road, and don’t blaspheme Allah when you’re cursing in traffic.
I call it “the Mexico of Finland”.
And Estonian cucks shut down the Nevsky Cathedral, which is a beautiful old Russian Orthodox cathedral. I am going to be outspoken about that.
Once the Cold War ended, it was like a hyperactive dog that got under the fence.
I’d change that to “hydrophobic”.
And I’m going to lay this out which won’t be popular. I despise Wilson’s sanctimonious moralizing as much as the next man, but you do have to take into account the historical context of the revulsion the Great War caused in the West among people with a 19th century concept of acceptable conduct of war, which the very brief (1914-1918) era of total industrial war, with millions of dead, was a shock that simply had no historical precedent, and the crowned heads of Europe, especially Victoria’s idiot grandchildren, mostly Wilhelm and Nicholas, were primary drivers of. The Germans did implement… Read more »
“rightfully regarded” by British propaganda?
Bingo! No dog in this fight, but most all points made are easily refuted—especially if one compares GB at the time, and even the American. Germany was “late to the table” as they say in this game.
I find the Ukraine business an echo of the First World War in that at least one side doesn’t understand the sunken cost fallacy. In WW1 it could be said all the players kept throwing blood and treasure into the fray because so much had been sacrificed, giving up was unthinkable.
In Ukraine, the West, [with the exception of Trump and his minions] cannot conceive that the last three years were a waste and calling it quits is the best option. Or maybe they just don’t want a profitable scam to end.
Foreign Policy is the handmaiden of national economic interest. Zman tends to focus on moral and political vectors, but we have to consider the strong influence on policy of economic interests. We fought WWI largely because NY banks lent a ton of money to UK and France and we aspired to export more. The US did not have a meaningful manufacturing surplus until 1900, by which point our raw material trade surplus had shrunk to parity. Progressive politics predates our emergence as an industrial exporter and certainly predates modern scientific management (Taylor, Ford, Sloan, Emerson, Drucker). The Progressive movement was… Read more »
I think the retreat from “idealism” is simply a tactical repositioning. Globohomo’s heart and soul is what it has always been. Given unlimited power, Globohomo would go back to its main mission and joy of exterminating the good, the beautiful, and the true.
I don’t know if Trump is the one to try this. But the USA has to become accustomed to have international relationships with any country independent of the international media cartel and globohomo clown world politicians. Like normalize relationships with Russia where the Ukraine is just a point in the agenda. But we can also sanction Ukraine if it insists on a cruel war to the last soldier. The Ursulas Van der Clownish will reeee but that’s the point of going back to reality. The real issue is we cannot be the perpetual payers of clown world wars and as… Read more »