Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

Those Hitler Loving Frogs

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The new brings news that French voters have gone big for the fascists in their recent elections. They don’t call them fascists these days, but we know what they mean by “far right.” After all, anyone who is not 100% committed to post-national globalism must be Hitler or at least Mussolini. Of course, as soon as they get control of the state, they will suspend democracy and impose a dictatorship, so it is critical that the fascists never win an elections. This news sounds ominous.

France’s far-right National Front party dealt a major blow to the ruling Socialists Sunday after several of its candidates took prime position in the first round of local elections.

The main centre-right opposition UMP party also hailed a “big victory” as initial estimates showed it came out trumps in the elections, as President Francois Hollande suffers record unpopularity against a backdrop of near-zero growth and high unemployment.

According to preliminary results from the interior ministry, the UMP and allies took 47 percent of the vote nationwide while the Socialist party and allies took 38 percent, and the FN five percent — far higher than its 0.9 percent result in the first round of 2008 municipal polls.

That’s strange. That headline was a bit misleading. Both 47% and 38% are larger than 5%, at least for all known values of five. Maybe democracy works differently in France but here in America, you don’t win much of anything with five percent of the vote. The panic seems a bit out of line, given that fringe parties are always a part of European politics, most polling in the single digits.

Applauding what she said was “an exceptional vintage for the FN”, Marine Le Pen — head of the anti-immigration, anti-EU party — said the polls marked the “end of the bipolarisation of the political scene”.

Although the FN had been expected to do well, the first round results were far better than expected.

Far-right candidates came ahead in several key towns and cities that will put them in pole position in the second round on March 30.

France's local elections

In the former coal-mining town of Henin-Beaumont in northern France, Steeve Briois went a step further and achieved 50.3 percent, an absolute majority which made him the outright winner and mayor.

Under municipal election rules in France, any candidate who gets more than 50 percent is declared the winner and there is no need for a second round.

The FN hopes to claim the mayorship of 10 to 15 mid-sized town after the second round, and if it achieves that, it will have beaten its previous record in 1997 when it had four mayors.

OK, it looks like the FN did well in rural areas while the Slightly Less Socialist Than The Socialists (UMP) did well in the major urban areas. Still, five percent is five percent, so the hyperventilating is a bit ridiculous. It reveals the paranoia and insecurity of the globalists despite their total control of the world. Maybe they know something that is not obvious to the rest of us. Alternatively, maybe they just need a bogeyman to keep everyone from noticing what’s happening in the West.

For Americans, this is a glimpse of what’s on the way. The FN is mostly what the Democratic Party looked like in the 1950’s. That’s populist, patriotic and protectionist. In France today, being patriotic is like being a Klansman in New York City. Populism is about as tasteful as a septic tank. Of course, protectionism is considered on par with witchcraft. The idea that the government should put the interest of citizens ahead of foreigners is a banned concept in France. In a generation, that will be true of America.

Why The West Is Losing

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This column is interesting. First off, Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics. Why was he commissioned by the New York Times to ruminate on foreign policy? That’s not his area of expertise, even if we want to pretend that economics is an area of expertise. His credentials don’t add authority to his analysis and they don’t suggest his analysis is based in anything ore than his own ruminations. If he was a professor of game theory, then it would maybe make some sense.

Now, Cowen is a smart guy, who has many interesting things to say, so maybe he gets some leeway. Still, it used to be that no one would ask an economist to discuss anything outside of economics and even that was a very narrow topic. Today, the local economist feels free to poke his nose into everything. They are the court magicians and the local soothsayer. Serious men consult them to divine the will of the gods. Maybe they should be required to dress like Gandalf.

In another era, religious leaders routinely commented on the morality of public policy, including foreign policy. Today that role is filled by members of the local economics faculty. The reason is the morality of Christianity has been replaced by a new materialist morality among the ruling classes. It is why passing a Byzantine health care bill was treated as a moral triumph. An economist somewhere said it would add wealth to the nation and there can be no higher good than increasing the GDP.

The flaw in this is that the benefits of public policy often lie well over the horizon, while the costs are often right now. Of course, the reverse is often true. The benefits of debt creation, for example, are immediate, while the long term costs are passed onto future generations. The result is a form of short term thinking about public policy that veers into the myopic. In America, the “live for the moment” morality has produced a nation of amnesiacs incapable of remembering yesterday or contemplating tomorrow.

In foreign policy, this new morality is at the heart of our troubles with Russia. The Russian elite reject the materialism of the West. They look at the Crimea as a part of their cultural history and a part of their patrimony. It is a part of what they hope will be their shadow, in which future generations will stand. That changes their cost-benefit analysis. Putin is willing to sacrifice now, for what he assumes will be a legacy passed onto his people. The West cannot understand such reasoning.

The other thing is just how deeply our elites are marinated in cultural nihilism. Top to bottom they think culture is witchcraft from a bygone era. Their extreme egalitarianism leads them to assume all people are the same. Everyone wants what we want, loves what we love and hates what we hate. In domestic policy we see this all the time. Education starts with the assumption that everyone can be above average, as Bush hilariously claimed. Diversity demands that no one notice the diversity of man.

In the competition with Putin, the West’s inability to see his motives through his eyes is leading to one error after another. John Kerry throws a temper tantrum thinking it will have the same effect it has when he does not get seated on time at the club. Instead Putin sees a weak, feckless man who is no threat to him. In Obama, he probably sees a guileless provincial surrounded by equally inept courtiers. The fact that Obama and his people cannot imagine that being the case means we have informational disequilibrium.

Consider this from the Cowen post:

A more reassuring kind of deterrence has to do with the response of Russian markets to the crisis. Russia is a far more globalized economy than it was during the Soviet era. On the first market day after the Crimean takeover, the reaction was a plunging ruble, and a decline in the Russian stock market of more than 10 percent. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to protect the ruble’s value. Such market reactions penalize Russian decision makers, who also know that a broader conflict would endanger Russia’s oil and gas revenue, which makes up about 70 percent of its export income.

In this case, market forces provide a relatively safe form of deterrence. Unlike governmental sanctions, market-led penalties limit the risk of direct political retaliation, making it harder for the Russian government to turn falling market prices into a story of victimization by outside powers.

The underlying assumption is that Putin wants what we want. He and his people love what we love, hate what we hate and see themselves as citizens of the world, just like Tyler Cowen! Maybe the folks running Russia put a high price on having swank Miami condos and houses in Switzerland. It is just as likely they love their country, their forebears and their own place in the Russian time-line more than those trinkets. The elites int he west are no longer able to understand such thinking.

The Spread of Stupid

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Part of getting older is losing patience for stupid people. That means losing interest in mass media, particularly the commentariat. These are people who spend all of their time opining about things, but never take the time to fact check themselves. They have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet they can never be bothered to look up basic facts about their topics. Instead they just repeat the same nonsense the other chattering skulls have been saying.

Here’s a good example from John Fund over on National Review. How hard would it be to call someone who knows something about natural gas? They could quickly tell him that it is really hard to ship overseas. They would also tell him we lack the facilities to do it in any sort of volume. It will take decades for us to built out those systems. We have not built a refinery in thirty years. The environmental lobbies will never go along with a large scale LNG facilities near a major port. It’s probably easier to start a nuclear plant than to build a new natural gas facility.

Let’s look at the building of alternative pipelines into Europe. What do you think Russia is doing in Syria and Iran?  They want to build a pipeline through Iran, over northern Iraq into Syria. Tartus would be a very convenient place to build LNG facilities as it already has port facilities capable of handling big sea-going vessels. The GCC and Saudi Arabia would like to build one too, except their pipeline would run through Saudi Arabia into Jordan to the Suez Canal. Neither of these plans will be done anytime soon. Given the problems in the region, both projects are on permanent hold.

Again, all of this stuff can be looked up on-line. Five minutes of time and you quickly see we are not going to be able to do anything about Gazprom. Even if he is unable to work the internet, he works for the Wall Street Journal. he can call people who know about these things. instead, he repeats nonsense. Most likely, the nonsense comes from the neocons who obsess of Russia. They feed these lunkheads in the medial their talking points, knowing that people like Fund will never fact check them.

The Great Game

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The general view of Ukraine is that it is a part of some great power game with Russia on one side and the US on the other. Where China and Europe fit into this does not seem to be that important to the experts. The American media is not stuffed with worldly, thoughtful people, so they tend to the simple-minded when explaining these issues. In fairness, most American don’t care, so keeping it simple is probably the only way to get the attention of the public.

The more likely issue is a German – Russian one than a replay of the Cold War. The Russians want to maintain energy dominance and their best customer is Germany. The Germans would like to have other options, but there’s not much they can do about it. Ukraine sits in between the two and a whole lot of history. I know, there are a bunch of countries wedged in there now. I’m speaking historically. To steal a line from Joyce, history is a nightmare from which Europe can never awake.

David Goldman is a reliable source on these things. His latest is no exception.

Western governments are jubilant over the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, a Russian ally. They may be underestimating Vladimir Putin: Russia has the option to hasten Ukraine’s slide into chaos and wait until the hapless European Union acquiesces to – if not begs for – Russian intervention.

That leaves the West with a limited number of choices. The first is to do nothing and watch the country spiral into chaos, with Russia as the eventual beneficiary. The second is to dig deep into its pockets and find US$20 billion or more to buy near-term popularity for a pro-Western government – an unlikely outcome. The third, and the most realistic, is to steer Ukraine towards a constitutional referendum including the option of partition.

Moscow has no need of allies with weak stomachs. But it will withdraw the offer of $15 billion worth of Ukrainian debt purchases and subsidies for natural gas exports to Ukraine and leave the nearly bankrupt country to the ministrations of the West. Careful what you wish for, Russia is telling the West.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Ukraine should get money from the International Monetary Fund: “We consider that such a situation would meet the interests of Ukraine, would put the country on the path toward major structural reforms. We wish them success in this undertaking and in the rapid stabilization of the political and social situation.”

Siluanov is being mischievous. Twice in the past six years, the IMF suspended promised loans to Ukraine after the country refused to cut salaries and pensions and raise energy prices. Russia had offered a loan without conditions; any money the West offers will require austerity measures that no Ukrainian government is capable of enforcing.

The fall of Yanukovich is an embarrassment to Russia, and a well-deserved one, but that does not leave Russia entirely without options. Russia most likely will adopt the same stance towards pro-European Union politicians that the Egyptian military and its Saudi backers took toward Egypt’s the Muslim Brotherhood: let the opposition take the blame for economic and social chaos, and then move in when the country is on its knees. The Brotherhood ruled Egypt for a year, and then the food and fuel ran out, 30 million Egyptians, more than half the country’s adult population, demonstrated to oust it. The military obliged in August 2013 and immediately obtained emergency loans from the Saudis.

The rest goes into some detail on the financial realities facing Ukraine. This part is particularly interesting.

The country also is a demographic deader. At its present fertility rate (1.3 children per female), its 47 million people will shrink to only 15 million by the end of the century. There are at present 11 million Ukrainian women aged 15 to 49 (although a very large number are working abroad); by the end of the century this will fall to just 2.8 million. There were 52 million Ukrainian citizens when Communism fell in 1989. Its GDP at about $157 billion is a fifth of Turkey’s and half of Switzerland’s.

Ukraine is barely a country, rather an amalgam of provinces left over from failed empires – Russian, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ottoman – cobbled together into a Soviet “republic” and cast adrift after the collapse of Communism. Lviv (Lemberg) was a German-speaking city, part of Austrian Silesia; before World War II a quarter of its people were Jews. Jews were two-fifths of the population of Odessa. A fifth of the population, mainly in the east, are ethnic Russians; a tenth, mainly in the west, are Uniate Catholics, who have a special place in Catholic policy since the papacy of John Paul II.

Ukrainian nationality is as dubious as Byelorussian nationality: neither of them had a dictionary of their language until 1918.

At a great distance, it is not hard to cheer for the flag waving irregulars on the streets we see on television. Up close they are not so inspiring. The Germans and Russians are up close. Every German and every Russian has an ancestor who died in the lands we now call Ukraine. Add in the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and the dog’s breakfast of minor peoples who have been run over by one army or another and you can appreciate the difference in perspective. Consequently, they see all of this through different eyes. This is a game community organizers are wholly unequipped to play.

That’s not an argument for or against one side of the ruling class. America is an island nation, as a practical matter. Like the Brits, we will naturally have a different take on world affairs. We should appreciate that by staying the heck out of European politics as much as possible. We will never be as good at the Great Game as the Continentals. There’s no shame in it. They will never be as good at sea power and a host of other things that come naturally to people insulated from other tribes by oceans. We can win the Great Game by staying out of it.

The Stupid State

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The ham-handed way American diplomats go about their craft is usually just a source of amusement, but it does have serious consequences. For decades, American rulers have been content to beat the stuffing out of third world nothings, rather than mixing it up with the big boys like Russia and China. It’s been mostly a waste of men and money, that has sapped the strength of the military. Otherwise, it has not caused that much trouble for Americans or anyone else, other than the third world target.

That may be changing with the reckless and stupid way the Obama administration has handled Ukraine. The story from a while back is a good example of the amateurish way the American deep state interfaces with the world. The Russians have very real interests in Ukraine. They also have very strong emotions about the place. They are not going to stand by as America peels away another layer of their defense against creeping liberalism.

They certainly are not going to let their access to the Black Sea get blocked by a bunch of yahoos from western Ukraine. That’s why they have moved to take Crimea and inched the world closer to a very dangerous confrontation.This may be a game for the ruling class in the state department and the administration, but it is serious business to the Russians. They will not yield to bluster from armchair generals in the American media or positioned at places in the State Department.

The Ukraine has a respectable military force. They have roughly 700 main battle tanks at the ready and 60,000 ground forces. To put that in perspective, the Russians have 360,000 military personnel spread over the whole of their country. If the Russians seize Crimea, Ukraine may feel they have no choice by to send in their tanks. Deliberately causing an international crisis by meddling in Ukraine is deeply stupid. That’s how Americans play the great game, which why we should not be playing it.

The Ukrainian nationalists in the streets have done one thing. That’s made clear they can and will force the politicians to flee. If you are a Ukrainian politician right now you understand that and will appeal to the nationalists. It is pretty safe bet that the nationalists will not be OK with the Russians seizing the Crimea. On the other hand, the usual suspects have been stirring up trouble in Ukraine for a long time, so who knows how the politicians will respond. That’s why we bets stay out of it.

Ukraine

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Russia is a giant energy company with a country attached to it. Putin certainly has a tribal affinity for his people and their shared history. He is a proud Russian. He exists, however, as long as Gazprom is generating tens of billions of dollars in profits for the Russian ruling elite. Like any CEO, he is not in charge because they like him. He is there to make sure the stock holders make money, even if that means people get killed.

Ukraine will never be allowed to drift into the NATO orbit by the Russians. The people can do what they like, but the Russians will always be there to undermine their efforts to break free from the bear. It is not just money involved, there’s history. The French and Germans have marched through Ukraine enough times for the Russians to think it is necessary to make Ukraine a wall to keep out the next European flood. That may seem ridiculous to the Western ear, but it is baked into the Russian DNA. There’s also Ukraine itself.

The simple division into “pro-East” and “pro-West” has been complicated by the heterogeneity of the Ukraine. The loosely knit country of differing regions is quite similar in its makeup to the Yugoslavia of old. It is another post-Versailles hotchpotch of a country made up after the First World War of bits and pieces, and made independent after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Some parts of this “Ukraine” were incorporated by Russia 500 years ago, the Ukraine proper (a much smaller parcel of land, bearing this name) joined Russia 350 years ago, whilst the Western Ukraine (called the “Eastern Regions”) was acquired by Stalin in 1939, and the Crimea was incorporated in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Khrushchev in 1954.

The Ukraine is as Russian as the South-of-France is French and as Texas and California are American. Yes, some hundreds years ago, Provence was independent from Paris, – it had its own language and art; while Nice and Savoy became French rather recently. Yes, California and Texas joined the Union rather late too. Still, we understand that they are – by now – parts of those larger countries, ifs and buts notwithstanding. But if they were forced to secede, they would probably evolve a new historic narrative stressing the French ill treatment of the South in the Cathar Crusade, or dispossession of Spanish and Russian residents of California.

Accordingly, since the Ukraine’s independence, the authorities have been busy nation-building, enforcing a single official language and creating a new national myth for its 45 million inhabitants. The crowds milling about the Maidan were predominantly (though not exclusively) arrivals from Galicia, a mountainous county bordering with Poland and Hungary, 500 km (300 miles) away from Kiev, and natives of the capital refer to the Maidan gathering as a “Galician occupation”.

They have a few articles on Ukraine that are worth reading. Steve Sailer touched on something the other day worth considering. Western Europe sorted through it’s tribal division over many centuries of warfare. Poles mostly live in Poland. Czechs mostly live in Bohemia. Germans mostly live in Germany. A thousand years of fighting it out has settled the boundaries, for the most part. There remain pockets of trouble, like the Walloons and Flemish, but not enough to die for or even kill for.

Eurasia is another matter. The Russians have been the dominant ethnic group for a 1,000 years in some areas, despite being a minority. Ukraine has been a part of Russia since the Treaty of Pereyaslav.  Instead of sorting out the territorial and cultural matters, they have remained bottled up. Ukraine is not a rational country as drawn because it is not  ethnically rational. Perhaps what we are seeing there now is a preview for the region as the tribes begin to assert themselves and sort through their territorial disputes.

The Non-Ideological Ideologues

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At this point, it should be clear to everyone that American policy makers have no idea what they are doing in the Arab world. The Iraq fiasco and the never ending Afghanistan blunder is proof enough. Just in case it is not clear, the Obama administration is trying to cut a deal with Iran that underscores the incompetence. The American foreign policy establishment is just a collection of people with positions not based in reality, but designed to set them apart from the other experts, because that’s what they do.

A good example is this piece from someone named Paul Pillar. His bio says he is a former CIA employee. He’s now “non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, as well as a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence.” That’s quite impressive until you start reading his article on the pending Iran deal. It is a strange mix of logical fallacies and random positions that don’t seem to fit together very well.

For anyone who genuinely wants to avoid an Iranian nuclear weapon and whose attitude toward the nuclear negotiations with Iran has not been shaped by some other agenda, the “Joint Plan of Action” that was agreed to in Geneva this weekend is a major achievement that deserves enthusiastic applause.

When you start with a no true Scotsman fallacy, it is safe to assume you have staked out an indefensible position. In this case, anyone who thinks the deal is a bad one or defective in some way is guilty of having a hidden agenda. or, worse still, wants to see Iran get the bomb. If he had come to this conclusion after an exhaustive analysis of the various criticisms and alternative, maybe it is OK to make the claim. To unilaterally declare your position the only morally acceptable one says you have a weak hand. It gets worse.

First, it unmistakably moves Iran farther away than it is now from any ability to make a nuclear weapon, and even farther away from any such ability it would have in the future in the absence of this agreement. Among the facets of the deal that do this are the stopping of enrichment of uranium to 20 percent and the conversion of all current material enriched to this level into forms making it unavailable for enrichment to the level required for weapons.

That sounds good except Iran has never stood by any of its past deals. Why should we believe them now? If you are truly concerned about Iran getting a deliverable nuclear weapon, what you have to assume is they are willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to get one, so taking their word for anything is a non-starter. If you’re just trying to make it tougher for them, but you accept they will eventually get the technology, then there really is no point in making any deal with them.

Second, Iran’s program will be subjected to an unprecedented degree of international inspection, going beyond the treaty obligations of Iran or any other country and providing additional assurance that any Iranian departure from the terms of the agreement would be quickly detected.

How is this different than what has been in place for a decade or so? He does not say, but we have technology in place to monitor them now. There are roughly four ways to develop fissionable materials for a  nuclear weapon. They are gaseous diffusion, calutrons, centrifuges and breeder reactors. We know the only option for Iran is centrifuges and we know that’s what they are using. This requires a lot of resources and human capital, which we can monitor and get a good idea of their progress. We don’t need inspectors.

The Iranians, however, have weighed on on this point. Iran’s current president said, “Let anyone make his own reading, but this right is clearly stated in the text of the agreement that Iran can continue its enrichment, and I announce to our people that our enrichment activities will continue as before.” In other words, they will sign no deal that they think binds them to inspections or halting their program. That means whatever deal is done, will have no practical impact to how the West deals with Iran.

The point is, this whole Iran deal is just an exercise. It is a task for career people in the foreign policy establishment, like recess of finger painting for school kids. This is fine for European countries like France, as they don’t count. The American empire does matter, so these silly exercises have an impact. Whether it is cutting a bad deal with Iran or screwing over the Saudis to get it done, these time waster done by time servers in the foreign policy establishment can make the world worse.

The fact is, we have no business in the Middle East. Buying oil and gas does not require a million troops in and around the region. Selling the Saudis and Israelis the tools to keep the really bad actors under control can be done from a distance. We can certainly give them quiet assistance if they need to put a beating on one of these bad actors. Otherwise, it is not our problem. Left on their own, the Iranians can’t get a nuke without help from outside and The Jews and Saudis can do a better job policing that.

President Blunders

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The Saudis are an odious bunch, but they are the main power broker in the Middle East, after the Israelis. As is often the case in foreign affairs, you have to team up with terrible people sometimes to thwart other terrible people. Saving the French from the Nazis was unpleasant, but they were less odious than the Nazis. If it had been the Italians who sacked Paris, maybe the choice is not so clear.

That’s the way it is with the Saudis. They will cause trouble, but a different sort of trouble than other players in the region. The Bush family took this too far and acted like sock puppets for the Saudi Royal Family, but what Obama is doing is quite dumb. He really thinks he can align with the Iranians and toss over the Saudis. This is so dumb that no one wants to be around him. The Iranians think he and his team are too dumb to pull off such an alignment and the Saudis think he is too dumb to trust.

In unusually blunt public remarks, Prince Turki al-Faisal called Obama’s policies in Syria ‘lamentable’ and ridiculed a U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons. He suggested it was a ruse to let Obama avoid military action in Syria.

‘The current charade of international control over Bashar’s chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious. And designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down (from military strikes), but also to help Assad to butcher his people,’ said Prince Turki, a member of the Saudi royal family and former director of Saudi intelligence.

Diplomats are not going to say Obama is a moron and they want nothing to do with him, but that’s what they are telling people. America may be a clumsy, oafish giant, but it is still a giant that can wield incredible economic and military pressure. The lesson the world learned from Iraq is that American mistakes get Arabs killed by the tens of thousands, so the Arab world is careful to not get on the wrong side the Americans.

It is one thing to have a bad policy. It is one thing to poorly execute a policy. Mistakes happen and we get stuff wrong all the time. The incompetence in the White House is a different issue. They have no understanding of the world, but they think of themselves a worldly statesman. The result is a feckless and unpredictable foreign policy. The one thing diplomats fear most is unpredictability. Nations with erratic leaders find themselves alone.

Of course, the larger issue is that Obama had a unique opportunity to get the US out of the region entirely. He did pull troops from Iraq, but that was just to spite the Bush people and the war party in Washington. It was not part of a larger strategy to unwind the war machine he inherited from Bush. It looks like he is committed to Afghanistan forever, which makes less sense than keeping troops in Iraq. At least Iraq has oil.

Why Obama Lost To Putin

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One of the things you learn when you go from working class to middle class is that the men get softer the further you go up the class ladder. By softer I mean less inclined to throw a punch. At the lower end of the scale, you better be able to back up your words with your fists or a knife or a gun. Otherwise, you better know how to keep your mouth shut and steer clear of trouble.

In elite society, alpha males are quick with the witty jibe and enforce their dominance with clever repartee. Careful politicking, networking and favor trading is how one advances in the upper classes. Words, not deeds, are the currency of the rich. In the lower classes, too much talking can get you killed. In the upper classes, being glib is like being tough, it is the thing expected of people of high status.

I thought about that as Obama stumbled and bumbled is way back from the brink of war yesterday. He and his advisers are from the same world. Upper middle and upper class childhoods. Prep schools then elite colleges. After college it was law school, government service and perhaps stints at elite Wall Street firms to take care of the finances. Then eventually service in the upper reaches of government or perhaps an NGO.

In the hermetically sealed world of American politics, this is not big thing. Everyone is playing by the same rules of the pseudo-meritocracy. Obama played the game better than most and was able to parlay his race into the top job. He has always dealt with people who have have the same mental models as he has, so he is unable to comprehend that there are people working from different mental frameworks.

In foreign policy, things are a bit different. In the Syria crisis, one of the major players is Vladimir Putin. He has probably killed people as a member of the KGB. He has certainly ordered people killed as he has gone up the food chain. He’s not Ivan the Terrible, but he is a genuine bad ass who made it to the top of the heap in a world where mistakes get you killed or let you kill your rival. He’s also dealt with the fashionable careerists who not dominate the elites of western countries.

You may think I’m overdoing it with Putin, but consider another major player. That would be Assad of Syria. He could easily have negotiated a deal to leave Syria and settle in Europe. Hell, he could do a deal with Obama and moved to New York City. Instead, he stays in Syria, fighting the rebels. According to various reports, 100,000 civilians have been killed since this thing started. It takes a genuine badass to be in charge of a tribe willing to kill anyone in their way. Assad may have got to his place through nepotism, but he remains in power by killing anyone who challenges him.

You can go through the entire roster of players in this story, Jews, Arabs and Persians, and find a whole bunch of seriously bad dudes. The thing about bad dudes, whether they are Arab dictators or the president of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, is they have no illusions about the human condition. They also know their limits. Sonny at the biker bar knows he is not talking you out of your interests. The House of Saud knows the only way to stay in power is to use it. Talking about it does nothing.

That’s why Obama & Co were outwitted by Putin and Assad. These are men fully equipped to deal with the realities of that part of the world. They have no illusions about what can be done. Obama and his people walk around thinking that a clever speech or well crafted argument is going to get everyone to do what they say. That’s how it has always worked for them. It is how they were trained. The result is they lost this round to Russia and the empire is showing it weakness.

How Does He Take A Punch?

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In politics, being lucky is the critical difference between being John Kerry and Barak Obama. Kerry, for all his faults, is an able politician. You don’t get to be senator by not having some political skills. He played the game carefully and made sure to take care of all the right people. Obama, on the other hand, is not a great politician, but he is a very lucky one. He bumped into the right people who helped him move up the ladder and he had the right opponents. That’s why he’s president and Kerry is not.

There’s another angle to this. Some politicians make up for bad luck or bad timing by being plucky and resilient. They figure out how to take a punch and keep standing. Bill Clinton is a classic example of the political survivor. Scandals that would have landed most pols in prison never slowed him down. Clinton could take a punch. We don’t know if Obama can take a punch. He’s been so carefully protected, no one knows if he has a chin. Even at this point in his tenure, we don’t know if the man can take a punch.

It looks like we will find out. The Left has decided to break ranks and abandon him over this Syria business. Grayson is a nut and probably should be in a mental ward, but he is a bellwether of sorts. If he is breaking ranks, that means the fever swamp is losing faith in their man over this. Then there is the international scene where Obama is getting embarrassed by Putin. There’s now a viscous cycle at work. As domestic support flags, international support flags, which drives down domestic support.

Obama is headed for an embarrassing defeat unless the GOP saves him, which is always a possibility. They think it sells with their voters to be on the warmongering side of every issues, so to them this looks like a good way to score points. That could be bad for Obama. The other choice is to cowboy up and go it alone, but that is not his style. Plus he does not seem like he is all that excited by the venture. Either way, he is going to have to win a few fights against some of his own people to get his way on this.

No matter how this plays out, Obama is going to take a hit politically. The question is how does he respond. Bush just put his head down and ran forward. Clinton found some low hanging fruit he could grab to change the subject. That’s what veteran pols do when they have been through some tough times. They develop a way to handle a loss. That’s why the best politicians usually have a loss early in their career. Obama has lived a charmed life up to this point. Now we find out if has that something extra to bounce back from a defeat or if he makes an early transition to lame duck status.