Has there ever been a time like this in American foreign policy? The president is a foggy-headed grandpa, the public is hypnotized by accounts of a monstrous Putin, and best, most lovely, most delicious of all: nobody gripes about anything the administration does abroad. Dissent has fled to the Internet, e-cheek by e-jowl with teenage influencers, tulip hobbyists, and Philip Kraske thrillers, there to do no harm. Way back when, Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is indeed message. Yes, the high mandarins of foreign policy are on a roll. It's open bar, playground time, a frat party in high gear.
Embarrass China? They deserved it. Destroy the Nord Stream pipeline? Don't mind if we do. Arm Taiwan? Think of the sales! Shoot a couple of drones over the Kremlin? Well, let's let the Ukies give it a shot, and if anyone beefs about attempted assassination, we'll have the media label it a Russian false-flag op.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon must be turning green with envy in their tombs. No opposition! No chanting protesters! From the Times, Journal and Post not a word of criticism -- quite the contrary. They're banging the drums for more, and when some outlying misfit leaks documents showing everyone in government knows Ukraine is going to lose, they help put him in the slammer. They've had enough of Julian Assanges and his dreary State Department cables. We're at war; this is no time to toss a monkey wrench into the works.
The Russians and Chinese watch all this with rising anxiety: it's easy to detect from their ever-more-strident statements. It's not that they aren't prepared or don't feel sufficiently armed; it's that the Americans are now unpredictable. Whatever position papers told world leaders in 2021 about what to expect from a Biden Administration, all of that has been tossed into the round file. Xi and Putin must improvise on the fly, parrying Washington's random thrusts.
Nothing they say wrinkles Washington foreheads, nothing gets their attention: not threats, not fists banged the table, not reasoned positions about legitimate security concerns. Red lines laid down? To Americans they look a very pale pink. China calls new American policy on Taiwan "absolutely intolerable"? The Americans hear "a pain in the neck." The top people in Russia and China must look at the unfolding drama of blithe recklessness and wonder if anything short of a nuclear strike will bring the Americans to deal seriously with them.
Yes, to Biden's team, consequences are for the little people. "Among America's most distinguishing features," writes Patrick Lawrence in his excellent book "Time No Longer," [is the idea that] Europe was where history took place. America was immune to history's ravages. It was changeless." For that is the subtext of the administration's ever-bolder punches: at the end, those lovely oceans will halt nearly any foreign riposte, and what gets through our trillion-dollar military will dispatch. Besides, a war would take place either far across the Pacific or in Europe -- but war there is so picturesque.
It is also the message they transmit to Americans, who hear about the distant gains and losses in Ukraine as if it were a baseball team having a mediocre season. To the odd informed citizen seriously troubled by developments, they listen in the same inert way one waits for a traffic light to change.
Europeans are more uneasy about Ukraine, knowing in their bones how history can grab a people by the scruff of the neck and give them a good shaking. But even here dissent scarcely exists. Governments and opposition parties alike sympathize, sympathize deliriously, with Ukraine. For they know they'd damn well better. As Caitlin Johnstone notes is the case with Australia in regard to China, politicians here fear America -- its media, covert ops, and sanctions -- more than they do Russia. In Brussels nobody mentions the Nord Stream matter, though inflation is rising and everyone knows why. The major media here follow the lead of the New York Times and repeat the cliche's about Putin's sanity, his totally unprovoked war.
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