Three paragraphs from a laterday Straussian Hysteric: Bret Stephens.

Newspaper Reader confronts his short, willful, erratic, & heedless final paragraphs!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 12, 2025

….

What team Trump has achieved is the opposite: A Russia that sees even less reason to settle, a Europe that sees more reason to go its own way, a China that believes America will eventually fold and a once-again betrayed Ukraine that will have even less reason to trust international guarantees of its security.

There’s more of this: Sunday’s arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia, may even get pro-Israel civil libertarians to defend his rights while making a martyr of him on the far-left. But the pattern is clear. Ignoring the political corollary to Newton’s Third Law of Motion — that every action has an equal and opposite reaction — the administration will now reap precisely what it should avoid.

Trump’s critics are always quick to see the sinister sides of his actions and declarations. An even greater danger may lie in the shambolic nature of his policymaking. Democracy may die in darkness. It may die in despotism. Under Trump, it’s just as liable to die in dumbness.

Newspaper Reader.

Unknown's avatar

About stephenkmacksd

Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer. 'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.' https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.