StephenKMackSD's Blog

Reading Mr. Stavridis’ CV, condensed by Bloomberg editors, is revelatory, to understate the case: 

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an operating executive consultant at the Carlyle Group and chairs the board of counselors at McLarty Associates.

Mr Stavridis record of  service is immaculate, in sum he is not Colin Powell, Stanley McChrystal nor David Petraeus! He projects both military and personal virtue, not to speak of his personal accomplishments, on a scale not many attain. That he is a political conformist is demonstrated by his latest essay:

Headline: Trump’s Retreat From Germany Is a Victory for Putin

Sub-headline: Pulling U.S. troops from Europe won’t save any money but it will make America less safe.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-22/trump-s-retreat-from-germany-is-a-victory-for-putin?sref=bfOwbK4O

Mr Stavridis is not just a believer in the American Mission, but one of its vital actors: ‘ former supreme allied commander of NATO’. This firmly establishes his credentials as not just an advocate, or a mere apologist for American hegemony, but one of it former military actors. He is not one of the collection of New Democrats and Neo-Conservatives who speak from the comfort of their offices/studies. Yet The New Cold War has become  a article of faith, featuring Putin, in the political guise of The New Stalin, for almost the whole of the American bourgeois Political Class , whose failed attempts at political self-rescue, generates an endless stream of political commentary, like my own!

What might Mr. Stavridis think of this news report?

Headline:France’s Macron pushes for ‘true European army’

Sub-headline: French President Emmanuel Macron has warned that Europeans cannot be protected without a “true, European army”, as he marks the centenary of the World War One Armistice.

On a visit to the former Western Front in Verdun, he said Russia had shown it could be a threat and Europe had to be able “to defend itself better alone”.

Russia’s president will be among world leaders marking the Armistice in Paris.

Mr Macron has already proposed a joint intervention force for crisis missions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed the idea of an intervention force in June, but said it would have to be part of “the structure of defence co-operation”.

The UK, while in favour of such a joint force, is opposed to a European army, because of the potential risk of creating a parallel structure to Nato.

…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46108633

Political Apprentice 

The reader of Mr. Rachman’s latest essay is first confronted by an editorial cartoon, depicting the American Eagle and an Indian Tiger, both noble and resolute, facing off with a demonic red  Chinese Dragon, with smoke coming from its nostrils. This cartoon, a readers guide as to the content of the essay. Call this the crudest kind of propaganda!

   

Mr. Rachman’s essay on the China/India ‘clashes’ is steeped in an ersatz political psychologism, attributing emotions to state entities and  its politicians, technocrats, anonymous and named, its  citizens, reduced to a carefully chosen few. Doesn’t just express lazy thinking, but demonstrates an absence of that more than valuable asset:

The mood in New Delhi, Indians feel assaulted and humiliated by China, Indians have watched nervously,has also gone down badly in New Delhi, India signalled its displeasure, in its efforts to woo India, Indians are wary,China should be worried.

Mr. Rachman provides a link to a Financial Times report:

Headline:India rethinks strategic ties following border clashes with China

Sub-headline: New Delhi likely to boost US relations and reduce reliance on commerce with neighbour

https://www.ft.com/content/47d40de6-42a9-4d45-833c-c5dc76cd4fa2

It takes three ‘reporters‘ to produce this one news story? 

Mr. Rachman role in this essay is focus on the Strategic, rather than any other consideration, if not to further the New Cold War, in its Asian iteration. In sum, Modi’s Hindu Fundamentalism, and its record of the murder of fellow Muslim Indian citizens, by Modi’s mobs of political acolytes, needs to be put in the background, of  a more pressing issues of a Strategy, steeped in a New Cold War Ethos: a moral/political obscenity.    

All four nations are intensely concerned by the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region. It is folly for China to drive India into America’s arms.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d74d9bda-6822-4f85-9d48-a285a9effe07

I came here from The Financial Times. Just looking at Gideon Rachman’s latest essay, made me a bit queasy:

Headline: India picks a side in the new cold war

Sub-headline: It is folly for China to drive its rival into America’s arms

https://www.ft.com/content/d74d9bda-6822-4f85-9d48-a285a9effe07

But seeking solace in Mr. Ferguson’s little melodrama, where he plays so many roles: Cassandra, Epidemiologist, Statistician, Historian all wreathed in the usual Ferguson self-congratulation. But the literary frame of Jack Kerouac’s ‘beatnik’ “On the Road” didn’t render his verbose polemic any more palatable. I survived the 1957 flu epidemic as a 13 year old, along with my sisters and brothers. 

Looking forward to returning to Rachman’s essay and James Stavridis (former supreme allied commander of NATO)  essay:

Trump’s Retreat From Germany Is a Victory for Putin

How should Neo-Conservatism be described? How might it be defined? by its political/philosophical myth-making, its relentless mendacity and its political schisms?
Bret Stephens, in his latest essay in the New York Times, comments upon John Bolton’s Trump Tell-All. I read the whole essay and I recommend to the reader that she skip to this last paragraph:

I write all this as someone who shares many of Bolton’s hawkish foreign-policy views. I’m also someone who urged Bolton, while he was still in office, to resign on principle. It’s a shame he didn’t do so while he still had a chance to preserve his honor, but it isn’t a surprise. Only the truly gullible can act totally cynically and imagine they can escape history’s damning verdict.

Bret Stephens is a typical Neo-Con, a dedicated Drawing Room General with no military experience. Though he is generous, with his accounts of Israelis being blown to bits, by Palestinian Terrorists in a small cafe, as his military credential.

In his column Stephens links to his political fellow traveler Anne Applebaum’s essay in The Atlantic:

Headline: History Will Judge the Complicit

Sub-headline:  Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

Her essay begins in ‘The Cold War’, with the story of Wolfgang Leonhard in 1949 East Germany, Markus Wolf, Stanley Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, Marianne Birthler, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, ‘“America First”,  the cast of characters, becomes an avalanche of names as sketches, place holders for political/moral  positions etc.  At more than six thousand words: this the epitome of Neo-Conservative strategy of exhausting the readers critical faculty, as the in-order-too of advancing their political mendaciousness. This the operative strategy of Leo Strauss and of Fukuyama. I fled to the  final two paragraphs of her essay:

Or perhaps the only antidote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s, or of the 1940s. The Miłoszes and the Hoffmanns of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see, more clearly than we can, the path that led the U.S. into a historic loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven’t experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. Then maybe Graham—along with Pence, Pompeo, McConnell, and a whole host of lesser figures—will understand what he has enabled.

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

The New Democrats, The Republicans and The Neo-Conservatives are the Midwives of Trump! The public moralizing of Stephens and Applebaum cannot forestall the judgement of history, that they so maladroitly attempt to rewrite. In that rewrite these two propagandists pass themselves off  as political paragons. Such is the state of America’s Political Class, while the Monuments and Statues of the Heroes of another Age are toppled, an echo of 1989? 

Political Observer

Andy Divine will never obtain what he most desires, a Red Hat, and the opportunity to sit in The College of Cardinals. Although his vestments could never outshine the Pope’s finery. Andy will just have to settle, like the rest of us, for what he/we could construct out of his and our attempts, to overcome what ever was in our way. Andy’s story is just more fraught with his self-created, excruciating, melodrama. 
Andy’s compensation is that he is a writer/propagandist, who arrogated to himself, the right to tell all the rest of ‘us‘, how we are to be, and act in the world. He is the Walmart of political moralists. His latest encyclical takes on Bostock v. Layton County, the opinion written by Neil Gorsuch:

Click to access 17-1618_hfci.pdf

Justice Gorsuch and Andy share a toxic commonality, an animus toward black people:  look to Andy’s enthusiasm for The Bell Curve here: 

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

A review of by Charles Lane in The New York Review of Books;

The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’

Justice Gorsuch is a Neo-Confederate/Originalist, whose connection to The Federalist Society is a fact, past or present. Gorsuch and Kennedy are fellow travelers, who both  masquerade, and masqueraded as ‘Centrists’, on a Court colonized by Political Romantics. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the politically necessary triumph of this coterie.

Andy can’t resist the temptation to perform his usual toxic political mischief: ‘intersectional left’ part of his continuing  campaign, against that amorphous enemy, that seeks, in Andy’s imagination, to insert itself into any and all political/moral questions, as fodder for their mendacious self-promotion. Because the religious politicking of Opus Dei, is an integral part of his inheritance of dogma, wedded to his religious self-infatuation: its like reading a misbegotten amalgam of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of reactionaries, Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher.

…

If current trends are any indication, these groups will simply merge into the broader intersectional left and become as concerned with, say, the rights of immigrants or racial minorities as they are with gay rights. In the political climate on the left at the moment, singling out gays as a separate category is increasingly impermissible. Which is why, for example, at a recent LGBTQ activist conference, there were workshops like “Elephant in the Waiting Room: Self-Love, Health, Queering Fat Acceptance” and “The Politics of Colony and Post-hurricane Politics in PR and USVI.” It’s why some LGBTQ groups keep adding various “sexualities” and “genders” to the long list and why white gay men are often seen as the oppressors, and not part of the “queer” movement, unless they agree to defer entirely to intersectional politics and acknowledge their white cis privilege.

…   

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/when-is-it-time-to-claim-victory-in-the-gay-rights-struggle.html

In the world view of Andy Divine, there are Saints and Sinners, and it is his moral, his journalistic duty, to expose these apostates, and publicly shame them. 

Political Observer 

Headline:Opponents of more IMF lending may have blood on their hands

Sub-headline: If that sounds dramatic, it is nothing compared with the death and suffering that can still be avoided

When it come to the manufacture of Economic Metaphysics Mr. Hausmann and his allies have an impressive collection of jargon, that reminds this reader of Heidegger, except that neologisms are avoided at all costs: Hausmann wants to attract readers with his inventive mind’s  slight of hand, with stage make-up by Willem de Kooning. While remaining within the bourgeois confines of ‘Economics’: The Invisible Hand, Animal Spirits, Creative Destruction, The Wisdom of the Market, Trickle Down etc.  The reader can only marvel at his collection, in its stage-makeup : 

Original sin, Self-discovery, Growth diagnostics, Dark matter, The Product Space

The IMF is an NGO:

Promote international monetary co-operation, facilitate international trade, foster sustainable economic growth, make resources available to members experiencing balance of payments difficulties

In sum a collective of Economic Technocrats, and the use of economic institutions to insure the welfare of its members : yet what Mr. Hausmann argues in his essay seems reasonable, if just a matter of self-interest. His last paragraph however doesn’t quite ring true:

Given what is at stake in terms of avoidable death and suffering, such arguments sound like those of a person unwilling to help the victim of a car accident for fear of getting blood on their shirt. But if these arguments are allowed to win the day, we will all have blood on our hands.

Mr. Hausmann’s concern about ‘blood on our hands’ refracted through these two news  reports, on his political involvement with America’s Venezuelan appointee Juan Guaido,  places his political moralizing into its proper perspective.      

 Headline:Venezuela’s Guaido pushes to name new representative to regional lender

(Reuters) – Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido named Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann as the country’s representative to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Guaido’s envoy to the United States said on Monday.

The regional lender confirmed it had received a letter from Guaido naming Hausmann and said it was considering how to proceed.

“We’ve received the letter and are determining next steps,” a bank official told Reuters.

Venezuela poses a tricky problem for the Washington-based lender, whose charter prevents its board from discussing internal political issue of member states. If the board agrees to accept Guaido’s representative, it would be the first financial institution to make such a move.

…

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-hausmann/venezuelas-guaido-pushes-to-name-new-representative-to-regional-lender-idUSKCN1QL2A6

______________________________________________________________

Headline: Hausmann, Venezuela’s representative to IDB, to step down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ricardo Hausmann is announcing plans to quit his job as governor of the Inter-American Development Bank, a position he took in March as representative of Venezuela designated by opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

Hausmann wrote Thursday on Twitter that his academic duties at Harvard University are incompatible with the job at the IDB and he suggested he be replaced by Alejandro Plaz, an engineer designated last month by Guaidó as commissioner for economic development.

The IDB is the only international financial organization to recognize Guaidó as the legitimate president of the South American country, a stand taken by the U.S. and about 50 other nations that say Nicolas Maduro’s re-election last year was rigged.

https://apnews.com/0f6f8ac927a747249b182b2854cd1e9c

Mr. Hausmann, long ago, spent his political capital! 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/351f5a02-4ba9-454b-ba42-83a6b662c665

How telling that Mr. Ganesh has missed this essay by Ian Brzezinski , son of Zbigniew, for the propaganda arm of NATO, The Atlantic Council. It was published on June 1, 2020, and presents his conception of NATO’s role, in America’s relations with China. The first two paragraphs of Mr. Brzezinski’s essay gives the game away.

Headline: NATO’s role in a transatlantic strategy on China

On the eve of the NATO Summit in London last December, the Alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg addressed the need for a collective response to China’s emergence as a global power. “This is not about moving NATO into the South China Sea,” he stated, “but it’s about taking into account that China is coming closer to us—in the Arctic, in Africa, investing heavily in our infrastructure in Europe, in cyberspace.” At the summit, NATO heads of state diplomatically declared that China has become a concern: “we recognize that China’s growing influence and international policies present both opportunities and challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance.”

Indeed, it is hard, if not impossible, for NATO to avoid China. Beijing presents a full spectrum challenge to the transatlantic community—a challenge whose potential mirrors, if not surpasses, that once posed by the former Soviet Union. China’s $14 trillion economy is expected to soon surpass that of the United States, and Beijing exercises that might in a predatory fashion around the globe, including in the United States and Europe. China threatens to boycott companies and countries that criticize its policies, leverages its debt instruments against poor nations, and is buying up critical infrastructure around the world. Its acquisition of European ports has raised concerns of top NATO commanders who warn that such ownership could adversely affect the Alliance’s ability to use those facilities in times of crisis.
…
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/natos-role-in-a-transatlantic-strategy-on-china/

The New Cold War on two fronts: Russia and China, with the lesser player in this political melodrama being Iran. 

Beijing presents a full spectrum challenge to the transatlantic community—a challenge whose potential mirrors, if not surpasses, that once posed by the former Soviet Union.

What Mr. Brzezinski  offers is a more sophisticated ‘Containment Policy’,  the once central idea of Kennan, in his ‘Long Telegram’ and ‘The X Article’ in Foreign Policy. Even Kennan eventually repudiated this strategy. Like so many of the Foreign Policy Technocrats, Ian Brzezinski lacks political/policy imagination. But more importantly NATO is and will always remain a military organization: a wing of American Military power, whose fealty is not to the notion of peaceful co-existence! 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d5829831-8ecb-486e-9b1f-251fb58450ef

From “you have to applaud the caregivers at 8 pm, they are heroes” to “you can drag them to the ground by their hair and violate them even if they claim their ventoline” really fast.

Headline: Emmanuel Macron in search of renewed reformist zeal

Sub-headline: France is handling the deconfinement better than the medical emergency

https://www.ft.com/content/56fc70b6-af17-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf762e

What other newspaper, specializing in Capitalist Apologetics/Advocacy, the reader can reverse the order of these terms at will, would print this encomium to M. 37% ? The days of the utterly bloated/pretentious ‘Jupertarian Politics’, is now long forgotten in the rush of events, not to speak of the unprecedented appearance of the gilets jaunes, gilets noirs, gilets fems, and their resistance to Macron’s Neo-Liberal project, that has crossed political lines.

The ‘Editors‘ of this publication are smitten with M. 37% and his project, but dare not name it political opportunism, in face of an open and tenacious rebellion. The Posh Boys and Girls, at this publication, don’t waste their time on twitter, where the ‘rebels’ post their videos of , unreported by a Corporate Media that categorize these events as ‘non-events’.      

Macronism was supposed to be about liberating French entrepreneurialism from an outsized public sector, yet state support is now the order of the day.

Political shape-shifting, though, is Mr Macron’s craft. Sunday’s address hinted at a new political formula combining what he called “republican patriotism”, social solidarity and a commitment to a low-carbon economic recovery.

The Editors are unable to self-emancipate from the thrall of Macron’s ‘modernising zeal’ , that is in fact a faith in the demonstrably failed trinity of Mises/Hayek/Friedman. 

That Macron expresses his Napoleonic ambition to lead the faltering European Project openly, even as the domestic Rebellion regains is former political strength: The Editors attempt to present this enarque, as a ‘Reformer’ , while speculating at possible political strategies to re-invigorate his political position:  ‘while addressing the inequities exacerbated by the crisis’ , the reader can only laugh at this lie! 

Mr Macron may seek a new élan by jettisoning his prime minister, an established tactic in the fifth republic but one that no longer seems to work. He has few compelling alternative candidates for the job, in any case. It is more important to create a policy agenda for the recovery that preserves his modernising zeal while addressing the inequities exacerbated by the crisis. In the end, the French, as he puts it, have to work more and produce more.

The last sentence, of the last paragraph of this propaganda, paraphrasing Macron, echos the redemptive moralizing of a Calvin or Luther, except that it is the Party Line of The Neo-Liberal Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman. 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/56fc70b6-af17-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf762e

Here is an excerpt for Andy’s latest encyclical, of June 12, 2020:

…
Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spirit to it. A spirit that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ideology — friendship, art, love, sex, scholarship, family. A spirit that seeks not to impose orthodoxy but to open up the possibilities of the human mind and soul. A spirit that seeks moral clarity but understands that this is very hard, that life and history are complex, and it is this complexity that a truly liberal society seeks to understand if it wants to advance. It is a spirit that deals with an argument — and not a person — and that counters that argument with logic, not abuse. It’s a spirit that allows for various ideas to clash and evolve, and treats citizens as equal, regardless of their race, rather than insisting on equity for designated racial groups. It’s a spirit that delights sometimes in being wrong because it offers an opportunity to figure out what’s right. And it’s generous, humorous, and graceful in its love of argument and debate. It gives you space to think and reflect and deliberate. Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this — and its mercy-free, moblike qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values,” President Kennedy once said. “For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” Let’s keep that market open. Let’s not be intimidated by those who want it closed.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/andrew-sullivan-is-there-still-room-for-debate.html

With his jejunely expressed  ‘faith’ in Liberalism, garnished with his conception  ‘soul’ , this not a ‘Liberal’ concept, but a theological one. He is grafting this concept onto his ‘Liberalism’: his disingenuous re-write. 

Aided by a quote from President Kennedy, framed in market terms. Kennedy the voice of reason, from another time in America. The idolatry of the martyr expresses Andy’s Catholic sensibility, allied to his own status as victim. 

Yet there is this record of Andy’s War Mongering, expressed as an ersatz mea culpa :

Click to access andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf

Or the publication of this in The New Republic, where he was editor from 1991 to 1996 :

Headline: Race, Genes and I.Q. — An Apologia

Sub-headline: The case for conservative multiculturalism

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

On the question of the history of ‘Liberalism’, and what defines it, Domenico Losurdo offers his Counter History:

Old Socialist