StephenKMackSD's Blog

As Yanis Varoufakis once observed ‘you don’t negotiate with the EU’ ! The Financial Times writers have a chance to repeat, and admire, in their own way, Variety’s review of the Movie Version of ‘Adults in the Room’ directed by Costa-Gavras. To say the least, Variety is not Cahiers du cinéma, or even the utterly pretentious American publication Film Comment!

In the midst of Boris Jonson’s manufactured crisis about Brexit, and its attendant political melodrama, played out in this newspaper: that has enlivened the comments section of its various ‘news stories’ on the vexing questions raised by Boris’ demonstrable incompetence- but Brussels Briefing supplies the reader with inner workings of the EU, while remaining fully vested in the Financial Times’ fealty to the highly evolved and rationalized Coal and Steel Cartel, founded by technocrat supreme Jean Monnet’s Neo-Liberalism before the fact.

Note too the use of photographs, and those evocative graphs, that drive those argumentative points home: technocrats, actual and just the pretenders, find this irresistible. See Deirdre McCloskey’s ‘The Rhetoric of Economics’ chapter 3 ‘Figures of Economic Speech’, for the hold that these explanatory devices have in economic reasoning.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/f34f72d0-cdf2-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f

___________________________________________________________

To The Posh Boys @FT

Printed the Spectator essay by Ivan Rogers, and read its eleven pages! Oxford and ENS:

Rogers was educated at Bournemouth School in his hometown, the south-coast town of Bournemouth in Dorset,^[2] at which his father taught history.^[2] After a gap year in Bremen, in north-western Germany, he studied History for three years at Balliol College at the University of Oxford, followed by the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. This was followed by another three years at Balliol, at which he pursued doctoral studies in the history of socio-biology and eugenic thinking on the political left, though he did not finish his degree.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Rogers

Establishes his credential as apologist for the Technocracy’s fealty to the Coal and Steel cartel: that ‘evolved’ into an ersatz Federalism. Although Mr. Rogers isn’t above a bit of hysteria mongering, of an almost genteel kind:

But if that is where we end up in a few weeks time, there is no politically credible path afterwards to where the Prime Minister says he wants to get. And the eventual outcome would be much worse for the UK, the EU and the entire West than it needed to be. Future political generations would excoriate this one for having let it happen – indeed in many cases for having worked assiduously to deliver, and celebrated delivering, this failure.

This era perhaps now bears more similarities with the gold standard era – with its free capital mobility, its open trade, and its staggering complacency – than any other. That era came to an abrupt and violent end with world war one and its key features could not be resuscitated for decades. Many sage figures bearing considerable similarity to our current political leadership confidently pronounced in the early 20^thcentury that conflict was now completely impossible between developed democratic states, given their economic interconnectedness. We know how that turned out.

The voice of the Eurocrat is heard:

Deep integration inevitably requires that we eliminate the transaction costs that traders and investors face in cross-border transactions, and end regulatory discontinuities at borders. To enforce, police and adjudicate this, by definition, requires supranational legislation and a supranational Court. And those necessarily undermine national autonomy in decision-making.

We used, across party lines, to be in favour of all that because we thought – and a massive extension of qualified majority voted to deliver it, supported by Margaret Thatcher – it a price worth paying for building a much larger and more open ‘home market’. The British were notorious, from Thatcher on, as the biggest enthusiasts for the Single Market.

Have we heard this before? The advocates for TPP, one being Barack Obama, recited from the Corporatist Hymnal. And Rogers is fluent in patois of the Eurocrat, and their concerns about the blessing of ‘deep integration’ and other conundrums of the European Mythology. The Greeks were the telling object lesson of the bankruptcy of the EU! Read your own newspaper:

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

So why couldn’t Germany do the same for others? “There is ample precedent within Europe for both debt relief and debt restructuring . . . There is no economic ground for Germany to be the only European country in modern times to be granted official debt relief on a massive scale and certainly no moral ground either.

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

Let me interject that what needs to happen, in tandem with Brexit, is a remaking of Britain into a revitalized Social Democratic State, with the welfare of its citizens and revitalization of its economy, and a renegotiation of trade deals with its partners,as hard as that may be is the wake of Brexit.

StephenKMackSD

Headline: Boris Johnson vows to purge rebels who vote against no-deal Brexit

Sub-headline: Threat to withdraw Tory whip and deselect former ministers such as Philip Hammond
…

The Tory rebels are planning to work with Labour and other opposition parties to try to seize control of the House of Commons order paper and then pass a law to stop Mr Johnson from executing a no-deal departure from the EU on October 31.

The prime minister agreed the dramatic deselection threat after talks with party whips and advisers at Chequers, his country residence, on Sunday; Mr Johnson’s aides believe the threat of deselection will burn off some of the rebels ahead of the critical votes this week.

But a source from the Tory whips’ office said: “If they fail to vote with the government on Tuesday they will be destroying the government’s negotiating position and handing control of parliament to Jeremy Corbyn.”

…

But Rory Stewart, former international development secretary, said: “If we want to stop no-deal, we have to stop it this week. I’m proud to be a Conservative, I want to stand as a Conservative in my constituency, but I can’t stand on a no-deal platform.”

Mr Hammond said on Saturday Mr Johnson was showing “staggering hypocrisy” in threatening to throw out Tory MPs who oppose no-deal, since eight serving cabinet ministers have rebelled on Brexit this year.

https://www.ft.com/content/92f6f320-cc87-11e9-b018-ca4456540ea6

Compare the above highly nuanced political melodrama, as deftly reported by George Parker, with Dominic Lawson’s essay in the good, grey Times of September 1, 2019

Headline: Johnson the proroguer is serving democracy

Sub-headline: In honouring the Brexit vote, the PM will save parliament from itself

…

The former chancellor Philip Hammond led the charge in describing the PM’s move as a denial of “democracy”. That might be true, if Westminster were the solitary repository of democratic legitimacy in the matter of Britain’s relationship with the EU. But it isn’t.

To understand why, read the words of the cabinet minister who introduced the second reading of the referendum bill in June 2015 — the then foreign secretary, one Philip Hammond. He began by declaring that the EU had “changed almost beyond recognition” from what the British had endorsed in the 1975 referendum, and that therefore another popular mandate was required.

He ended: “Whether you favour Britain being in or out, we surely should all be able to agree on the simple principle that the decision over our membership should be taken by the British people. Not by Whitehall bureaucrats; certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by government ministers or parliamentarians in this chamber. The decision must be for the common sense of the British people . . . For too long, powers have been handed to Brussels over their heads. For too long, their voice on Europe has not been heard. This bill puts that right. It delivers the simple in/out referendum that we promised and I commend it to the House.”

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2019-09-01/comment/johnson-the-proroguer-is-serving-democracy-5x9s5rg6m

Is it possible to ignore that Johnson has by, his act of proroguing Parliament,  rendered null, the fact that the ‘how’ of the Brexit will take place, without one of the vital political actors, in this decision, will be forcibly excluded from the negotiation of that ‘how’.

But the above quote by Philip Hammond : Not by Whitehall bureaucrats; certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by government ministers or parliamentarians in this chamber. The decision must be for the common sense of the British people . . .

The Brexit will simply take place via a vote? Call Mr. Lawson employment of Hammond’s reductionism awash in political fantasy.

It is true the prime minister is more concerned to honour the referendum result than the will of parliament (which has been to oppose everything and back nothing). In the battle between two forms of democratic legitimacy, he has taken sides. But if parliament declares itself more sovereign than the people, it will do itself more damage than any bombs dropped on it by the real Hitler.

The balance between all of the three branches of government is the imperative that must be recognized as just that!

Old Socialist

Headline: This is Not Propaganda — how the information revolution was hijacked

Sub-headline: The Soviet-born writer warns of the ‘war against reality’ being waged by populist forces

Pomerantsev reviewed by Thornhill is instructive in terms of political melodrama , at its most gruesome, with the murder of Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, described in vivid detail. At least as vivid as Financial Time’s might permit! Mr. Thornhill’s two paragraphs describes Pomerantsev’s realization:

…

The impetus for the book came from Pomerantsev’s realisation that although he had left Russia in 2010, Russia had somehow followed him. Having dismissed the country as a “sideshow, a curio pickled in its own agonies”, he began to notice how many of its pathologies were popping up elsewhere.

“Suddenly the Russia I had known appeared to be all around me: a radical relativism which implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgias, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equating to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is just information warfare . . . and just this sense that everything under one’s feet is constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid.”

…

The review sifts focus for just a paragraph to recount, in highly condensed form, Pomerantsev’s father’s story and posits the notion ‘new narratives’.

…

But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the global financial crisis of 2008 exploded both narratives, throwing ideology up into the air. Smart populist politicians, including Putin and Donald Trump, have been quicker than many rivals to invent infectious new narratives, playing heavily on conspiracy theory and ethnic identity.

…

The story of the American intervention in the internal affairs of Russia, after the Fall of The Soviet Union, which placed manipulable drunkard Boris Yeltsin in power. That, then,  led directly to the rise of Putin is, and remains, subject to the political amnesia of both this author and his reviewer. Should ‘we’ thank Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott for Putin, by way of the Yeltsin appointment?

To express it in terms of the current Political Mythology, why might Putin hate The West? Look to the infliction of  vengeful Market Discipline on the Russian People? Instead, what the reader receives from Pomerantsev, is another reheated version of The Populist Menace: this left-over has been reheated so many times, it smells like what it is fetid political garbage.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/073057c0-c9a6-11e9-af46-b09e8bfe60c0

@Les Kaye votes Leave! @Lancaster Professional

Blonde in the Belly of the Beast is your first source! She is articulate, but she lapses into what can only be called a collection of straw-men,  a litany of bad actors favored by the Canadian Frontiersman Jordan Peterson: to call him a charlatan is an apt descriptor!  ‘Blonde’s‘ version of the Frankfurt School is pure fiction! Read Theodor W. Adorno : One Last Genius by Detlev Claussen:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057135

Adorno was an active advocate of democracy, in Germany in the face of student protests, when he returned to his home.

Also read The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1555-the-melancholy-science

Polemic has its place, and she is an accomplished practitioner of the art. Polemic in service to what? is the pressing question. Consider the practice of willful ignorance! ‘Blonde’s’ collection of bad actors, fills her audience with dread of The Enemy Within, a favorite trope of not the status quo, but of a politics cleansed of unruly dissidents: see Bloom, Kimball, D’Souza and its latest duo Lukianoff and Haidt for her precursors!

Regards

StephenKMackSD

https://on.ft.com/2ZvnFiI

Headline: Argentina is in default, says Standard & Poor’s

Sub-headline: Restructuring plan amounts to the ninth time that the country has reneged on its debt

Argentina has defaulted on its debt, according to Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, after it announced plans to delay payments on its $101bn of borrowings.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/9161f0c0-caff-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f

Standard & Poor’s like the other ‘rating agencies’ are bankrupt!

Headline : The Indisputable Role of Credit Ratings Agencies in the 2008 Collapse, and Why Nothing Has Changed
…
The role of the credit ratings agencies during the financial crisis remains highly criticized and mostly unaccountable. The agencies have been blamed for exaggerated ratings of risky mortgage-backed securities, giving investors false confidence that they were safe for investing. While criticizing the ratings by credit ratings agencies in an op-ed for The New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “The skewed assessments, in turn, helped the financial system take on far more risk than it could safely handle.” In 2011, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found that these ratings agencies “were key enablers of the financial meltdown.”
…
https://truthout.org/articles/the-indisputable-role-of-credit-ratings-agencies-in-the-2008-collapse-and-why-nothing-has-changed/

Germany defaulted four times in the 20th Century as reported in this newspaper:

…

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

When do the Posh Boys at The Financial Times admit that Neo-Liberalism is not just an utter failure, but a catastrophe? There is more about Macri political defeat, and ‘The Three’ lowering Argentina’s credit rating- the corrupt ‘rating’ the incompetent?

Argentina’s bonds and currency have slumped since Mr Macri — who had been a popular figure with international investors — suffered an unexpectedly heavy defeat in a primary election which all but ended his hopes of re-election in October.

…

The result of the primary election had already seen two of the big three rating agencies lower Argentina’s credit rating.

Next in line is the Financial Times’ Editorial Board’s intervention:

Headline: Argentina’s debt debacle poses a difficult choice

Sub-headline: Addiction to US dollar borrowing is haunting the country once again

Argentina is hurtling towards another disorderly debt default. It would be the ninth in the country’s history. The timing is highly unusual, coming two months before a presidential election and less than a year into an IMF bailout that had already been increased. But it is also a recognition of reality. IMF assumptions on Argentina’s ability to roll over its short-term debt proved wildly optimistic in the face of political uncertainty. A recent central-bank auction that covered only a fraction of the debt falling due highlighted how much Argentina is struggling to refinance its vast and largely US dollar-denominated debt pile.

The resounding defeat of President Mauricio Macri in a nationwide primary election on August 11 triggered protracted financial market turbulence. The currency has weakened by about 25 per cent since the vote, taking the country’s ratio of public debt to gross domestic product — 86 per cent at the end of 2018 — to something closer to 100 per cent. The finance ministry announced late on Wednesday that Argentina will seek a “voluntary reprofiling” of its debt, though describing the problem as “liquidity stresses” rather than a solvency issue. The distinction does not matter. Maturity extensions are classified as defaults by rating agencies. And institutional investors have been given no choice in the delay in repayment of $7bn in short-term debt imposed by the government. Argentina will now try to negotiate a restructuring on the rest of its debt, split between $44bn in repayments to the IMF and $50bn in international bonds. Any swift agreement will be difficult to achieve.

https://www.ft.com/content/63999014-ca67-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f

The reader notes that Macri is given a bit of a scolding by @FT: his ‘Austerity Lite’ wasn’t strong enough medicine. In sum, Market Discipline must cause suffering to insure ‘salvation‘. This, the Party Line of the Free Market Mythology in route!

The country’s economic problems are deep rooted. But Mr Macri bears some responsibility for not tackling them more robustly. Years of outsized fiscal and current account deficits are only now being reined in — the latter thanks more to a collapse in imports than to any sustained improvement in exports. Had Mr Macri accelerated fiscal consolidation at the start of his term four years ago and relied more heavily on domestic financing, Argentina’s vulnerabilities would be much lower. This “original sin” problem has been the country’s downfall time and again.

The editors then consider Macri’s responsibility in this debacle, eliding from their narrative the why of the near free-fall of the peso, but most importantly, the continuing proof that Neo-Liberalism is a spent force.

With the exception of Macron’s ‘Reforms’, that are not just haunted by both the  gilets jaunes and gilets noirs, but a generalized political discontent, defined by the 36.5% of ‘spoiled ballots’ in the final vote:  that can, given the right circumstance, lead to open rebellion!

Old Socialist

Instead of announcing your ignorance about Cosmopolitanism, and your use of it as a political straw-man of your fictional New Republicanism, that looks like the same bourgeois respectable Racism of Reagan ( ’76’Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’,’80 ‘I believe in States Rights’)

Add to this inherited Dixiecrat toxicity, the usable paranoia, of the McCarthy/Mundt/McCarran/Nixon Axis, and its attack on The New Deal as ‘a generation of treason’ . Voila! there you are, the natural inheritor of this legacy, in all your brazen, cultivated ignorance, in its various dimensions : the charge that the ‘Democrats’, read New Democrats, have any interest, or the intellectual inclination, much less the  capacity to advocate for such a larger moral/political vision, is preposterous on its face! Cosmopolitanism and bankrupt Neo-Liberalism are antithetical practices and World Views !

A possible avenue of escape from your state of ignorance ?

Here is screenshot of the first page of Chapter 2, page 48:

Have one of your underlings type up a paragraph length precis of this book, and/or just block me from commenting on your twitter account!

Add to your reading list, as part of your self-education, this book:

Regards,

Queer Atheist

Headline:Seven days in August tell us ‘We’re not Rome’

Sub-headline: The US president is no Caesar, and the imperial moment lies in the past

Recall that Mr Ferguson opened his August 11, 2019 column with this, framed in the above headline and sub-headline :

‘A republic, madam — if you can keep it.” That was supposedly Benjamin Franklin’s reply to a woman who asked him the result of the constitutional convention after it adjourned in 1787.

But later in his essay he mentions his bedtime reading:

My bedtime reading last week was Seven Days in May, a bestselling novel by Charles W Bailey and Fletcher Knebel, first published in 1962, when John Kennedy was president. It’s a reminder that “We are Rome” was a much more plausible claim in the early phase of the Cold War than it is today.

Mr. Ferguson’s essay then evolves into a discussion of the 1964 film, Seven Days in May, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Ferguson can’t resist the temptation to engage in a bit of what? Hyperbolically charged Movie Criticism?

The president, Jordan Lyman, is a bookish former governor who has signed a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The would-be emperor, General James Scott (played with wolfish charisma by Burt Lancaster in the film), regards Lyman as a weakling and a dupe.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-days-in-august-tell-us-were-not-rome-cmfz29cf7

The pungent characterization of Lancaster’s performance as displaying ‘wolfish charisma‘ demonstrates that Ferguson possesses literary prowess?

In his August 25, 2019 essay Mr. Ferguson opens it with this headline and sub-headline. He frames this essay with another American Movie reference:

Headline: From Trump’s trade wars to Brazil’s fires, the world is on the brink

Sub-headline: Global games of chicken are frying our planet

‘Hey, Toreador! . . . We head for the edge, and the first man who jumps is a chicken. All right?” In Rebel without a Cause, Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) play the most famous game of chicken in Hollywood history, driving their jalopies at full speed towards a Californian cliff. At the last minute, Jim jumps. Buzz, his sleeve caught on the door handle, plunges to his death.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/from-trumps-trade-wars-to-brazils-fires-the-world-is-on-the-brink-nvq6ds90w

Mr. Ferguson is catching up on his American Movie viewing, which seems to favor Hollywood political potboilers and melodramas!

Mr. Ferguson has missed one of Lancaster’s most unmannered and memorable performances in ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’, in which he plays newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker, modeled after Walter Winchell.

American Writer

Headline: The global gag on free speech is tightening

Sub-headline: In both democracies and dictatorships, it is getting harder to speak up

After a roll call of political bad actors, in nation  state contexts, on the vexing question of ‘Free Speech’ the Posh Boy & Girl coterie @TheEconomist shift their narrative by means of this utterly weak segue:

Meanwhile, in mature democracies, support for free speech is ebbing, especially among the young, and outright hostility to it is growing. Nowhere is this more striking than in universities in the United States.

The Economist reactionary clique then rely on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s anti-student political hysteria of “The coddling of the American mind”

The Economist clique is utterly ignorant of the American political context that is essential to an understanding of ‘The Coddling‘ , as political polemic.An integral part of an American Anti-Intellectual, Anti-Student tradition.

For those of us who came of age in California during the late 50’s and 60’s, can recall Max Rafferty as State Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1963- using the dismissive trope of coddling or its cognates ,to describe The Free Speech Movement of 1964, led by Mario Savio, Reagan’s governorship from ’67 to ’71 steeped in anti-student bile, the San Francisco State boycott and its conservative hero S. I.  Hayakawa.

Not to forget the substantial pioneering work done by Allen Bloom  in his  ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ of 1987 ,that described in detail, the students of succeeding generations addled by narcissism and ‘Rock Music’. ‘Students’ ignored self-appointed Platonic Guardian Bloom.  The poor old neglected Professor, had his revenge, in his polemic framed in World Historical terms, a la Hegel as interpreted by Alexandre Kojève.   Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel  its English language version compiled by Bloom. Its charitable to call Bloom’s polemic bloated hysteria mongering.

American Anti-Intellectualism was given further weight by attacks on academic professionals in Kimball’s 1990 ‘Tenured Radicals’ and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 ‘Illiberal Education’. 

The Economists writers recount to its readers, the horror stories collected by Lukianoff and  Haidt aided by other destructive actors like Black Lives Matter, “antifa” , French “yellow jacket” . ‘The Proud Boys’ are alluded to in this essay , by means of this: ‘far-right extremists’. What is reader to think of the writers at The Economist who, not very carefully, launder a gang of White Nationalists?

Headline: James Fields Guilty of First-Degree Murder in Death of Heather Heyer

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Sixteen months after swastika-toting white supremacists swarmed the streets of Charlottesville, one of the demonstrators was convicted of first-degree murder Friday by a jury that found he intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring nearly 40 others.

James Fields Jr., 21, faces up to life in prison for the death of Heather Heyer, 32, in a case that has stirred soul-searching in a city that prides itself on being a liberal bastion. Mr. Fields, who traveled from Ohio to attend the Unite the Right rally, was also convicted of nine other charges, including aggravated malicious wounding and leaving the scene of a fatal accident.

Friday’s verdict was cheered by those fighting racial and religious hatred and provided some closure in a case that cast a national spotlight on Charlottesville, the scene chosen by racists and anti-Semites to rally for their cause, near a Confederate monument that some city leaders were trying to remove.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/us/james-fields-trial-charlottesville-verdict.html

Yet none of these organization named, Black Lives Matter, “antifa” , French “yellow jacket” exist as State Actors, but indigenous civic actors, but without any demonstrable connection to State Power!

Another feminist, 60-year-old Maria MacLachlan, was beaten up by a transgender activist at Speakers’ Corner in London, where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct.

The failure of this Economist Coterie to convincingly connect the Populist Bad Actors, in their National political contexts, with the political horror stories provided by Lukianoff and Haidt , with additional embroidery, renders this essay a mere excuse for more of the same, from this ultra-conservative newspaper: Populism, and a decline in an argued ‘free speech’ allied to a  ‘political civility’, are connected to a ‘radicalism’ that threatens the benefits of ‘Centrism’ . Call that ‘Centrism’ an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism that cannot right itself.

Old Socialist

https://www.economist.com/international/2019/08/17/the-global-gag-on-free-speech-is-tightening?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/theglobalgagonfreespeechistighteningthenewcensors

I’ve read both Mr. Galbraith’s and Mr. Caryl’s reviews of ‘Russia Hand’ and tweeted these two comments to Mr Talbott:

Tweet number 1

@strobetalbott

James K. Galbraith reviews your book ‘The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy’. Although you deserve scathing polemic. Perhaps the NYRB review might provide that? Galbraith 1st then Christian Caryl.
The Ghost of I.F. Stone

In the late days of 1992, economist Axel Leijonhufvud of UCLA got in touch with me. Leijonhufvud was then an adviser to the new country of Kazakhstan. He had written a penetrating analysis of how free-market policies would destroy the industrial structure of the old Soviet Union, and with it the livelihoods of many millions living there. Leijonhufvud asked that I find a way to convey his papers to Strobe Talbott, who had just assumed a position as President Clinton’s special adviser on Russian matters. Through a personal connection, I forwarded the materials to Talbott.

The anecdote is trivial, except for two points. First, it illustrates that there were economists who did know just how disastrous the “shock therapy” program then under way in Russia would prove. The notion that no one knew has been widely used as an alibi since then, but it is false. Second, there is no evidence that this information made any impression on Talbott, nor indeed on anyone in the Clinton administration.

Talbott’s memoir, The Russia Hand, helps to clarify why this could be so. Talbott knew Russia. The opening pages evoke his youthful visit — and that of his friend Bill Clinton a year later — to the Soviet Union, the great shades of Russian intellectual life (from Mandelstam to Brodsky) encountered over the years, and how the young scholars “quietly detested” the system. (It is Clinton, not Talbott, who is the Russia hand of the book’s title.) Though Moscow was “better heated” than Oxford in 1968, the Soviet Union was drab and repressive. The regime had a criminal past; in the present, it is seen distributing “stale bread and rotten sausages.” It did not occur to Talbott that the alternative — well-stocked shops selling excellent produce that almost no one can buy — might, for many Russians, prove to be worse.

https://prospect.org/article/shock-without-therapy

Tweet number 2

Replying to

@StephenKMackSD
and @strobetalbott

Then there is this:
… as Talbott puts it, “The rules that governed IMF lending weren’t arbitrary or intrusive — they were a reflection of the immutable principles of economics, which operated in a way similar to the rules of physics.” Talbott relates this without irony.

Talbott offers this astounding proof of his cultivated ignorance:  ‘immutable principles of economics, which operated in a way similar to the rules of physics.” Economic Determinism as an article, not of faith, but of Science?

I regret to say Mr. Christian Caryl review of Mr. Strobe’s book/political self-apologetic offered minimal insights, too mild mannered a critique of Mr. Talbott. But later in his essay he gives the game away with this comment on FDR, and  his confidence that he could handle Stalin, as indicative of the dangers of ‘personalized diplomacy’

…
One of the obvious problems with personalized diplomacy, for all the hard work it may entail, is its intellectual laziness. It is the eternal fantasy of US foreign policy that leaders can simply get together and talk things over like regular guys. After reading this memoir, I came across the following remark in a new book on the end of World War II, when an ailing FDR was thoroughly hoodwinked by Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt’s claim, “I can handle Stalin,” was part of what Eisenhower’s political adviser Robert Murphy acknowledged to be “the all-too- prevalent American theory” that individual friendships can determine national policy. “Soviet policy-makers and diplomats never operate on that theory,” he added.
…

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/07/18/giving-the-russians-their-spinach/

In sum Mr. Caryl is a Cold Warrior and shares with Talbott the myth of Stalin as – the fate of ‘Eastern Europe’ lay in the hands of a ‘hoodwinked’ FDR: this has resonances of the Republicans, like Nixon and McCarthy, of an hysterical charge that The New Deal was a ‘Generation of Treason’,in a dilute form. Yet still partaking in a manufactured ‘betrayal myth’. The fact that the utterly destructive coterie, of demonstrably incompetent and vindictive Technocrats,  Talbott and his collection of ‘Experts’, aided and abetted the rise of the Oligarchs cannot be denied. Except to those who trade on the currency of that ‘betrayal myth’ in whatever iteration.

Old Socialist