Did you even read the content of the article?
Yup. And I even noticed it wasn't by the American State Department, whose own words you were claiming to link to, and then tried to defend not referring to in favor of a detractor's take before taking issue for positions not being accurately reflected.
The article was less interesting than the irony, and not particularly relevant to the post the citation was meant to refute.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one went right over your head...
A common mistake you make, I'm sure.
Lol. Okay.
Okay indeed.
Now, would you like to drop further points to a more defensible motte, or just try one more time for a last word? There aren't many more positions left for you to abandon in the face of challenge, but I doubt I'll see more than a downvote.
Dean
16d ago
And he tried exercising it to find more amicable solutions to the problem. That's what the Minsk Accords were.
The Minsk Accords were many things- including the functional erosion of national sovereignty by legislating an external power's veto by proxy- but an amicable solution they were not.
Why was the west encouraging Ukraine behind the scenes to give Russia a run around, while the west poured arms into the country to bolster its strength so the government could betray the terms of their agreement?
Why wouldn't the west encourage Ukraine not to submit to unreasonable Russian demands that the Russians knew were unreasonable and would not be accepted, while bolstering the ability to resist the military coercion that pushed the demands in the first place?
The demands were unreasonable, and were made at the end of a military intervention. Europeans, as with many other cultures, tend not to support those things against their neighbors lest it be applied to them.
Dean
9d ago
There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.
Dean
18d ago
There's also the points that one of the key premise of the Iron Dome system as a system that doesn't just bankrupt the country is it's trajectory tracking for when things are believed to be going for low-risk impact areas. Rather than shooting expensive interceptors at everything, it, well, doesn't, and the parameters for what it does/does not accept risk on are subject to different factors.
As such, Ranger's twitter doesn't really indicate as much as one might want one way or another. Things 'getting through' the Iron Dome isn't the failure state, it's the intended state. At the same time, it doesn't mean the system wasn't being overwhelmed... but also doesn't mean that the system was running out of ammo / got hit / etc.
Without clarity on to what was being hit, there's not much saying whether the system succeeded of failed at it's purpose.
Given that Ukrainian opinions on European Union affiliation were a matter of public record, it certainly would be a far reach to deny that the EU was popular for the Ukrainians.
Just as the political controversy of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot protestors after public Russian pressure was also a well-apparent fact at the time. Just a mite consequential, when your own government is composed of people backed by those protestors.
But feel free to fluff up the American importance in things that weren't really about the Americans. I understand they feel insecure these days, and it makes both them and their haters feel better if they're the hyperagents in a Ukrainian political movement literally named after the Euro.
...did you forget a negative and mean to say 'if Trump wins'?
A significant part of the drama of the last decade of American politics centers around the modern Democratic party's collusion with various state and non-state actors to perpetrate a series of conspiracies and smear campaigns to a degree not seen in political generations for the purpose of making Trump lose no matter what. Russia-gate wasn't simply an election-year smear, but a sustained multi-year conspiracy that was on national television so often that the Democratic party convinced a plurality of itself that it was true. Well-established precedents in various legal subjects were tossed or ignored in the name of lawfare against policies, nullification theory was directly resurrected in the name of resistance, and entirely new and novel legal theories were embraced in the name of prosecution and attempted disqualification. There are a whole host of tactics and escalations that have been unleashed on Trump that are not even close to matched when he was in a position of actual power.
If Trump is destroyed, the message is not clear or firmly set that 'heads I win tails you lose' election will result in the person doing it's total annihilation, because the Democratic coalition has been doing that for most of the last decade would not have been annihilated. Trump's defeat would be a validation, not a discreditation, to that style of politics.
Don't know why you're trying make a mess of history on the matter. Even the regime change wing of the State Department admits of their activities in Russia's backyard and the very thing I'm calling it out for.
I'm not sure why you believe Global Research .ca, an anti-globalization conspiracy website, represents the regime change wing of the State Department, but this would be both an incorrect citation and not a rebuttal to the post on hyper and hypo agency.
And as such, Russia's response is reasonable in turn to US' operations in their sphere of influence.
Similarly, you seem to have missed that point that he was making fun of the argument structure, and not actually making a position that your argeement with would advance your position.
Doesn't make for strange bedfellows when you understand the Minsk Accords mandated a similar relationship to Ukraine that the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period,
Which was not an amicable solution to negotiations, but a compulsory surrender punctuated by more than one nuclear weapon after years of unrestricted submarine warfare against an island that needed to import resources and firebombing of cities made of wood and paper... after the receiving country had launched a series of unprovoked invasions and a litany of warcrimes across the region.
The Minsk Accords were, again, many things, but the Pacific Campaign of WW2 they were not.
which remains today.
Alas, the Japanese-American alliance today does not remain an unconditional military occupation with overt censorship by the occupying authority.
Also, the Russians aren't interested in dismantling a warmongering oligarchy as much as installing one.
Dean
16d ago
...?
By contrast, the power of Borris Johnson to coerce, compel, bewitch, or otherwise overturn the true desires of the Ukrainian political establishment was...?
There are three general sets of US sanctions / trade restrictions on Cuba, which for political convenience/tradition are often grouped together under the misnomer of 'blockade.'
Group one, and the longest and the original source of the blockade moniker, is the Embargo. The Embargo restricts US citizens, companies, and foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing trade with Cuba outside of specific Humanitarian niches (i.e. food). The Embargo doesn't legally stop others from doing so, and while there have been arguments to the effect that it was a soft-ban- mainly because of past US threats to stop giving foreign aid to countries that did non-food business to Cuba- this is neither a blockade nor an obstacle to those who saw greater value from business with Cuba than in aid from the US. Foreign companies, including European ones integrated with (and thus at risk to) the US economy can and have done trade with Cuba without sanctions retaliation, especially in the last 3 decades since the Cold War. Rather, the reason the Europeans and Chinese and others don't invest much in the Cuban is that Cuba is notoriously bad at paying back its loans, and has been since the cold war when it was a regular frustration of the Soviets, and the early-2000s belief that foreign companies could get into the Cuban market before the American companies did but reap the American money flowing into Cuba weren't worth the steady losses. The countries continuing to offer Cuba loans or sell things in exchange things for IOUs are typically doing so for ideological interests / strategic concessions (Venezuela, Russia, China), rather than economic.
Group two, and sometimes cited but rarely carried further on inspection, are the more targeted sanctions, typically on senior leaders and for humanitarian abuses. These are not massive impacts on the broader economy, but do limit the ability of Cuban party elites and security officials to establish themselves as Russian-style oligarchs in the international system, as they become non-viable business interests even as they monopolize business opportunities at scale, but few people seriously argue that a Venezuela or Russian oligarchic model is some moral imperative as a step forward and that non-sanctioning these people would create some significant material change for the population.
Group three, and the one that modern Cuba actually would have the most grounds on saying impacts them but which is the furthest from the traditional Embargo rhetoric, is Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism under post-9-11 counter-terrorism-finance legislation. For those unaware, that's the actual and wide-reaching legislation which unlike the Embargo isn't just for US-actors, but very much an international 'if you want to do business with or through the US, you won't with the countries on this list' dynamic. No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list, there's just irregular (and usually weak) pressure that it just shouldn't matter that much / that Cuba is really hosting them to facilitate peace. Cuba was on the list pretty much from the start of the post-9-11 changes, but since the state list is as much a political tool as anything else, Obama dropped Cuba in 2015 when it was pursuing normalization with the expectation of a Hillary hand-off (which, implicitly, would have meant an election win where the Cuban vote in Florida didn't derail the Democrats), but Trump won and... didn't actually re-apply it until 2021, right before leaving office, and the Biden administration has maintained the same core assessment for upholding it that Cuba wasn't cooperating to general expectations. So not actually a partisan wedge issue, and not a 'anything but the predecessor' American policy decision.
Overall, the US Embargo had an effect but was mostly a propaganda deflection for the Communist system, general sanctions aren't particularly relevant, but the state sponsor of terrorism restrictions have real teeth... but, of course, have to compete with the point that Cuba is still run by the same sort of people who believe state control of the economy is a moral as well as strategic security for the party-state.
Dean
1mo ago
The refusal to be alone in a room with a woman that wasn't his wife, yes. That it was on grounds he couldn't be trusted is the partisan strawman.
Dean
20d ago
You are probably thinking of the Icelink proposal.
This was a proposal as opposed to a project, and more or less died in the later 2010s at the Feasibility study level. There are probably three main reasons for that. One, cost-benefit on a technical level, as Icelink was more of an environmental proposal for UK governments to boast green credentials than an actual way to most efficiently use green energy in industry (as you could just invest the energy consumption infrastructure in Iceland). Two, related to cost and benefit, was Brexit, on top of the internal budget disruption to the UK governmental also put the UK and Iceland on opposite sides of the EU single market wall at a time when UK and EU relations at the regulatory and policy level were, shall we say, uninterested in major investments to the UK benefit. Third was the point that any UK investment in Icelink would land in territories with significant risk of separating from the UK over the medium/long term, as the cables would either naturally land in Scotland- where the SNP was having a strong period and polling near-majorities in hypothetical separation referendums- or in Northern Ireland- which the post-Brexit EU policy was to have economically segregated from the rest of the UK economic-legal architecture. A major, UK-level investment which would provide EU baseload power to territories with significant political interests who would rather be a part of the EU than UK would be a territorial integrity risk.
So, don't expect it to go through.
Which is a shame, because when it is available at economically viable rates, geothermal is one of the 'better' green power systems because it meets the baseload power requirements of predictable, non-swingy power. The economic viability is dependent on geography that isn't necessarily where you want it, but that's actually why long-range transmission makes sense in that context because you can't simply build a closer geothermal plant, but geothermal is good baseload generation and if you do build it, you don't have to build duplicative generation capacity like with intermittant green sources.
Dean
9d ago
I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.
Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.
Dean
1mo ago
Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet.
This is the motte, and yet not the same as an implicit claim that the Americans are exceptionally involved in every corner of the planet, let alone in every administrative decision of the planet, let alone vis-a-vis the ability of local actors.
That the Americans have more ability to project power to distant corners than others is quite different than that Americans have more ability to be involved than local powers who may not be able to project far, but are actually local.
Given that the exceptional US ability to get involved in every corner of the planet is dependent on having allies and partners in every corner of the planet able or willing to facilitate their involvement, the ability of the US to effectively influence needs to be compared to places where it lacks critical enablers- and thus who they are.
If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years.
Interesting claim. Identify the villages, please, and why the bombings were on grounds of not being ruled by the Americans, as opposed to other reasons that other non-US powers wouldn't emulate if placed in equivalent contexts.
The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries.
Are we conflating wars and meddling as the same category, and are we comparing to historical trends?
If it's just in terms of starting wars, the US is unexceptional in historical terms. The only interesting point in relative terms is its relative ability in the Pax Americana, which is notable for being one of the most peaceful periods in human history precisely because the US had- and exercised- unique ability to pick conflicts.
If the argument is simply in ability to meddle in non-war-instigating forms, this is a reflection of evolving technology and economic growth over time, which the American system coincided with and encouraged, but which is not a uniquely American pathology in nature. The Americans certainly conduct more cyber-espionage than the colonial empires of old ever did- this is because the colonial empires lacked computer networks to spy on, not the willingness.
If the argument is simply about the size and capability of the US, because it's big, that's neither an argument of moral inclination nor an argument that the size and capability actually have been disproportionate in starting wars and meddling relative to the size and capability of other actors.
Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.
'Driving force' is a meaningless term bar a relative comparison of forces, which you have not and consistently do not provide comparisons to.
The US was not exactly thrilled by hostile forces extending their influence into its hemisphere during the Cold War (or any other time really), especially the forward basing of missiles. It's expected that great powers will try to avoid this.
It's also expected that Russia can read a map and is aware that it is already in the position regardless of Ukraine- so invading Ukraine to keep it out of NATO doesn't change the missile threat, and thus does not serve as a sensible rational. If NATO wanted to place missiles in range of Moscow, they don't need Ukraine to do so.
Likewise, it's also well known that the US is in range of Russian missile bases in... Russia. Russia gets no nuclear posture advantage by advancing nuclear bases into Ukraine.
The Cuban Missile Crisis logic stopped making any sort of strategic sense within two decades of it happening. The US did not need to maintain nuclear missiles in Turkey for the sake of ranging Russia, and the Russians did not need missiles based in Cuba to range the US. ICBMs and SLBMs largely rendered the role of IRBMs irrelevant, which is why they were an easy-to-negotiate away weapon in the nuclear arms control treaties as a trust-building measure.
Sensors and missiles based in Ukraine are relevant to nuclear warfare, as are Ukraine's claims to Donbass and Crimea.
Not really. The sensors and missiles that can nuke Russia can do so from the continental united states and orbit. The nuclear deterrence argument continues to fail because the technology levels involved are not the 1950s or 60s or even 70s.
If you want to argue that Ukraine is the key to a potential NATO nuclear decapitation strike of Russia, you need to establish what Ukraine brings to the table that the Baltic countries don't... and why Russia's second-strike deterrent capability only works in the invade-Ukraine scenario but not in the other.
Dean
16d ago
And where would you expect to see the other side that vested western interests have an interest in keeping suppressed? CNN? Fox? MSNBC?
Non-American or European media, to start. Al Jazeera has good production value if you're insistent on English language, but if you're willing to indulge in machine translation then there are entire other continents of geopolitical fans with viewpoints- and memories- outside of anglosphere cultural frameworks.
However, your citation wasn't to have someone on the other side of vested western interests- your citation was on a claim of what the vested western interests were themselves supposed to be admitting. Citing someone accusing them of stuff is not them admitting to... well, you were very vague and generic, to a degree it's not clear what was supposedly being confessed to (or not).
Which, admittedly, was probably the rhetorical technique intended, it was just an odd appeal to authority to neither cite the authority, or anyone with special insight into the authority's position, but then to immediately appeal to an outsider with no authority when the lack of authority was noted.
How about the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy? Or is he just a senile old man at this point?
Chomsky was a senile old man at heart decades ago, given that he's been an anti-american tribalist for longer than you've likely been alive with no particular moral creed to peg consistency to otherwise, and not a particularly impressive one unless you're awed by sophistry. If you think he's the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy, you have a very shuttered view of the world of American critics.
If you want intellectual heft, try the French foreign policy establishment and its advocates. Defiantly not-American enough not to buy into Anglophone tropes by default, but familiar enough with both western cultural contexts and a cultural inclination towards argument structure to be delightfully relevant, and with significant national patronage in order to define themselves against the US in their attempts to align Europe to their interests.
You're the one who obliged with the logic of that statement. Makes it difficult to argue against if you stand with it.
I suspect the difficulty is that you don't seem to recognize- or at least acknowledge- a satirical tone of non-agreement. Neither he nor I were standing with the position, and your continuing insistence that they were (and your word choice in the process) is suggestive that part of the reason why may be that English isn't your first language.
Seems like you're engaging in some pretty strenuous intellectual acrobatics to preserve a conclusion you wouldn't accept if another actor adopted a similar justification.
I accept your concession of your limited perception with good cheer.
Sure, you made a silly historical metaphor while trying to ignore the inconvenient parts that ruin it as a simile. History's hard. Fortunately, this is the motte, and asinine positions are for being flanked, spanked, and penetrated as a result.
Judged by the standards of moral idealism, maybe both Russia and the US fall short. Judged by the standards of the world's only superpower, Russia isn't doing anything the US wouldn't approve of in it's own defense.
Modern Russia is certainly doing things the modern US wouldn't approve of in its own defense, not least of which is invading adjacent countries in territorial expansionism on irredentalist grounds based in the past. American warmongers of the current generation, as everyone has familair examples of, invade far-away countries on ideological grounds driven far more by humanitarian considerations/rationals in the present.
Even if you wanted to appeal to the 1800s Americas, back when it was run by racist imperialist most Americans would be appalled by and oppose today if a mirror-US magically appeared, the expansionist era American imperialists didn't rely on claims historical conquest to justify their conquests. They just resorted to the sort of lovably mockable jingoism and manifest destiny that's parodied, and no one believes or particularly claims that the Mexican-American war was a defensive war.
The fact that you tried appeal to a war the better of a century ago- to a war that was declared against rather than by the US by the perpetrators rather than defendent of territorial aggression- to force some kind of equivalence between the modern US-Japan relationship and the ongoing attempt to subjugate Ukraine kind of shows you missed the mark on historical metaphors. The US-Japan relationship of 2020 isn't the relationship of 1950, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not aiming to establish a relationship of 2020 US-Japan.
Now, if you argument is instead that Japan is analogous to Russia, and that Russia should be nuked and forced into unconditional surrender in order to be occupied and forcibly reconstructed as Japan was, that might be an interesting historical parallel to make...
You want me to be more introspective, check your own actions at the door first.
I'd rather you devise a competent metaphor than be introspective. Naval gazing and whataboutism is easy, but not particularly impressive. Competence is hard.
Alas, the Japanese-American alliance today does not remain an unconditional military occupation with overt censorship by the occupying authority.
Which wasn't the point I was making. If you think history is important, I encourage you to read it. If not, then that tells me everything I need to understand your position.
I will submit that you likely think you are far more informed than you are, but that you also don't care when you make a bad historical claim with more relevant differences than similarities.
If you care to disagree with my position on historical differences mattering... let's hear it!
Dean
1mo ago
Aside from the border being closed, I would assume that Finland takes a dim attitude towards mass murderers, even if they're mass murderers of Russians.
Finland has one of the largest unmonitored borders in the region, as only the SE-most is actually populated and monitored. You could literally walk across most of it and the only thing to notice would be if your vehicle was obviously abandoned near the road. The first the Finns would really be aware of is if you walked into their cities... which might get you turned over, or maybe not, but if you can stage the weapons and such to conduct a major terrorist attack, you can stash the hiking gear and supplies to go cross-country.
Ukraine, on the other hand, is a barely-functional society for which "hating Russia" is a number one priority, and trying to lay low in Ukraine for long enough to figure out how to get to IS controlled territory in some shithole in the caucuses or central asia is a plan that's at least a plausible level of dumb.
To get to Ukraine from Russia, you have to go through mutliple no-civilian zones, drive through a papers-please occupational region, and go through two generally parallel trench systems with a minefield inbetween.
The far, far simpler option than either of these is, of course, to go through the caucuses or central asia, or just hide in rural russia for awhile.
Dean
15d ago
What's your ingroup?
Counter examples would require ingroup to be identified, but give us one of reasonable scale and it's generally trivial to find some policy or practice that can framed as an act of aggression towards others. Even hobbyists can rightfully be accused of taking money that could spent to benefit starving people and squandering it on unnecessary self-satisfaction instead.
Miranda's ass tipping the domino that launched a chain reaction leding to the collapse of the skyscraper of game writing, makes absolutely no sense.
I know we disagree off and on, but may I commend you for making me laugh out loud at this visualization? The scaling alone...
Dean
16d ago
I'd expect a lot of people don't want to fight regardless of conscription.
If you're asking if conscription as a policy indicates a lack of public support for a war, not really. No major war as a share of national population has been fought on a volunteer-only recruitment basis. At the same time, there have been many wars where support for continuing the war has remained high even as conscription numbers ran high.
Dean
16d ago
Is your position that Ukraine conscripts are 60% free and 40% slaves?
If not, what percent do you think are the slave-analogs here? 30%? 15%
Dean
16d ago
I'll just add that the media bouncing has also shifted over time. In the first six months of the war, the pro-peace-via-concession element was decisively in the European court, particularly Germany before the Nord Stream pipeline explosion scuttled attempts to keep the Russian gas flowing. In the last six months of the war, as the US aid holdup began, the more US-based conession voices have increased, but more belicose support from the European powers has increased due to evolving government perspectives on what Russia would do with its Cold War over-build if a peace were to emerge. At this point, the re-activated Russian stockpiles have themselves become a national security threat, as the current attrition rate has made them a use-them-or-lose-them asset for the Russians who can't credibly modernize them after a war, but could continue to use them for a near-term war if Ukraine were to capitulate shortly.
I'd go as far as to wager that even if Trump were to try and pressure Ukraine to make a deal, the Europeans would continue to back the Ukrainians and maintain the conflict, if only to give their own arms industries more time to mobilize and attrit more of the Russian stockpile. The US isn't the only party with an interest in depleting the Russian armored corps, and the strategic logic takes a life of its own with other EU-sovereignist interests are considered.
Dean
27d ago
Worse than Yeltsin and the 1990s? Worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Ukraine has been by far the worse Russian strategic failure.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a failure of ideology, and even legitimacy- a lack of belief that the system was worth maintaining. However, recognizing that no one believed in the project, that it was ruining the nation vis-a-vis reforms, and that brutal oppression of unwilling subjects was not necessary was... an accurate and even validated strategic assessments. The Russians lost their empire, and yet the military suppression of their neighbors was proven to NOT be necessary to prevent war or an invasion of Russia. The Soviet empire was unnecessary for Russia's security needs, because Russia was not, in fact, at meaningful risk of NATO invasion despite the loss of a major conventional military, even as the Gulf War of '91 already demonstrated that they had lost military dominance.
By contrast, Ukraine was a failure of strategy because it was unforced error born of systemic incompetence at strategic evaluation. All the costs- direct and opportunity- have been unnecessary, and it was incredibly counter-productive on even its own stated goals and rationals, propagandized as many of those were.
A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up.
I spent some time talking about popularity and how well the strategy was communicated through to the population. Just lie flat gets a lot of hype in certain parts of Western media - but what results have come from it?
The results are that despite how 'well' the strategy is being communicated through to the population, there is a growing subculture in China's increasingly important and undersized youth pillar, required to maintain the system as the ideological generation retires, who are increasingly don't care to maintain the ideological project, for reasons that are both compounding and beyond the the CCP's ability to stop. Reasons like the pending loss of generational savings of the retiring ideological generation due to the property crisis that is resulting from party policy, which will place more of the burden of supporting (and recovering) on the youth-generation where the passive-resistance has manifested and spread because of, and not despite, social pressure efforts.
Their existence is a counter to arguments of social mobilization behind Xi's national rejuvination narrative, and their growth is a strategic vulnerability to strategies which rely on a supportive populace, as opposed to an apathetic-indifferent one.
Similarly, there are NEETs and quiet quitters in the West - they're not exactly bringing down the govt. This looks like it's part of the modern lifestyle, common to all developed countries.
And this defense is what undermines the previous sentence and the implicit premise of the first post, which attempted to set up a contrast to the popular unity of the Chinese strategy versus the unpopular dissent of the American strategy. Equivalence of NEETs and cultural equivalencies isn't an advantage remaining with China, it's the undermining factor of any strategy that depends on social elan by denying it unique advantages proscribed to it.
There certainly have been strategies over history that attempted to rely on the assumption of a hyper-motivated populace on one's own side, vis-a-vis the apathetic and decadent losers on the other. They are typically poor strategies, serving more as rationalizations of those dependent on the offense rather than actually well founded, and just as often built on the rhetoric of the propaganda state being echoed by the compliant subjects, who by the nature of the state lack the outside perspective to actually make well informed conclusions of their system.
Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
Yes, that's the part I described as 'rules based order', one of the three strands of US strategy.
And that would an inaccurate characterization, particularly given what is behind the (multiple pages) of each of those geographic and technical areas.
Note that I said national strategy as opposed to national security strategy.
And note that I predicted you might try this deflection-
Now, you could argue that the US fails to achieve that (meh), isn't consistently being followed (sure), that it's not the real strategy of the United States ...
-and as I said then- it is. This is how the American government- by law- articulates and communicates national strategy. It is called the National Security Strategy by the virtue of the same law- the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, because that's what they called it in 1986, and no one in the US Congress has felt a need to rename it even as the Presidents have gradually broadened it to the whole-of-government strategy.
Unless you wish to identify some other document as the the real actual national strategy document, I charge this as a No True Scotsman appeal to a semantic that the American government doesn't abide by.
You seem to be thinking about national strategy only in the field of security, which is a very important factor but not everything.
You seem to be under the impression that the national security strategy is only about the field of security, which is a very important indicator that you haven't read it. And are probably confusing it with the National Defense Strategy.
The US National Security Strategy only 48 pages, including the cover and agendas. Admittedly more than some other countries, but nothing a serious commentator on national strategies should find overwhelming. Here you go. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
By contrast, the National Defense Strategy is a wee 30 more pages, but does go into far more detail as to how the 800-lb-gorilla of the US government thinks about going about competition. https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=872444
DEI isn't just a policy used to achieve a strategic goal, it's an end in itself. The US has tried influencing Estonia to be more multicultural. Blinken apparently brings up LGBTQI in every conversation with the Saudis. US media pushes the virtues of blacks just like Chinese media pushes nationalism, albeit in a less hamfisted way. I was watching an Avengers film the other day, the super-smart black African girl in the hidden hyper-advanced African country clowning on the white physicist was a little cringe-worthy. There's a huge affirmative action apparatus in the USA, subsidies and assistance for non-white businesses.
And yet, this does not make DEI the American national strategy, and does not keep DEI from being a policy. I would certainly agree that DEI is a policy that it's advocates believe in as a good in and of itself, and even that is irrelevant to whether the spread of DEI is viewed as a advancing American strategy, but neither of those are relevant to the difference between being a strategy and being a policy advanced on the basis of strategy.
They didn't naively read that McKinsey paper and think 'hey diversity is really efficient and improves our other goals, let's do it'. There are true believers that the US Air Force ought to be more representative of the country's demographics, that there should be plenty of female construction workers building chip factories, that there need to be more people from marginalized communities on company boards. The people who write these papers believe in reshaping the world in a certain direction and that is happening in all kinds of different areas. China teaches national rejuvenation in schools, America teaches diversity in schools, you've got the gay-straight alliance and various other initiatives. Perhaps I could add China's 'uphold the supremacy of communist party' as a strategy with all kinds of supporting policies but that really goes without saying.
This, too, does not make DEI the American national strategy, nor does it keep DEI from being a policy. In fact, it is directly compatible with DEI being a policy- policies counter eachother.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort isn't just a policy. A policy would be something like the semiconductor suppression against Chinese high-tech industry, it's subordinate to US national security. It's specific, discrete and focused, usually in just one sector like economics.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort is precisely what an American WGA entails.
Whole-of-Government Approach (“WGA”) refers to the joint activities performed by diverse ministries, public administrations and public agencies in order to provide a common solution to particular problems or issues, and involve some form of cross-boundary work and restructuring.
Which is to say- a government policy.
The Jack romance certainly ends with a lovers relationship, and her romance is the only one where she makes meaningful emotional healing and interpersonal progression in ME2. Miranda is uniquely characterized as smiling in a way she never did before and is also only able to have a healthy emotional relationship solely if Shepard is the one to provide it (with their dick). Kelly Chambers, in so much as that one qualifies, resolves it's emotional catharsis by having her do stripper dances in your room after she was kidnapped, locked into a pod, and nearly turned into bio-goop. Tali is much less emotionally traumatized, but certainly emotionally questionable given that she risks death itself for the sake of the Shepard bone out of a mix of captain-crushing hero crush (and the fact that you covered up her father's cultural war crimes).
Ashley... is a more mature frank attraction in ME1, but Ashely's character arc also jumps to the point that the tomboy not-a-model gets a major model glow up come ME3, so who knows there.
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