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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Henry Kissinger died today. I knew he was a popular punching bag for the left, but seeing the barrage of over-the-top reactions gives me the feeling that I’m missing something. My impression is that Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat who laid the foundation for total American victory in the Cold War. Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed. What is the steelman “Kissinger is evil” position? What am I missing?

He is one of the people who pushed globohomo on the world. He was a key architect in creating a global order that is a giant airport terminal, bland, placeless, multicultural and generic with mass surveillance and shopping. The world order he pushed makes national sovereignty impossible as we are all subject to an imposed world order by the US. The US milks us by rigging trade and acting as a financial hub while barking orders at us and occasionally killing hundreds of thousands of people in a war of aggression and leaving us with the migrants.

The world order he pushed makes national sovereignty impossible as we are all subject to an imposed world order by the US.

American FoPo before the Kissinger era was much more self-conciously about America being the hegemon and not being able to tolerate rival power centers. Nixon and Kissinger were unique partially because they believed there not only could but should be multiple great powers.

The President is proceeding not only to establish a rapprochement with Peking but to work out specific accords with China's main adversary, the Soviet Union, and to encourage new trade with the restive Communist nations of Eastern Europe, all the while trying to stabilize a non‐Communist Government in South Vietnam. Without repudiating U.S. commitments, he hopes to avoid new ones. He keeps out of disputes whenever he can, wary of U.S. intervention in such explosive situations the India‐Pakistan conflict and the Middle East. In short, postwar U.S. foreign policy has been turned upside down...

His approach to world politics is to see a pattern of relationships involving five major power centers: the United States, Russia, China, Japan and, eventually, Western Europe (including Britain). In this pentagonal world each power center will be constrained by the others. The President first made this vision explicit last summer in Kansas City, when he explained the passing of the cold war. “Twenty‐five years ago,” he said, “we were No. 1 in the world militarily, with no one who even challenged us, because we had a monopoly of atomic weapons. Now, 25 years having passed we see five great economic superpowers: the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, China and, of Japan"...

Nixon has articulated a concert of great powers that resembles in some respects the balance of power in Europe during much of the 19th century. “We must remember,” he has said, “the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have strong, healthy United States. Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan — each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.”

Don't forget printing megabucks as the US$ is reserve currency. That's an inflation tax on all other countries that need to use the petrodollar to trade. Must be nice.

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