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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
George W Bush was really bad. He invaded a country under false pretences, got the US into two inglorious, expensive, losing wars. He provided the example for the pre-emptive strike/who cares about international law doctrine that Russia is now implementing. Maybe Afghanistan was necessary but he managed it with the same contempt and neglect he showed in Iraq. There was no plan for running the occupied territory, no clear and sustainable objective, nothing! Bush also pointlessly threatened a bunch of countries with invasion - lo and behold Iran did its best to cause problems for America lest it be the next Iraq. After being put on the Axis of Evil North Korea decided to nuclearize.
On domestic policy he wasn't great either. No Child Left Behind was a huge waste of money. He started the unconstitutional mass surveillance program. What is there to like about Bush?
You think Russia needed to use Bush as an example/excuse to invade a neighboring country and to blow off international law.
Come on man please. Bush can be bad/wrong for the invasion without trying to blame him for Putin acting like an average Russian autocrat over the last few centuries.
NK did not decide to nuclearize merely because they got put on a rhetorical naughty list.
Ironically, threatening Iran put them off their nuclear weapons program.
I don’t like Bush. I came of political age during Bush and was polarized because of the blatant incompetence and inability of the Red Tribe to admit they fucked up on Iraq, in particular.
But also it’s very important to criticize bad people/things accurately and not simply add unjustified blame.
Bush made a list of three countries he regarded as threats, rhetorically justified pre-emptive strikes and then invaded one in 2003. In 2003 North Korea left the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to pursue nuclear weapons whole-heartedly. The connection seems pretty clear.
It certainly doesn't help when Bush goes and flushes UNSC legitimacy down the toilet, embracing unilateral action. Other countries can also play that game. America exiting the ABM treaty and proposing NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine were very unhelpful for US-Russia relations.
Possibly but it surely encouraged them to fund militias and harass the US so the US wouldn't be able to encircle and invade them. There are many dead US servicemen at the hands of Iranian-backed militias who might well regret Bush's need to threaten countries with invasion.
Please read the following and acknowledge the chronology and the fact NK had a weapons program before it left the NPT:
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/north-korean-nuclear-negotiations
Russia is the primary problem with US-Russian relations, which is why it gets so pissy when anyone interferes with their ability to dominate/invade their neighbors. I don’t know that the Bush admin did the best job on Russian policy, but trying to blame Bush for the path Putin has taken—given how many times the US tried to make friends with him—strikes me as highly unjustified.
The Iranians have been killing US servicemembers for 40 years. Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave them an opportunity to do it close to home. Ironically, we did them a huge favor by eliminating Saddam and it’s not like they like the Taliban either.
You think I didn't know that? That's why I said pursue nuclear weapons wholeheartedly, as opposed to half-heartedly like before, when they had a deal trading power plants for non-proliferation.
The US undeniably tried to overthrow two friends of Russia in Yugoslavia and Syria and very likely were behind the Ukraine coup, the Nuland phone calls show their involvement was deep. If you express hostile sentiment and behave with hostility, you get hostility back. It makes perfect strategic sense for the little Baltic countries, Ukraine and Poland to seek US patronage - but what does the US get out of exposed Baltic allies who feel emboldened to harass their Russian minorities and have negligible military capabilities? The most reasonable conclusion from the Russian perspective is that the US wants bases and real estate to encircle and attack Russia from - why else would they want Georgia in NATO?
The US attitude can be most succinctly expressed in Biden's prophetic words:
https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1646291932552003585
The American foreign policy attitude (Bush is an exemplar but the others are similar) seems to be 'get fucked, we can do whatever we like and nobody else can do anything'. Not unsurprisingly, this attitude makes enemies. US leaders don't seem to understand or care about that, they think it's a joke. There's no self-awareness: the US interchangeably derides North Korea as a joke and threatens to attack them - oh wait, North Korea then sends Russia more shells than the EU can manage. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to demand they give up their nuclear weapons, after you attacked two other countries that halted their nuclear weapons program. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to renege on the Iran deal when Shaheds are wrecking Ukraine...
Somehow I doubt the thing that put NK over the edge was the rhetorical Axis of Evil. The point is that they were in violation for a long time and chose to exit when they were close enough to success that dealing with inspectors wasn’t going to work.
Blaming an outcome decades in the making on Bush is asinine.
NATO is a defensive alliance and believing that a tiny country bordering Russia joining is an actual threat to Russia, vs. the real problem of taking away Russia’s ability to dominate, is simply not justified by any understanding of Russian foreign policy for the last century. You do a good job of not being very charitable to US leaders, but they’re saintly compared to Putin.
Blaming Putin’s regional aggression on Bush is asinine. (You can observe that whatever its faults our war in Iraq was clearly not territorial conquest.)
American foreign policy is far from perfect and the Bush administration was a particularly bad case (only superseded in modern times by the administrations that dragged us into Vietnam IMO), but that’s without needing to exaggerate or misplace blame.
I do agree backing out of the Iran Deal was stupid and there was a pretty strong bipartisan consensus on that (even among those who had opposed initiating it). But Trump was Trump.
When you say “after you attacked two other countries that halted their nuclear weapons program” are you referring to Iraq, Syria, or Libya?
Iraq and Libya, though I guess Syria sort of counts.
Great powers do not like it if hostile great powers expand into their sphere of influence. The US seems to think Russia doesn't deserve a sphere of influence - the Russians disagree. This could have been avoided if the US had just accepted what even their own CIA chief Burns said in "NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES" and done nothing. It was a can of worms that shouldn't have been opened.
And this 'taking away Russia’s ability to dominate' strategy has failed on its own terms. European security is far worse than in 2014 or 2008. Russia is mauling Ukraine to the point where Macron's been floating sending French troops to Ukraine.
If the US really thought that Russia was this rampant, expansionist power, why didn't they foresee this war and plan to win it? Why is Russia outproducing the entire West, let alone the US in shells? Nobody seemed to think about producing large numbers of munitions until 2022, which is exactly what you'd do if you thought that Russia was this aggressive imperial power. I'm not sure if US leaders were thinking at all, aside from Burns that is. I think they assumed 'we're invincible, we don't need to prepare, compromise or make any special effort'.
I do not blame Bush for Putin invading Ukraine but he illustrates the thoughtlessness in US foreign policy that has led to all kinds of bad outcomes.
Libya voluntarily stopped its nuclear weapons program.
Saddam most definitely did not. His reactors got bombed into oblivion and then he pretended to still have a program and didn’t cooperate with inspectors, even though it got him invaded. Basically everyone thought he had one going and he kept up the pretense to appear strong.
The US and NATO providing security guarantees is not something Russia has to like. But the fact that they don’t like it so much is kinda the whole reason countries want to join, and that case seems stronger than ever. Reasonable people can disagree about what exactly was the best way to handle Russian aggression, but please don’t pretend the West caused Putin to regress to the USSR/imperial mean. He has agency.
European incompetence is immense on many fronts, security and foreigner policy high among them. If I thought some US policy stance could fix it I would advocate for it.
I don’t think you understand how the US viewed Russia. No one was thinking Putin was going to try to conquer Ukraine until suddenly that’s what he was doing. Sure, a little invasion here and there to annex a slice of any given country, but not a full-on war. Being a Russia hawk went out of style a while ago (except for Mitt Romney in 2012), then Trump screwed up the traditional US political stances on top of that.
Once it was clear an invasion was coming, almost everyone thought Putin was going to win pretty quickly. The Ukrainians have outperformed expectations immensely, and the Russians underperformed. Unfortunately, that means a bloody quagmire for the indefinite future. (Which they judge better than being Putinized.)
The US military has not been very focused on countering a Russian land war for over 30 years. We are trying to focus on China after so much time in the Middle East. We let our traditional artillery production fall off too much during that time and rebuilding capacity doesn’t happen instantly.
You phrasing things as if we think “we’re invincible” is not even wrong. We, the United States of America, are not being threatened by Putin. We have never had more of a military advantage over Russia in century or more because Putin is burning up so much of his military in Ukraine. You’re simply assigning beliefs to the US national security apparatus with little bearing on reality. We spend an immense amount of money on the military, but no one was excited to spend that on artillery production capacity (old, boring) and not say an F-35 (new, exciting).
Russia invading its neighbors is a tale as old as time and the US is almost an irrelevant variable, except for the part where becoming a formal member of The West is an alternative and insurance policy for counties at risk of Putinization. Ukraine was moving towards the EU and Putin did not want that trend to succeed.
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Arguably Iran too has already got the bomb, or is pretty close to the threshold, and not quite politically committed to crossing that line yet. It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy that has continued to act to destabilise both South East Asia and the Middle East.
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PEPFAR is estimated to have saved over twenty million lives, if that's worth anything to you.
I've literally never even heard of this before, thanks for bringing it up.
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I'm not a Bush fan, but if I were to try to say:
I disagree - I think he was part of the dissolving. Look at the profits accrued to Halliburton et al as a result of the Iraq war, a war which has had ruinous consequences for the rest of the world. Those private profits came about through the expenditure of the USA's blood and treasure.
I also disagree here - he (if he actually had much power personally) exploited those feelings to drum up support for a terrible war that he and his friends personally profited from.
This truly sounds more academic than realistic. I think it's well easy to say what you might have done in a perfect hypothetical world, but actually leading the country, and leading the country through such an unprecedented, harrowing event is another thing
Perfect hypothetical world? Who needs that? I can absolutely do a better job that would have far more positive consequences for the future, and I can do it with a single policy statement: Don't start a war of aggression in the middle east so that my friends in business can juice their profit margins at the cost of thousands of lives, billions of dollars and creating not just a refugee crisis but the Islamic state terror group.
I have an intensely heartfelt and deep disagreement with your post and what it implies. There's nothing "academic" about simply not starting a war - there are several US Presidents who avoided starting wars of aggression or invading other countries. The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you're so deeply cynical you believe that the military industrial complex has so much power over the government that the role of President is largely ornamental, and making the decision to avoid the war would have just lead to me getting shot in the head in public so that my war-hungry VP could take the top job.
I definitely don't disagree that he should not have gone into Iraq, and probably not Afghanistan, too. Uhh, I was responding in the car and maybe I got your post mixed up with another one at a similar time, also about Bush and how he responded to 9/11, when I said it was more academic.
This is actually illegal in my country - please keep your eyes on the road and drive safely!
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He blew 9/11 way out of proportion. The smart play would have been to ignore it and build the trade center back exactly how it was. That would have been the true power play. It was just a mosquito bite after all to a multi-trillion dollar economy and a country of almost 300 million. It could have been ignored. Instead, the terrorists won.
Oddly enough there was a Trump plan in the early-mid 2000's to do just that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Towers_2
Also the country basically runs on auto-pilot. You could have no president and not much would change. In fact, 8 years with no president would have been better than bush.
That is so unrealistic. No one would have stood for that. Maybe you weren't in America at the time, or maybe you weren't even born yet. But trust me it was a harrowing experience well before Bush said anything. No leader would have simply done nothing in response to an unprecedented attack of American citizens on American soil, and if he had, no one, not even most of the people on the left would have stood for him.
I was in my freshman year of college. I helped put together the google page of news as it was happening. I said this exact same thing then. I stand by it now. It was crazy and stupid to respond the way we did. I voted for Bush and was against leftist nonsense. It was just a bad way to respond.
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I was in high school in 2001, and the view espoused by @AhhhTheFrench , that we should do nothing and that Bush is playing into the hands of Al Qaeda by attacking Afghanistan (even moreso Iraq) was basically the mainstream consensus where I lived. It certainly wasn't universal, but enough that there was social pressure to conform. I recall thinking at the time that this was just another murder, scaled up by not even 3,000, and thus only criminal proceedings are justified.
Given that my environment wasn't typical, I think you're right that most leftists still would've complained if Bush took the pacifist route, but I think there would still have been quite a bit of support. Minority support, to be sure, though.
88 % of Americans supported military action against Afghanistan in October 2001.
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Just to make my point clearer, I don't necessarily think that Bush needed to parlay 9/11 into attacking Afghanistan, and definitely not Iraq, and I don't think there was universal support for those specific actions. But I think to simply ignore it, as @AhhhTheFrench said, was out of the question. Where I was (in the blueish-purple part of northeastern US), it was basically a given that he had to acknowledge the loss and try to coach the country through it in some way, swear vengeance, and at least try to go after Al Qaeda in some fashion.
It was so far out of proportion or balance. They killed a few thousand people, they were not a nation state. It was an immune reaction almost killing the host.
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