American foreign policy

Donald Rumsfeld died this week — and it’s just so easy, isn’t it? It’s so convenient to dance on the grave of the man who helped bring about the disastrous Iraq war. For Rumsfeld, the old dictum, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, seems to have been discarded almost from the start. The obituaries, mostly in left-leaning publications like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, have been downright vicious. Rumsfeld was George W. Bush’s first defense secretary who, alongside Dick Cheney, pushed hard for deposing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Because of this, he’s been labeled a war criminal. He’s been held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan where he refused to accept a Taliban surrender.

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s football and wrestling teams. Successful candidate for office, easily reelected to Congress twice before he left to join the Richard Nixon administration. There he proved a success at navigating both the federal bureaucracy and the internal politics of the scandal-consumed administration. He survived Nixon’s resignation and soon became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — and after that, the youngest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, taking charge of a newly-minted all-volunteer force whose morale and discipline were in shambles after Vietnam.

President Joe Biden turned up almost three hours late to his Nato press conference tonight. He offered no apology, because, well, why should he? He then gave a short speech. It was adequate enough, albeit predictable and rigid — read as it was almost entirely from a teleprompter. It wouldn’t be Biden if he didn't open with a gaffe, though. He managed to stumble early by saying ‘we’re still averaging in the last seven days the loss of 300 deaths per day.’ In answer to a press question about Putin, he said ‘I’ll be happy to discuss with you when it’s over, not before, about what the discussion will entail’. That didn’t make much sense. He successfully quoted Benjamin Disraeli and said ‘the proof will be in the pudding’ without jumbling the words.

Tomorrow, The Committee will bundle up Joe Biden, titular president of the United States, and take him for a nice ride across the big, big ocean in a very shiny airplane. Weeee! No details have been released yet about what flavors of ice cream he will enjoy, but The Committee’s press arm has been full of stories with titles like 'Three things to watch on Biden's first foreign trip’. This is not a difficult assignment. The big boys and girls who arrange Joe’s play-dates have told all his favorite friends in the media exactly what to say. And just a couple of days ago they surprised Joe with an article in one of his favorite newspapers, the Washington Post. It was just so nice. A couple of the minders got together and wrote the article and then put Joe’s name on it.

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than four months into the Biden-Harris deep-state maladministration and we have roaring inflation, the most disastrous jobs report in recent memory, rising unemployment, spiking gas prices, an imploding stock market, devastating cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and a janus-faced crisis on our Southern border in which tens of thousands of disease-ridden illegal migrants are huddled into cages while thousands more fan out across the fruited plain taking jobs from Americans even as they infect us with COVID. Quick work, Joe! And of course that is just the tip of the proverbial North Atlantic iceberg into which His Senileness is steering the ship of state.

Two weeks ago, while speaking to Revd Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, America’s ambassador to the United Nations said ‘When we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale, we have to approach them with humility. We have to acknowledge that we are an imperfect union – and have been since the beginning — and every day we strive to make ourselves more perfect, and more just.’ She said that she had recently spoken to the UN General Assembly about growing up in the segregated South adding ‘I shared these stories and others to acknowledge, on the international stage, that I have personally experienced one of America’s greatest imperfections.

Age matters in Japan, so when Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga (73) sat down for talks with President Biden (78), deference to his ‘senpai’ (senior) colleague would have been his default setting. But from the looks of the joint statement following their summit, he seems to have held his own. The main issue, it seems, was China. Japan wanted assurances from the US that their claim to the Senkaku Islands would be respected. The islands’ status is covered by the US/Japan security treaty, but as China routinely sends its own fishing boats to menace Japanese vessels, Suga was looking for a reaffirmation of American support.

I am no fan of Trump, but what Joe Biden said in a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos made me almost nostalgic for some aspects of the last presidency. When Biden was asked if he believes Putin to be a killer, he replied, 'I do.’ He also confirmed reports that in 2011, while serving as vice president, he personally told Putin that Putin does not 'have a soul’. Putin’s reply was quick and masterful: he wished Biden best health and inviting him to a public debate about big existential and ethical issues on Zoom. Biden’s strong words stand in sharp contrast to Trump who, in 2017, when the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly called Putin a 'killer’, suggested that America’s conduct was just as bad as that of the Russian president.

Thoughtful observers of life often comment on the richness of the English language, its huge polyglot vocabulary, its precision, it sinewy expressiveness. It is doubtless politically incorrect to say so, but English has also shown itself to be a conspicuous ally of political liberty. I have commented on this in the past, noting that 'there seems to be some deep connection between the English language and that most uncommon virtue, common sense'. Speakers of English can be plenty extravagant, it may go without saying, but there is something about English — exactly why, I do not know — that acts to tether thought to the empirical world.

The world has many island nations, and sometimes the United States counts itself among them. We have water on either side of us, and though we share our big island with Canada and Mexico, neither poses any threat. America is immune to invasion, a castle surrounded by the safest of moats. This wasn’t always so, and it isn’t really true today, unless we forget about Hawaii and our Pacific and Caribbean territories, most of which would be easy prey for other states if they weren’t under our sovereignty. In the earliest days of the republic, we shared the North American continent with outposts of Europe’s leading powers: France, Russia, Spain and Britain.