William S. Smith

Wednesday

William S. Smith

The American mess in the Ukraine

Russia is massing tanks and troops on the Ukrainian border. Inevitably, we are about to hear many ‘Putin is Hitler’ media stories. What will go unsaid is that the seven-year crisis in the Ukraine was largely an American creation, due to the US’s congenital meddling and interventionism in nations with little strategic importance to the United States. There is great irony in Biden administration officials trying to get ahead of a potential crisis that was largely caused by Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland. The potential area of conflict is Ukraine’s Donbass region, the eastern-most portion of Ukraine where most people speak Russian as their first language.

ukrainian ukraine donbass

Monday

William S. Smith

Why did Biden kill Keystone?

The Biden critique of the Trump foreign policy is twofold. The policy complaint is that an ‘America First’ foreign policy is a selfish foreign policy and ignores pressing global issues, such as climate change and women’s rights, that are threats to all humanity. The president is not the leader of only the United States, Biden insisted, but the leader of the whole world. The second complaint was about process, i.e. Trump did not consult closely with allies before pressing forward; he made erratic and unilateral decisions that harmed our alliances. Yet with Biden’s snap decision to terminate the Keystone XL pipeline project, Biden has sent a clear signal that ‘leading the world’ may be more important than ‘consulting with allies’.

diplomacy

Saturday

William S. Smith

Dead letters

In a plea for vocational education, Sen. Marco Rubio famously remarked that we could use ‘more welders and less philosophers’. Doesn’t everyone know that ‘skills pay the bills’? If things weren’t bad enough, the rise of deconstruction and critical theory has created a generation of humanities scholars who themselves see little value in the works they study, insisting that famous art and literature emerged from racist and sexist power structures. What sensible young person would borrow $100,000 to be educated in these pointless disciplines? Eric Adler, a classicist at the University of Maryland, has the answer: anyone who wants to understand his own humanity. Adler’s invaluable survey not only defends the humanities: it even lays out how their allies have fallen short.

classics

Monday

William S. Smith

What will a Biden administration do? Ask Rousseau

There is an endless stream of commentary on what a Biden administration will do in foreign and domestic policy. Some writers seem prescient, others seem like gossip and speculation. However, you need not be a Beltway policy wonk to understand the moral, spiritual and ethical outlook of the Establishment elites who will be on Biden’s staff — and therefore to know what their policy prescriptions will entail.Classical political philosophy understood that all political problems are downstream from moral and spiritual problems. And, in the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau destroyed the West’s understanding of morality and spirituality, setting the stage for our current confusions.

rousseau

Friday

William S. Smith

The sunset of secular Turkey

Christians around the world have been outraged by Turkey’s decision to convert the Hagia Sophia cathedral into a mosque. This astonishing architectural masterpiece was completed in 537 and is considered one of the Orthodox church’s holy sites. (The cathedral was, for 57 years after the crusades, a Roman Catholic church.) With the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, minarets were added, and it was converted into a mosque. In 1934, the secular leader of Turkey attempted to end the religious division over the building and turned it into a museum.The reader should notice that I place the responsibility for Hagia Sophia’s conversion on the nation of Turkey, not on President Erdogan.

turkey

Wednesday

William S. Smith

What is the US Navy doing in the Persian Gulf?

American alliances and security commitments tend to live on long after the world has changed. Many of our far flung military bases are legacies of a Cold War that ended decades ago. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Nato alliance became all but obsolete, so it eagerly embraced conflicts in the Balkans, Libya, Syria and other locations far from the Central European theater it was originally designed to protect. However, none of these holdover security commitments seem as absurd as US military operations in the Persian Gulf during a COVID-19 oil market.As recently as last month, the United States was keeping two aircraft carrier battle groups deployed near the Persian Gulf.

navy persian gulf