"It is unfortunate when men cannot, or will not, see danger at a distance; or seeing it, are restrained in the means which are necessary to avert, or keep it afar off."
I may make a plaque with the above inscribed. The applications are limitless:
The current tragedy in CA is Exhibit A. Similarly, whenever markets are in turmoil, the signs were always there well before the downdraft. The list goes on.
I truly enjoy the educational experience from your posts. Always informative and enlightening.
Because Jimmy Carter was a U.S. Navy officer, his failure to understand the history, which you have so ably recounted here was especially egregious.
I learned this part of American history in Navy boot camp, along with the lyrics of the Marine Anthem, which we sometimes sang as we marched in company around the San Diego Navy boot camp facility.
Thanks, Robert, for what was a spine tingling post for me. 😊
Robert, love the way you step back, stitch in the perspective of history, and reframe current "events"/"issues." The people are in great need of such minds as yours, connecting and seeing the big picture. Thanks for your terrific efforts.
Thank you for this! I have been blowing this trumpet, specifically about the Red Sea humiliation, for months. The American hostages held by Hamas are Pedecaris all over again. I think the current hosannas for the Biden cease fire deal may very well be a last gasp effort by the Biden administration to contractually bind both Israel and the US to its (Biden's) vision of a two-state, stop killing off Hamas, implicitly blame Israel for it all, policies. Retired Navy intelligence officer J.E. Dyer points out here that Trump has never supported the cease fire – hostages released Yes!... ceasefire not his agenda. She notes that the hell he would release would be provided by Israel. The current effort with the cheer leading from the media and other pro-Palestinian on-lookers, has all the earmarks of a, dare I say, disinformation campaign? Link to her piece below:
I am taking the liberty of repeating below what I wrote exactly one year ago... January 2024:
The administration is drawing lines again – this time in the Red Sea. We are warning the Houthis – don’t do that – thus affirming that what they are doing is working. That'll do it – just look how well it has deterred them in the past. Admiral James Stavridis has a good piece on gcaptain.com discussing four actions he suggests, in summary here, in his words:
First, US rules of engagement need to be modified to permit offensive action against verified Houthi targets at sea.
A good second step would be strikes ashore at known Houthi infrastructure.
Third, if the Houthis do not cease their operations after proportional attacks against their maritime assets, we may need to up the ante by striking more broadly at their military capability.
A fourth, and highly controversial, level of escalation would be to attack Iranian assets directly.
But then he diminishes his argument by tossing in this: "Any campaign against Iran would need to be a carefully calibrated series of escalating attacks, with built-in pauses allowing Tehran to stop the Houthi piracy." Carefully calibrated escalation with scheduled pauses to induce the foe to moderate conduct has been the bane of every conflict we have engaged in from Vietnam to Afghanistan, to current situations in Iraq and the Red Sea. Do we never learn? Reinstitute the time-tested concept of punitive expeditions ... exact severe consequences and go home, with the explicit understanding that there is more where that came from if you do it again.
Per Stavridis recommendations 1 & 2, there should be smoking holes wherever there is a Houthi launcher, support facility, command center, supply hub – you get the idea. Houthi forces afloat? Sink them on sight. Iran supplying targeting information via a ship in the Red Sea? Sink it – OK warn them to remove it or lose it, but if they don’t – sink it. The Iranian frigate now in the Red Sea? Same thing – send her home or we send her to the bottom. No occupation, no gradual escalation, no pause for reflection, no wringing of hands about international comity, no inducements to join in the brotherhood of nations ... f**k with us and pay a price. Do what you must within your country – do not harm ours, or our national interests or those of the free world. "This Government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead."
"Smoking Holes" of any detected Houthi military facility should only be the beginning.
The port of Hodeida ,which is controlled by the Houthis and used by Iran to resupply their proxies, should be rendered a smoking, unusable ruin without further notice or warning.
The Iranian frigate and the "Research Vessel" in the Red Sea supplying targeting information to the Houthis should be sunk without warning, and disclosure of their activities (which information is no doubt in the hands of our intelligence agencies), made public.
Iran will no doubt protest that these are "Acts of War". Let them.
Our response should be that ANY further protestation of our necessary and timely response to the activities of their proxies will result in Isfahan and Qom joining the ranks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as nuclear targets - again, without notice or warning.
The Iranians should also be reminded that if our actions against the Houthis were within the scope, purview and capability of Israel they would have already happened.
No doubt the "International Community" will react in horror to all of this.
Let them. It's a time for choosing. You either stand with the United Sates of America
in favor of an international order of laws and rules governing the behavior of states and their non-state proxies or you do not.
If you do not, it's your free choice - but then, be prepared to withstand the unrestrained diplomatic AND military response of the United States.
Great historical perspective. How can such stories be made mandatory reading for presidents....and their advisers....and their wives, and for whoever else is running the country??
But my memory is fogging over here while it wanders to past incarnations of Carter and Biden. What was that last act of the Obama presidency? Something about loading pallets of good old American cash onto a 747 and shipping them to Teheran. Was it for good behavior? Can't remember.
As you point out Washington couldn't threaten because he didn't have the capability to fulfill the threat. Similarly Carter really couldn't threaten to invade Iran to rescue the embassy hostages as the military after the end of the Vietnam war wasn't really capable of such an invasion (I was a member of the Air Force at that time). That became even clearer when a rescue mission was tried and failed miserably. Reagan tried threatening Lebanon with that military and the result was 220 dead Marines, and a hasty retreat.
What was Biden supposed to threaten? That he would invade? An empty threat as he was and is already supporting an active invasion. In fact, it was exactly the invasion that Hamas both expected and wanted. The whole point of their Oct 7th attack was to instigate an invasion which Hamas expected to result in the deaths of their own people, but would also result in the loss of respect for Israel in the court of world opinion. Check, and check, so far they got what they wanted.
On the other hand the carrot has worked better, if not great. To date, the negotiations have rescued 107 hostages while the invasion has rescued 8 (and killed in all probability a larger number). The issue in the negotiations is trying to get both Hamas and Israel to both make hostage release a priority and to trust that the other side will fulfill the agreement. Israel's priority has been the destruction of Hamas (with Palestinian civilians as collateral damage), and Hamas' has been destroying Israel's reputation and presumed moral superiority. What would Hamas trust Israel to do in return? Stop the invasion? Once the hostages are freed, what is there to keep Israel from continuing to level Gaza? World opinion? Other than freeing hostages what would Israel trust Hamas to do? Probably nothing. Thus the long stalemate.
As far as things getting better under Trump what does he have as either a stick or a carrot that is more believable. We've seen the threat of a bigger invasion isn't much of motivator for Hamas. So far Trump has mostly been threatening allies (Canada, Mexico, Denmark, our NATO Allies, and Ukraine), not adversaries. In his first term he threatened China and kicked off a trade war, which he promptly lost. Trump may well make threats, but it seems unlikely to me that he will get the results he expects. As they say be careful what you ask for.
I never suggested that Carter “threaten to invade Iran to rescue the embassy hostages.” That was Brzezinski’s foolish idea (versus’s Vance’s foolish idea that he could jawbone the mullahs to a happy conclusion).
The brilliance of “Perdicaris alive or Raisuni dead” was that T.R. effectively said, “I’d like Mr. Perdicaris home safely. But if you prefer, I’ll be equally happy to humiliate the Sultan and feed Raisuni’s bowels to the jackals and hyenas. Either way is fine with me. You choose. I’m busy with some other things.”
In 1979, a TR-type president would have said, “I’d like all 53 hostages home safely. But if you prefer, I’ll be equally happy to turn every military installation and government building in Iran to rubble. You choose. I’m busy with some other things.” If they failed to meet the deadline, an Iranian naval base and perhaps an electric power plant would be been powderized. And more the next day.
As you suggest, the post-Vietnam military had no ability to pull off an Entebbe-style rescue—particularly in a dense urban area deep inland. But we did have ships, planes, shells, bombs, and missiles to do that. After the second or third day, the Iranian military would have overthrown and executed the regime.
It was Carter’s fecklessness that handed the mullahs their victory over America and their license to terrorize for the next 46 years. Without Carter propping up the ayatollahs, it’s likely that Hezbollah would have been in no position to blow up the U.S. Marines or the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires; Assad wouldn’t have had the capacity to slaughter half a million Syrians; Hamas wouldn’t have had the means to spend two decades firing missiles into Israel and launching their orgy of rape, torture, murder, and necrophilia on October 7; the Houthis couldn’t have disrupted shipping lanes; the Iran-Iraq War wouldn’t have claimed a million lives; Lebanon would still be a pleasant little resort country and not a failed state. All of that is Carter’s doing.
And I’ll agree that Reagan failed in Lebanon. I didn’t include it because my article focused solely on hostage-taking. I’ll also add that Thatcher should have done a Falklands on Iran when they issued a public death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a British citizen in Britain.
As for Biden in Gaza, by no means did he “support an active invasion” in any meaningful way. He gave occasional lip-service to Israel’s right to defend itself and then drew red lines all around its capacity to do so. Including his oatmeal-brained vice president commanding Israel not to go into Rafah—where the terrorists were—because she had “seen the maps.” Fortunately, Israel ignored her and aerated Sinwar and friends while moving civilians to safety.
A competent president—admittedly few and far between in recent history—would have verbally separated the American hostages from the others. “The others are between you and Israel. But those seven are ours. You will escort them to safe release by Tuesday, or American firepower will flatten every single government building in Gaza. And we will assure that your leaders enjoy no more cushy safety in Qatar or elsewhere.” A competent president would have treated Hamas as precisely what it is—the local branch of a rebranded terrorist organization established in the 1930s with the organizational, financial, and philosophical support of Nazi Germany. A group whose charter pledges to murder every Jew on earth. Including your neighbors.
As for Trump, my essay merely said that he "might" understand better. As I've shared with you in the past, I enjoy the blissful serenity that comes from low expectations and a healthy contempt for the entire political spectrum. My article expressed nothing more than a modest hope that perhaps Trump understands this particular dynamic better than Biden, while (1) recognizing that bettering Biden is an exceedingly low bar and (2) acknowledging that there's a good chance that I'll be disappointed once again.
Finally, thanks greatly for your service to our country. I admire all that you've done. You served with great distinction. Unfortunately, you served in a military that for many decades has been told by its top brass and civilian leaders, "You can go fight, but don't you dare think about winning." Hence, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq twice, Afghanistan. A close friend was assigned an advisory role in the SecDef's office. He wrote memos arguing that the military is talented at "killing people and breaking shit" but not at building democracy or winning hearts and minds, and that their actions should focus on their limited strengths. He said his memos went straight to the circular file.
As a loyal reader, I allow myself to venture that this piece is far more important than even the author is aware. Required reading for every free human being.
We already know. Trump’s chosen negotiator bullied Netanyahu into a bad deal—well the Israeli mood had much to do with it, too—but Israel lost the war.
That’s why I stated it in tentative terms. I’ll still say “We’ll see,” as I have some suspicion that this deal will be forgotten in two or three weeks.
I generally tried to explain to my public administration students that good management consisted mosrly of "looking ahead to see problems or barriers to good policy and practice, and removing or mitigating them so that the people doing the actual work didn't even have to know they existed." Good managers do not constantly tell their employees what to do, they hire good employees and clear the way so the employees can do their jobs.
One reason so many are promoted but are not good managers is they can only 'see' the moment, not 'imagine' the future.
I have never understood why principles such as the ones you helpfully lay out for us here are not simply assumed as part of basic statecraft.
Of course Western naïveté can be extreme at times, based upon a romantic view of human nature, and considerable ‘mirror imaging’—“I’m an earnest person of good will, and I’m sure that totalitarian dictator over there is a decent fellow too, so we just need to sit down and talk this out”—but c’mon, do these hapless leaders of ours have eyes? The film Mars Attacks! is hard to watch in places, but does offer the valuable lesson that there really are such things as implacable foes who want us all dead
Biden is totally incompetent, so no resolution is expected. When Trump gets there, a lot of changes in American policy and foreign reaction will follow..
This narrative that Mr. Netanyahu was taken to the wood shed by a nobody and suddenly “saw the light” does not comport with his resistance over the last year to ignore and resist American edicts. Thoughts?
Craven FJB surpassed Jimmy Carter's cowardice ten fold. President Trump shows some similarity to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan when it comes to real world 'diplomacy.' The coming days are going to be interesting indeed.
Barbara Tuchman wrote a fine essay on Perdicaris, "Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli [her spelling] Dead" collected in her book PRACTICING HISTORY. Most interesting part of the Perdicaris story was that he renounced his American citizenship in an effort to avoid property confiscation. By the time Roosevelt and John Hay, his SecState discovered this, the notorious phrase had been well launched, not least to the Republican National Convention, which was considering TR's renomination. Whaddaya know---they renominated him.
"It is unfortunate when men cannot, or will not, see danger at a distance; or seeing it, are restrained in the means which are necessary to avert, or keep it afar off."
I may make a plaque with the above inscribed. The applications are limitless:
The current tragedy in CA is Exhibit A. Similarly, whenever markets are in turmoil, the signs were always there well before the downdraft. The list goes on.
I truly enjoy the educational experience from your posts. Always informative and enlightening.
Because Jimmy Carter was a U.S. Navy officer, his failure to understand the history, which you have so ably recounted here was especially egregious.
I learned this part of American history in Navy boot camp, along with the lyrics of the Marine Anthem, which we sometimes sang as we marched in company around the San Diego Navy boot camp facility.
Thanks, Robert, for what was a spine tingling post for me. 😊
Thanks, David. Honored by your analysis on several accounts.
Robert, love the way you step back, stitch in the perspective of history, and reframe current "events"/"issues." The people are in great need of such minds as yours, connecting and seeing the big picture. Thanks for your terrific efforts.
Thank you for this! I have been blowing this trumpet, specifically about the Red Sea humiliation, for months. The American hostages held by Hamas are Pedecaris all over again. I think the current hosannas for the Biden cease fire deal may very well be a last gasp effort by the Biden administration to contractually bind both Israel and the US to its (Biden's) vision of a two-state, stop killing off Hamas, implicitly blame Israel for it all, policies. Retired Navy intelligence officer J.E. Dyer points out here that Trump has never supported the cease fire – hostages released Yes!... ceasefire not his agenda. She notes that the hell he would release would be provided by Israel. The current effort with the cheer leading from the media and other pro-Palestinian on-lookers, has all the earmarks of a, dare I say, disinformation campaign? Link to her piece below:
https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2025/01/14/thinking-aid-trumps-warning-to-hamas-is-about-hostages-not-a-ceasefire/
I am taking the liberty of repeating below what I wrote exactly one year ago... January 2024:
The administration is drawing lines again – this time in the Red Sea. We are warning the Houthis – don’t do that – thus affirming that what they are doing is working. That'll do it – just look how well it has deterred them in the past. Admiral James Stavridis has a good piece on gcaptain.com discussing four actions he suggests, in summary here, in his words:
(link here: https://gcaptain.com/stavridis-hit-the-houthis-iran-red-sea/?subscriber=true&goal=0_f50174ef03-a6a902de22-170552099&mc_cid=a6a902de22&mc_eid=859186b276)
First, US rules of engagement need to be modified to permit offensive action against verified Houthi targets at sea.
A good second step would be strikes ashore at known Houthi infrastructure.
Third, if the Houthis do not cease their operations after proportional attacks against their maritime assets, we may need to up the ante by striking more broadly at their military capability.
A fourth, and highly controversial, level of escalation would be to attack Iranian assets directly.
But then he diminishes his argument by tossing in this: "Any campaign against Iran would need to be a carefully calibrated series of escalating attacks, with built-in pauses allowing Tehran to stop the Houthi piracy." Carefully calibrated escalation with scheduled pauses to induce the foe to moderate conduct has been the bane of every conflict we have engaged in from Vietnam to Afghanistan, to current situations in Iraq and the Red Sea. Do we never learn? Reinstitute the time-tested concept of punitive expeditions ... exact severe consequences and go home, with the explicit understanding that there is more where that came from if you do it again.
Per Stavridis recommendations 1 & 2, there should be smoking holes wherever there is a Houthi launcher, support facility, command center, supply hub – you get the idea. Houthi forces afloat? Sink them on sight. Iran supplying targeting information via a ship in the Red Sea? Sink it – OK warn them to remove it or lose it, but if they don’t – sink it. The Iranian frigate now in the Red Sea? Same thing – send her home or we send her to the bottom. No occupation, no gradual escalation, no pause for reflection, no wringing of hands about international comity, no inducements to join in the brotherhood of nations ... f**k with us and pay a price. Do what you must within your country – do not harm ours, or our national interests or those of the free world. "This Government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead."
Tit-fot-tat only encourages more tats. Wham-for-tat gets the point across.
"Smoking Holes" of any detected Houthi military facility should only be the beginning.
The port of Hodeida ,which is controlled by the Houthis and used by Iran to resupply their proxies, should be rendered a smoking, unusable ruin without further notice or warning.
The Iranian frigate and the "Research Vessel" in the Red Sea supplying targeting information to the Houthis should be sunk without warning, and disclosure of their activities (which information is no doubt in the hands of our intelligence agencies), made public.
Iran will no doubt protest that these are "Acts of War". Let them.
Our response should be that ANY further protestation of our necessary and timely response to the activities of their proxies will result in Isfahan and Qom joining the ranks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as nuclear targets - again, without notice or warning.
The Iranians should also be reminded that if our actions against the Houthis were within the scope, purview and capability of Israel they would have already happened.
No doubt the "International Community" will react in horror to all of this.
Let them. It's a time for choosing. You either stand with the United Sates of America
in favor of an international order of laws and rules governing the behavior of states and their non-state proxies or you do not.
If you do not, it's your free choice - but then, be prepared to withstand the unrestrained diplomatic AND military response of the United States.
Great historical perspective. How can such stories be made mandatory reading for presidents....and their advisers....and their wives, and for whoever else is running the country??
But my memory is fogging over here while it wanders to past incarnations of Carter and Biden. What was that last act of the Obama presidency? Something about loading pallets of good old American cash onto a 747 and shipping them to Teheran. Was it for good behavior? Can't remember.
As you point out Washington couldn't threaten because he didn't have the capability to fulfill the threat. Similarly Carter really couldn't threaten to invade Iran to rescue the embassy hostages as the military after the end of the Vietnam war wasn't really capable of such an invasion (I was a member of the Air Force at that time). That became even clearer when a rescue mission was tried and failed miserably. Reagan tried threatening Lebanon with that military and the result was 220 dead Marines, and a hasty retreat.
What was Biden supposed to threaten? That he would invade? An empty threat as he was and is already supporting an active invasion. In fact, it was exactly the invasion that Hamas both expected and wanted. The whole point of their Oct 7th attack was to instigate an invasion which Hamas expected to result in the deaths of their own people, but would also result in the loss of respect for Israel in the court of world opinion. Check, and check, so far they got what they wanted.
On the other hand the carrot has worked better, if not great. To date, the negotiations have rescued 107 hostages while the invasion has rescued 8 (and killed in all probability a larger number). The issue in the negotiations is trying to get both Hamas and Israel to both make hostage release a priority and to trust that the other side will fulfill the agreement. Israel's priority has been the destruction of Hamas (with Palestinian civilians as collateral damage), and Hamas' has been destroying Israel's reputation and presumed moral superiority. What would Hamas trust Israel to do in return? Stop the invasion? Once the hostages are freed, what is there to keep Israel from continuing to level Gaza? World opinion? Other than freeing hostages what would Israel trust Hamas to do? Probably nothing. Thus the long stalemate.
As far as things getting better under Trump what does he have as either a stick or a carrot that is more believable. We've seen the threat of a bigger invasion isn't much of motivator for Hamas. So far Trump has mostly been threatening allies (Canada, Mexico, Denmark, our NATO Allies, and Ukraine), not adversaries. In his first term he threatened China and kicked off a trade war, which he promptly lost. Trump may well make threats, but it seems unlikely to me that he will get the results he expects. As they say be careful what you ask for.
I never suggested that Carter “threaten to invade Iran to rescue the embassy hostages.” That was Brzezinski’s foolish idea (versus’s Vance’s foolish idea that he could jawbone the mullahs to a happy conclusion).
The brilliance of “Perdicaris alive or Raisuni dead” was that T.R. effectively said, “I’d like Mr. Perdicaris home safely. But if you prefer, I’ll be equally happy to humiliate the Sultan and feed Raisuni’s bowels to the jackals and hyenas. Either way is fine with me. You choose. I’m busy with some other things.”
In 1979, a TR-type president would have said, “I’d like all 53 hostages home safely. But if you prefer, I’ll be equally happy to turn every military installation and government building in Iran to rubble. You choose. I’m busy with some other things.” If they failed to meet the deadline, an Iranian naval base and perhaps an electric power plant would be been powderized. And more the next day.
As you suggest, the post-Vietnam military had no ability to pull off an Entebbe-style rescue—particularly in a dense urban area deep inland. But we did have ships, planes, shells, bombs, and missiles to do that. After the second or third day, the Iranian military would have overthrown and executed the regime.
It was Carter’s fecklessness that handed the mullahs their victory over America and their license to terrorize for the next 46 years. Without Carter propping up the ayatollahs, it’s likely that Hezbollah would have been in no position to blow up the U.S. Marines or the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires; Assad wouldn’t have had the capacity to slaughter half a million Syrians; Hamas wouldn’t have had the means to spend two decades firing missiles into Israel and launching their orgy of rape, torture, murder, and necrophilia on October 7; the Houthis couldn’t have disrupted shipping lanes; the Iran-Iraq War wouldn’t have claimed a million lives; Lebanon would still be a pleasant little resort country and not a failed state. All of that is Carter’s doing.
And I’ll agree that Reagan failed in Lebanon. I didn’t include it because my article focused solely on hostage-taking. I’ll also add that Thatcher should have done a Falklands on Iran when they issued a public death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a British citizen in Britain.
As for Biden in Gaza, by no means did he “support an active invasion” in any meaningful way. He gave occasional lip-service to Israel’s right to defend itself and then drew red lines all around its capacity to do so. Including his oatmeal-brained vice president commanding Israel not to go into Rafah—where the terrorists were—because she had “seen the maps.” Fortunately, Israel ignored her and aerated Sinwar and friends while moving civilians to safety.
A competent president—admittedly few and far between in recent history—would have verbally separated the American hostages from the others. “The others are between you and Israel. But those seven are ours. You will escort them to safe release by Tuesday, or American firepower will flatten every single government building in Gaza. And we will assure that your leaders enjoy no more cushy safety in Qatar or elsewhere.” A competent president would have treated Hamas as precisely what it is—the local branch of a rebranded terrorist organization established in the 1930s with the organizational, financial, and philosophical support of Nazi Germany. A group whose charter pledges to murder every Jew on earth. Including your neighbors.
As for Trump, my essay merely said that he "might" understand better. As I've shared with you in the past, I enjoy the blissful serenity that comes from low expectations and a healthy contempt for the entire political spectrum. My article expressed nothing more than a modest hope that perhaps Trump understands this particular dynamic better than Biden, while (1) recognizing that bettering Biden is an exceedingly low bar and (2) acknowledging that there's a good chance that I'll be disappointed once again.
Finally, thanks greatly for your service to our country. I admire all that you've done. You served with great distinction. Unfortunately, you served in a military that for many decades has been told by its top brass and civilian leaders, "You can go fight, but don't you dare think about winning." Hence, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq twice, Afghanistan. A close friend was assigned an advisory role in the SecDef's office. He wrote memos arguing that the military is talented at "killing people and breaking shit" but not at building democracy or winning hearts and minds, and that their actions should focus on their limited strengths. He said his memos went straight to the circular file.
As a loyal reader, I allow myself to venture that this piece is far more important than even the author is aware. Required reading for every free human being.
We already know. Trump’s chosen negotiator bullied Netanyahu into a bad deal—well the Israeli mood had much to do with it, too—but Israel lost the war.
That’s why I stated it in tentative terms. I’ll still say “We’ll see,” as I have some suspicion that this deal will be forgotten in two or three weeks.
I generally tried to explain to my public administration students that good management consisted mosrly of "looking ahead to see problems or barriers to good policy and practice, and removing or mitigating them so that the people doing the actual work didn't even have to know they existed." Good managers do not constantly tell their employees what to do, they hire good employees and clear the way so the employees can do their jobs.
One reason so many are promoted but are not good managers is they can only 'see' the moment, not 'imagine' the future.
I still believe that to be true,
I have never understood why principles such as the ones you helpfully lay out for us here are not simply assumed as part of basic statecraft.
Of course Western naïveté can be extreme at times, based upon a romantic view of human nature, and considerable ‘mirror imaging’—“I’m an earnest person of good will, and I’m sure that totalitarian dictator over there is a decent fellow too, so we just need to sit down and talk this out”—but c’mon, do these hapless leaders of ours have eyes? The film Mars Attacks! is hard to watch in places, but does offer the valuable lesson that there really are such things as implacable foes who want us all dead
I would bet the house on Trump "getting it". He understands human nature. Everything else follows that.
Hope so!
Biden is totally incompetent, so no resolution is expected. When Trump gets there, a lot of changes in American policy and foreign reaction will follow..
This narrative that Mr. Netanyahu was taken to the wood shed by a nobody and suddenly “saw the light” does not comport with his resistance over the last year to ignore and resist American edicts. Thoughts?
I agree. My guess is there’s something we don’t know about yet. Side deal. Promises not yet mentioned.
Craven FJB surpassed Jimmy Carter's cowardice ten fold. President Trump shows some similarity to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan when it comes to real world 'diplomacy.' The coming days are going to be interesting indeed.
Barbara Tuchman wrote a fine essay on Perdicaris, "Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli [her spelling] Dead" collected in her book PRACTICING HISTORY. Most interesting part of the Perdicaris story was that he renounced his American citizenship in an effort to avoid property confiscation. By the time Roosevelt and John Hay, his SecState discovered this, the notorious phrase had been well launched, not least to the Republican National Convention, which was considering TR's renomination. Whaddaya know---they renominated him.