Twilight of the Idols

Long but interesting piece in City Journal about the significance of modern iconoclasm. My bottom line: Replacing the statues of heroes with those of victims exalts the nation's dominant cult: victimhood. Only the Victim is pure. The culture that valorizes victimhood is saying that achievement is a sham because it inevitably creates losers whose victimhood trumps any good the achievement has created. So we become trapped, frozen by the impossibility of doing anything because our new Cult will seek out and exalt its "victims" as martyrs - no matter how few - above the benefit to the many. 

On American Realism about Ukraine, China and the World.

 

Sumantra Maitra makes the same points that I've been making for a long time, only more eloquently.  Ukraine is part of the Russian sphere of influence.  They squandered their opportunity to break free in 1917 and then again in 1990.  Maybe there will be another opportunity.  But this war isn't it.  

So why isn't India on our side?  India, like China, Russia, the EU and US consider their near abroad to be their concern as befits those with the scale to be great powers (EU is kind of an ersatz version). Indeed we consider the entire western hemisphere plus the entire pacific and Atlantic Oceans to be ours. While tossing in the antipodes, the UK and maritime east asia. The other great powers obviously resent this 'rule Amero-Britannia'. 

We are in a multi polar world where (thank God) we are no longer the world's policeman or welfare agency.  One of Trump's better moves was to emphasize this while creating lots of uncertainty about how he would respond to aggressive moves.  It may not work in the long term but the long term is simply a string of many short terms.

Our key goal today is to keep China quiet until it becomes senescent.  Not that many more years we just have to be clever and circumspect.  Obviously neither Trump nor Biden is the right model for that. China by its very rise - even before its macho posturing - has driven many powerful and rising nations back into our arms.  Our goal is to let them keep doing that while quietly making Taiwan too toxic to even think of invading (some more circumspect assistance to Vietnam is also called for).

We must thank the Blundering Mr. Putin for his help in this.  Unlike Nazi Germany - whose easy early victories encouraged Italian, Japanese and Soviet adventurism, Putin's quagmire (and the ease with which hand held American and European weapons immobilize wildly expensive military hardware) have radically changed the warlord calculus.

If it all turns out the way we hope, we ought to give Putin a Nobel Peace prize.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/04/focusing-on-russia-instead-of-china-would-be-the-united-statess-biggest-foreign-policy-mistake-ever/