Posted on 03/15/2015 12:27:25 PM PDT by x
Why do our “best and brightest” fail when faced with a man like Putin? Or with charismatic fanatics? Or Iranian negotiators? Why do they misread our enemies so consistently, from Hitler and Stalin to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph?
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Telling yourself that you are “the best and the brightest” doesn’t actually make you “the best and the brightest.”
It seems to be a “Law” that once great institutions become bankrupt. I think wealth and success breed slackness, then ineptitude, triviality and sloth.
It’s quite simple, really. It’s human nature to believe that the guy across the table with think, and act, as you do. Now take a look at the list: Putin, Hitler, Stalin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Do those guys look like rational actors?
Because they are traitors.
This is easy. It’s because Putin and ISIS know absolutely that our guys will never use violence. They have said so going in, while negotiating, and have told them that everything is on the table EXCEPT military force. They simply do not believe anything can be solved by violence. While Putin knows that everything can be effectuated better when a tank rolls into town and ISIS knows they can solve the problem by cutting your head off, your children’s heads off, and auctioning off your wife to a life of sex slavery to an ISIS warrior. . . or burning them all to death in a cage.
Prep-School Diplomats?
More like Pre-School Diplomats.
There was a guy on Dennis Prager years ago who wrote a book about why presidents so often fail in foreign policy. The skills that get them ahead in American politics are those of persuading people who start out with mostly the same worldview. Sure there are political differences, but the vast majority of Americans agree on the basic rules we live under (at least until Obama). They agree that there should be elections, the bill of rights, etc. The skills that get them ahead in our system are persuasion, compromise, etc. They are good at it or they wouldn’t be elected.
So once they are elected and start to deal with other world leaders who share none of these values, they continue to operate in the same way. They think other people must be more or less like the people they have dealt with their whole career, and trust their abilities to succeed with them too. But people with vastly different worldviews are not going to react like Americans. They will take decency as weakness, and compromise as a temporary measure until they gain an advantage. This isn’t only liberals. Just think about G.W. Bush claiming to look into Putin’s soul, and believing that everyone in the world longs to live in a free society. It’s an inability or unwillingness to step outside their experience and understand the world from an alien point of view.
- Al Capone
Just ask Putin. He told you up front. “They will stand there and lie to you even when you know it is a lie.”. That means in a nut shell, they apparently are evil and very bad people. You must earn trust and respect to be able to negotiate properly. The US is finished in that regard. It will never ever again be trusted.
You forgot Tojo and Ho Che Min.
Long and well written article that could be summarized in one sentence:
Nice kids lose to street thugs every time.
Because they have all the answers and the world is just too dumb to see things their way /s
Because they learned their trade in protected environments against other rich-kid cream puffs in the party. The media blows them kisses and prestige-craving sycophants never challenge them on anything and certainly never have had someone confront them with real power at their back.
Putin and the rest of the Rogues’ Gallery of players have direct access to force and know to threaten with it and ultimately use it. Kerry and the rest can bluff and bluster, but the wheels of American might turn much more slowly and grudgingly.
john kerry’s reaction to russia invading crimea was to whine that “this isn’t how 21st century countries behave”.
whiny little bitch.
It’s nothing to do with prep schools. It’s ALL the schools. The public schools probably were the first to go down the tubes, but from what I have seen the prep schools have followed them. And the Ivy League colleges.
When I went to prep school back in the 50s, I got a good, solid classical education, lots of discipline, history, math, science, great books, and all the rest of it. Plus daily chapel, and plenty of religious teaching.
All of that is gone now, thanks to the spread of leftist idiocy.
Good point. That also accounts for Chamberlain's failure with Hitler and FDR's failures with Stalin. Subsequent politicians learned from their mistakes.
Peters may have a point about the ticket punching mentality in government nowadays. There's an assumption that there's a specific set of things one has to do and a narrow range of opinions one can have in order to rise through the system.
Maybe outsiders who aren't just climbing the ladder by doing what they think they're supposed to do have a better understanding of foreign despots who also rose in unconventional -- indeed, brutal -- ways.
I think the answer to your “It can’t just be the prep school thing” comment is in this paragraph:
“Once-great universities have turned into political indoctrination centers worthy of the high Stalinist Era or the age of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Their aims may be more benign, but their unwillingness to consider alternative worldviews is every bit as rigid. Students in the social sciences at Harvard or Yale today are cadets being groomed to serve a soft-Socialist form of government conceived not in the streets, but in the very same classrooms. It’s a self-licking ice-cream cone. And graduates leave campus brilliantly prepared for everything except reality.”
Elite universities are run by the radicals and communists of my ‘baby boomer generation’ who got their radicalism from their parents and decided to infiltrate the universities to get their communist and socialist goals spread. Others of us went into the military to fight the outward battle, no seeing that we were being undermined at home.
While the human race is slowly civilizing, with fewer wars and lower murder rates, that doesn’t mean everyone is pacified or that wars will never happen.
I think in 1000 years or so, the equivalent of trade wars and espionage and “cold wars” will be standard, assuming we beat back ISIS and Boko Haram and the like who are reverts of the worst order.
If we give in to them, even if allowing them a quarantined piece of Earth to turn into Hell, then we will have demonstrated to those who’ve been holding back that a few horrifically mutilated people and videos on Youtube are enough to get your own country and terrorized populace, and no one will do more than whine about it. And then we’ll see more seperatists from Chechnya to Africa to pockets in South America seeking to replicate that example.
We have this same problem at all levels of government. Want to be a cabinet member? Want to be a judge? Almost have to have graduated with an advanced degree from a small list of Ivy league schools.
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