Posted on 07/16/2016 6:09:14 PM PDT by MaxistheBest
Turkey's haphazard (and apparently failed) coup — led by parts of the largest standing army in NATO outside the U.S.'s own — has justified the growing skepticism around today's international order that has defined Donald Trump's White House run.
Amid all the uncertainty and hollowness of Trump's myriad proclamations, so unnerving in such an uncertain and hollow time, great clarity has suffused his sharply divergent view of the world and America's role in it. Trump believes that the U.S. has lost its power and force because the structure it helped create to order the globe has lost its efficacy and control.
The Turkish ordeal dramatizes these problems in stunning fashion.
This is not "just another" terror attack, or "just another" round of unrest and repression in the Middle East. This is a NATO country, increasingly divided and anti-Western, careening between two dark futures with no end in sight and no peaceful escape from a showdown. Here in a single paroxysm is fodder for every one of Trump's indictments against the U.S.-led international "order": the passivity, weakness, and irrelevance of the Obama administration and the North Atlantic alliance at their worst; the implacable strength of Muslim extremists in the absence of effective local strongmen; the absurdity of depending on weak regional partners while rejecting grand bargains with those who can best project power; and perhaps above all, the profound lack of wisdom of trying to "lead" a hostile and alien world engaged in a bloody and uncontrollable race to the bottom.
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If there is a wave from abroad that will propel Trump to power, it will not arrive on a tide of surprising victories amassed by Western reactionaries; it will come on a tide of blood, unleashed with grim regularity by anti-Western radicals.
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
“If there is a wave from abroad that will propel Trump to power, it will not arrive on a tide of surprising victories amassed by Western reactionaries; it will come on a tide of blood, unleashed with grim regularity by anti-Western radicals.”
Already happening.
the largest standing army in NATO
Oops there goes another kilowatt dam...
And now Obama’s appears to have lost Turkey, an ally for 100 years.
Well, he’s sure kissy-face with Erdogan. And Erdogan and Turkey are about the last allies we need, no? Total caliphate wanna-bes.
Trump just sees it like it is and tells it like he sees it.
The liberals are like dogs, kiss each others aSS and eat their manure and then lick them in the face.
Free trade and imagration both illegal and to some extent legal is destroying this country.
Like most writers, he fails to notice that Erdogan is ISIS’s godfather.
So that blind adherence to NATO puts us in bed with ISIS’s godfather.
NATO is important, but a little skepticism, and a demand that its Euro members field a real military, and that its Turkish contingent stop supporting ISIS while pretending to be our ally, is not out of bounds.
Ataturk did two things worth remembering: he abolished the Islamic caliphate, and the fez, you be the judge of which was more important.
SUMMARY: “Trump is still stupid, even if he is right.”
Abolishing the caliphate was a very serious error, as subsequent history has proven.
What Americans need now is a forceful defender of liberal internationalism as a crystallization of greater prudence and principle than Trump and his fellow skeptics can muster. But what Americans have is Hillary Clinton — more hawkish and internationalist than Barack Obama, but a walking, talking apotheosis of neoliberalism's reigning, failing orthodoxies. Clinton is the voice of those who believe their enlightened moralism justifies their permanent elitehood. Yet the "right" kind of cultural progress simply does not offset their dereliction of duty as protectors of international peace and security. And if they cannot correct their course, they will face coups of their own.
Jamie is living proof Liberals are both ignorant and irretrievably stupid.
The Turkish empire lasted 1000 years. Turkey as an “ally”, perhaps 70.
"No I'm never going to do it without the Fez on."
Given what the politics of the rotting from the head down new world order looks like, I will take disorder any time. It is what our founding fathers voted for.
liberal used, long ago, to mean rationalism and individual liberty. I fail to see how that has anything to do with internationalism. But the real problem is that this is just another leftist trying to overwhelm us with language the meaning of which is beyond the author or anyone else for that matter.
Yeah, like Thomas Jefferson.
... just another leftist trying to overwhelm us with (meaningless) language...
Perhaps I can translate for you...
a forceful defender of liberal internationalism
In traditional English: George Soros' Homo butt boy.
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