The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza

By Rashid Khalidi

Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.

politicalWade Lee HudsonOctober 28, 2023foreign policy Comments

After Germany and Japan, Another Demand for Total Surrender

How Russia Went from Ally to Adversary, Keith Gessen

The dominate-and-surrender paradigm on the global stage

In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush... Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”... Bush did not react... Perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender...

politicalWade Lee HudsonAugust 4, 2023foreign policyComment

Oppenheimer

By Wade Lee Hudson

After watching the feature film, “Oppenheimer,” I viewed the PBS documentary, “The Day After Trinity,” and the documentary about its production on the Criterion channel. I then did some research on the issues these films raise.

The backdrop for the decision to bomb Hiroshima was America’s apparently unusual demand for unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan.

politicalWade Lee HudsonAugust 2, 2023foreign policyComment

China and Democracy

On May 18, 2023 I posted the following to the Compassionate Action Workshop listserv:
In his “What Americans Don’t Understand About China” New York Times op-ed yesterday, Peter Coy reported:

The latest World Values Survey, conducted from 2017 to 2020, indicates that 95 percent of Chinese participants had significant confidence in their government, compared to 33 percent in the United States. Similarly, 93 percent of Chinese participants valued security over freedom; only 28 percent of Americans did so.

This data prompted me to find these quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” story in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear—for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them…

This elicited the following comments:

Larry Walker: I like this a lot. I believe China is VERY misunderstood in America - to our loss!
Wade Lee Hudson: Should we encourage the development of more democracy in China? If so, how?

politicalWade Lee HudsonMay 24, 2023foreign policyComment

Cultural Complementarity

By Hector E. Garcia

All humans see only a small part of reality, which brings about a sense of insecurity (this is one of the assumptions of CC). Our tendency is to subconsciously allay anxiety by acting as if what our group sees in our time is all of the true reality; consequently, all other groups must be totally or partially wrong. Since all groups are doing the same, conflict easily develops and grows. We then try to validate our position, and often our aggression, by showing current and past evidence for that position. This is not difficult for any group to do since the present and the past hold multiple facts and human errors to pick from and take offense. (The time I have spent as a consultant has taught me that you can usually select from an abundance of facts to validate most positions you want to sell). Parties in conflict will continue to assign fault to each other until the more powerful one puts an end to the never-ending argument by exercising its power; as a victor, it will acquire the credibility to gain support for its position.

politicalWade Lee HudsonMay 2, 2022foreign policyComment

China's Foreign Relations

By Wang Yi

The Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era laid out in the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a major theoretical innovation by our Party, and the latest achievement and a significant advancement of adapting Marxism to the Chinese context. It provides a strong theoretical framework and guideline for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.

politicalWade Lee HudsonApril 26, 2022foreign policyComment

The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means

“After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds,” Matthew Rose writes in his powerful new book, “A World After Liberalism.”

Rose does not mean liberalism in the way we typically use the word. This is not about supporting universal health care or disagreeing with Justice Samuel Alito. Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West: a belief in human dignity, universal rights, individual flourishing and the consent of the governed.

That liberalism has been battered by financial crises, the climate crisis, checkered pandemic responses, right-wing populists and a rising China. It seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle.

At least, it did.

politicalWade Lee HudsonApril 3, 2022foreign policyComment

American "Progress" and Putin's Mysticism

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Timothy Snyder

…So by the politics of inevitability, I mean the notion that sometimes goes under the heading of progress. I mean the idea that some kind of outside force is going to guarantee that the things that we desire and wish for are actually going to come about. And if that seems abstract, then what I mean in particular with reference to the United States after the end of communism in 1989 is the notion that there are no alternatives left in the world.

To quote Margaret Thatcher or to quote Frances Fukuyama, history is over. And it’s inevitable that a larger force, namely capitalism, is going to bring about the thing that we desire, namely, democracy and freedom. And that idea was in the air. That idea shaped everything else. And I think that idea has a lot to do with the crisis of democracy and freedom that we’re in right now.

politicalWade Lee HudsonMarch 16, 2022History, foreign policy, rationalityComment

Ezra Klein Interviews Fareed Zakaria

Transcript: March 4, 2022

Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China

The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.

That’s changed….

politicalWade Lee HudsonMarch 7, 2022foreign policy, cooperation, dominationComment

Vladimir Putin’s Clash of Civilizations

“…In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally-cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.

This idea, redolent of Samuel P. Huntington’s arguments in “The Clash of Civilizations” a generation ago, clearly influences many of the world’s rising powers — from the Hindutva ideology of India’s Narendra Modi to the turn against cultural exchange and Western influence in Xi Jinping’s China. Maçães himself hopes a version of civilizationism will reanimate Europe,…” (read more)

CulturalWade Lee HudsonFebruary 27, 2022foreign policyComment

The Foreign Policy Conversation Washington Doesn’t Want to Have

Interview with Robert Wright

So I wanted to have a foreign policy conversation that I’m not hearing with someone who stands outside of and critiques the Washington consensus on these issues. Robert Wright is a journalist and an author. He’s the founder of one of the great enduring institutions of the blogosphere, bloggingheads.tv. He writes on science, and religion, and human cooperation, and foreign policy — particularly foreign policy — in his excellent newsletter Nonzero. I’m a subscriber to that. I urge you to be one too.

In Nonzero, he really routinely examines the assumptions that drive America’s foreign policy conversation, the interest groups that drive it, the kind of collective social dynamics of what he and others call the blob, which is the Washington foreign policy establishment. And that’s what I wanted to talk to him about — the ideas about American power that get taken for granted, the history of failure and blowback that we often ignore, and the lessons we need to learn.

Our reckoning with not just the harm we have done, but I want to say this clearly — with the good we could achieve, the good we could do is long overdue.

politicalWade Lee HudsonAugust 31, 2021foreign policyComment

We’re Living in the World the War on Terror Built

How the politics of the 9/11 era produced Donald Trump.

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” My guest today is somebody I’ve known almost as long as I’ve been in journalism. Spencer Ackerman is a leading national security reporter. He’s the author of the newsletter “Forever Wars,” he’s a contributing editor at The Daily Beast, and he’s a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that reported on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. But now he’s out with a new book, his first book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”

The core premise of “Reign [of] Terror” is that the policies and the politics of the 9/11 era, they didn’t only wreak havoc on the Middle East, but they transformed America itself. And they transformed us so profoundly that we’ve stopped seeing the way they’ve reshaped our country and culture. Now it’s just the water we swim in. In Spencer’s telling, the core of the war on terror itself was this narrative, a narrative of fear.

politicalWade Lee HudsonAugust 12, 2021foreign policyComment