MCViewPoint

US foreign policy is earmarked by chronic stupid stuff because we no longer produce Renaissance men or women who see things in their proper perspective and avoid magnifying fleas into elephants. Renaissance thinkers understand, like Lord Byron, that history, with all its volumes vast, hath but one page, that there is nothing new under the sun, and, that an Aristotelian mean is the presumptive optimal approach to any problem. Narrowly trained specialists cannot see the forest for the trees and routinely stumble.

https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2023/03/26/the-banality-of-bidens-exceptional-elite-advisers/

by Ray McGovern

Danger: President Joe Biden’s sophomores running U.S. foreign policy today live in a dream world on the verge of becoming a nightmare. The nightmare – military confrontation with both Russia and China – now looms.

It is scary enough that Biden seems to be out of it. Scarier still is the reality that his advisers appear to be oblivious to the tectonic-change implications of Russia-China entente. Blinded by the illusion of US”exceptionalism,” they may have to learn the hard way. The nightmare into which they are sleep-walking may be the last nightmare for pretty much all on this planet, except maybe the cockroaches.

Okay: Antony Blinken is no longer a sophomore. But he was a sophomore 20 years ago when he helped his then-boss, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden lie about weapons of mass destruction to win congressional approval for war on Iraq. Neither of them were held accountable for that – one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. Indeed, the only thing they seem to have learned from it is that they will never be held accountable, not even if they wander, oops, into cataclysmic disaster.

Blinken is his now-boss’s, loose-cannon Secretary of State. Will Blinken, now an upperclassman, and the insider-sophomores like national security adviser Jacob Sullivan get us, willy-nilly, into war with Russia? How about war with both Russia and China? Do not put it past them.

Oddly, they have the benighted notion they can “manage” China; keep it from military-alliance-type support for Russia; or – if necessary – handle a two-front war with the two other major nuclear powers. Odder still, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, who should know better, seem cowed by Blinken and Sullivan – despite the fact that they have less military experience in the military than an ROTC cadet.

No Renaissance Men (or Women)

Bruce Fein, a Renaissance-man-type lawyer, pins the blame squarely on these benighted policy makers for trying to encircle and handcuff both China and Russia. Fein is not impressed by the fact that these specialists come from “the best schools.” Here’s Fein in a recent substack post:

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