Monday, September 19, 2022

The FBI Should Be Nuked From Orbit

Nothing less than the total dismantling of the American Stasi is acceptable.


I speak only of metaphorical nuclear hellfire, of course. As a moderate centrist, I thoroughly reject the radical position that the Republican Party should use actual nukes against the deep state. That’s a bridge too far for a restrained, independent voter like myself.

But merely annihilating the FBI as an entity and arresting its most corrupt members is the kind of suburban soccer mom-friendly public policy proposal I can get behind. Indeed, “Destroy the FBI” would make a terrific moderate centrist campaign slogan for Donald Trump in 2024. Joe Biden’s state security service is obviously out of control. It is time Americans accept the plain truth: the D.C. “blob” is the enemy of decency and civilization. The evidence of gross, politically motivated misconduct by the “Injustice” Department piles up daily. 

The raid of Mar-a-Lago, the crackdown on Trump’s allies like John Eastman and Mike Lindell, and the unhinged prosecution of ordinary Americans who protested in favor of election integrity on January 6 are all prima facie evidence that the White House has weaponized America’s “apolitical” organs of justice against one set of Americans as a result of their political beliefs.

This behavior has no place in our republic. 

The American Right should therefore make the complete dismemberment of the FBI one of its top priorities going into 2024. The whole organization should be disbanded. Everyone from Director Christopher Wray to the lowliest secretary should be fired. The FBI’s ugly and godforsaken Soviet-style concrete fortress in downtown DC should be bulldozed. The FBI’s archives should be entirely declassified.

The FBI is America’s KGB. We should treat it as such. For too long, the FBI has engaged in subversive and anti-democratic activities. The ongoing connection of FBI informants to terrorist attacks is especially disturbing. A heavy dose of sunlight is essential.

For instance, two of the 9/11 hijackers lived with an FBI informant in San Diego prior to the World Trade Center attacks. 

An undercover FBI agent texted a would-be mass shooter to “tear up Texas” prior to the attempted 2014 terror attack on a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas. That same FBI agent was in the parking lot of the location where the two gunmen launched their attack. 

Boston magazine reporter Michelle McPhee reported in 2017 that one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, was very likely an FBI informant. Despite the FBI receiving warnings from the Russian government that Tsarnaev was a threat, he somehow managed to enter and exit the United States from a known terror hot spot without a passport . . . all while his name was on two terrorist watchlists. 

In 2017, the FBI maintained a network of some 15,000 to 20,000 turncoat informants: an utterly mind boggling number. Between 2011 and 2018, the federal government paid $548 million to federal informants for the DEA, ATF, and FBI. Those informants collectively were involved in 22,800 crimes while receiving taxpayer funds.

One of those informants was Joshua Caleb Sutter, a member of the alleged “neo-Nazi” group Atomwaffen. Sutter ran a printing press called Martinet that published Satanist and Nazi material. The FBI, it turns out, paid Sutter around $100,000 over nearly a decade.

Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who headed the Russian hoax investigation into Trump, is especially dirty. He had exculpatory evidence for four innocent men who had been wrongfully convicted of murders committed by FBI agents. He stonewalled the evidence as director in order to protect the corrupt Boston office of the FBI, where at least a half-dozen agents were taking bribes from organized crime.

The FBI, along with its investigative brethren, is actively enmeshed in the dealings of the underworld. In 2016, the FBI seized the world’s largest child porn site on the “darkweb” called Playpen and then kept it running for two weeks while it infected the computers of visitors to the website with malware designed to track their activity.

Put simply, the FBI distributed child porn in the name of the supposed “greater good.”

The line between the scum of the earth and the FBI has blurred to the point of disappearing entirely. The lead FBI agent in Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping case, Richard Trask, was a “swinger” (involved in polyamorous sexual activity) who also beat his wife. Trask testified repeatedly in the FBI’s case against alleged militia members but had to be pulled from the case when it was discovered that he had been railing against Trump on social media.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Every part of the FBI is politically corrupt, broken, and vicious. The problem is not a few “bad apples” but the utter lack of “good apples” anywhere in the organization. It is rotten to the core. Americans need to man up and demand radical change. Nothing less than the total dismantling of the American Stasi is acceptable.  

Much like the Roman Senator Cato the Elder who ended all of his speeches prior to the Third Punic War with the pronouncement “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed), Trump should end all of his public events with a similar call for the elimination of the FBI.

Raze it to the ground and salt the earth.

It is a mistake for America-First Republicans to merely complain about their abuse at the hands of Big Tech and Joe Biden’s state security services. Whining is not a good look. Playing the victim won’t get us anywhere. Engaging these fools in argument is not a particularly useful path, either. 

The Department of Injustice and their FBI goon squad raided Mar-a-Lago on completely ridiculous pretexts. To treat this as legally valid in any sense whatsoever is ritual humiliation. The three statutes under which the search warrant was conducted have no applicability to the president. 

First, federal law states: “Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States” shall be punished. 

Trump had every right to keep all of his records. He was the president. He alone decides what qualifies as a federal record and what he wishes to turn over to his subordinates at the National Archives Administration. The president is a unitary executive. The National Archivist works for him, not the other way around. 

Telling Trump he couldn’t keep documents that he declassified is absurd. Trump did not interfere with the “proper administration” of a matter before the “jurisdiction” of a federal agency because he was the one who controlled those entities. They did not control him. 

The federal statute that addresses the mutilation of government documents doesn’t apply for the same reasons. It states that the “unlawful” concealment of documents is not allowed. Trump had every right to declassify and use documents that were created and maintained by the executive branch. Again, the American executive is unitary. President Trump is, per Article II of the Constitution, the sole possessor of executive power in the United States government. The FBI and National Archives Administration do not get to decide what is unlawful for their boss, the chief executive, to do with his own documents.

The final law under which Trump was searched, the Espionage Act, is outrageous in the highest degree. The idea that the president can be charged as a spy because he kept his own documents is absurd. The law is so broadly written that virtually any American citizen who has ever taken a photo on or of a military base—even soldiers—could be guilty of a crime. 

It is obvious that the Biden Administration’s secret police are manipulating the law in order to crush political rivals. 

Pointing out that the Left are “hypocrites” when they spy on their opponents, arrest their enemies, and help their friends is of little value. Instead, the Right should simply state the reverse: when we get into power we are going to do the same to you. Turnabout is fair play.

Republicans should dismantle the FBI and then go about weaponizing their own faction to go after corrupt liberal politicians and communist agitators. The Left imagines that it will be perpetually in power. The arc of history bends toward endless immigration from the Third World, transgender genital mutilation for children, and the expropriation of the white middle class. 

That is a dangerous assumption. Joe Biden and the craven Left with their boiling hatred and resentment toward middle America have enraged ordinary Americans. They think that they can spit in the face of God-fearing people and nothing will happen. They think they will keep on winning forever. It isn’t true. There will be a backlash.

America’s gerontocracy is grifting on borrowed time. The gaping maw of the eternal abyss awaits our octogenarian ruling class. The Grim Reaper patiently readies himself for the Mitch McConnells, Nancy Pelosis, and Joe Bidens of the world. 

And when they are gone a new power will arise. The swamp will be drained. The FBI will be consigned to the dustbin of history. The federal bureaucracy will submit to the people. The time is soon. The fight is about to begin.




X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- Sept 19

 



Here's tonight's news:


Equal Justice, They Said ~ VDH


We are now a revolutionary society in decline using the courts, prosecutors, the administrative state, and the law itself to punish enemies, help friends, and declare such asymmetry “social justice.”


What once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.”

The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court—an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept—what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later became enshrined as the central criterion of all Western consensual governments.

Does it still exist in Joe Biden’s America? 

In many ways, no—due both to state and private vendettas as well as state efforts to destroy rather than merely defeat political opponents. 

Is the law equally applied at the border? 

Ask yourself whether you are more likely to be hounded by the federal government for not being vaccinated if you are a citizen in the U.S. military, or illegally violating federal immigration law as you storm the southern border? 

Who needs a passport to leave and enter the United States—a citizen or an illegal alien?

If you nullify federal law and refuse to hand over a detained illegal alien to federal immigration agents, are you more or less likely to be prosecuted than someone who likewise deliberately seeks to nullify federal law by bulldozing on his property a nest of federally protected squirrels?

What tradition of Western jurisprudence allows violent criminals in America’s largest cities to be released upon booking? 

What law states they are instantly free to commit more crimes without worry of incarceration or punishment, while those accused of illegally parading sit in jail for years awaiting charges? 

Is it a greater crime in this republic to walk peacefully through an open door into the Capitol, as at least some who were charged as a result of January 6 did, or to beat to near death an innocent bystander as many do who are released after arrest?

As far as that reprehensible, buffoonish January 6 riot, compare the treatment accorded to those hundreds—many guilty of “illegally parading or “demonstrating in the Capitol”—with some 14,000 who were arrested in 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, assault, and murder during the spring and summer 2020 riots. 

Did the FBI spend over a year tracking down the names of those known from videos who torched federal buildings, murdered those in the street, sought to storm the White House grounds, and set up no-go zones in downtowns?

To incite the January 6 riot was prosecuted as a crime, but Kamala Harris, who was soon to be a vice-presidential candidate in the summer of 2020, could incite with impunity. Even more, she helped to raise bail for violent offenders during those riots and said of the summer-long “protests” shortly after the violent attempt to storm the White House grounds:

But they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up—and they should not. And we should not.

What do those who had recently torched the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church take away from Harris’ adolescent greenlighting?

After all, Harris essentially promised continued protests, which she knew had so often turned terribly violent and descended into death and destruction. Were her insurrectionary calls a crime or at least worthy of a cell phone grab? A leg iron? A squad of FBI vehicles swarming her car?

Is questioning an election outcome a crime? Or even taking steps to challenge the elections? 

That is, did a John Eastman have the power of former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and current January 6 committee chairman Benny Thompson (D-Miss.), who, with little or no evidence, took far more dramatic measures in 2004 to reject the Ohio electors and thus attempt to nullify that year’s presidential election results?

Did Stacey Abrams “undermine democracy” by touring the country denying she had been beaten in the Georgia gubernatorial election by some 50,000 votes? Did Hillary Clinton again undermine election integrity when she publicly urged Joe Biden not to concede the 2020 election if he lost the popular vote, or claim that Donald Trump was not the legitimate president of the United States?

Does Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice apply to some, none, or all retired high-ranking military officers? 

What are we to make of retired lieutenant colonels who urged the military well before the 2020 election to remove Trump from office if they thought he questioned the election?

When generals and admirals called their commander-in chief a Mussolini-type character, a liar, like the Nazis, akin to the architects of Auschwitz, or wrote that the “sooner the better” he should be removed, were those violations to be prosecuted? 

Did retired officers have their businesses or employers’ contracts with the Pentagon nullified? 

Or was it only a more obscure retired officer, such as Lt. General Gary Volesky? He was a conservative who tweeted that the first lady (not the commander-in-chief) sounded hypocritical on the issue of abortion—and thus was fired as a Pentagon consultant. Was that equal administrative justice?

Is there really a Logan Act, the ossified 18th-century statute under which no one has ever successfully been prosecuted? It depends.

In 2016 James Comey’s FBI and the Justice Department interim head Sally Yates used that ruse as a pretext to set a perjury trap for National Security Advisor designate retired Gen. Michael Flynn. But did not former Secretary of State John Kerry meet stealthily with Iranian high officials during the Trump Administration to reassure them that the Iran Deal could be salvaged after the Trump tenure—a deliberate Logan Act subversion of his then government’s foreign policy?

Is it a crime to withhold presidential papers from the National Archives? Was that Donald Trump’s sin: that he did not more carefully and officially declare documents at his residence as unclassified or his own personal papers? 

Was that a clumsy way of doing what George W. Bush did in 2001 when he simply issued an executive order allowing an ex-president or his heirs to veto release of presidential papers? Did FBI agents with guns enter one of the Obama mansions to discover why ownership of thousands of pages of his personal papers was still in dispute?

Did the FBI raid the home of the late Clinton-Administration National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to see whether he sought to hide or erase other documents, in addition to those he stole from the National Archives and destroyed? Was he ever frog-marched or put in leg irons?

What were minor celebrities and politicians trying to do in December 2016 when they cut commercials begging the electors not to follow their federally mandated roles in voting in accordance with their states’ popular votes? Were they pointing a “dagger at the heart of democracy”? Were they “insurrectionists”?

Conspiracy is a word that the Biden Administration reintroduced to the American discourse after a hiatus since the 1950s and 1960s. And the Left was eager to charge hundreds with conspiracy for storming the capitol or “colluding” with Russia to rig the 2016 election.

But Molly Bell in a 2021 Time essay proudly also used that word in the scariest sense in modern memory. She outlined how the Left, quietly with the DNC, unions, the anarchic left-wing street, and corporate help, all modulated the violent protests to ebb before the election and to be ready to flow again should Biden have lost. 

She bragged how nearly $500 million of Silicon Valley dark money was funneled into key preselected precincts to essentially absorb the work of state and local registrars. She gushed how the Left conspired with Silicon Valley to monitor and censor any expressions and opinions on social media felt to be detrimental to the Biden campaign.

Did federal prosecutors pursue racketeering charges against any she named?

Speaking of “conspiracies,” was it legal for Hillary Clinton to hire a foreign national as a campaign helper to spread lies and dirt on her political opponent, even as she hid her role through the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS? What did she have to hide?

Did James Comey’s FBI likewise conspire to interfere in an election by also hiring members of Clinton’s opposition hit team, specifically Christopher Steele and Igor Dyachenko, as FBI informants? 

Was all that “democracy dying in darkness”? 

That illegal effort to use the federal government to disrupt an election makes the clownish attempt of the Trump keystone cop team to question the electors look like child’s play. Will current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan be pulled over driving home by an FBI fleet eager to seize his cell phone to ascertain fully his conspiratorial role in 2016 pushing the phony Trump Tower pings, Steele dossier, and collusion hoax to warp a federal election? 

How about using equal justice in investigating supposed conspiracies and real violent demonstrations?

Did the FBI team, which monitored school kids’ parents to report back to Merrick Garland about their supposedly racist opposition to critical race theory, also ever monitor Twitter and Facebook to anticipate the next planned riot location of Antifa and BLM? Is it now investigating all the stolen money and diverted funds used for personal extravagance by BLM’s fraudulent leadership?

Donald Trump is continually audited for possible tax violations. Fine, but, given Hunter Biden’s laptop and the testimony of the Biden family co-grifters, has any Biden ever been under serious investigation for not reporting tens of millions of dollars in shake-down money, or gifting millions to Biden children? 

How about lying under oath or to federal investigators? Are those activities still crimes? 

Could a citizen swear under oath to IRS investigators, as James Comey did under oath to Congress on 245 occasions, that he did not know what was asked or could not remember?

In that context, what do ex-CIA head John Brennan, ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and ex-FBI interim director Andrew McCabe all have in common? 

1) They all lied either under oath to Congress or to a federal investigator. 2) They all faced no criminal liability by committing such felonies. 3) Their animus and zeal in pursuing enemies were seen to be useful to the Left and thus they were rewarded by being hired as analysts at either MSNBC or CNN.

Is leaking or improperly possessing classified or confidential government information still a crime? 

It seems that is one of the accusations against Donald Trump: that he had in his possession classified federal property that might have been insecure. 

In contrast, was it a felony to leak to the media a rough draft of a confidential Supreme Court opinion—with the intent of helping to either undermine or change it? Was the unidentified, unprosecuted leaker a felon or a hero? 

Were Trump’s boxes at home as insecure as the confidential, memorialized memos that James Comey wrote on FBI devices shortly after a confidential one-on-one conversation with the president of the United States, which he then deliberately leaked through a third party to the New York Times

Was all that a conspiratorial gambit to fuel public pressure for a special prosecutor for the Russian collusion hoax? Was that not a clandestine effort that worked brilliantly in the appointment of his friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller? 

As special counsel, Mueller went on to waste 22 months and $40 million to prove that Russian collusion was a Clinton-FBI generated hoax as critics had insisted from the very outset of the appearance of the Steele dossier. Mueller was successful only in wounding an administration through the deliberate, daily leaked rumors that instantly became “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” media lies.

Is it a crime to threaten a Supreme Court justice? 

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did just that in front of the Supreme Court doors, when he riled up protestors by threats to individual justices: 

I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

Had Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) done the same and warned both Justices Sotomayor and Kagan that the two “won’t know what hit you,” what would the Biden Administration have done?

It is a felony to mass at a justice’s home, and threaten his person, in attempts to warp a judicial ruling? Attorney General Merrick Garland saw no problems when a left-wing mob descended on the homes of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. No one was arrested or indicted. No wonder an admitted would-be assassin later felt he could approach, with impunity, the Kavanaugh residence or that a mob could, with impunity, drive him out of a restaurant. 

Again, would Garland have stood by had a MAGA crowd swarmed the home or the dinner table of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson? For that felony, most would likely still be sitting in jail awaiting charges.

Is it a crime to destroy subpoenaed property? 

Currently, that is one of many unproved charges floated to justify the raid on the Trump home. If it is, Hillary Clinton destroyed thousands of subpoenaed and likely improper or illegal emails. She even ordered her assistant to destroy devices that might have risked leaving electronic prints of them. 

The Mueller investigation’s FBI team simply shrugged that its phone data of its employees under federal subpoena were “mistakenly” wiped clean. Were any of these miscreants tried for defying a court order? For obstruction of justice?

In today’s America, it is a far greater sin to illegally parade at the nation’s Capitol than to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland.

A policeman who recklessly puts his knee on the neck of an ex-felon suspect, contributing to his death in custody, will be known to the nation in 24 hours as the most hated man in America and destined for a life behind bars. To add that the suspect was high on fentanyl and methamphetamines, violently resisting arrest, apprehended after committing a felony, striking officers, and in the past a convicted home invader who stuck a gun to the womb of a pregnant woman is irrelevant.

But not the same case is a Capitol policeman, with his own record of reckless conduct, who lethally shoots an unarmed female suspect and military veteran, for the misdemeanor crime of unlawfully entering through a window. 

Unlike the former, the latter will not be immediately identified. His picture will not be splashed over the media. The results of the investigation into his conduct will instead be suppressed for months. And his critics will be smeared as racists. And the deceased? She will be slandered postmortem as a nut and pervert, while George Floyd was memorialized with a halo and angelic wings.

So, what has happened to blind Lady Justice? 

The new Antifa/BLM/Squad/socialist Left filtered into government and absorbed the Biden Administration. It knows it lacks majority public support, so it has weaponized the justice system to punish enemies and ignore the crimes of allies—all to be excused by its morally superior ends that justify the use of such discreditable means. And the Left wishes to send a message to Americans: We are serious and mean business. So, join us, and receive indemnity from the federal government; oppose us and watch your back.

The result of all this is that America is not quite America anymore. We are now a revolutionary society in decline that uses the courts, prosecutors, the administrative state, and the law itself to punish enemies, help friends, and declare such asymmetry “social justice.” There is no equality under the law, but simply “some are more equal than others.”




Here’s What A Realist Foreign Policy Requires To Take On China

Crusade abroad, insolvency, and internal decay will rot America from within. 
Our rivals understand that and are willing to exploit it.



China is the biggest challenge that the United States has faced in its entire history. Unfortunately, it is not the type of challenge we are used to.

To start with, the gross domestic product of China, measured as the rival GDP of a great power compared to the United States, is at a whopping 77 percent, up from 13 percent in 2001 compared to any systemic rival America has faced previously, including Imperial Germany (35 percent), Nazi Germany (26 percent), Imperial Japan (13 percent) and the Soviet Union (roughly around 40 percent).

America wasn’t dependent on her former great-power rivals for trade or manufacturing. If tomorrow the dollar isn’t the reserve currency of the world anymore, China will choke us by aligning with the European Union, just like we’re choking Russia now with sanctions. Wars, need not be fought.

According to Statista, in 2017, China had 4.7 million new science, math, and engineering graduates, while India had 2.6 million. The United States had 568,000 and Russia 561,000. There are now three new Chinese universities in the top 20, compared to one European, with the rest, Anglo-American.

China, the world’s second-largest military spender, allocated around $300 billion to its military in 2021, an increase of 4.7 percent compared with 2020, with spending that grew for 27 consecutive years. Chinese shipbuilding is currently outpacing the Anglo-German naval race.

Chinese carrier groups are concentrated in Asia, and American warships are placed in places such as Bahrain and the Baltics, where there are no hegemonic threats present in the near future, and where local powers are capable of balancing any adversaries on their own if they so choose. But they do not, because they know America is there to break the glass during a fire.

China is stockpiling food rapidly. By the end of this year China, with 20 percent of the world’s population, will have 65 percent of the world’s corn and 53 percent of the world’s wheat.

A study found around 160 incidents of Chinese espionage, with nearly a quarter of those between 2000 to 2009 and another three-quarters between 2010 to 2021. The study reports, “42% of actors were Chinese military or government employees. 32% private Chinese citizens. 26% were non-Chinese actors (Americans recruited by Chinese), 34% of incidents sought to acquire military technology, 51% of incidents sought to acquire commercial technologies, 16% of incidents sought to acquire information on US civilian agencies or politicians, 41% of incidents involved cyber espionage.”

A recent National Association of Scholars report stated, that, of the 104 Confucius Institutes that have closed or are in the process of closing, at least 28 have replaced it with a similar program, and at least 58 have maintained close relationships with their former partners.

Socially, China is doing the exact opposite of what they are preaching abroad, often on social media. China’s government banned feminine men on TV and told broadcasters to “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics.” China’s Education Ministry published plans to “cultivate masculinity” in boys from kindergarten through high school with more effort on physical education. A crackdown was ordered on any feminist activism or movements like “Me Too.” China also cracked down on “immoral activities” and “misinformation from abroad.” 

Meanwhile, a new TikTok press release stated that they are opening a new election integrity center in the United States that will influence American elections by countering “misinformation.”

The Reason for Realism

So, the Chinese challenge to the United States is a little more than a seaborne invasion of Taiwan. But how does realism help design an effective response to China? Realism in foreign policy is a framework based on material evidence of threat and power distribution, predicated on some core assumptions.

First, the world is anarchic, in the sense that there is no fixed hierarchy and global policemen. The reason great powers rise and fall are due to conflicts, insecurity, or ideological crusades abroad, and nothing is more important than survival and avoidance of catastrophic great power wars, unless the homeland is directly threatened. That is the reason smart great powers should always prefer internal security over utopian misadventures abroad. One might hate the game, and the actors might change, but the game will remain the same.

Second, alliances are the means to an end, not an end in itself. Consider that the United States joined the two world wars, not because of some lofty ideals of human rights used as war rhetoric, but as Hans Morgenthau wrote, to prevent a hegemon from dominating the whole continent, either in Asia or Europe. The core motivation was strategic, not ideological.

Finally, and the most crucial point of them all, “buck-passing” is a smart strategy. One might not like that in our post-modern world of “liberal rights promotion,” but the smartest way to fight an absolutely unavoidable great power war is to rely on foot soldiers of allies instead of a forward presence everywhere. Being the final “offshore balancer” is the smart way.

All of these lessons were internalized by our wise elder statesmen. All of these lessons we have forgotten in the last 30 years of unipolarity.

What Realism Requires

Realism, therefore, dictates the following course of action.

First, arm Taiwan to the teeth, but avoid the Thucydides Trap of a civilization-ending great power war. Asia in 2022 isn’t similar to Europe in 1949, with the balancing powers broken, and no one to stop the march of the Soviets.

China is surrounded by Japan, Vietnam, Australia, and India — all powers that are either treaty allies, or in tactical alignment with the United States against China. That is a structural advantage. It is tough to imagine a scenario where China is on a blitz with simultaneous wars in the Himalayas and in the South and East China seas. Having a sense of proportion is crucial.

The “area denial” strategy that is an advantage for China is also an advantage against Chinese sea-borne invasions with proper weapons and platforms. Taiwan is a heavily armed, rich, capable, advanced, and a big island of 24 million people. If armed properly, it could turn out to be China’s own 20-year misadventure and imperial graveyard.

Second, husband resources. The biggest cause of great power collapse isn’t war, but atrophy, internal decay, and overstretch. Funding utopian crusades abroad, whether promoting women’s rights in Afghanistan or LGBT rights in Ukraine, to the point of insolvency is a fundamental danger to an exhausted republic. A smarter strategy is to force allies to shoulder a larger share. We have to remember that allies will always free-ride as long as they can free-ride.

Third, and a crucial point, understand the ideological roots of our current grand strategy. Consider that Soviet state universities were extremely diverse and included top students from China, Kazakhstan, Syria, Poland, and East Germany, but they were all hardcore communists. There’s a tendency to project a certain rationality among people when it is rarely the case.

Surely, corporates are smart enough to see that wokeness is hurting capital and country? Surely, activist professors are rational and can be persuaded with reason? Surely everyone can see that spending an unlimited amount on foreign aid can result in a crippling inflation?

Soviet history suggests otherwise. Some of the most intelligent people can be extreme ideologues, and the detached majority are often led by a handful of extremely irrational ones.

The bias in favor of assumed mass rationality is almost always flawed. Politics is top-down. A common mistake in America is to conflate “meritocracy” — a system where merit and quality is favored, which could happen under any system of governance, either imperialism, aristocracy, or democracy — with credentialism, a rule by ideologues and experts, which we have now.

It is our universities that are the primary drivers behind the activist mentality of “promoting liberal rights,” either abroad or at home. The root causes of crusading interventionism abroad to the point of bankruptcy are the same behind a crusading wokeness at home. It’s a universalist desire to “ensure social justice” everywhere. Our rivals understand that and are willing to exploit that.

In sum, the realist option is to avoid direct escalation or indefensible red lines, and instead prop-up local actors to be the front line of deterrence, while building up strength and focussing inward. The Cold War playbook can be applied here, and the post-Cold War playbook to be avoided.

The challenge of China is far more complex than a simple Churchillian binary, and America’s internal problems added with the post-Cold War crusading impulse are bigger threats to the future of the republic than China invading and occupying Taiwan and trying to pacify a brutal insurgency with their blood and treasure. Crusade abroad, insolvency, and internal decay at home, on the other hand, will rot America from within.

You are familiar with George Washington’s farewell address warning against entanglements abroad and foreign influence at home. The second part is often forgotten but equally important: “since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Washington said, and we forgot, “the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible … our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”

I’d end with one of my other favorite Georges. George Canning’s guiding principle for post-Napoleonic British grand strategy argued for “non-intervention; no European police system; every nation for itself, and God for us all; balance of power; respect for facts, not for abstract theories; respect for treaty rights, but caution in extending them…”

We should re-learn the old wisdom of the two Georges, as we face an old type of global rivalry returning to form.