Timothy Birdnow

'This essay is, well rather silly. It argues that we should stay out of fights like Iran and focus on China.

This is rather like saying that, when you are walking home from a bar at night and see a guy you got into a fight with walking down the street you should ignore the mugger coming up behind you.

He also makes some factual errors - like saying we've been the world's policeman for thirty years - uh, it was since WWII, which makes it over well over twice as long. He furthermore doesn't understand China became a world power because we knowingly, willingly made them one. I remember New Gingrich talking about it in the nineties; he argued that we needed to use engagement with China because when they allowed free markets into their economy, allowed our goods, the public in China would like the wealth flowing in and there would be reforms of the Communist regime. That is like saying greater prosperity would lead to reforms of the Mafia, but that was what so many were thinking then and with the Soviet Union falling and "the end of history" being proclaimed nobody wanted to face the fact that our enemy was only partially gone. So we implemented a strategy to build China economically, moving factories there to take advantage of cheap labor and did ebverything in our power to Make China Great Again. Guess what? It worked - at our expense.

Yes, China is a seriojs, existential threat. But so is a nuclear Iran.

I agree that the Washington elites pine for the old days when they could play with the "peace process" which never seemed to lead to peace, and other internationalist clap-trap. In point of fact the Washington Establishment used the Cold War to justify the creation of the very thing Dwight Eisenhower warned against - the Industrial Military complex. Actually he warned against even more than that - he warned about a technocracy run by universities and research facilities and with the media complicity. Ike knew where we were headed and warned us.The elites miss the good old days of endless wars to "make America safe for democracy". It allowed them to remake America in their own democratic socialist image.

And it is also correct we are exhausting our economic power by spending so much money on multiple foreign wars.

But that's not what we are doing here and it is not what MAGA was about. America First meant precisely that - putting our interests first. Stopping a nuclear armed Iran most assuredly is a first priority for America, as they are prone to chanting "Death to America" and attacking our national interests. You may remember they have bee implicated in a plot to assassinate President Trump,, and they've attacked our military bases even before the current war.

Meanwhile this author wholly fails to see how Trump's Iran war is squeezing the daylights out of China, preventing the Chinese from getting the oil it desperately needs without leading to open conflict with the Chicoms. This war is as much about China as it is about Iran.

The "take my ball and go home" Conservatives have not actual plan; it's just about returning to a simpler time before the Spanish American war where we could stay in our own hemisphere and let the world go by. Satellites and ICBM's and supersonic aircraft make that impossible now. We can't hide from that fact. That doesn't mean we have to get into every disagreement - getting involved in the Ukrainian-Russian war is an example of where we should butt out. But when our own safety and security and economic interests are involved we have every reason to take action.

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