Oh, I agree, but existential threats can arise in a short enough time that the lack of such a threat now does not mean we can afford a President who twiddles his thumbs while the threat grows because he’s focused on income inequality. What happens if Sanders is President and Russia decides to test him in the Baltics? I’d really like to hear from him that he’d honor the NATO treaty. Obama made that pledge explicitly, in Riga. It needs to be heard from Sanders. I have no doubts about Clinton.
He has a point. The only way to end ISIS is to get the local countries to tackle it properly. Otherwise do you plan to occupy Iraq and Syria for decades? He has also called out Saudi Arabia for not participating in the fight against ISIS, pointing out they have by far the largest air force in the region.
Clintons foreign policy is an utter failure. She supported invading Iraq, she supported overthrowing the Libyan government. Guess what? Both those places are now ISIS strong holds. Toppling governments without having a solid plan to stabilise afterwards them makes the US less secure, not more.
As far as foreign policy goes you have the choice between an experienced failure and someone untested.
Oooh, Bern! Oh wait, that hurts my guys too! Hey! Cut that out!
In all seriousness though, there’s a big drawback to saying, “The Muslim countries have to lead the way”. It’s like saying the Nazi problem is a European problem. If the Muslim countries fail to beat ISIS, we can’t just throw up our hands and go, “Oh well”.
Is Russia “testing us in the Baltics” an example of a sudden existential threat?
It used to be that the U.S. kept a small military force in peacetime, and built it up when the government saw a war coming, and then built it down again after the war. That approach won us all our wars from the Mexican-American War through WWII. Isn’t that more sensible – and cheaper – than maintaining a war-footing with a big military force at all times, as we have done ever since WWII ended?
Yes, since by treaty an attack on the Baltics is an attack on the United States.
A) not even remotely true, even if it says so in a treaty and B) an attack /= existential threat.
Ehhhhhh, yes and no. I don’t think the military needs to be as big as it is now, but it does need to be big enough to credibly defeat any other military in the world. We don’t want another situation like we had at the beginning of WWII, and that was after a pretty decent buildup.
IMO, 3% of GDP is a reasonable budget target for the current world situation. If we ever got a safe world, 1% would be ideal.
The reason we bound most of Europe into a treaty is because Europe’s defense is a vital interest of the United States. We can’t stand idly by again as a power hungry maniac swallows up country after country. The Baltics is where we have drawn the line.
Fine. Say that then. An “existential” threat means something other than “our interests are threatened”. Also, the European countries we actually care about have nukes. eta: oh yeah except Germany.
That support, whatever the level it is at, doesn’t spring up for no reason. Sunnis were getting a raw deal from the Iraqi government, giving them a choice between two evils.
ISIS exists because of a power vacuum in the area. This is nothing new, Hayek wrote in the 40s of how, when political leaders are chosen by violence, the most violent and ruthless will prevail.
These aren’t problems that bombing runs and ground invasions can solve; that’s what created this whole mess. Working with regional partners, building up US credibility that was shattered in 2003 - these are proposals I can get behind, and it’s what I’m hearing from Sanders. Yet another foreign war that leaves the world worse off than when we started? Not so much.
Also Spengler, a little bit.
I can appreciate a little bit of Huey Long’s optimistic populism, but seriously, Qin, walk back the nativist stuff. It’s bad enough when white people do it; it looks silly on you.
Spengler, to be fair, included several nonwhite civilizations in his list of “high cultures.”
[del]Wow, how did you get those goalposts on the top of the Empire State Building?[/del]
No, I’m sorry, you have a point about theoretical threats, and about whether something is a police or military issue, you…don’t. Having an A-Bomb does not make you a state. This is not a James Bond film.
That said, Daesh is a state, and BG is wrong to dismiss that.
Considering this entire thread is a low blow attack by someone claiming to be a democrat I have no problem swinging back. Clintons foreign policy is more of the same failure that doesn’t achieve anything except enriching arms manufactures. If you want to defeat ISIS first you have to address the two elephants in the room, Turkey’s support for ISIS and Saudi Arabia’s exporting of extemist Salafist ideology. Some of the US so called “allies” in the region need to be re-evaluated. I see no evidence that Clinton would do that.
OK, you’re off the deep end. The modern French Republic has faced worse existential threats in living memory.
For what it’s worth, I would love to see someone put an end to Daesh. I grant that Hillary would probably be somewhat less incompetent at it than Bernie. (And how weird is it that this is a first-name basis nomination race?) But the USA, in general, does not seem prepared to keep the peace in Syria and Mesopotamia long-term. Remember that it only took the USA three years (2003-2006) to go from an enthusiastic invasion of Iraq to war-weary and ready to come home.
(OK, it was really five years counting W Bush’s other activities.)
That’s not on point as a rebuttal. White nationalists don’t necessarily claim supremacy as a race. The underlying theme is purity.
You are naively focusing on one factor only. ISIS does not only have a presence in areas with a power vacuum. Upper class women in Karachi are supporting ISIS, for example. European raised Muslims are flocking to it, and attacking their home countries in support of ISIS. The common factor among populations supporting ISIS is that they are Sunni Muslims, usually those who have been influenced by Saudi funded mosques.
Ground invasions done on the cheap contributed to this, but did not cause this. We have no way of knowing what the world would be like if Saddam was not taken out of power. It may have been better, and it may in fact have been worse.
Those are platitudes that bring nothing new whatsoever to the table, aside from a comforting but clueless detachment from realities on the ground. Do you think that Obama is not trying to work with partners in the region? Do you think that Clinton’s plans don’t include working with them?
Then the last person we need in power is a politician with no grasp of foreign policy, who is more likely to blindly lead us to a situation where a large scale war is our only option.
I keep asking the same question the moderator asked Sanders in the debate: what is there about his foreign policy that differentiates it from Clinton’s? And this is the only answer, that we are going to get the “Moose-slims” to lead for us. Like, what in the actual fuck does he think we have been trying to do over there for the last decade? Where does he think the Iraqi army got the American made Humvees and artillery that they essentially donated to ISIS?
So maybe there’s no difference between their approach to ISIS. Now what?
Well, it is kindasorta, but nobody recognizes it as such and all its neighbors hate it. It ain’t gonna get any bigger and it ain’t gonna get any stronger and it ain’t gonna last forever.