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The marriage of the woke left and military industrial complex is something few of us would have expected. The "Bush lied, people died", crowed demonstrating against the patriot act got turned into war hawks. Palestine is the one exception however it is exceedingly difficult to pin Hamas on Putin-bots. Assange should be a hero of the left who fought against the actual power structure, the surviellence state and the military industrial complex. Instead, the military industrial complex became the guardians of woke on a moral crusade against evil Putin. If the deepstate is running social media, that is considered good as the military industrial complex ensures that the woke values of the rand corporation.
In 2003 the media allowed for some criticism of the war in Iraq. Bagdad Bob was on TV. Today no journalist beside Tucker would ever interview a Russian. Those who don't support Lockhead Martin financed think tanks are equivalent to MAGA voters and transphobes.
Granted this is somewhat similar to what happened to the right during the Bush years. People who were nominally libertarian became supporters of spending trillions of dollars on wars with no real benefit while supporting measures that expanded state power to unprecedented levels. It will be interesting to see if the left has an equivalent realization to Iraq had no WMD.
The most obvious reason why more people questioned the Iraq war than oppose Russia is that the Iraq war was more questionable than opposition to Russia.
Is it? I can see that when you're looking at the issue from within the media landscape of the US, but I don't see how you can draw that conclusion when you're able to access a variety of sources and see what the other side is actually saying.
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Part of me hopes that the left just rewrites history and acts like they were never against whistleblowers or whatever. If that's what it takes to make this not permanent.
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Requests have been made for interviews with Putin. The BBC still has Steve Rosenberg in Russia and I feel safe assuming there are other western journalists, some of whom interview Russians.
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The idea that the Democratic Party was categorically opposed to the Iraq War in 2003 is a fiction that was created some years later to dunk on Bush for his bungling prosecution of it. While there was certainly some opposition, a good number of Democrats supported it (40% in the House and over 50% in the Senate). Even the so-called "liberal media" didn't mount much opposition. There was a call throughout the early '00s for a "liberal alternative" to the big conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, most notably evidenced by the brief existence of Air America Radio. MSNBC threw their hat into the ring with Phil Donahue. In the run up to the war, Donahue's show was cancelled because the network couldn't stomach his opposition to the war. They claimed it was because of low ratings and cited the fact that his numbers never got anywhere near O'Reilly's, which was true, but he still had the highest-rated show on the network. As someone who was politically conscious at the time, I distinctly remember that being anti-war was seen as a somewhat extreme position; once the war actually started, anti0war protestors had the same cultural status as the pro-Hamas protestors on college campuses do today. Mainstream opposition really only started once the war was going badly and the administration didn't have an exit strategy other than doubling down. While the 2004 election was seen as a referendum on the war, Kerry was quick to criticize Bush over getting us into it but he didn't act like he had an exit strategy, and, IIRC, he specifically said he wasn't going to withdraw a la Howard Dean. Full-scale opposition didn't really crystalize until the tumultuous fall of 2005 put Bush in the doghouse within his own party and bashing him over Iraq became acceptable among Republicans (who essentially adopted the 2004 Democratic position), giving Democrats enough cover to call for actually ending the fiasco.
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As someone who was an anti-Bush, anti-war liberal in the 2000s its been incredibly black pilling for me to see the Democratic Party become the very thing I was fighting against.
That said, it was common knowledge that many of the neo-Conservatives during the Bush years (such as Paul Wolfowitz) were former liberals who never really abandoned their liberal beliefs. To them, invading Iraq was a utopian project to bring a western-style democracy to the Middle East. This pairs perfectly with a lot of woke ideology - which is both blank-slatist and militant. And indeed today, we see some of these same Bush-era neoconservatives being lauded as the "Good Republicans" by the elite establishment.
I think rather than say there's some actual philosophical link between domestic and foreign policy, it's both easier and more accurate to say that foreign policy is this strange third wheel of American politics that rarely makes a difference but is talked about quite a lot. Because it's so out in the woods, we get strange bedfellows all over. I don't think it has any strong link with domestic fundamentals or worldview. Kennedy (D) and LBJ (D) were interventionists, Nixon (R) was mixed, Ford (R) was non-interventionist, Carter (D) non-interventionist, Reagan (R) and then Bush Sr (R) both interventionist, Clinton (D) mixed, Bush Jr (R) super-interventionist, Obama (D) mixed, Trump (R) and Biden (D) both relatively non-interventionist. I don't see a pattern, do you? Maybe that's a little reductionist, but overall, it just feels like you have political opinions, and then foreign policy is tacked on after. Highly relevant to Latest Issue Here, and who happened to be the incumbent. It's highly reactionary.
It looks like misread my post and then insulting the strawman you created.
Yes, there is nothing inherently interventionalist in the Democratic or Republican parties. Where did I ever say there was? In 2024, the Democrats are more into war than Republicans. Trump will stop escalating in Ukraine. Biden won't. And, yes, this is the Latest Issue. In 2003, the Latest Issue was the Iraq War. I care about foreign policy and it affects my vote. I am even so gauche to care about the Latest Issue. What I don't care about is the (R) or (D) next to someone's name. The meaning of that changes over time.
What's the point of talking about JFK? There have been 1.5 realignments since then. Might as well talk about Polk and the Mexican American War.
I went back and forth about it, but since the Vietnam War is a natural starting point in the discussion, and Kennedy kicked that whole thing off, starting somewhere later felt too arbitrary. Anyways, why did I make this illustration? My point the list was intended to illustrate was that foreign policy rarely coincides with fundamental worldview. It's like an orthogonal axis of political belief. Most presidents find themselves taking foreign policy positions due to circumstance rather than an affirmative/assertive foundational worldview! You'd think, for example, that because Reagan was all "small government best government", that he'd feel the same way about the military, but nope! Neither does "big government best government" do anything to predict how a president might act foreign-policy-wise when in office. Or really, any other of the classic left-right axes, but that one usually is the most natural when comparing Dems and Reps.
Perhaps it might be better to ask you to define what you mean by "liberal beliefs". Why would "blank slatism", which as I understand it is the "nurture >> nature" philosophy, necessarily be a militant ideology as well? Why would classical liberalism's emphasis of strong individual rights and the social contract have anything to do with foreign policy either?
And relevant, but a side-bar: I disagree that 2024 Democrats are more "anti-war" than 2024 Republicans. What does anti-war even mean? Hatred of war in general? A stronger predisposition to use diplomacy first, force last? A total renunciation of military action, or the military? Or simply, weighted-average less likely to get involved in a war-level conflict? Are limited military strikes war? What about funding foreign combatants? Not only are these not the same question, but also, there is no common agreed-upon answer yet for the question of whether the US is best served by peace-through-strength or peace-through-dialogue.
I agree with this take. I would extend this from foreign policy to policy in general. The fundamental compass for most politicians is their own personal power. That's why you see revolutionary groups like the Bolsheviks flip from anti death penalty to extremely pro death penalty the second they gain power. Neither party in the U.S. can claim an anti-war mantle. If the Republicans are peaceful now it's only because they don't hold the reins of power. A younger me believed that anti-war Democrats had actual principles. It was blackpilling for me to learn that they don't, and disgusting to see them celebrating the death and destruction in Ukraine.
I didn't say it was, but I actually do believe that, if strongly believed, blank-slatism must become militant. Why? Because it's wrong.
The blank-slatist believes that all races have (somehow) exactly the same IQ. Therefore any group differences must be explained by racism. Based on this flawed worldview, they make policy prescriptions to fix the problem. But it never gets fixed because all races don't have the same IQ. Convinced of their erroneous belief, they double down and take stronger actions, which still don't work. Etc... Etc...
If your belief set is that
Racism is the most important problem that trumps all else
Any differences in group performance is caused by racism
Then you will tear the world apart trying to fix what cannot be fixed. It's similar to how Communists, confronted with the failure of their ideas, blamed it on "wreckers" and resorted to totalitarianism.
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I don't think the Biden administration has gotten involved in any new land wars in Asia - in fact they got out of one by implementing Trump's surrender to the Taliban.
Both parties are pro-war when it comes to Ukraine, but the Democrats more so. Trump is far more likely to bring an end to that war then Biden, whose administration seems gleeful at the opportunity to bleed Russia at the small cost of a few hundred thousand lives.
To which, of course, the reply is "but this is a good war". People thought the same thing about Afghanistan and Iraq too until they didn't. Ukraine will end the same way or worse if it isn't stopped.
What do we mean by "pro-war" here?
Neither party favours America fighting the war in Ukraine. America has various other levers that they can use to influence the result - Biden thinks that America should use them to work towards a Ukrainian victory, Trump that America should use them to work towards a Russian victory (his policy only makes sense if he is planning to jawbone Ukraine into surrendering). I don't see why an aggressor winning is an "anti-war" outcome.
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As someone who remembers the '90s, 9/11 caused both parties to do an about face on war. If you remember the 2000 election, Bush criticized Clinton for his international meddling and promised a "more humble" foreign policy. Nobody was really opposed to Afghanistan (Barbara Lee said later that she only voted against it because it gave the administration a blank check on terrorism and would have supported the resolution if it were limited to the immediate objectives), and there was still strong Democratic support for Iraq. That support collapsed when the war turned into a fiasco and it became de rigeur for conservatives to double down on it during roughly 2004–2006. It was only really about a 10 year period where Democrats could firmly claim the mantle of being the anti-war party and it was de rigeur among Republicans to speak favorably about any military intervention. The last real instance of this was around 2013, when Assad crossed Obama's "line in the sand" over chemical weapons and Obama took heavy criticism for letting it slide. Or possibly 2015, when there was some suggestion that Obama could have gotten a better Iran deal if he made it clear that military action wasn't off the table, though this sentiment wasn't as widespread.
I'd like to say that this ended with the rise of Trump, but that's not really the case. While the Republican base will criticize Democrats for any of the current administration's foreign adventures, there's still widespread support for the shots we don't actually take. I actually hang out in bars with a lot of conservative-leaning people and most of them will make some comment about how we need to bomb Iran back into the stone age every time they're in the news for doing something aggressive. Every time Biden makes a concession to some foreign leader I hear remarks about him not being tough.
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