I rarely read anything that I agree with 100%. This is one of those times.
Infuriating to hear *billions* and critical strategic oil/military materials to go here, there, everywhere, as if America is some magic fairy with no bottom to the bucket.
America has no choice but to try. It’s easy to say “surrender Ukraine to Putin”, but when you look what catastrophic results that would mean in the confrontation with this “Axis of Evil”, you realize it’s not an alternative. When you are clueless about foreign policy, it’s very easy to say “let’s drop this and everything will be fine, nobody will bother us”. The war in Iraq was an idiocy, but just pulling the US troops out meant having to fight the ISIS later. Getting out of Afghanistan might have been a good idea, but clearly doing it in such an inept, disastrous way encouraged Putin to try his luck in Ukraine. It’s an old lesson, that should have been learned with WWI and WWII.
"Easy to say...?" Neither I nor the authors of the piece said anything close to what you suggest in your reply.
"An old lesson?" Notably you fail to say what "old lesson" we should be applying here from WWI and WWII. My guess would be maybe isolationism, or maybe appeasement? I try not to assume what's in other people's heads when they decline to be clear, but if that is what you are thinking, neither concept was inferred in my comment or the original essay.
Though obviously it is right to look to history for lessons to be learned but is dangerous to do so without recognizing that the world and the circumstances here now are significantly different than what faced America in the first half of the 20th century. Off the top of my head, I would point to a nuclear world, non-state actors, digital connectivity and vulnerability, lesser percentage of military-age Americans who are also military-capable, and America's decline in energy production and heavy manufacturing ability.
None of that is to say that America should ignore the world, or that we should not sacrifice if doing so is in our interest. It does support the realization that we cannot be everywhere, every time, with a bottomless supply of money and materials (or - God forbid - troops to fight on behalf of others' interests).
The clear and unequivocal assessment that the retreat from Kabul was a rout is what gets the term "clueless" to apply to Biden and Blinken. Add onto that the clear failure of leadership represented by the term of Mark Milley as the senior military officer.
Our opposition is smart enough to recognize the signs of weakness; it is a shame that our leadership cannot see it in our own actions.
A nation does not have to be aggressive to be strong. But with all of our power, why have our ruling class allowed us to be knocked around the ring like a rank novice?
You have chosen to read my general remark “when you are clueless about foreign policy” as addressed personally to YOU. If you want to interpret it like that, please ask yourself if the rest of my remarks fit you: are you actually saying that if the US refuses any foreign entanglement we would be left alone and we wouldn’t be forced to intervene later? Obfuscation is not a great strategy in a discussion. Along the same lines, the abrupt retreat from Iran, followed by sending back American troops to fight something even worse, or the disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan - examples that I have given - didn’t happen in the first half of the 20th century, did they?
More hubristic bull. Exactly how do you intend to defeat an axis of Russia, China and Iran in a long Cold War? They outnumber us, they control all the key minerals and resources on the planet, and they have a faster growth rate, and they can outmatch us in many areas of technology. E.g in hypersonic rocket engines. They also have interior lines of communication which we cannot cut, and they have the ability to block our own transport systems. Moreover they are beating us to the first moon colony and they are planning to establish missile bases on the moon which will prevent anyone else from landing on that object.
I see, so maybe we should just surrender and become all communists and bow to China. Or maybe we should cut the BS like the ridiculous propaganda in your post and get to work, just as America does when all the other alternatives are exhausted.
Have you ever considered that they are just as scared of us as we are of them. They know how much we can hurt them if we get irritable. So, like two lion packs in the same game park, we need to divide the territory, guard the boundary,, arm ourselves to the teeth with new technology, make sure they cannot break our intelligence and information network, and maybe and set up a neutral trading post and body for dispute resolution. Allies are those who agree to join our network and restrict strategic trade and travel and purchases from China.
Agreed. The real issue is going to be reindustrialing the US manufacturing sector which has been systematically decimated by both parties since at least the ‘90’s. (Hat tip to Al Gore on that one).
But any thoughts that the US can prevent China from taking Taiwan are delusional. We can provide a deterrence and extract a cost, but short of a nuclear holocaust, there is no way to militarily defend Taiwan. Once again, thanks to the nitwits who helped turn China into an industrial and economic powerhouse so that hedge fund and private equity parasites could get very wealthy at untold cost to the working and middle classes here at home, China can take Taiwan when it so chooses.
The takeaway from this article is to restore our manufacturing base, including chip manufacturing, but that will require rethinking a whole lot of prior policy choices, and our political class likely isn’t up to the task.
Rebuilding chip capacity? Look at moors law. By they time we have reestablished chip design and fabrication sectors, the Chinese will already have two new generations of faster product. Meanwhile our AI software sector is starved for decent compute power. So we kill TESLA apple , google and Facebook in order to save INTEL and AMD and NAVIDA. This is a mess for our foreign policy and a total catastrophe for the American middle class.
Thank you for articulating that the American middle class has been robbed of its wealth and taken for granted by our leadership.
The only real way we can change this is to vote out the bums that got us to here and refuse to vote for anyone who thinks that government is more important than those being governed.
And I disagree 100% with both Vance and the writer of the article. In short it's too late, kids! Consolidating priorities makes sense, but if Ukraine arms aid comes out the loser - we will be perceived by Russia and China and Iran as retreating. Leaving Ukraine to fend for itself. The withdrawal won't be as messy as Afghanistan, which in its ineptitude probably prompted Putin to play his hand in Ukraine, but it will be seen as another loss for the U.S. nonetheless, and empower other similar forays by the players against us. Perception in this neighborhood is as good as reality. In short, we're stuck. We have to do both - aid Israel and Ukraine and of course, ourselves.
Who says we can't build more weapons, missiles and jets? Of course we can.
We’ll see. Now that the ground invasion of Gaza has apparently begun, if Hezbollah decides to enter the war, they have to be convinced American cruise missiles and jets armed with precision weapons parked offshore won’t come their way. I don’t think they’re convinced.
Bull. Talk is cheap. You sound like a lot of desperate tyrants of history, after their strategic reserve is exhausted and defeat is inevitable. You are Hitler in his bunker, ordering up imaginary divisions to reinforce the Stalingrad front. Pathetic. A supposed chess player who does not see the checkmate.
We stop sending arms to Ukraine. Ukraine potentially loses the war in time. Putin or his surrogates take over. NATO allies start screaming about collective security in face of a victorious Russia. We then have to respond due to the nature of the agreement - which would mean not just financial treasure but manpower. You either pay now, or pay a much higher cost later. In my view.
It means we pressure Zalinski and Germany to take financial and military responsibility for the Donbas front. We need. To pressure Putin to make a deal with the USA rather than with China. Essentially we offer him half of Ukraine if he does this. This is harsh but remember Ukraine is not NATO and we have no legal obligation to defend their territory and they simply cannot hold it by themselves even after some very heavy supply efforts on our part. Efforts that have weakened our reserves. Maybe, if they negotiate while still having intact forces, Ukraine doesn’t need to totally surrender, but can still keep something. A good coach needs to throw the towel if his side is getting creamed. It would be nice to have a buffer state between Germany Poland and Russia. A rump Ukrainian state could provide this.
We need more statesmen like JD Vance who are veterans and know the harsh realities of war. Our establishments Magical thinking on printing money, men, and weapons out of thin air is ending. Only in América can someone go from hillbilly poverty to Yale Law to the Senate and perhaps the Oval Office one day.
Agreed. We need more statesmen like JD Vance and like Ron DeSantis who had a humble beginning but graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School, then joined the United States Navy and was promoted to lieutenant before serving as a legal advisor to SEAL Team One.
But is he a fighter? Trump was belligerent, yes. He was boisterous, yes. But we had secure borders or almost, we moved the capital to Jerusalem, we almost had the Abrams Accord, countries were afraid of Trump. Now we have a buffoon for President ( run by Obummer), a VP that is worthless, a bunch of leftists for senators. We are in a hell of a mess now.
I completely agree. I was an Independent all my life and registered with a party for the first time so that I could select Trump in the 2016 primary. At that time it was the terrible "sanctuary cities" which led me to that. Then, I voted for him twice for president. We do indeed have Brandon run by O. It is terrible how his good work was largely undone. But, I think this is the hour for DeSantis. He knew how to put the right people in place in Florida. He took on Disney... He is very smart and measured. He was a Navy Jag. I think his tone is different but he sure demonstrated that he knows how to get things done as governor of his state. I am not for getting stuck in the past. I think there is a place for Trump. And, I think the Biden crime family needs to be prosecuted when out of office - as I don't see much getting done before then.
Certainly, having seen some death a distraction up close and personal is a big plus. We don’t need any more think tank generals. But we can’t just fight the last war. Technology has moved and changed everything. We need to get into space and secure the strategic high ground before our competition. The military competition for near earth planetary space has begun and the same for AI and quantum computing and biotechnology and a dozen other areas. We need to stay focused on strategic sources of national strength.our queens and bishops and castles. Not on isolated pawns.
JD Vance’s dad worked for GE and his mom was a nurse, so I doubt they had dirt floors. Also, he enlisted in the Marines and worked in Public Affairs. I honor his service, but it doesn’t confer any special military expertise.
I think he agrees with your isolationist views and is therefore a visionary.
His mother was a troubled drug addict, his parents were divorced and his mother’s family did live in Appalachia and struggled with many of the pathologies of poverty.
"Helping to secure the Gaza Strip, Vance writes, is more achievable and more important for American interests than helping to recover Ukrainian territory, which would require decades of sustained conflict at the current pace."
Yes.
"It’s very hard to look in the mirror and say America is constrained in part because I made mistakes. It’s much easier to pretend that those constraints don’t exist and hope that reality never hits you in the face.” "
They've been too busy pretending that the constraints of the sex binary do not exist - even as US military policy.
People need to understand where we are, not where we wish we were or where we were 25 yrs ago.
I served in the army from 1986 til 1991 when I was released after Desert Storm. I know what a large, well trained, well equipped, fully supplied army looks like.
I have spent the last 20 yrs working with DoD across the branches. I have watched the procurement cycles and watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen the war on terror and I have seen how the military has changed. None of it is for the better. None of it. Too many in the officer corp and even the enlisted are just there for the paycheck and potential opportunities to go work for a defense contractor when they get out. Certainly not all, but a very large portion of the members in our service are like that. Our defense contractors are greedier even than they were then and their influence on Capital Hill is larger. The mergers, the acquisitions, the going public, all of it has undermined what once was an industry populated by people who really gave a damn even while trying to skim a little extra. Not today. The companies are now no better than any run by a hedge fund. VC money showed up and treated these companies like they made consumer electronics. No real concern for national security. Even Boeing and Lockheed have gone to crap.
Congress and the presidents have wasted the lives of so many troops, burned out so many more with multiple deployments that nobody wants to stay in and nobody wants to enlist unless they are desperate. To get to the level of manpower we need we are going to have to institute a draft. But GenZ is such a emotional and physical wreck that even under a draft we would probably have to reject 2/3 of them. Never mind they all want seem to want to support our enemies and undermine our own country. UGH!!
We allowed the government and Wall Street to de-industrialize the country. We shipped our manufacturing ability and the skills to do it to our enemies for cheap labor. In the process, we undermined wages here, wages that were would have been taxed, taxes that were not paid (also undermining the Social Security Trust Fund) while the government ran up eye watering debts. All while Wall Street financialized the entire economy, funded useless companies like Face Book, Instagram, and Apple, that produce NOTHING that actually has value in the material world.
Like it or not, the US has been hollowed out, physically, financially, culturally and there is nothing left but a facade of what we were before the Boomers took over the government and the economy. It started with Clinton, got really going under Bush Jr, accelerated under Obama, slowed a little under Trump and has accelerated again under Biden.
Sorry folks. We are not defenseless, but we are NOT what we were 30 yrs ago. We allowed that to be pissed away and it is going to take decades to recover assuming we ever are able to recover. For God's sake we are not even capable of securing out borders.
We have depleted this country of nearly all that was strong and good. It seems to me that now is the prime time to invade us. We have become weak to the extreme in just defending ourselves let alone the world. We have sent our munitions to other nations, our military has been undermined by DEI and gender nonsense. Even we the people do not trust our institutions or agree with each other on the right way to come together as a nation.
The current administration seems determined to aid in our fall.
My favorite thing DC experts do is trash JD Vance and friends as dangerous fools when literally none of their ideas have been tried. Meanwhile the foreign policy DC expert class has spent $5 trillion dollars losing 19 consecutive wars. Morons.
I work in blown film manufacturing. My suppliers, competitors and customers all have trouble finding reliable equipment operators.
Operating film lines is not rocket science but requires attention and some thinking. It’s a job with responsibility, but if you’re good, it requires only intermittent physical labor.
It seems to me no one wants this type of job. Folks want to be on their phone and be told what button to press.
I worry we can’t ramp up the manufacturing talked about here even if we wanted to.
I agree. My husband works in a factory that makes rubber parts for automobile manufacturers. The lines don't require a great deal of physical labor, and it is light enough work that women outnumber men, and the wages + benefits are very good. But finding employees who can a) pass the drug screening, and b) get through their 90-day probation without deciding at some point that they can't be bothered to come to work, is a real challenge.
Similar problems at the security company I work for part-time. It's the easiest job I've ever had, and there is a lot of downtime for reading or playing on your phone. But too many new employees can't cope with EVER putting down their phone. They can't BEAR to show up to work every day.
Young people have been coddled so long that they have never grown up, regardless of the fact that their birth date was 18+ years ago.
What did these guys think was going to happen when we offshored our entire heavy industry to other places?
It would take vision and guts to change course and years to make it happen. We have neither the caliber of politicians to push this or a population than can move itself off social media and Netflix enough to realize the danger.
Good luck, the next war is going to be a wakeup call and a funeral of epic proportions.
We need a ceasefire and treaty in Ukraine. They have this ridiculous idea they can get all of their territory back from Russia but really should be content with getting their boarders back to a pre-war state. It's gone on way too long and the amount of money we are wasting there is absurd. I don't think every dollar we've spent there has been a waste, but they were a corrupt nation prior to the war and are likely more so now.
I can't believe Biden has made me a Trump voter...thanks Obama!
Unless they deal soon Putin will take Odessa and Ukraine would have to settle for the western region (Galica) with capital at Livov. This was once part of Austria-Hungary and also of Poland and also of Lithuania. So it is a cosmopolitan place and the population is used to being treated as pawns and cannon fodder by big powers.
Looking to JD Vance for insight is going to make some people’s head explode regardless of what the insights are.
One can go into a battle of folksy sayings. However, one that popped into my head was ‘keep your powder dry’. We’ve taken our powder out and scattered it everywhere.
Was this entire plan formulated once they saw that the corrupt Biden Crime family would be in charge? Did they see Biden would diminish our strategic oil reserves, allow all these illegals into our country and let this DEI flourish? Let the leftist destroy our universities? Promote transgenders, corrupt our FBI, CIA and DOJ? Look at all the antisemitism leftist protest and marches? 140 elected democrats would not sign a pledge to support Israel? All the MSM propaganda? I could go on and on? Would this have happen under Orange man? I don’t think so but they were after him from the start. This country is falling apart because of all the lies the democrats and leftist tell us. I pray we come out ahead but my bets aren’t very good.
When has the US response been any different? In '73 but for the US Israel would have totally destroyed the Egyptian Army and reduced Damascus to a smouldering ruin. In '48 Israel's super-power ally was the USSR. In '56 Eisenhower doubled down on Britain, France, and Israel while allowing Hungary to be crushed. '67 the USS Liberty got shot up because Tel Aviv couldn't trust the US not to welch them out to Amman, Cairo, and Damascus.
The USA hasn't been a trustworthy ally since forcing the R.O.C. to call off the Battle of Harbin; ultimately driving them off the mainland.
The accumulated evidence says you are likely to win big if you chance your arm in any game that has the USA in it.
The world is better off not waiting for the USA to get its' sorry act together. My advice to Israel? 1 'plane, one bomb, once, to Tehran.
Are the enemies of the US who aren't actively in a war(i.e. China and Iran at the moment) actively ripping through munitions through aiding their allies as quickly as the US is? I lean isolationist, but it would make me feel a little better that at least everyone is depleting their weaponry instead of just us.
The difference between Ukraine and Israel, first and foremost, is that the latter has nuclear weapons (very probably) and the former does not, while the Ukraine's adversary has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. That makes the calculus for aiding these two nations VERY different.
The author accepts a flawed premise from Republican isolationist politicians, which has nothing to do with foreign policy but with the understandable political desire to prove the Biden Administration wrong in all respects at all costs. Yes, in a true shortage case some weapons like artillery shells and Patriot missiles would rather go to Israel than to Ukraine - Taiwan needs mostly different weapons such as land to sea missiles.
And yes, giving fewer artillery shells to Ukraine might very well mean that recovering territory conquered by Russia might have to wait - maybe a very long time. However, unlike what J.D. Vance claims, Ukraine needs money, even with fewer weapons, to keep its economy functioning and to avoid a very different and catastrophic outcome - a real Russian victory. If the isolationist crowd would be able to add one plus one plus one, they would realize that if the “Axis of Evil” scores at least one full victory out of three - when the other two wars haven’t even fully started - that puts them in a dominating position, where the US might see some of its allies looking for the exits.
Biden and company yammer on about climate change being the biggest existential threat to the US. In fact there are several more immediate threats that the administration's war on fossil fuel energy is exacerbating. If we maximized drilling and fracking and otherwise ended the pursuit of a green new deal, we would be better able to address the immediate serious threats we face.
I rarely read anything that I agree with 100%. This is one of those times.
Infuriating to hear *billions* and critical strategic oil/military materials to go here, there, everywhere, as if America is some magic fairy with no bottom to the bucket.
Magical thinking is pretty much the ONLY thinking the Left engages in.
“as if America is some magic fairy with no bottom to the bucket”
—————————————————-
Oh we all have bottoms and the IRS knows how to access them. They raid mine quarterly.
America has no choice but to try. It’s easy to say “surrender Ukraine to Putin”, but when you look what catastrophic results that would mean in the confrontation with this “Axis of Evil”, you realize it’s not an alternative. When you are clueless about foreign policy, it’s very easy to say “let’s drop this and everything will be fine, nobody will bother us”. The war in Iraq was an idiocy, but just pulling the US troops out meant having to fight the ISIS later. Getting out of Afghanistan might have been a good idea, but clearly doing it in such an inept, disastrous way encouraged Putin to try his luck in Ukraine. It’s an old lesson, that should have been learned with WWI and WWII.
Hey, Andy...
"Clueless?" Why engage in personal slander?
"Easy to say...?" Neither I nor the authors of the piece said anything close to what you suggest in your reply.
"An old lesson?" Notably you fail to say what "old lesson" we should be applying here from WWI and WWII. My guess would be maybe isolationism, or maybe appeasement? I try not to assume what's in other people's heads when they decline to be clear, but if that is what you are thinking, neither concept was inferred in my comment or the original essay.
Though obviously it is right to look to history for lessons to be learned but is dangerous to do so without recognizing that the world and the circumstances here now are significantly different than what faced America in the first half of the 20th century. Off the top of my head, I would point to a nuclear world, non-state actors, digital connectivity and vulnerability, lesser percentage of military-age Americans who are also military-capable, and America's decline in energy production and heavy manufacturing ability.
None of that is to say that America should ignore the world, or that we should not sacrifice if doing so is in our interest. It does support the realization that we cannot be everywhere, every time, with a bottomless supply of money and materials (or - God forbid - troops to fight on behalf of others' interests).
The clear and unequivocal assessment that the retreat from Kabul was a rout is what gets the term "clueless" to apply to Biden and Blinken. Add onto that the clear failure of leadership represented by the term of Mark Milley as the senior military officer.
Our opposition is smart enough to recognize the signs of weakness; it is a shame that our leadership cannot see it in our own actions.
A nation does not have to be aggressive to be strong. But with all of our power, why have our ruling class allowed us to be knocked around the ring like a rank novice?
You have chosen to read my general remark “when you are clueless about foreign policy” as addressed personally to YOU. If you want to interpret it like that, please ask yourself if the rest of my remarks fit you: are you actually saying that if the US refuses any foreign entanglement we would be left alone and we wouldn’t be forced to intervene later? Obfuscation is not a great strategy in a discussion. Along the same lines, the abrupt retreat from Iran, followed by sending back American troops to fight something even worse, or the disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan - examples that I have given - didn’t happen in the first half of the 20th century, did they?
More hubristic bull. Exactly how do you intend to defeat an axis of Russia, China and Iran in a long Cold War? They outnumber us, they control all the key minerals and resources on the planet, and they have a faster growth rate, and they can outmatch us in many areas of technology. E.g in hypersonic rocket engines. They also have interior lines of communication which we cannot cut, and they have the ability to block our own transport systems. Moreover they are beating us to the first moon colony and they are planning to establish missile bases on the moon which will prevent anyone else from landing on that object.
I see, so maybe we should just surrender and become all communists and bow to China. Or maybe we should cut the BS like the ridiculous propaganda in your post and get to work, just as America does when all the other alternatives are exhausted.
Have you ever considered that they are just as scared of us as we are of them. They know how much we can hurt them if we get irritable. So, like two lion packs in the same game park, we need to divide the territory, guard the boundary,, arm ourselves to the teeth with new technology, make sure they cannot break our intelligence and information network, and maybe and set up a neutral trading post and body for dispute resolution. Allies are those who agree to join our network and restrict strategic trade and travel and purchases from China.
Essentially we get ready for a new cold war and we then go on to win the new space race and the new computer race all over again.
Agreed. The real issue is going to be reindustrialing the US manufacturing sector which has been systematically decimated by both parties since at least the ‘90’s. (Hat tip to Al Gore on that one).
But any thoughts that the US can prevent China from taking Taiwan are delusional. We can provide a deterrence and extract a cost, but short of a nuclear holocaust, there is no way to militarily defend Taiwan. Once again, thanks to the nitwits who helped turn China into an industrial and economic powerhouse so that hedge fund and private equity parasites could get very wealthy at untold cost to the working and middle classes here at home, China can take Taiwan when it so chooses.
The takeaway from this article is to restore our manufacturing base, including chip manufacturing, but that will require rethinking a whole lot of prior policy choices, and our political class likely isn’t up to the task.
Rebuilding chip capacity? Look at moors law. By they time we have reestablished chip design and fabrication sectors, the Chinese will already have two new generations of faster product. Meanwhile our AI software sector is starved for decent compute power. So we kill TESLA apple , google and Facebook in order to save INTEL and AMD and NAVIDA. This is a mess for our foreign policy and a total catastrophe for the American middle class.
Thank you for articulating that the American middle class has been robbed of its wealth and taken for granted by our leadership.
The only real way we can change this is to vote out the bums that got us to here and refuse to vote for anyone who thinks that government is more important than those being governed.
And I disagree 100% with both Vance and the writer of the article. In short it's too late, kids! Consolidating priorities makes sense, but if Ukraine arms aid comes out the loser - we will be perceived by Russia and China and Iran as retreating. Leaving Ukraine to fend for itself. The withdrawal won't be as messy as Afghanistan, which in its ineptitude probably prompted Putin to play his hand in Ukraine, but it will be seen as another loss for the U.S. nonetheless, and empower other similar forays by the players against us. Perception in this neighborhood is as good as reality. In short, we're stuck. We have to do both - aid Israel and Ukraine and of course, ourselves.
Who says we can't build more weapons, missiles and jets? Of course we can.
They already know that we won't seriously challenged any military move that they make....Obama and Biden have made that abundently clear.
We’ll see. Now that the ground invasion of Gaza has apparently begun, if Hezbollah decides to enter the war, they have to be convinced American cruise missiles and jets armed with precision weapons parked offshore won’t come their way. I don’t think they’re convinced.
Bull. Talk is cheap. You sound like a lot of desperate tyrants of history, after their strategic reserve is exhausted and defeat is inevitable. You are Hitler in his bunker, ordering up imaginary divisions to reinforce the Stalingrad front. Pathetic. A supposed chess player who does not see the checkmate.
So..
We stop sending arms to Ukraine. Ukraine potentially loses the war in time. Putin or his surrogates take over. NATO allies start screaming about collective security in face of a victorious Russia. We then have to respond due to the nature of the agreement - which would mean not just financial treasure but manpower. You either pay now, or pay a much higher cost later. In my view.
It means we pressure Zalinski and Germany to take financial and military responsibility for the Donbas front. We need. To pressure Putin to make a deal with the USA rather than with China. Essentially we offer him half of Ukraine if he does this. This is harsh but remember Ukraine is not NATO and we have no legal obligation to defend their territory and they simply cannot hold it by themselves even after some very heavy supply efforts on our part. Efforts that have weakened our reserves. Maybe, if they negotiate while still having intact forces, Ukraine doesn’t need to totally surrender, but can still keep something. A good coach needs to throw the towel if his side is getting creamed. It would be nice to have a buffer state between Germany Poland and Russia. A rump Ukrainian state could provide this.
We need more statesmen like JD Vance who are veterans and know the harsh realities of war. Our establishments Magical thinking on printing money, men, and weapons out of thin air is ending. Only in América can someone go from hillbilly poverty to Yale Law to the Senate and perhaps the Oval Office one day.
Agreed. We need more statesmen like JD Vance and like Ron DeSantis who had a humble beginning but graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School, then joined the United States Navy and was promoted to lieutenant before serving as a legal advisor to SEAL Team One.
But is he a fighter? Trump was belligerent, yes. He was boisterous, yes. But we had secure borders or almost, we moved the capital to Jerusalem, we almost had the Abrams Accord, countries were afraid of Trump. Now we have a buffoon for President ( run by Obummer), a VP that is worthless, a bunch of leftists for senators. We are in a hell of a mess now.
I completely agree. I was an Independent all my life and registered with a party for the first time so that I could select Trump in the 2016 primary. At that time it was the terrible "sanctuary cities" which led me to that. Then, I voted for him twice for president. We do indeed have Brandon run by O. It is terrible how his good work was largely undone. But, I think this is the hour for DeSantis. He knew how to put the right people in place in Florida. He took on Disney... He is very smart and measured. He was a Navy Jag. I think his tone is different but he sure demonstrated that he knows how to get things done as governor of his state. I am not for getting stuck in the past. I think there is a place for Trump. And, I think the Biden crime family needs to be prosecuted when out of office - as I don't see much getting done before then.
Certainly, having seen some death a distraction up close and personal is a big plus. We don’t need any more think tank generals. But we can’t just fight the last war. Technology has moved and changed everything. We need to get into space and secure the strategic high ground before our competition. The military competition for near earth planetary space has begun and the same for AI and quantum computing and biotechnology and a dozen other areas. We need to stay focused on strategic sources of national strength.our queens and bishops and castles. Not on isolated pawns.
JD Vance’s dad worked for GE and his mom was a nurse, so I doubt they had dirt floors. Also, he enlisted in the Marines and worked in Public Affairs. I honor his service, but it doesn’t confer any special military expertise.
I think he agrees with your isolationist views and is therefore a visionary.
His mother was a troubled drug addict, his parents were divorced and his mother’s family did live in Appalachia and struggled with many of the pathologies of poverty.
"Helping to secure the Gaza Strip, Vance writes, is more achievable and more important for American interests than helping to recover Ukrainian territory, which would require decades of sustained conflict at the current pace."
Yes.
"It’s very hard to look in the mirror and say America is constrained in part because I made mistakes. It’s much easier to pretend that those constraints don’t exist and hope that reality never hits you in the face.” "
They've been too busy pretending that the constraints of the sex binary do not exist - even as US military policy.
People need to understand where we are, not where we wish we were or where we were 25 yrs ago.
I served in the army from 1986 til 1991 when I was released after Desert Storm. I know what a large, well trained, well equipped, fully supplied army looks like.
I have spent the last 20 yrs working with DoD across the branches. I have watched the procurement cycles and watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen the war on terror and I have seen how the military has changed. None of it is for the better. None of it. Too many in the officer corp and even the enlisted are just there for the paycheck and potential opportunities to go work for a defense contractor when they get out. Certainly not all, but a very large portion of the members in our service are like that. Our defense contractors are greedier even than they were then and their influence on Capital Hill is larger. The mergers, the acquisitions, the going public, all of it has undermined what once was an industry populated by people who really gave a damn even while trying to skim a little extra. Not today. The companies are now no better than any run by a hedge fund. VC money showed up and treated these companies like they made consumer electronics. No real concern for national security. Even Boeing and Lockheed have gone to crap.
Congress and the presidents have wasted the lives of so many troops, burned out so many more with multiple deployments that nobody wants to stay in and nobody wants to enlist unless they are desperate. To get to the level of manpower we need we are going to have to institute a draft. But GenZ is such a emotional and physical wreck that even under a draft we would probably have to reject 2/3 of them. Never mind they all want seem to want to support our enemies and undermine our own country. UGH!!
We allowed the government and Wall Street to de-industrialize the country. We shipped our manufacturing ability and the skills to do it to our enemies for cheap labor. In the process, we undermined wages here, wages that were would have been taxed, taxes that were not paid (also undermining the Social Security Trust Fund) while the government ran up eye watering debts. All while Wall Street financialized the entire economy, funded useless companies like Face Book, Instagram, and Apple, that produce NOTHING that actually has value in the material world.
Like it or not, the US has been hollowed out, physically, financially, culturally and there is nothing left but a facade of what we were before the Boomers took over the government and the economy. It started with Clinton, got really going under Bush Jr, accelerated under Obama, slowed a little under Trump and has accelerated again under Biden.
Sorry folks. We are not defenseless, but we are NOT what we were 30 yrs ago. We allowed that to be pissed away and it is going to take decades to recover assuming we ever are able to recover. For God's sake we are not even capable of securing out borders.
I agree with your assessment 100 percent.
We have depleted this country of nearly all that was strong and good. It seems to me that now is the prime time to invade us. We have become weak to the extreme in just defending ourselves let alone the world. We have sent our munitions to other nations, our military has been undermined by DEI and gender nonsense. Even we the people do not trust our institutions or agree with each other on the right way to come together as a nation.
The current administration seems determined to aid in our fall.
My favorite thing DC experts do is trash JD Vance and friends as dangerous fools when literally none of their ideas have been tried. Meanwhile the foreign policy DC expert class has spent $5 trillion dollars losing 19 consecutive wars. Morons.
Well, their objective was to make 💰💰💰. And they have. So more sociopathic than stupid. But yes, morons.
I work in blown film manufacturing. My suppliers, competitors and customers all have trouble finding reliable equipment operators.
Operating film lines is not rocket science but requires attention and some thinking. It’s a job with responsibility, but if you’re good, it requires only intermittent physical labor.
It seems to me no one wants this type of job. Folks want to be on their phone and be told what button to press.
I worry we can’t ramp up the manufacturing talked about here even if we wanted to.
I agree. My husband works in a factory that makes rubber parts for automobile manufacturers. The lines don't require a great deal of physical labor, and it is light enough work that women outnumber men, and the wages + benefits are very good. But finding employees who can a) pass the drug screening, and b) get through their 90-day probation without deciding at some point that they can't be bothered to come to work, is a real challenge.
Similar problems at the security company I work for part-time. It's the easiest job I've ever had, and there is a lot of downtime for reading or playing on your phone. But too many new employees can't cope with EVER putting down their phone. They can't BEAR to show up to work every day.
Young people have been coddled so long that they have never grown up, regardless of the fact that their birth date was 18+ years ago.
What did these guys think was going to happen when we offshored our entire heavy industry to other places?
It would take vision and guts to change course and years to make it happen. We have neither the caliber of politicians to push this or a population than can move itself off social media and Netflix enough to realize the danger.
Good luck, the next war is going to be a wakeup call and a funeral of epic proportions.
We need a ceasefire and treaty in Ukraine. They have this ridiculous idea they can get all of their territory back from Russia but really should be content with getting their boarders back to a pre-war state. It's gone on way too long and the amount of money we are wasting there is absurd. I don't think every dollar we've spent there has been a waste, but they were a corrupt nation prior to the war and are likely more so now.
I can't believe Biden has made me a Trump voter...thanks Obama!
How else will Hunter get all his money?
Lol. He has his art right?
Ugh....that the media think we are stupid enough to accept that...
I cannot decide if the media are really THAT dumb or they think we are?
War and Art. Classic and proven means to launder money.
Tomato tamato?
Unless they deal soon Putin will take Odessa and Ukraine would have to settle for the western region (Galica) with capital at Livov. This was once part of Austria-Hungary and also of Poland and also of Lithuania. So it is a cosmopolitan place and the population is used to being treated as pawns and cannon fodder by big powers.
This information certainly accentuates the absolute debacle of the US Afghanistan withdraw and the arsenal left behind.
As a Jew with friends and family in Israel, I've been naturally scares for 3 weeks. This only makes me more scared.
I feel for you. I am not Jewish, but I am deeply worried for all of us. Nothing is looking good on our side.
Looking to JD Vance for insight is going to make some people’s head explode regardless of what the insights are.
One can go into a battle of folksy sayings. However, one that popped into my head was ‘keep your powder dry’. We’ve taken our powder out and scattered it everywhere.
Was this entire plan formulated once they saw that the corrupt Biden Crime family would be in charge? Did they see Biden would diminish our strategic oil reserves, allow all these illegals into our country and let this DEI flourish? Let the leftist destroy our universities? Promote transgenders, corrupt our FBI, CIA and DOJ? Look at all the antisemitism leftist protest and marches? 140 elected democrats would not sign a pledge to support Israel? All the MSM propaganda? I could go on and on? Would this have happen under Orange man? I don’t think so but they were after him from the start. This country is falling apart because of all the lies the democrats and leftist tell us. I pray we come out ahead but my bets aren’t very good.
When has the US response been any different? In '73 but for the US Israel would have totally destroyed the Egyptian Army and reduced Damascus to a smouldering ruin. In '48 Israel's super-power ally was the USSR. In '56 Eisenhower doubled down on Britain, France, and Israel while allowing Hungary to be crushed. '67 the USS Liberty got shot up because Tel Aviv couldn't trust the US not to welch them out to Amman, Cairo, and Damascus.
The USA hasn't been a trustworthy ally since forcing the R.O.C. to call off the Battle of Harbin; ultimately driving them off the mainland.
The accumulated evidence says you are likely to win big if you chance your arm in any game that has the USA in it.
The world is better off not waiting for the USA to get its' sorry act together. My advice to Israel? 1 'plane, one bomb, once, to Tehran.
Are the enemies of the US who aren't actively in a war(i.e. China and Iran at the moment) actively ripping through munitions through aiding their allies as quickly as the US is? I lean isolationist, but it would make me feel a little better that at least everyone is depleting their weaponry instead of just us.
The difference between Ukraine and Israel, first and foremost, is that the latter has nuclear weapons (very probably) and the former does not, while the Ukraine's adversary has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. That makes the calculus for aiding these two nations VERY different.
💯
The author accepts a flawed premise from Republican isolationist politicians, which has nothing to do with foreign policy but with the understandable political desire to prove the Biden Administration wrong in all respects at all costs. Yes, in a true shortage case some weapons like artillery shells and Patriot missiles would rather go to Israel than to Ukraine - Taiwan needs mostly different weapons such as land to sea missiles.
And yes, giving fewer artillery shells to Ukraine might very well mean that recovering territory conquered by Russia might have to wait - maybe a very long time. However, unlike what J.D. Vance claims, Ukraine needs money, even with fewer weapons, to keep its economy functioning and to avoid a very different and catastrophic outcome - a real Russian victory. If the isolationist crowd would be able to add one plus one plus one, they would realize that if the “Axis of Evil” scores at least one full victory out of three - when the other two wars haven’t even fully started - that puts them in a dominating position, where the US might see some of its allies looking for the exits.
Biden and company yammer on about climate change being the biggest existential threat to the US. In fact there are several more immediate threats that the administration's war on fossil fuel energy is exacerbating. If we maximized drilling and fracking and otherwise ended the pursuit of a green new deal, we would be better able to address the immediate serious threats we face.
And we squandered our strategic oil reserve to keep Joe Biden in power.