Foreign Affairs The Next President Needs a Foreign Policy Reality Check  Whoever wins the White House in November will be forced to make stark U.S. foreign policy choices. (Jeremy Christensen/Shutterstock) On top of ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the next administration will inherit structural domestic and international obstacles that have been mounting for decades. Addressing these challenges while keeping our current U.S. foreign policy strategy on autopilot simply won’t cut it—it is time for a new approach.  Since America’s victory in the Cold War, our national security elites in both parties have avoided asking fundamental questions about what missions the United States should be engaged in. These experts insist that maintaining a heavy military footprint across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia simultaneously is necessary for American security.  Focusing on how to resource these missions without reflecting on their wisdom or sustainability misses the forest for the trees. Twenty years of open-ended nation-building efforts in the Middle East cost thousands of service members’ lives. These conflicts also came at the price of $6 trillion, damaged American military readiness, and aided our great power rivals by diverting our focus and energy.   After decades of deficit spending, our national debt is approaching $36 trillion, a ten-fold increase from the end of the Cold War. After the COVID pandemic, our nation’s debt hadn’t been so large in relation to our economy since the Second World War. At this point, our interest payments alone are exceeding U.S. defense spending from this year. On top of these challenges, the trust funds for our biggest domestic programs—Social Security and Medicare—are on track to be insolvent in a decade and impose benefits cuts unless the next administration makes difficult domestic choices to secure their future.   Taken together, the United States now experiences a strategic scarcity that our national security class has not had to deal with for generations.   We cannot buy our way out of these constraints, as the Commission on the National Defense Strategy recently called for. Voters, especially in swing states, are already disillusioned with America’s level of involvement in conflicts abroad. Americans are not going to make the painful fiscal sacrifices needed to secure our financial future only to see trillions more squandered on flawed defense strategies.   In the face of these challenges, Concerned Veterans for America’s new report, “Realism in Practice,” offers a fresh, disciplined path forward for U.S. foreign policy, rooted in assessing our strategic situation as it is, not as we might wish it to be.  American strategic goals need to align with America’s available resources. Policymakers also need to use the right tools to achieve these goals, avoiding overreliance on an already overstretched, undermanned military. Our allies can and should take greater responsibility for their own defense. The United States needs to concentrate its military resources on regions most vital to its core interests, while relying more on diplomatic and economic engagement elsewhere.The next president should insist on maintaining a world-class military tailored to meet our principal threats. Nevertheless, our next commander-in-chief should stop repeating our decades-old blunder of turning to our armed forces first to solve too many problems. Shrewd diplomatic and economic overtures to potential partners can be more effective methods for pursuing many of our objectives, and these approaches will be increasingly necessary in an environment of limited defense budget growth. The next president also needs to make real choices about regional prioritization and reconsider which military deployments are most important. As American energy production rises, the Middle East matters less to us. The United States can neutralize credible terror threats to our homeland, protect shipping lanes, and sustain diplomatic efforts like the Abraham Accords without 40,000 troops across the region. In Europe, our wealthy allies have been capable of spending more on their own defense for decades. NATO-Europe collectively outclasses Russia in wealth, population, and latent military strength. Our allies should be taking primary responsibility for their own security and for arming Ukraine, while the U.S. role in Europe shifts to one of logistical support. Excessively “reassuring” NATO has sapped European political will to invest in adequate defense while diverting resources needed elsewhere. Leaning on our partners and allies to step up more in other regions will give our military greater ability to concentrate on more important long-term U.S. interests in Asia. Here, the United States should grow economic ties with our partners and allies while equipping countries like the Philippines and Taiwan with the anti-air and anti-ship defensive systems necessary to deter China.   Whether they like it or not, the next president will confront severe challenges at home and abroad. These challenges will demand hard choices. Squandering our national power on ill-considered deployments is no longer an option. American policymakers will need a more disciplined mindset about when using military force is effective and will have to lead with diplomatic and economic overtures more often as constraints mount. Congress should act as a safeguard as well, only authorizing military missions with clear objectives and ties to our national interests.    A principled foreign policy approach guided by core American national interests built our country’s strength. To ensure that the United States remains strong, secure, and prosperous in the decades to come, the next president should put realist principles into practice. The post The Next President Needs a Foreign Policy Reality Check  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Miles to Go, No Matter the Result Whoever wins next Tuesday, the Establishment will remain. Credit: image via Shutterstock A U.S. diplomat based in Constantinople once wrote of a visit made to the embassy there in 1906 by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, according to the diplomat, appeared unacquainted with the region and upon learning the next leg of his journey was to the Balkans, replied, “What are the Balkans?” We are a long way from that now. Yet from the vantage point of 2024, Bryan’s innocence seems both quaint and preferable to what we have now—especially after four years of the worst kind of activist American foreign policy under Joe Biden. Today, the U.S. is saddled with a foreign policy establishment imbued with a kind missionary zeal to spread the most current iteration of what passes for American “values” all over the world. And when it isn’t busy doing that it is killing people. Lots of people. What allows for such a state of affairs to continue? The answer lies in the nature of the foreign policy establishment.  As the English journalist Henry Fairlie noted some 70 years ago, the establishment, is not those people who hold and exercise power as such. It is the people who create and sustain the climate of assumption and opinion within which power is exercised by those who do hold it by election or appointment. As we approach next Tuesday’s election, it is worth recalling the words of the great revisionist historian William Appleman Williams on the matter. Williams warned against confusing the establishment with the government or state,  for in doing that we remove ourselves from any consequential part in shaping our way of life. In the first place, we foster an illusion that electing or appointing different people will produce or lead to a change in the outlook of the Weltanschauung. But we are in reality changing the wrong people. The only prediction that can be made with any certainty with regard to next Tuesday is that the foreign policy establishment will escape unscathed.  Within the establishment, a Harris victory will a be treated as a vindication of the Biden administration’s policies of genocide facilitation in the Levant, proxy war in Europe, and a new Cold War in Asia. A Harris victory means continuity, not change. Her camp is making no secret of this.  If Trump becomes the first chief executive since Grover Cleveland to win non-consecutive terms, the policies may be similar, despite the hand-wringing coming out of the usual quarters. After all, only last week Trump told Hugh Hewitt that neocons like Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo are on his short list for secretary of defense. Those looking for new thinking and new ways of doing things should prepare to be disappointed.  The problem, then, goes well beyond the strengths and weaknesses of one or another presidential candidate. The problem is the foreign policy establishment itself, which serves a single overarching purpose: to patrol the parameters of the acceptable and the sayable in order to prevent the country at large from understanding what is being done in its name. In other words, the US foreign policy establishment has been, and remains, at the forefront of a decades-long exercise in obfuscation.  As such, the establishment is implacably hostile to truth.  There are things that must not be said, things that must not be acknowledged. For example, we must not acknowledge that our interventions in the Middle East over the past quarter century have resulted in deaths of almost a million people. It must not be said that the current president and his aides, including his secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor, have facilitated the murder of tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of civilians in order to prolong an illegal and brutal military occupation by one of our “allies.” (It must also never be said that no treaty of alliance exists between us and our revered “ally.”) It must not be said that our newest and closest “allies” in Eastern Europe are the proud heirs of World War II ethno-nationalists who were among Third Reich’s most enthusiastic accomplices, and who, as recently as 2014, carried out a pogrom in which they burned alive their political opponents. Nor dare we mention that the leader of this new ally—feted and celebrated as the reincarnation of Churchill—has shut down no fewer than 11 political parties as well as numerous opposition media outlets. Such inconveniences are written out of the story in order to make it appear that we (and our sainted “allies”) are always and everywhere on the side of the angels. One would like to think that such a situation is not tenable over the long term. I suspect the opposite is the case.  And part of the reason the foreign policy establishment is as unassailable as it is that militarism has inculcated itself within American life—in our churches, in the entertainment industry, in professional sports—to such an extent that no one blinks an eye when, for instance, an unmanned American drone blows away a wedding party. Such things are relegated to the anodyne category of  “accidents” or “mistakes in war.” Better to turn the page and move on. Worryingly, the timid and thoroughly insular club of realists, restrainers, and anti-interventionists here in Washington seems to want nothing more than to be co-opted by the foreign policy establishment. Prioritizing conformity over principle, the same faces and names peddle the same ideas over and over again. It is becoming a world in which those who parrot the establishment’s talking points get rewarded, while those who do not, like the scholar and The American Conservative’s contributing editor Ted Galen Carpenter, are marginalized. Those who hold the purse strings and dole out the jobs and fellowships in this world seem to neither realize nor care they are creating the same perverse incentive structure that obtains in the rest of Washington.  That said, it is the current establishment that lies at the root of the rot. And the coming years will neither see its ouster nor its exile. Instead, there is every indication that it will become even more firmly entrenched, no matter the outcome on Tuesday. The post Miles to Go, No Matter the Result appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Harris and Walz Declare War on America Walz’s education advisor provides the key to understanding the ticket’s true radical vision. Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are prepared to wage war on America.  Let me explain. Walz’s most important education advisor is Brian Lozenski, a professor of “urban and multicultural education” at Macalester College. Lozenski is a prominent national voice in the world of critical race theory (CRT), and the foremost authority on CRT in Minnesota. CRT holds that everything about American society is racist. Everything—American values, from patriotism and hard work; American institutions, from the traditional family to religion; and American policies, from secure borders to energy independence. Racism, say the critical race theorists, is in America’s DNA. In a recently unearthed video, Brian Lozenski puts it even more directly: “America is irreversibly racist…[and] must be overthrown.” In case you missed his meaning, he goes on to say, “You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S.” This is a declaration of war. It could not be any clearer.  Tim Walz appointed Lozenski to a key curriculum committee tasked with developing “ethnic studies” standards for instruction in every grade, in every required class, in every public school in Minnesota. (Ethnic studies is a cousin of CRT and, like CRT, has the “overthrow” of America in its sights.) Under the proposed standards, as described by Katherine Kersten of the Center of the American Experiment: “First-graders must ‘identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power’ and ‘use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.’” (Yes, first-graders.) “High school students are told to ‘develop an analysis of racial capitalism’ and ‘anti-Blackness’ and are taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.’” Ethnic studies is the centerpiece of Walz’s education agenda, and Lozenski is the leader of the ethnic studies initiative. Nor is this radical program simply something that has bubbled up from below. According to Kersten, Walz himself “has used both legislation and administrative rulemaking to achieve…radical Ethnic Studies instruction… Between 2021 and 2023, Walz proposed and pushed Ethnic Studies in a series of ‘governor’s policy and budget bills’ at the Minnesota Legislature.” This is the Democrats’ nominee for vice president of the United States of America. Republicans have long failed to realize that they are in a war. Now they should. If someone says they want to destroy you, then you know you are in a war—it’s pretty obvious. It’s time for Republicans to get on a war footing. They must fight like our democracy depends on it. The destructive left is sure that the former President Donald Trump is a threat to democracy—or at least they say so, and they act as if they believe it. We know this is nonsense. The Lozenski video shows us clearly where the real threat to our democracy lies.  If Lozenski is a revolutionary, and he certainly is, then so is Tim Walz, who entrusted him with the education of Minnesota’s children. What about Kamala Harris? Could it be that she didn’t know who she was choosing? No, it couldn’t be. She knows perfectly well who Tim Walz is and what he believes. After all, she chose him over more qualified candidates precisely because his ideology was the most compatible with hers. It is sometimes the case that a presidential candidate fails to detect some aspect of their running mate—for example, personal failings or minor policy positions—but a candidate does not choose, say, a Marxist, or in this case, a revolutionary, running mate by accident. From Kamala’s perspective—and we must understand Kamala’s perspective—she simply chose a man who wants to improve America in the same way she wants to improve it. But their idea of “improving” is identical to Lozenski’s overthrowing.” Trump regularly says, and quite rightly, that the enemy within is “far more dangerous” than China and other enemies without. But we have not had a face for the “enemy within.” Now we do. The face of the enemy within is Brian Lozenski. The right must give up the delusion that we are still engaged in politics as usual. We are in a war. But only one side is fighting—their side. You can’t win a war if you don’t fight. It is well past time that we engage the enemy, prepared to give our last full measure of devotion so that the greatest country in the history of mankind shall not perish from the earth. Brian Lozenski is an ignorant child. I doubt he has given 30 seconds of thought to what would happen were he and his fellow revolutionaries to succeed in pulling down this great country. That is beside the point. Lozenski may be ignorant—even a moron—but he is a powerful moron. This is precisely the choice America faces in this election: whether our country is given over fully to the rule of powerful morons—which amounts to “overthrow”—or its patriotic citizens stand up and fight before it is too late. The post Harris and Walz Declare War on America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Patriot Act SECRETS They Don't Want You to Know - Forgotten History - The American People Were The Ones Who Were The Victims Of The War On Terror (Along With Arab Nations). And the U.S. Government and Israel Were THE TRUE TERRORISTS - (((Actually, the Patriot Act was written well in advance of the Twin Tower Attack. The Government Participated in the Attack Committed by Israel, and Used it as a False Flag to Institute the Patriot Act, Give the False Premise for War and ATTACK THE ENEMIES OF ISRAEL))) - 52,530 views April 22, 2024 FORGOTTEN HISTORY - After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 the federal government had an almost immediate reflex action in order to prevent another such occurrence. This was not unusual, as throughout American history laws have been passed that were ostensibly to provide security but eventually became too intrusive and often labeled unconstitutional. - The other side of the argument is that certain laws were required to increase national security and protect American citizens, and were therefore necessary depending upon the circumstances. We will discuss both arguments here. Written and Hosted by Colin D. Heaton. Forgotten History is a 10th Legion Pictures Production. ============================= Sources: The Alien and Sedition Acts: Defining American Freedom, Constitutional Rights Foundation. Alien and Sedition Acts, The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Our Documents: Alien and Sedition Acts, National Archives and Records Administration. The Sedition Act Trials, Federal Judicial Center. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). Alien Enemies Act of 1798, Densho Encyclopedia. Bush Signs Patriot Act Renewal. CBS News. FBI Admits No Major Cases Cracked with Patriot Act Snooping Powers. Washington Post. Fifty Terror Attacks Foiled Since 9/11: The Homegrown Threat and the Long War on Terrorism. The Heritage Foundation. H.R.3162 – Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001. Congress.gov. N.S.A. Collection of Bulk Call Data is Ruled Illegal. The New York Times. Surveillance Under the Patriot Act. ACLU. The USA Patriot Act: Preserving Life and Liberty. Department of Justice Website. USA Freedom Act. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. William J. Clinton, XLII President of the United States: 1993-2001, Statement on Signing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The American Presidency Project. - Patreon page:   / forgottenhistorychannel   Join this channel to get access to perks:    / @forgottenhistorychannel   =============================== Thanks for watching. Please subscribe using the link below so we can continue making new content. Your subscription to the channel means a lot to us!    / @forgottenhistorychannel   ================================= About us: Host/Military Historian/Film Consultant/US Army and USMC Veteran - Colin Heaton https://www.heatonl

Kamala BOO’D Again As She Completely Unravels. Biden Fumbles and Kamala Fumes 10-31-2024 - Hecklers Boo Harris Everywhere - The Incompetency. The Insanity. How Did Our Politics Become Such a Shit Show??? - Our Republic Truly is on it's Last Leg, and There Is No Political Solution other than a Great Reset of the People Back to 1776... *** 30,527 views October 31, 2024 Melanie King - At yet another chaotic rally, Kamala Harris faced a barrage of boos for the fourth time in a single day, visibly losing her composure as the crowd's discontent mounted. The situation escalated when Donald Trump, donning a garbage man costume, took the stage to mock her, effectively obliterating any positive press she had managed to garner. - Meanwhile, President Joe Biden's bizarre antics at a Halloween event, where he was seen biting babies, fueled rampant speculation that he might be undermining Harris's campaign—drawing unsettling parallels to the sabotage allegations that surrounded Hillary Clinton's 2016 bid when Trump emerged victorious. - Kamala LOSES IT During CHAOTIC Rally As Final Poll Drops Trump HUMILIATES Kamala with STUNNING Move Just days before ELECTION Michelle Obama LOSES IT as Rally Fans PROTEST Kamala Kamala Rally ERUPTS Into CHAOS as Furious Fans WALK OUT - Subscribe to my other channels: Melanie OFF Script :    / @melanieoffscript-o9i   Melanie King Reacts :    / @melreacts-l3i   Cashapp - http://cash.me/$MelanieKing99 Follow Me: https://rumble.com/c/c-6022511/videos   / itsmelanieking     / 61560539625102     / realmelanieking  - FAIR USE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES Mirrored From: https://www.youtube.com/@itsmelanieking

That's all it took. The post A lucky break: the word that gave Whitesnake their only number one hit first appeared on Far Out Magazine.