Sunday, 29 September, 2024. In France, we’re good. My office is wondrous save that I must be disciplined not to stare out onto the horse pastures. and mist-draped hills. Financial planning, luck, and US citizenship have provided security and advantage. In this year 2024 The United States is the most powerful economy and military on the face of the earth.
A writer’s view
I sent out my Wisconsin absentee ballot on Monday, September 23, 2024. Unlike France (politically deadlocked 3-4 months post-election) our American choice is binary. For better or worse, we will have, post-first Monday in November, our president for the next four years.
The race is deadlocked with six weeks to go and if you’re an undecided, unsure or wavering voter it looks like Awful vs. Empty. Peggy Noonan Sept. 19, 2024, WSJ
Beyond a horizon of rolling Burgundian hills, the world is unsettled. Revanchist foreign leaders assess the capabilities and predilections of US presidents in formulating their foreign policy. They assess, and they test. Global Warming and US Foreign policy are my issues. The wars in Ukraine and in Israel-Gaza threaten my interest as an American. How much, one never really knows, but I am concerned. Why?
US foreign policy and global warming are my issues.
Foreign affairs
What’s the state of the world around me this summer 2024? It doesn’t look good to me.
When the Trump administration assumed the presidency in 2016, it confronted two ‘hot’ foreign policy issues.
1) In 2016, ISIS controlled most of Syria, its ‘Caliphitate’ rapidly expanding into regional vacuums. Vladimir Putin tested Donald Trump’s mettle using Wagner to attack an American base (The Battle of Khasham, (or Conoco Fields), 7 February 2018). The US counter-attack was devastating. Fingers burned, Vladimir Putin pulled back, and tested no further.
Under skillful and limited US response, ISIS collapsed (though now apparently reviving under Biden administration).
2) In 2016, under the Obama administration North Korea was all in the news daily, threatening to become a ‘nuclear’ power and regularly laughing ICBMs into the sea of Japan. Under Trump persuasion (persuasion, the velvet glove that covers the mailed fist of authority), North Korea disappeared as an international ‘threat.’
Based on the Russian assessment of the Biden administration foreign policy, Russia invaded the Ukraine; The assessment was correct; The US offered Zelensky a ride out of town. In the Ukraine, there is ‘living’ memory. The Soviet Collectivization and the WWII Eastern Front took place for the most part in the Ukraine, killing Ukrainians by the millions. There are no words, only numbers.
The Ukraine passed on the free ride and are fighting Putin to a standstill. Still, Good (and I suppose, bad) Russian kids are dying by the hundreds of thousands. Ukraine’s fate remains uncertain.
3) On 7 October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel and killed/mained/raped/kidnapped hundreds of Israel, documenting it all on cell phones. Hamas, as did the Nazis, had a ‘Jewish’ problem. River to the sea’ and ‘Judenfrei’ are synonyms. For those not bi-lingual, “River to the sea” means ‘Kill all Jews.’ Ignorance may be bliss, but is no excuse.
My experience tells me that the Biden Administration fickle foreign policy factored into Hamas decision-making. Time will tell. Time will test this assumption, but it is my ‘working truth.’
I judge a Donald Trump-led administration more capable than a Kamala Harris administration to manage revanchist impulse among foreign leaders seeking to violently upset the status quo.
Global warming is a religious mania
Any political party/politician/person pushing a global warming agenda has two strikes against him. I consider Global warming a con, a fraud, a religious mania. Two cents spent to mitigate climate change is too much.
Religious manias periodically sweep the abrahamic-influenced societies. I tread in France upon the archeology of France’s Wars of Religion—massive fortresses, massacres, destroyed religious sites—dissolving into the earth. Kick a rock and voila, the remains of a once-vast fortress complex.
I worry about Germany. I speak German, lived there almost ten years, have a shitload of German friends, two of my five children were born there, and from time to time seek in my memory one unhappy moment in my life in Germany among a million good ones. None come to mind.
But there is something about the German collective soul that tends them toward ‘final solutions,’ Götterdämmerung, if you will. The German government, in order to to solve global warming, closed down down their nuclear and coal-fired power plants. As an interim measure until their Carbon-free nirvana, they bought LPG from Russia and the United States, and nuclear-sourced electricity from France, interim measures until sufficient wind and solar become available to run German home and factory. Putin’s Russia played the Merkel government for fools, an astute judgement, and invaded the Ukraine, thinking energy dependance would render them neutral. Zelensky et. al. fooled them.
The cost of energy runs into the stratosphere as German industry moves elsewhere. The French mouth global warming platitudes, but operate eleven nuclear power plants with five additional complexes under construction. They sell this excess electricity to Germany power at a goodly mark-up. Ach, mein Gott!.
Okay, I’ve been wrong before…
In my professional life, I have at least twice grossly erred in intelligence assessments.
The Soviet Union: I was stunned at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was a long serving US intelligence officer––my specialty the Soviet Union deception––who had multiple super clearances. I read, write and speak Russian, German and French. I studied Soviet statistics, observed Soviet war gaming, and daily read Red Star, Izvestia and Pravda cover-to-cover. I allocated millions of your tax dollars attempting to exploit artificial intelligence to break Soviet deceptions. I knew the state of the Soviet economy. I studied their lies.
When on 9 November 1989 East Germans breached the Berlin Wall, we Soviet scholars and professionals were stunned. We had been certain the Soviet Union would endure into the undetermined but distant future and was wrong, taken by surprise, fooled, deceived.
Second Gulf War: I supported the second gulf war (2003) and the US invasion of Iraq. Post-retirement without access to intelligence, I accepted the Bush/Cheney narrative, US intelligence assessments, New York Times articles and editorials, and UN Inspection team assessments. It seemed clear that Iraq was developing nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons. Wrong again. Utterly Wrong. I see Dick Cheney has endorsed Karmala Harris for president. Bad juju. Really bad.
We’ll see how this article ages when I return to the subject in a couple years.
