Saturday, September 10, 2016

CrossTalk: The Hillary Doctrine



The Hillary Doctrine: if elected, what kind of foreign policy agenda can we expect? Does Clinton hold an extreme view of American exceptionalism? And is she now a neoconservative?

22 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

All terror states

Whaaaaaaat?

Matt Franko said...

Afgahan hosted alqueda... Iraq scudded Israel during GW1... Yemen suicided the Cole.... Libya Pan Am Lockerbie and Berlin Disco ....Syria hosts Hezzbollah.... etc...

Tom Hickey said...

"Afghanistan, "Iraq", "Yemen," and "Libya" did not do those things. Category error.

Kaivey said...

So we murder a few million people to get a few bad guys. No wonder the West has so many enemies.

Kaivey said...

The Taliban offered Bin Ladin to the US as long as he were tried in an independent court. The US refused and then blew the country up. 97% of the population had never heard of 9/11.

Matt Franko said...

The leadership of those nations allowed those things to happen or was complicit hence the nation is responsible...

One needs to be a nationalist to understand things this way...

I dont think Tom you and Kevin are nationalistic... so you 2 at least would not see things this way... you two are more "globalist"...

However nationalism looks to be making a YUGE comeback so we might get to watch how that goes going forward... compare that to the libertarian "globalist" utopia we've had for quite a long time now...

Matt Franko said...

Kevin it is more than that it is the principle of the thing...

Its not "an eye for an eye" which is an OT type of teaching... not applicable here...

Matt Franko said...

Tom what are you saying that if the the "Gulf of Tonkin" was true then the whole Vietnam thing would have been this great thing?

Or "Bush Lied!".. ie if Bush didnt lie then the whole Iraq thing would have been this great thing?

Tom Hickey said...

The leadership of those nations allowed those things to happen or was complicit hence the nation is responsible...

One needs to be a nationalist to understand things this way...


No. One just needs to be a moron that lacks a political compass.

Tom Hickey said...

One just needs to be a moron that lacks a political compass.

But I don't think for a minute that the US and NATO leaders were morons. They had a more expansive agenda in their aggression under the propaganda veneer used to dupe the rubes in their countries into acquiescence. But I suspect that many of the "rubes" realized that it was really all about the oil, gas, and pipeline routes.

Tom Hickey said...

Tom what are you saying that if the the "Gulf of Tonkin" was true then the whole Vietnam thing would have been this great thing?

Or "Bush Lied!".. ie if Bush didnt lie then the whole Iraq thing would have been this great thing?


I am not saying that at all. I happen to know the history of both areas and Western involvement there which the US just perpetuated. I also happen to know that the real reason for both was securing territory and resources for the West and denying it to adversaries rather than either helping the Vietnamese people rests Communist takeover or to remove a brutal dictator that was threatening us with WMD. That was just propaganda.

As a result, tens of thousands of US troops died, many more were injured physically and psychologically, and hundreds of thousands "enemy" civilians were killed and millions maimed or displaced. So the Western world would remind dominate and control global resources.

I was a rah-rah boy when I entered the US military when Vietnam was heating up, choosing to serve as an officer rather than get drafted. I started to figure this out while I was serving.

Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, had already summed it up in War Is A Racket, which he composed in 1935. Follow the money.

Matt Franko said...

The SA leadership is trying to stop this as the stated policy of the nation....

Doesnt mean they are doing a very good job of it...

Tom Hickey said...

This won't be over until someone goes in and cleans the place out or the people revolt, which is unlikely since it is a heavily militarized police state.

The Rombach Report said...

"...compare that to the libertarian "globalist" utopia we've had for quite a long time now..."

Matt - Would you care to elaborate on that statement some?

Kaivey said...

I think the US is the biggest terrorist state. They estimate that the US has killed 20 to 30 million people via its proxy wars. The US ruling class is run by organised crime.

'US war-murdered 20-30 million since WW2: arrest today’s War Criminals

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Carl Herman


US covert and overt criminal Wars of Aggression caused 20-30 million deaths of human beings since World War 2, according to the outstanding documentation of James Lucas of Countercurrents.org. The US use/support of armed attacks is documented in 37 countries, and in direct violation of treaties after both world wars (Kellogg-Briand and UN Charter) to forever end armed attacks unless first attacked by another nation’s government.

The end of this gruesome and psychopathic history of armed attacks and war-murders in the Orwellian names of unalienable rights and freedom will end upon the demand of enough in the 99% to arrest the obvious current War Criminals'

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/us-war-murdered-20-30-million-since-ww2-arrest-todays-war-criminals.html

Matt Franko said...

"no authority " Ed, or a general denigrating of authority....

Goes back a long time from present day...

Tom Hickey said...

The Hobbesian view is that authority is needed for orders, so any form of authority is superior to disorder. It's basically a justification of authoritarianism, which libertarians of the left and right oppose. Libertarians of the right hold that actual freedom results in spontaneous natural order rather than disorder. Libertarians of the left argue that order simply assumes good Hgovernancerather than authoritarianism since good governance is not necessarily hierarchical but can be consensual as in government of, by and for the people.

The Rombach Report said...

"no authority " Ed, or a general denigrating of authority....

Matt - Let's just agree that we have different interpretations of what Libertarian means. Libertarians are not anarchists. They advocate for small government not "no authority".

Tom Hickey said...

There are different flavors of libertarianism on the right and right, just as there are different flavors of authoritarianism, with an equal balance at the center of the range, the extremes of which are statists and anarchists. There are also different types of absolute statism and different types of absolute anarchism.

Matt Franko said...

Ed that "small government" meme easily translates into the "we're out of money!" meme...

If you were to debrief any one of the "we're out of money!" morons to get them to support their position in this, they would make their argument based on libertarian normative reasonings or rationalizations... not any empirical evidence...

iirc Warren actually did this when debated the Murphy guy... Warren made the empirical case and the Murphy guy agreed with Warren empirically but just said he disagreed with looking at our system that way due to libertarian (monetarist) reasonings and rationalizations...

all the "we're out of money!" people are suffering under tremendous libertarian cognitive biases...

The Rombach Report said...

"Ed that "small government" meme easily translates into the "we're out of money!" meme..."

Matt - Agreed. I am something of an anomaly in the Libertarian paradigm, not unlike the way I am anomaly in MMT space. I have always had a hard time swallowing the party line, which may say more about me than anything else. That said, my preference for small government is simply based on my perception that there are relatively few economic endeavors that the government can undertake that the private sector can't execute more efficiently. I think the reason for this is that bad ideas in the private sector tend to fail, while bad ideas in the public sector tend to perpetuate because their is less accountability. In other words, "we're out of money!" does not really apply.

Tom Hickey said...

It appears to me that those that are actually the most authoritarian, e.g., the eurocrats, also think that "we're out of money."

The reality is that few of those people at the top actually think that we are out of money as shown in their attitude toward military spending, bailouts for the wealthy, etc

The "we out of money" meme is about duping the rubes to curtail social spending based on ideology.

They ignore MMT to the degree they can and when they do confront it is with "Weimar" and "Zimbabwe." I'm with Randy on the moron or complicit debate. If someone is profiting from a position consistently, they probably understand it pretty well.