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November 15, 2006

Thought of the Day: Avoiding the Kissinger of Death

Formulating a coherent foreign policy 2008 forward

 

 

In foreign policy, acting on what you wish to be but is not is like driving up to a red light and accelerating in the hope the light will change before you transgress the intersection, thus avoiding a serious collision.

 

Yet this wishful thinking is increasingly becoming U.S. policy around the world. Aside from any rare occasion of luck, this liberal policy guarantees negative, if not disastrous results.

 

As we witnessed in Vietnam and have also seen to various degrees and in various forms with Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, Russia, and others, including right here in North America with our current border and trade policies with Latin American states, such wishful thinking is unhelpful. In reality, those who oppose us will only gain in number as respect for U.S. policy in the far-abroad and the near-abroad continues to dissolve.

 

Casting aside all lessons re-learned during the Reagan era, we seem doomed to repeat a spiraling cycle of avoidable losses, which could be side-stepped were common sense again to replace mugwumpian, prevaricatory, and beltway and academia ad populum thinking. In other words, were we to abandon the political autism brought into effete popularity decades ago in large part by the Kissinger mentality and revived (because no mediocre deed goes unrewarded) by the Clinton administration and this Bush administration, the needs of Americans and the rest of the world would be much better served.

 

 

Posted by Martin at November 15, 2006 01:38 AM

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