June 28, 2008

Letter to the Paper LX

I'm going to our eparchial assembly in a bit but I decided to take a quick dip into the Catholic blogosphere first. Mark Sheas disappoints as usual when he's talking about the Bush administration because he has no understanding of the underlying dynamics or issues and is relatively uninterested in developing same. Just for old times sake I dropped a mini primer on our actual foreign policy developed by this administration.

Our actual foreign policy for some time under this administration has been to promote 'regional sheriffs' to do much of the heavy lifting and to defuse the possibility of the world ganging up on the US in order to balance our power (this balancing phenomenon happens every time a dominant world power emerges) and drag us down. For Asia we have three major sheriff candidates, India, Japan and the PRC.

N. Korea's submission to the PRC is a recognition of their status as local sheriff and so the US pulls back on threats encouraging the sheriff dynamic. But who is the sheriff in the Middle East? There are no candidates right now. The closest we have is Iraq itself, a sheriff that is years away from being ready. But their armed forces emergence into competent, even-handed action against militias gives a bit of hope that a decade from now they will be able to emerge as sheriff. That has something of a protective effect on Iran.

In short, while some were chanting about no blood for oil and even about bronze aged barbarians, we developed our first real foreign policy that fit the post-cold war age under this administration. It's even marginally more moral than our previous cold war realpolitik because the playing field is still tilted for the local sheriffs to be free states and to encourage liberty in their regions. In 20 years the historians may even notice.

Posted by TMLutas at June 28, 2008 07:42 AM