Link. One wonders whether Gary thought out his entire viewpoint and sourcing, or simply wanted to post a screed against Joe Biden. He does the latter:
In 2015, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote his famous memoir "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War." In that memoir, Gates wrote that Joe Biden "has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." Eight years later, Biden's streak is still intact and growing. Since 2015, Joe can add Crimea, Afghanistan and Ukraine to his list of failures.
Joe's list of failures is predicated on the belief that appeasement, aka diplomacy, is the key to world peace. This, of course, if foolish. Terrorist organizations and terrorist-supporting nations (think Iran) love playing idiots like Biden like a fiddle. They're known in the Muslim world as "useful idiots."
Joe Biden's affection for Iran is one of his worst stumbling blocks.
Gary continues by citing a Murdoch - WSJ op-ed (behind a paywall). Crabgrass chooses not to buy blarney, It is the basis for his screed against Joe Biden's "Foreign Policy" because Gary has a predilection against Iran. Gary does not identify the WSJ author, nor is pre-paywall WSJ lead-in doing that on the link.
Gary's initial link (presumably because he liked phrasing) is to a 2014 item, (not 2015 - a minor point), about an advanced look at a Robert Gates book set to come out in 2014, where it appears unclear what Gary wrote himself and what he was quoting.
Citing Philip Bump as a source? Gary's out of date first-cited item was by Philip Bump, then with The Atlantic and now with WaPo, who most recently has written at WaPo:
Why is protecting institutions largely the Democrats’ responsibility?
Analysis by Philip BumpOctober 4, 2023 at 11:24 a.m. EDTThe frustration that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had been trying to keep hidden for months (with varying degrees of success) seeped out on Tuesday evening. At a news conference following his ouster as House speaker, McCarthy attacked those responsible for the defeat, particularly Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who had called for the vote in the first place.
McCarthy also offered more than a little bile to another longtime foe: his political opposition.
“I think today was a political decision by the Democrats,” McCarthy said. “I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution,” he said, pointing, as an example, to the removal of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from committees in the last Congress.
Speaking of the eight Republicans who voted to oust him, McCarthy said: “My fear is the institution fell today, because you can’t do the job if eight people — you have 94 percent or 96 percent of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side. How do you govern?”
[...] Why wouldn’t Democrats side with the institution and defend the Republican speaker? Weren’t they the ones who liked to preen about being the defenders of democracy and good governance?
But this invites an obvious response: Why, particularly for the past decade or so, has it consistently been up to Democrats to be the line of defense?
McCarthy’s ouster was due in part to his working across the aisle last week to pass legislation funding the government. Gaetz invoked McCarthy’s willingness to pass legislation with Democratic votes as a criticism earlier this week.
One should not labor under the misapprehension that this was common, however. In a letter to his colleagues, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) detailed occasions in which McCarthy had broken agreements or refused consensus. (He also reminded Democrats that Gaetz’s ability to seek McCarthy’s ouster followed a rules change to which McCarthy had agreed.)
Even when it came to Tuesday’s question on whether he should get to serve as speaker McCarthy told his caucus in private and said publicly in an interview on CNBC that he wasn’t going to reach a compromise with Democrats. There was just the expectation — or McCarthy would later claim such an expectation — that the Democrats would side not with him but with tradition and stability. Democrats didn’t call for McCarthy’s removal, but they didn’t keep it from happening, either.
From a practical standpoint, it’s useful to consider the calculus for the minority.
Republicans have a nine-member advantage, something that consistently frustrated McCarthy’s efforts to get things done — particularly given his party’s ostentatious antipathy toward compromise. So issue after issue saw the right-wing fringe of his caucus demanding concessions and not infrequently receiving them. On issue after issue, McCarthy wouldn’t or couldn’t reach an agreement with Democrats.
Whoever replaces him will have similar constraints. Perhaps there were wins McCarthy attained that his successor wouldn’t. But there may be ones his successor can achieve — perhaps thanks to having arrived in power with a broader mandate from the caucus — that McCarthy couldn’t. [...] What’s the worst a new speaker could do, use falsehoods to launch an impeachment probe targeting President Biden?
Put another way, there is certainly a little room for the next speaker to be worse for Democrats. There is a lot of room for the next speaker to be better.
But now we come back to the bigger issue, the one that colors so much of national politics in the moment. McCarthy watched as the Republican Party shifted toward more and more overt rejections of the institutions of governance. At times, he leveraged that shift. At other times, he stood by tacitly.
For example, there is probably no other Republican who demonstrated the same combination of personal power and silent fealty to Donald Trump. Trump is the embodiment of demands for the dismantling of political norms and power structures, someone whose rise on the right was predicated on his indifference to building consensus or respecting how Congress (or anything else in government) usually worked.
McCarthy’s party gave Trump and his supporters space — and encouragement — to shred Washington and to undercut the functions of democracy. [...]
[...] McCarthy’s inability to lead his caucus is in part a function of his base simply rejecting leadership out of hand. Increasing the debt limit is now a partisan issue — as often is funding the government at all. The pressure against these things comes from the right. Keeping things running becomes the Democrats’ responsibility.
And make no mistake: The broad rejection by Republicans of D.C. as tainted, polluted — an idea that McCarthy certainly hasn’t done much to combat — is itself a hostility to government institutions. But it’s one that plays well with the GOP base and, for a long time, didn’t threaten McCarthy’s power.
Hardly a thinker in line with Gary's general thinking, but Gary liked some wording of a 2014 item. Indeed, DailyCaller says so.
As to Robert Gates, on whom Gary keys, and a Republican reporting of him as far back as 2011, there is Pat Buchanan:
“(A)ny future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. MacArthur so delicately put it,” Robert Gates has just told the cadets at West Point.
America would be nuts, Gates is saying, to fight a new land war like the two he inherited.
It follows that the “neo-isolationists” who opposed invading Iraq and a “long war” in Afghanistan were right, in Gates’ eyes. Quite an admission from a defense secretary who presided over the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.
Yet, do not the balance sheets of both wars bear Gates out?
Nearly 10 years after 9/11, at a cost of $100 billion a year, we are still bleeding in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, however, is long gone, but embedded today in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.
Eight years after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the butcher’s bill is in: 4,400 U.S. dead, 37,000 wounded, 100,000 Iraqi dead, half a million widows and orphans, half of Iraq’s Christian population in exile, the other half terrorized and a Shia Iraq drifting toward Tehran.
For what? Al-Qaida was not in Iraq in 2003, but it is there now.
[...] If we are not going to fight another land war in Asia, when the troops come home from Afghanistan and Iraq, let us close the U.S. bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. As the Russia-Georgia clash showed, America is not going to fight in the Caucasus, either.
As for Europe, the Red Army went home decades ago. Eastern Europe and the Baltic republics are free. As President Eisenhower urged JFK 50 year ago, we should bring U.S. troops home and let Europe man up to its own defense.
No one threatens Europe today, and we could sell them all the missiles, tanks, ships, guns and planes they need to defend themselves.
Robert Kagan writes in The Weekly Standard that before we cut defense we must decide what commitments we are going to give up.
He is correct. Instead of cutting the sinew, bone and muscle of defense, let us first terminate treaty commitments to go to war for nations that have nothing to do with U.S. vital national interests.
U.S. policy should be to tell Europe, Asia, Africa and the Mideast: Your defense is first and foremost your responsibility. You police your own neighborhood. And if there is something you can’t handle, give us a call. We may be able to help. Then again, we may not.
Robert Gates may just have started a long-overdue debate.
This is interesting toward Ukraine policy. Buchanan viewed the Biden approach, supply materiel (sell it was Pat's view) but they do the fighting, as good policy.
Yet that policy is under Republican attack. Cut Ukraine loose entirely, or police our spending there better, are options, but the Republican view is spend nothing there, let Russia have its way. This fiscal isolationism is Trumps, and Gary's people follow.
The days of Bush-neocon "One Superpower" chest pounding, or earlier "World's Policeman" are in question, but if Gary wants to question Biden's foreign policy, by saying we should - what - go to war with Iran, with China, or not, is unclear.
Iran is not a sponsor of loss on our shores. The last sponsor were the Saudis, 9/11, and Trump takes their golf tournament money while Jarad gets the big payoff.
If the Iranians sell more oil bringing down petro prices worldwide, doesn't that fit with Gary's repeated carping over pump prices? It is unclear what he wants other than to throw shade on Biden, who, in Buchanan's view, has a Ukranian policy of Dick Nixon.
It is unclear what Gary is saying other than criticism of Biden likely will help his party and his favorite, DeSantis. He could be correct, but he's structured a strange Philip Bump argument, while embracing the Murdoch empire. What's Iran done against us lately?
One thing worth emphasis. Biden did not give Iran any money. It was always theirs, banked here, and impounded as a sanction. In an effort at a non-hostile policy Biden lifted sanctions - letting them have their money back. If somebody had impounded your banked money, would you not have a more friendly attitude to somebody who enabled you to have it back? What is wrong with that? Peaceful coexistence is best for each side. If Israel has a Hamas insurgency problem these days, it's theirs, not mine, not yours. Quite simply, they don't call our shots. We do. It is precisely because Israel has its settlement policy, and other aspects of its hostility toward Palestinians, that it faces a responsive hostility. If we were meaner toward Iran, what would you expect?
___________UPDATE__________
In Jan. 2020 Trump's military conducted a drone strike against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani who headed the Quds Force which conducted actions against U.S. military installations in the Middle East. Iran was restrained in its reaction. Iran resumed its nuclear development program full scale when Trump breached an existing arms agreement.
They are hesitant to trust us again, with cause.
Iran has assisted Shia causes outside of its borders. Not against our nation. We likewise have armed the Saudi effort in Yemen, and we are arming a part of the Israeli efforts against Lebanon's Hezbollah and Gaza's Hamas. They - the Iranians - do things that we do, so we hate and demonize them? Where's the sense there?
We provide four billion in free arms annually to Israel. Republicans are happy with that, but free arms to Ukraine hits a stop sign. Economically, BRIC nations are growing, within a worldwide economy of which we are a large part. But BRIC has India, not Iran as the "I" nation along with Brazil, Russia and China. Iran is not an economic threat to us, nor a nation strong enough to realistically threaten us militarily. Why hate them? If being a theocracy is the issue, Israel is one also. Compare and contrast how we treat one and then the other.
China is the major economic force in competition with dollar hegemony. There, it seems Gary and his favored candidate DeSantis also have major policy issues. But, Biden has not been soft on China. They restrain themselves from any real and substantial international provocations over Taiwan, out of respect for a Biden response, should they push a crisis.
This is while we by long policy starting in Nixon years to acknowledge Taiwan as a part of China. It was Republicans Nixon - Kissinger to first form a policy to open to China, with the UN seat being transferred from Taiwan to the mainland.
Presidents after the China - Taiwan balance was struck (before Nixon was purged), of both parties, have kept policy constant, Trump included. He started a trade war, but that is economic policy, not the balance dimension. Taiwan is a part of China but has been accorded independent economic hegemony and kept a military. Things date back to the revolution with the Nationalist forces defeated but withdrawn to Taiwan. Korean War. Quemoy and Matsu shelling before Nixon's initiative. It is unique. China is patient.
Human rights? Ask the Palestinians about that issue, if you want to kick Iran or China about human rights. And don't forget racism or immigrant hate here. We have human rights issues to where we should fix our own situations first, and be restrained criticizing others.
BOTTOM LINE: The Obama - Biden administration had reached an equilibrium with Iran which Trump trampled. Iran has that as a cause to be distrustful now.
________FURTHER UPDATE________
Neither China, Iran nor Biden wants to fuck with my or your Social Security.
Matt Gaetz does. DeSantis. Know who your enemies are, or get screwed by them, smiling as they have their way.
________FURTHER UPDATE________
Without calling Biden a Nevil Chamberlain, Gary implies he is - feckless in Foreign Policy. He dislikes negotiation with Iran, and casts stones.
Buchanan again, Sept. 22, 2023, "Biden Commits US to War for Taiwan." The item is unequivocal. We have interests in Taiwan. TSMC makes all of Nvidia's chips, and is the foundary for other chip designs. We need Taiwan.
Why exactly Gary wants us to bully Iran, is unclear. It is something which has not worked and likely will not again, and where Reagan, Gary's demi-god, cut the obscene secret Sandinista funding arms to Iran contract. Nobody but Reagan and Bush cut the deal that undercut Carter on the "hostages crisis," but now - no deal - dealing is verboten. So, Gary, why the hot pants to scrap with Iran, under the continuing leadership which the Gipper serviced?
What's it get you? We took out an Iranian national hero, and they did not over react, so what's the hot button? Why demonize Iran? Religious bias? What?