#foreign policy realism

[infamousbrad]

This hangs some details on a rant I was going to release after they buried him in the cold, cold ground. (It's been long enough I'm starting to wonder if some patriot at Arlington is making excuses not to take him.)

"Foreign policy realism" turns out to not be realistic after all.

Henry Kissinger's obituary in the NYT wasn't half the fawning apologist trainwreck we all expected it to be, but they did bend over backwards to present his side of the argument, what he was thinking all those decades, based on interviews with many of his friends, co-workers, and his students at Harvard:

Kissinger's WWII experiences convinced him that America was the most moral and trustworthy country in the world. And, he reasoned, that is why the President of the United States should be able to give an order to anybody in the world, in any country, and reasonably expect to be obeyed. And since the evil countries won't want to acknowledge the American president as the Leader of the World, not only is he morally allowed to do whatever it takes to get his way, he's morally required to do so.

Which was what he was thinking when he taught "foreign policy realism" both in the halls of power and in the halls of the Ivy League schools, which meant that, given a range of options, he was always, every time, on the side that would result in the most innocent civilian deaths. The more innocent civilian deaths there are, the faster other countries will have to do the right and moral thing: accept the moral superiority and moral authority of the President of the United States.

To describe this as merely incoherent is to fail to notice the most idiotic part of it:

Every time a US president or secretary of state or CIA covert operations director, on Kissinger's advice, murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, every single time, the result was the opposite of what Kissinger predicted it would be. At best, we replaced bad governments with worse. At worst, you can trace the origin story of every single one of the worst terrorist groups in the world to the results of Kissingerist "realism." And, even more appallingly to me, ...

Kissinger gave this same stupid, evil advice every few years for sixty years without learning a thing from his failures. Sixty years' worth of US leadership followed his bad advice and never even paid any attention to his track record. It's the same old disgusting cognitive bias over and over again: it takes no evidence to believe what you already want to believe, and no amount of evidence can disprove something once you've already made up your mind.

It's why, among other things, there's never any consequence to being demonstrably wrong in politics or elite journalism: if you were telling people in power that their darkest impulses are good and right, and it turns out you were wrong, that can't possibly be your fault, because "nobody could possibly have known" it wouldn't work, no "reasonable person" would have thought you were wrong. Nor can it be the fault of people who were persuaded by his "foreign policy realism" because "everybody knew" he was always right, knew it so confidently they never looked back and checked.

So I apologize to Henry Kissinger's family and friends for not letting them grieve, but if they're going to keep postponing the funeral service, I can't stay silent forever. Henry Kissinger was a monster, because he made the people he touched even more monstrous than they already were, and no matter how early he had died, I would have wished it had been sooner, and may the hallowed ground of Arlington spit out his evil corpse, and may his ghost spend eternity in a customized torture pit in the fiery depths of Tartarus as a warning to the next 100 generations that his kind of "realism" isn't just evil, that being a "foreign policy realist" isn't just monstrous, but it's also demonstrably, historically, really, really stupid. Psychopathic callousness isn't "realism." It doesn't even WORK.

VOR: Henry Kissinger

Ugh, HUGELY overrated, Bismark has nothing on him. What, truly are his accomplishments? Oh, rapprochement with China? You mean the country that had just experienced a huge split with the Soviet Union, to the point where they were scared of military conflict, that was simultaneously backing North Vietnam in a war against the US? And so we opened doors to them and gave them literally everything they asked for, hanging Taiwan out to dry, and in return got absolutely nothing; China's aid to North Vietnam actually *increased* the year after? The corpse of a roadkill dog could have done that.

The "cease fire" with North Vietnam? That's just losing with coat of paint to poorly cover the shame! At least he had the self-respect to try to return his Nobel Peace prize. Ho Chi Minh handed him his ass on a platter and somehow that is a win on his ledger.

Accelerating arms sales to the Shah of Iran in order to back separatist fighters in Iraq? Whoops! Wow, that uh, wow what a call there. Really picked the right side.

Coup against Allende in Chile? That went well! Not to mention...he didn't. Chile coup'd Chile, Allende was a complete disaster imploding the country's economy. The Chilean military asked for permission as like a token gesture, we gave them support that didn't matter. Its like taking credit for a sports team win because you bought box seats, except at this game they dropped the opposing team's family out of a helicopter headfirst onto the pitch.

All the SALT treaty stuff started under Johnson, he continued it which is fine but is VORcel stuff. His grand "pivot to Europe" was trying to link trade policy to increases in defense spending from European partners...which didn't happen. They didn't increase them. We gave them trade deals anyway. Its fucking Trump without the memes.

On March 1, 1973, Kissinger stated, "The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

Awww "I'm such a cool little edgy boy, look at me and my joke about the Holocaust when discussing systemic discrimination against Jews the Soviet Union, surely this will somehow score me Realpolitik points on the Big Board that I can cash in for prize money while shedding America's moral legitimacy because it makes my dick hard."

He is the academic definition of style over substance, snottily walking from fuck-up to disaster to status-quo free ride and putting a pithy quote about The Nature of Power over it to pretend he had any to begin with. Hurry up and die already so I can stop running into you haggling over hostess tips at overpriced Georgetown restaurants.

F-

[nevermind-i-forgot-whats-that]

Sometimes, as much as I love internet communities and spaces, I really think a lot of people have spent so much time in sanitized, morally pure echo chambers that they lose sight of realism and life outside the internet.

I live in Alabama. My fiancée and I cannot hold hands down the street without fear of homophobic assholes. We have an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. We are one of the poorest states in the US with some of the lowest scores on metrics related to quality of life, including maternal mortality, healthcare, education, and violence. It’s not a coincidence that we are also one of the most red, one of the most Republican states in the Union. In 2017 the UN said the conditions in Alabama are similar to those in a third-world country.

Trump gave a voice to the most violently racist, sexist, xenophobic groups of people who, unfortunately for most of us in the Southern U.S., run our states and have only grown more powerful since his rise to power. The Deep South powers MAGA, and we all suffer for it.

We have no protections if they don’t come from the federal government.

I know people are suffering internationally and my heart is with them. However, this election is not just about foreign policy - we have millions of Americans right here at home living in danger, living in areas where they have been completely abandoned by their local leaders. We need this win.

No candidate is perfect, but for the first time in my voting lifetime I’m excited to vote. I’m excited for the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket because they are addressing the issues close to home. They’re advocating for education as the ticket to a better life, but without the crippling student debt. They’re advocating for the right to love who you love without fear and with pride. Kamala has always been pro-LGBT+ and so has Tim. Again, if you’re queer in the South, we don’t have support unless it comes from the federal government, and we absolutely will not have support if the Republicans regain the White House.

Kamala speaks in length about re-entry programs to reduce recidivism and help people who have been arrested and imprisoned regain their lives. Tim Walz supported restoring voting rights to felons. In the South, you know who comprise the majority of felons? Members of minorities. It’s one of the major tools of systemic racism and mass disenfranchisement, and arguably the modern face of slavery (there are some fantastic documentaries and books that explain the connection between the post-Reconstruction South and the disproportionate rates of imprisonment for BIPOC). Having candidates who recognize this and want to restore the freedom and rights to people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system? And keep them from having to go to prison in the first place? That’s refreshing. That’s exciting.

I would *love* to live in a country where women’s rights are respected, where LGBT+ rights and protections are a given, where we treat former criminals and individuals experiencing mental health crises with respect and dignity. I would *love* to live in a country where education is free of religious interference and each and every citizen is entitled to a fair start and equal opportunities.

But I don’t live in that country. Millions and millions of Americans find their rights and freedoms up for debate and on the ballot.

Project 2025 poses the largest threat to the future of our democracy as we know it. We are being called to fight for the future of our country.

We have to put on our oxygen masks first before we can help others.

You don’t have moral purity when you wash your hands of the millions of us who are still fighting for own freedoms right here.

The reality is that a presidential candidate is a best fit, and not a perfect fit. But comparatively speaking? Kamala is pretty damn close.

[artbyblastweave]

i only learned recently from a friend's who much more comic literate than I that magneto's backstory as an Auschwitz survivor wasnt planned from the start, which surprised me since it seemed to me a really integral part of his character. anyway, twofold question: how common is it to see capes with backstories tied to very specific historical events, and, as time inevitably passes and real world survivors of those events pass, how do they justify having their characters still alive and kicking? (stay safe on your mountaintop friend)

Depending on how wide you cast the net, this is a pretty big list! There are a lot of comics who's characters cutting-edge ripped-from-the-headlines origin later became a very specific historical event, or at least Of A Specific Moment, in a way the writers had no reason to anticipate the franchise would run long enough to have happen. But to shed pedantry and hone in on some specific ones;

The big one, of course, is Captain America. Superficially Cap's contemporary origin comes with a baked-in means of him making it to the present day- he gets stuck in the ice and then gets unthawed. The fly in the ointment, though, is when he unthaws. When they first brought him back into rotation in 1964, his stint in the ice was only around 20 years; long enough for there to be a significant culture shock, but not long enough that his entire social circle was dead or even culturally sidelined. Nick Fury is still around and kicking ass as a zeitgeist-appropriate 60s superspy. But the further the sliding timeline hauls forward his implicit date of release, the more it changes the tone and tenor of the resulting story. Losing twenty years is different from losing fifty years (as was the case in The Ultimates, where he very explicitly comes back during the Bush years as part of the book's commentary on The War On Terror) and those will both be way different from when we inevitably hit the point where he's lost 100 years and he's the cultural equivalent of a Civil War Vet or something. There's strength to all of those stories but they're undeniably different.

Iron Man's origin was originally explicitly tied to the Vietnam war; he was captured by a detachment of "Red Guerillas" while consulting for the US military and the South Vietnamese government. Unfortunately U.S. foreign policy to this day has prevented this from ever becoming an unresolvable storytelling issue.

The Fantastic Four are a case where their origin was intimately tied to the space race; their untested, cutcorner spaceflight was expressly an attempt to show up the Russians. The extremely specific political context of their test flight is something that sort of gets brushed off; the Ultimate incarnation (written by Warren Ellis) threaded this needle deftly by having the accident be a dimensional expedition instead, circa the early 2000s. I'm not actually sure how the urgency of their test flight is currently contextualized in 616 continuity. Anyone got their finger on that pulse?

The Punisher was also originally a Vietnam vet- but through the jaded cynical lens of the 1980s rather than the straightforwardly peppy and jingoistic lens that defined Iron Man's debut in the 60s. Current continuities I believe have mostly bitten the bullet and updated his origin to the invasion of Afghanistan. However, an interesting decision in the Garth Ennis-spearheaded Punisher MAX continuity of the early 2000s- where Punisher is literally the only costumed vigilante- is that they bit the bullet and posited a version of Frank Castle who really has been killing criminals nonstop since shortly after his return from Vietnam in the 70s, a man well into his 60s who's survivability and efficacy at killing are edging up against the boundaries of magical realism.

Hulk I feel sort of deserves a mention here- he's in a sort of twilight zone on this issue, as there was, uh, a pretty goddamn specific political context in which the Army was having him make them a new kind of bomb, but you can haul that forward in the timeline without complete destruction of suspension of disbelief. Pretty soon it'll be downright topical again.

To circle back around to The X-Men, Claremont introduced a lot of historical specificity with the ANAD lineup. Off the top of my head, Colossus was explicitly a USSR partisan (updated to a gangster forced into crime to survive in the mismanaged chaos of the USSR's collapse in the Ultimate Universe) and Storm was orphaned by a French bombing during the Suez War. More to the point, the timing was such that Magneto, in his upper-middle age, had a pretty strongly defined timeline vis a vis his ideological development vs Xavier; child during the holocaust, Nazi hunter who eventually rifts with Xavier during the mid-to-late 60s, and then the two of them spend their years marshalling their respective resources before coming to blows during the quote-unquote "Age of Heroes," whatever the timeline looked like for that in the 80s. And it was a timeline that held together pretty damn well in the 80s, but it's gotten increasingly awkward as time's gone on. The Fox films completely gave up on having it make sense, near as I can tell. In the comics they've had all sorts of de-aging chicanery occur that very pointedly ignores what an odd timeline that implies for everyone else in the X-books besides Magneto. The Cullen Bunn Magneto standalone from 2014-15 I remember actually leaned into playing up the idea that he's just old as shit and dependent on so many superscience treatments to remain functional that he's basically pickled, which was a take I liked; the comic ended when he died of exertion trying to stop two planets from crashing into each other, right before a brand-wide universal reset. When the MCU was at it's peak and people were wargaming how to integrate the X-Men (lol) you occasionally saw people float "fixes" for the issue, such as making Magneto a survivor of the Bosnian Genocide, or making him black and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide; I remember that this consistently drew a lot of ire from people who (reasonably) thought that his Judaism and connection to the holocaust were deeply important to his character, continuity be damned. But yeah, he's a character dogged by specificity in a way only Cap even slightly approaches. If this is a tractable problem I'm not going to be the one to tract it.

Interestingly, I'm genuinely having a lot of trouble coming up with stuff that's analogous to this at DC comics- almost universally the core roster updates into any given time period much more smoothly. Furthermore, DC stuff has always been much more willing to eschew Marvel's World-Outside-Your-Window philosophy in favor of deliberately obfuscating the time period via the Dark-Deco aesthetic of BTAS's Gotham or the retrofuturism of STAS's Metropolis.

The closest you get to this kind of friction is The Justice Society, who, pre-crisis, were siloed off in a universe where superheroes had existed since the 40s and there was no comic book time, so they were all in their upper-middle-age to old age now, with their kids and grandkids as legacy capes. Post crisis they were (and are) kind of an awkward fit in DC continuity; in the scant few JSA comics from the 90s and early oughts that I read, surviving members of the WW2-era lineup like Alan Scott and Jay Garrick were absolutely written as dependent on their metahuman physiques to have endured up to the present day. I think they're still doing stuff with those guys. I don't know how. I do understand the impulse, though. I also never throw anything out.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Lammy’s doctrine of “progressive realism” is a deliberate counterweight to the “ethical” foreign policy pursued by former Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook, which Lammy has said “snagged on the limits of what was possible”.

While Lammy expressed admiration for Cook’s idealism, he said he was “most informed” by Labour’s pragmatic postwar foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, who took on the Labour left with an Atlanticist approach that saw the birth of Nato and Britain’s adoption of nuclear weapons.

“I’m not going to be sitting down with proscribed terrorists, but diplomacy requires you to sit down with people who don’t share all your values,” he said. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, for example, were vital interlocutors in the search for peace in the Middle East.

"well obviously in determining the final solution to the palestinian question i would not sink so low as to negotiate with political-military organisations enjoying substantial support among the palestinian ppl and in particular those palestinians currently most severely affected by israels ongoing mass slaughter, i am ofc willing to sit down with more moderate parties with a stake in the debate, like islamist-theocratic absolute monarchies including one whose perceived willingness to abandon palestinian solidarity for the sake of normalised relations with israel is widely regarded as having catalysed the current round of heightened conflict"

[mariacallous]

From the homeless to a new global color line to immigrant “safe havens,” the harm will be absorbed by the unseen and the unheard.

While I’ve been at a mind-jolting workshop in Canberra about “progressive” foreign policy, my head has just been spinning the entire time from everything going on in the world. Countless political cross-currents happening at the speed of Twitter right now.

But the J.D. Vance thing stands out as singularly significant, in part because people can’t help but comment on it while appearing to be confused about what the Vance nomination actually means for everything from the defense budget to “great-power competition,” and from NATO to war in America.

This take, for example, from Murtaza Hussain—who is generally of quite sound mind—totally misreads Vance based purely on a selectively hopeful reading of Vance’s rhetoric.

I’ve made it a point to digest every Vance speech, quote, or piece of writing since 2017 (or at least as much of it as I could find). Not because I thought he’d be Veep.

Rather, initially, I was trying to understand right-wing #NeverTrumpers (he had once been one). But Vance also intrigued me because it was obvious from the beginning that he was a class subversive, cosplaying as an Appalachian working-class explainer while actually following a typical Ivy-League-to-finance-bro pipeline. He was exploiting, rather than representing, a particular rural, white working-class grievance—and that made his presentation distinct from typical defenders of ruling-class privilege.

Now, you don’t need me to tell you all the reasons why he’s a bad candidate or a danger or whatever. Plenty of people doing that right now.

What I can add is an explanation of:

How Vance’s ideas about violence are explicitly racialized (envisioning a Global Color Line),

Why a Trump-Vance presidency will never yield foreign-policy realism (because of neocon infiltration), and

How the political terrain we’re operating on has changed (Washington’s foreign policy imagination is becoming post-hegemonic in a particularly reactionary direction).

[contemplatingoutlander]

Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

(Illustration: Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post)

This opinion column by Robert Kagan reminds us that history appears to be repeating itself. Trump's America First movement is an echo of the 1930s/1940s isolationist, neo-fascist America First movement that tried to keep the U.S. out of WWII. This is a gift🎁link, so you can read the entire article, even if you don't subscribe to The Washington Post. Below are some excerpts:

Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history....Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did. The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain. [...] This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. [...] Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.”  [...] Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power. [...] Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. [...] The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it. [emphasis added]  

Use the gift link above to read the entire article. It is worth reading.

____________ Illustration: The above illustration by Brian Stauffer originally drew me to this article. It does a great job of succinctly illustrating the Trump GOP's rightward march towards isolationism (and Putin-style dictatorship). [edited]

[quartz-tsw]

Demo | Forum

You are a high school student passionate about writing interactive fiction novels. Grammar, story structure, character design, and story design are foreign concepts to you, but that won’t slow you down because you have passion and the power of friendship on your side. A tragic accident sends you into a coma, transporting you into the world you have created.

Explore a world filled with bugs, excessive stats that cancel each other out, and ambiguous choices. Romance one-dimensional characters, overcome poorly designed challenges to escape the hell you’ve created, and become the Strongest Writer!

The game is primarily narratively driven, even though there will be silly challenges sprinkled here and there. Some random elements are present, but they won’t stonewall your progress. You will never be forced to replay an encounter because you had a bad die roll. Ridiculously difficult or poorly worded mini-games will pop up here and there. But the ones that have “correct” solutions are accompanied by a skip button that can be used without any punishment.

You will have a mobile base of operations, a castle that can fit in your pocket, where you can grow plants, make potions, train with your companions and decorate your rooms. After you reach a certain point in the game, time will advance when you complete quests, making the plants grow. The plants can be used for brewing potions that will add more flavor to future encounters but aren’t a prerequisite for progress.

At the end of each chapter, you will enter a dream-like state where you can communicate with the Real World via a powerful artifact. However, the communication is limited to sending updates to the game you’re trapped in and reading the player’s feedback on the forum.

After the first part of the game, you will get to have a say on how the Empire grows over the course of the story by voting on policies. These policies will get enacted if you and your crew complete quests that will sway the citizens in your favor. You will be free to tackle specific issues from a progressive or conservative lens without having the game punish you for making the wrong choice. Scratch that. Whatever you choose will have catastrophic consequences on the Empire but in different ways. By the end of the story, the Empire will be in crisis.

The game is split into three parts: Escape from the Underworld, Rise of the Empire, and Fall of the Empire. In the first part, you will escape the Underworld, the hell of your fictive world, with the aid of your fully customizable romanceable companion, Olympia/Olympus. You will gather a party of virtuous souls and traverse the Great Barrier into the surface world. Upon escaping the Underworld and entering the MC’s fictional world, the “Real” World, you and your companions become Immortals, overseeing the fate of the Empire for centuries to come.

At the time of writing the story, the MC was sick of all the medieval fantasy stories that resort to misogyny for the sake of realism, so they wrote an “inclusive” setting that “solves” inequality issues only on a surface, superficial level. The Empire is a mishmash of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece under constant assault by progressive barbarian hordes who enslave and torture citizens equally, regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation. Political decisions in the Empire are ultimately made by a supreme ruler, Caesar, but every citizen has a right to express their grievances and opinions in the Forum (an actual roman style forum, not an online one).

As generations pass, you and the Immortals will oversee the Empire grow from antiquity to a steam-punk future near its decline.

Olympus/Olympia

age: unknown/ timeless

race: unknown

gender: player selectable

appearance: custom

Olympia/Olympus is the first immortal that the MC encounters in the Underworld. The self-proclaimed soul mate of the main character, Olympia/Olympus, is the primary romantic option for the player. Kind-hearted, straightforward, overpowered, and with a non-existent sense of personal space, Oly will accompany the MC almost everywhere. The only times when you will be apart is when you have to do challenges alone.

Bellona

age: 27

race: human

gender: female

appearance: average height, athletic build, olive skin, brown eyes, long brown hair in a high ponytail.

Bellona is one of the finest warriors of the Empire, who knew no equal on the battlefield until she found her end at the Kālá’s hand, whom she managed to take down with her to the Underworld. Abandoned at a young age by her parents, she had to learn to fend for herself and develop a can-do attitude that no one rivals. Impulsive by nature, she has no regard for diplomacy - her creative swear words are common in any heated discussion. The one thing she hates more than whining and weakness is others picking on her friends, even for the most trivial things.

Athena

age: 30

race: human

gender: female

appearance: tall, slim build, fair skin, green eyes, undercut, blonde hair.

Athema is a scholar, politician, and equal rights activist. She died at a banquet where a political adversary poisoned her wine cup. Outspoken and articulate, her opinions have sown the seeds of critical thinking within the Empire, prompting a vocal minority to question whether the Empire will be remembered as a bastion of enlightenment in history or a shameful asterisk. Competent in rhetorical debates, she never backs down from a winning argument, even if it means losing political currency. Although she stands her ground firmly in intellectual standoffs, physical confrontations are a no-go for her, looking for cover at the first sign of danger.

Hera

age: 22

race: human

gender: female

appearance: petite, light skin, heterochromia eyes (blue and green), braided, black hair.

Hera is a quiet, reserved young woman whose life ended in mysterious circumstances. She does not remember how she died or does not want to tell anybody. Although she does not enjoy getting involved in politics too much, she is convinced that the best way to organize society is through clearly defined gender roles. Family is the most important thing to her, and she hopes that she will be able to start one as soon as possible. Her cooking and organizing skills are unmatched, which is why she was often employed by wealthy nobles to host their lavish banquettes.

Vulcan

age: 46

race: human

gender: male

appearance: burly, gray hair, groomed silver beard, dark skin 

A respected inventor, this reclusive self-reliant man found his end at the hand of an ambitious experiment to replicate the sun in his forge. Even though he feels more at home with his inventions than with people, he is kind and gentle despite losing his temper from time to time. Vulcan will be the main driving force behind the rapid technological advances that the Empire will go through during the game, and you will have a say in what innovations take priority.

Plutus

age: 33

race: human

gender: male

appearance: tall, thin, blond messy hair

This neurotic treasurer got on the wrong side of a knife after uncovering a circle of corrupt aristocrats who were siphoning gold out of the treasury. His obsessive compulsion to account for every penny spent makes him an excellent financial advisor for your team. His expertise will be invaluable in growing the Empire over the centuries.

Kālá

age: unknown

race: unknown

gender: unknown

appearance: short legs, wide hips, elongated torso with thin, long arms, large hands. Dark skin, black eyes, bald. Wears extravagant clothes.

Little is known about them besides their affiliation with the Barbarian hordes and unorthodox fighting style. Before the encounter with Bellona, Kala was undefeated in combat. Has the role of the main antagonist of the story.

Olympia/ Olympus will be the only RO with which you can have a meaningful, long-term romantic relationship. There will be the possibility of having flings with minor, episodic, one-dimensional characters. But you will not be able to be in a relationship with other immortals (but that does not mean you can’t try). As far as the attraction to Oly is concerned, you have multiple options: regular attraction, no attraction, “platonic” attraction, “asexual” attraction, too much attraction, and attraction once you get to know each other better. There will be no explicit sex scenes, but you can expect bizarre scenes that kind of resemble it.

[bluepecanpie]

From the UK perspective, Trump round 2 is going to be particuarly amusing, and to give some context - it's because a few weeks ago, he accused the British government, currently led by the Labour Party, of interfering in the presidential election campaign for Team Harris.

This is funny not because that "Trump=Russian agent" crap, but because a) Members of the Labour Party were actually going across the pond to canvass for the Harris campaign b) It is well understood, as in not even an open secret, that there is a cross-pollination in terms of policy, political strategy, donors, etc. between the left liberal parties of the Anglosphere especially between the US and the UK that has been going on for decades so Labour activists in Pennysylvania or whatever is not only nothing new but the least interesting thing about the UK Labour-US Democrat link c) Because of b), Labour were looking to consolidate a revival of the Atlanticist model that defined the 1990s-2000s: a liberal internationalism (and as implied, with features of 'humanitarian interventionism') informed by an echo of third-way politics with Starmer representing a reiteration of New Labour and Harris for the New Democrats. This liberal internationalism persisted, and was even strengthened during the Bush presidency, and New Labour itself became a vector for neoconservative advisors. Labour's 'progressive realism' was supposed to underpin this, but Trump's victory undermines it completely as he conceives of no reason to even pretend that the UK is even a junior partner to the US, but a lackey to call on when necessary.

British foreign policy has since World War II been mostly about how to come to terms with the loss of its geopolitical standing as paramount hegemon - and what was most important to it since then is at least hedging closely to American imperialism, and presenting outwardly that the UK's interests are in accordance with the US. If Trump's approach to foreign policy is repeated in his second presidency, then it suggests that not only will there be a malformed iteration of Atlanticism due to the UK's and specifically the Labour government's insistence on maintaining the so-called "special relationship" in spite of so many of its MPs and even the Mayor of London having expressed personal disdain for Trump, it also potentially problematises the coordinated operations of Western imperialism currently taking place, or about to take place.

All of this presents decline of not just the American empire, but also accelerates that of the British one as well. The whinging of the British ruling class about 'sacrifices made' over Afghanistan three years ago have made that clear that this process was happening. With this, the UK is locked in the black hole of American decline, and in light of European imperialism now openly stating that they wish to strike out on their own - it is entirely a desicion of their own accord.

[warsofasoiaf]

Mearsheimer Realism

Do you have a take on the realist school of though seen from people like John Mearsheimer? Was listening to an interview he did that made some interesting points about ethics vs realism in foreign policy as well as the end of the unipolar world situation following the cold war. Boiled down to we need to concede on Ukraine and get Russia more aligned with the west to contain China, its not possible to do both and China is more of a threat. I can see the value of this kind of arguments but its very much at odds with some of the more morally informed view about the US opposing tyrants and smaller nations rights etc that you have at times expressed on the blog and I wanted to know if you had a take. 

In short: it’s wrong, and despite being named “realism” is grounded in fiction.

For one, the growing Russia-China alliance was always going to happen. As Russia declined further into geopolitical irrelevance, Putin’s choice was to either fade away or attempt to force a return to the past by acting as the champion of a bloc to resurrect the old Cold War. He opted for the latter, and given Russia’s anemic GDP, its only recourse was to act as a bully on the world stage. To hope for Russian support against China is a fantasy - China and Russia’s growing closeness grows out of a desire to push other countries out of what they see as their spheres of influence. Even a Russia that was downright hostile to China would demand US withdrawal from Eastern Europe. If the point of realism is that countries govern according to their national interests, power politics, and self-preservation, then Russia is always going to seek confrontation with the United States because the US, EU, and NATO emerged as a credible and desirable alternative to the Russian sphere of influence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

For two, Russia has used a variety of coercive measures against its neighbors for decades, attempting to export instability and maintain a stranglehold on the near-abroad. Under the Mearsheimer model, Russia started to be provoked with the 2008 increased NATO dialogues with Ukraine (and Georgia), but Russia had already been meddling in Ukraine years earlier, attempting to rig the 2004-2005 elections or enacting energy sanctions against Kyiv for not showing enough deference to Moscow throughout the 1990′s and early 2000′s. From the get-go, Russia is a perennially paranoid, hostile world actor attempting to export instability as a means to preserve its own influence as opposed to a sober, rational actor that sought to preserve its own power. So to expect them to align themselves and act as a good-faith actor is a pipe dream.

So yeah, it’s not only wrong from an idealistic perspective, but from a practical one as well. Should someone like Ramaswamy (who also argues for this) get into power, Putin will laugh, take everything they’re willing to give away, and continue turning his nation into a Chinese client-state all out of a vain desire to recreate the old Cold War where Russia mattered.

Thanks for the question, Esq.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[woodenbowls]

The Great Delusion: Mearsheimer's Critique of Liberal Hegemony

Dive into the complex world of global politics with our latest video, where we explore the intriguing dynamics of power and influence among nations. Discover how the theory of liberal hegemony, once viewed as a beacon of peace, faces intense scrutiny. John Mearsheimer's sharp critique reveals the discord and instability stemming from the pursuit of this utopian vision. Delve into the American foreign policy of promoting democracy, and the unintended chaos it often brings. Through the lens of realism, understand the significant human and political costs of military interventions. Join us as we unravel Mearsheimer’s argument for a pragmatic, restrained foreign policy that prioritizes national interests and global stability. #GlobalPolitics #LiberalHegemony #Realism #ForeignPolicy #JohnMearsheimer #InternationalRelations #WorldPolitics #USForeignPolicy If you found this video insightful, please like and share!

[tomorrowusa]

Vivek Ramaswamy and other Republicans are trying to rehabilitate the memory of Richard Nixon. I will concede that Nixon is at least a step up from Donald Trump; Nixon wrote his own books and probably even read them.

In the current GOP, Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford are nonpersons; the integrity and honesty of Ike and Jerry are too high a standard for today's cesspool-dwelling Republicans.

Current Republicans are Reaganites In Name Only. If he somehow returned, Uncle Ronnie would castigate the Kremlin-friendly Trumpsters who play footsie with the Evil Empire which is now led by a onetime KGB (secret police) colonel.

The Bush clan has never been on great terms with the Trump crew. Jeb's kid, George P. Bush, had tried to save his own political skin by pandering to MAGA – but to no avail.

So Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon enters into the revisionist GOP pantheon.

In late August, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a break from his typical campaign events to make a pit stop at an unusual venue for mainstream Republicans: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Speaking before a packed house, Ramaswamy was slated to deliver a speech on foreign policy. But his opening remarks served the more provocative purpose of challenging Nixon’s much-maligned status in the annals of conservative history. “He is by and away the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country — probably in all of American history,” said Ramaswamy, without a hint of irony. Ramaswamy’s homage to America’s most disgraced ex-president perplexed some liberal commentators, for whom Nixon remains the ultimate symbol of conservative criminality. But Ramaswamy is far from alone in rethinking Nixon’s divisive legacy. Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, “Tricky Dick” is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the “ crook” that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history. Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a “ blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the “ New Nixonians” who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president’s swarthy good looks.

I can understand them loving Nixon for his attempts to improve ties with Putin's old Soviet Union. But Nixon as a sex symbol requires a strong imagination. He's hot only when compared to Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani.

“No man is perfect — Richard Nixon definitely wasn’t — but one element of his legacy that I respect is reviving realism in our foreign policy,” said Ramaswamy in an interview from the campaign trail, pointing specifically to Nixon’s successful efforts to reestablish diplomatic relations with China during the 1970s. “Pulling Mao out of the hands of the USSR was one of the great victories that allowed us to come to the end of the Cold War … and it took an independent thinker like Nixon to lead us out of that.”

What Ramaswamy ignores is that Nixon escalated the Vietnam War after promising "peace with honor" in his 1968 campaign. After Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1970, large protests broke out across the US which led to the killings of unarmed students by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi.

And Nixon certainly did not pull "Mao out of the hands of the USSR" the way Vivek claimed. The China-Soviet split pre-dates the Nixon administration by over a decade. The USSR and China even fought a small border war against each other in 1969.

Ramaswamy has a pitiful understanding of the world. Like Elon Musk, most of his knowledge of geopolitical history seems to come from memes and dubious social media posts. Tech billionaires are among the most ignorant people on the planet outside of their narrow fields.

[nicklloydnow]

Heaven gained a Nobel Peace Prize winning angel yesterday

“Henry A. Kissinger, the scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so, died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 100.

(…)

Few diplomats have been both celebrated and reviled with such passion as Mr. Kissinger. Considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era, he was by turns hailed as an ultrarealist who reshaped diplomacy to reflect American interests and denounced as having abandoned American values, particularly in the arena of human rights, if he thought it served the nation’s purposes.

He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.

(…)

Mr. Kissinger’s secret negotiations with what was then still called Red China led to Nixon’s most famous foreign policy accomplishment. Intended as a decisive Cold War move to isolate the Soviet Union, it carved a pathway for the most complex relationship on the globe, between countries that at Mr. Kissinger’s death were the world’s largest (the United States) and second-largest economies, completely intertwined and yet constantly at odds as a new Cold War loomed.

For decades he remained the country’s most important voice on managing China’s rise, and the economic, military and technological challenges it posed. He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial.

He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region.

Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war proved far from over, and critics argued that he could have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives.

(…)

As was the case with Vietnam, history has judged some of his Cold War realism in a harsher light than it was generally portrayed at the time. With an eye fixed on the great power rivalry, he was often willing to be crudely Machiavellian, especially when dealing with smaller nations that he often regarded as pawns in the greater battle.

He was the architect of the Nixon administration’s efforts to topple Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende.

He has been accused of breaking international law by authorizing the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70, an undeclared war on an ostensibly neutral nation.

His objective was to root out the pro-Communist Vietcong forces that were operating from bases across the border in Cambodia, but the bombing was indiscriminate: Mr. Kissinger told the military to strike “anything that flies or anything that moves.” At least 50,000 civilians were killed.

When Pakistan’s U.S.-backed military was waging a genocidal war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, he and Nixon not only ignored pleas from the American consulate in East Pakistan to stop the massacre, but they approved weapons shipments to Pakistan, including the apparently illegal transfer of 10 fighter-bombers from Jordan.

Mr. Kissinger and Nixon had other priorities: supporting Pakistan’s president, who was serving as a conduit for Kissinger’s then-secret overtures to China. Again, the human cost was horrific: At least 300,000 people were killed in East Pakistan and 10 million refugees were driven into India.

In 1975, Mr. Kissinger and President Ford secretly approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor by Indonesia’s U.S.-backed military. After the loss of Vietnam, there were fears that East Timor’s leftist government could also go Communist.

Mr. Kissinger told Indonesia’s president that the operation needed to succeed quickly and that “it would be better if it were done after we returned” to the United States, according to declassified documents from Mr. Ford’s presidential library. More than 100,000 East Timorese were killed or starved to death.

Mr. Kissinger dismissed critics of these moves by saying that they did not face the world of bad choices he did. But his efforts to snuff out criticism with sarcastic one-liners only inflamed it.

“The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

On at least one potentially catastrophic stance Mr. Kissinger later reversed himself.

Starting in the mid-1950s as a young Harvard professor, he argued for the concept of limited nuclear war — a nuclear exchange that could be contained to a specific region. In office, he worked extensively on nuclear deterrence — convincing an adversary, for instance, that there was no way to launch a nuclear strike without paying an unacceptably high price.

(…)

“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”

(…)

Few figures in modern American history remained so relevant for so long as Mr. Kissinger. Well into his 90s he kept speaking and writing, and charging astronomical fees to clients seeking his geopolitical analysis.

While the protesters at his talks dwindled, the very mention of his name could trigger bitter arguments. To his admirers, he was the brilliant architect of Pax Americana, the chess grandmaster who was willing to upend the board and inject a measure of unpredictability into American diplomacy.

To his detractors — and even some friends and former employees — he was vain, conspiratorial, arrogant and short-tempered, a man capable of praising a top aide as indispensable while ordering the F.B.I. to illegally tap his home phones to see if he was leaking to the press.

(…)

To read Mr. Kissinger’s laudatory 1957 book analyzing the world order created by Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, who led the Austrian empire in the post-Napoleonic era, is also to read something of a self-description, particularly when it came to the ability of a single leader to bend nations to his will.

“He excelled at manipulation, not construction,” Mr. Kissinger said of Metternich. “He preferred the subtle maneuver to the frontal attack.”

(…)

In the spring of 1969, soon after taking office, he was so enraged by the leaks behind a Times report on the Cambodia bombing campaign that he ordered the F.B.I. to tap the phones of more than a dozen White House aides, including members of his own staff. The recordings never turned up a culprit.

He was similarly infuriated by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The Times and The Washington Post in 1971. The classified documents chronicled the government’s war policies and planning in Vietnam, and leaking them, in his view, jeopardized his secret face-to-face diplomacy. His complaints helped inspire the creation of the White House burglary team, the leak-plugging Plumbers unit that would later break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building.

(…)

Aides described his insights as brilliant and his temper ferocious. They told stories of Mr. Kissinger throwing books across his office in towering rages, and of a manipulative streak that led even his most devoted associates to distrust him.

“In dealing with other people he would forge alliances and conspiratorial bonds by manipulating their antagonisms,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his comprehensive 1992 biography, “Kissinger,” a book its subject despised.

“Drawn to his adversaries with a compulsive attraction, he would seek their approval through flattery, cajolery and playing them off against others,” Mr. Isaacson observed. “He was particularly comfortable dealing with powerful men whose minds he could engage. As a child of the Holocaust and a scholar of Napoleonic-era statecraft, he sensed that great men as well as great forces were what shaped the world, and he knew that personality and policy could never be fully divorced. Secrecy came naturally to him as a tool of control. And he had an instinctive feel for power relationships and balances, both psychological and geostrategic.”

(…)

There was something fundamentally simple, if terrifying, in the superpower conflicts he navigated. He never had to deal with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or a world in which nations use social media to manipulate public opinion and cyberattacks to undermine power grids and communications.

“The Cold War was more dangerous,” Mr. Kissinger said in a 2016 appearance at the New-York Historical Society. “Both sides were willing to go to general nuclear war.” But, he added, “today is more complex.”

The great-power conflict had changed dramatically from the cold peace he had tried to engineer. No longer ideological, it was purely about power. And what worried him most, he said, was the prospect of conflict with “the rising power” of China as it challenged the might of the United States.

(…)

Mr. Kissinger took some satisfaction in the fact that Russia was a lesser threat. After all, he had concluded the first strategic arms agreement with Moscow and steered the United States toward accepting the Helsinki Accords, the 1975 compact on European security that obtained some rights of expression for Soviet bloc dissidents. In retrospect, it was one of the droplets that turned into the river that swept away Soviet Communism.

(…)

“It’s almost impossible to imagine what the American relationship with the world’s most important rising power would look like today without Henry,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who once worked for Mr. Kissinger, said in an interview in 2016.

Other Kissinger efforts yielded mixed results. Through tireless shuttle diplomacy at the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Mr. Kissinger was able to persuade Egypt to begin direct talks with Israel, an opening wedge to the later peace agreement between the two nations.

But perhaps the most important diplomatic contribution Mr. Kissinger made was his sidelining of Moscow in the Middle East for four decades, until Mr. Putin ordered his air force to enter the Syrian civil war in 2015.

(…)

��For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horror of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse,” said Fritz Kraemer, a non-Jewish German immigrant who was to become Mr. Kissinger’s first intellectual mentor. “It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”

Some have argued that Mr. Kissinger’s rejection of a moralistic approach to diplomacy in favor of realpolitik arose because he had borne witness to a civilized Germany embracing Hitler. Mr. Kissinger often cited an aphorism of Goethe’s, saying that if he were given the choice of order or justice, he, like the novelist and poet, would prefer order.

(…)

Heinz became Henry in high school. He switched to night school when he took a job at a company making shaving brushes. In 1940, he enrolled in City College — tuition was virtually free — and racked up A’s in almost all his courses. He seemed headed to becoming an accountant.

Then, in 1943, he was drafted into the Army and assigned to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana.

It was there that Mr. Kraemer, a patrician intellectual and Prussian refugee, arrived one day to give a talk about the “moral and political stakes of the war,” as Mr. Kissinger recalled. The private returned to his barracks and wrote Mr. Kraemer a note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you in any way?”

The letter changed the direction of his life. Taking him under his wing, Mr. Kraemer arranged for Private Kissinger to be reassigned to Germany to serve as a translator. As German cities and towns fell in the last months of the war, Mr. Kissinger was among the first on the scene, interrogating captured Gestapo officers and reading their mail.

In April 1945, with Allied victory in sight, he and his fellow soldiers led raids on the homes of Gestapo members who were suspected of planning sabotage campaigns against the approaching American forces. For his efforts he received a Bronze Star.

But before returning to the United States he visited Fürth, his hometown, and found that only 37 Jews remained. In a letter discovered by Niall Ferguson, his biographer, Mr. Kissinger wrote at 23 that his encounters with concentration camp survivors had taught him a key lesson about human nature.

“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance,” the letter said. The survivors he met “had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.”

Mr. Kissinger stayed in Germany after the war — fearful, he said later, that the United States would succumb to a democracy’s temptation to withdraw its weary forces too fast and lose the chance to cement victory.

He took a job as a civilian instructor teaching American officers how to uncover former Nazi officers, work that allowed him to crisscross the country. He became alarmed by what he saw as Communist subversion of Germany and warned that the United States needed to monitor German phone conversations and letters. It was his first taste of a Cold War that he would come to shape.

(…)

But the outsider now had direction, and he found another mentor in William Yandell Elliott, who headed the government department. Professor Elliott guided Mr. Kissinger toward political theory, even as he wrote privately that his student’s mind “lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systematic thoroughness.”

Under Professor Elliott, Mr. Kissinger wrote a senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” focusing on Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. At a hefty 383 pages, it gave rise to what became informally known at Harvard as “the Kissinger rule,” which limits the length of a senior thesis.

(…)

Returning to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D., he and Professor Elliott started the Harvard International Seminar, a project that brought young foreign political figures, civil servants, journalists and an occasional poet to the university.

The seminar placed Mr. Kissinger at the center of a network that would produce a number of leaders in world affairs, among them Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who would become president of France; Yasuhiro Nakasone, a future prime minister of Japan; Bulent Ecevit, later the longtime prime minister of Turkey; and Mahathir Mohamad, the future father of modern Malaysia.

With Ford Foundation support, the seminar kept his family eating as Mr. Kissinger worked on his dissertation on the diplomacy of Metternich of Austria and Robert Stewart Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, after the Napoleonic wars. The dissertation, which became his first book, both shaped and reflected his view of the modern world.

The book, “A World Restored,” can be read as a guide to Mr. Kissinger’s later fascination with the balancing of power among states and his suspicion of revolutions. Metternich and Mr. Castlereagh sought stability in Europe and largely achieved it by containing an aggressive revolutionary France through an equilibrium of forces.

Mr. Kissinger saw parallels in the great struggle of his time: containing Stalin’s Soviet Union.

“His was a quest for a realpolitik devoid of moral homilies,” Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard colleague who later split with Mr. Kissinger, said in 2015.

Mr. Kissinger received his Ph.D. in 1954 but received no offer of an assistant professorship. Some on the Harvard faculty complained that he had not poured himself into his work as a teaching fellow. They regarded him as too engaged in worldly issues. In fact, he was simply ahead of his time: The Boston-to-Washington corridor would soon become jammed with academics consulting with the government or lobbyists.

The Harvard rejection embittered Mr. Kissinger. The Nixon tapes later caught him telling the president that the problem with academia was that “you are entirely dependent on the personal recommendation of some egomaniac.”

With the help of McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard colleague, Mr. Kissinger was placed in an elite study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the time a stuffy, all-male enclave in New York. Its mission was to study the impact of nuclear weapons on foreign policy.

Mr. Kissinger arrived in New York with a lot of attitude. He thought that the Eisenhower administration was wrongly reluctant to rethink American strategic policy in light of Moscow’s imminent ability to strike the United States with overwhelming nuclear force.

“Henry managed to convey that no one had thought intelligently about nuclear weapons and foreign policy until he came along to do it himself,” Paul Nitze, perhaps the country’s leading nuclear strategist at the time, later told Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Kissinger seized on a question that Mr. Nitze had begun discussing: whether America’s threat to go to general nuclear war against the Soviet Union was no longer credible given the commonly held view that any such conflict would invite only “mutually assured destruction.” Mr. Nitze asked whether it would be wiser to develop weapons to conduct a limited, regional nuclear war.

Mr. Kissinger decided that “limited nuclear war represents our most effective strategy.”

What was supposed to be a council publication became instead a Kissinger book, and his first best seller: “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.” Its timing, 1957, was perfect: It played into a national fear of growing Soviet power.

And its message fit the moment: If an American president was paralyzed by fear of escalation, Mr. Kissinger argued, the concept of nuclear deterrence would fail. If the United States could not credibly threaten to use small, tactical weapons, he said, it “would amount to giving the Soviet rulers a blank check.” In short, professing a willingness to conduct a small nuclear war was better than risking a big one.

To his critics, this was Mr. Kissinger at his Cold War worst, weaving an argument that a nuclear exchange could be won. Many scholars panned the book, believing its 34-year-old author had overestimated the nation’s ability to keep limited war limited. But to the public it was a breakthrough in nuclear thinking. To this day it is considered a seminal work, one that scholars now refer to in looking for lessons to apply to cyberwarfare.

(…)

David Riesman, the sociologist and co-author of a seminal work on the American character, “The Lonely Crowd,” suggested that dinner with Mr. Kissinger was a chore. “He would not spend time chatting at the table,” Mr. Riesman said. “He presided.”

Leslie H. Gelb, then a doctoral student and later a Pentagon official and columnist for The Times, called him “devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”

(…)

At Harvard, he began organizing meetings on the emerging crisis of the day, Vietnam. He explored the link between military actions on the ground and the chances of success through diplomacy, seemingly convinced, even then, that the war could be ended only through negotiations.

After a long trip to Saigon and the front lines, he wrote that the American task was to “build a nation in a divided society in the middle of a civil war,” defining a problem that would haunt Washington not only in Southeast Asia but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(…)

With Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House engaged in peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Mr. Kissinger was said to have used his contacts on his own trips to Paris to funnel inside information back to Nixon. “Henry was the only person outside the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiation with,” Richard C. Holbrooke, who went on to key positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations, told Mr. Isaacson for his Kissinger biography. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the United States negotiating team.”

Nixon himself referred in his memoirs to his “highly unusual channel” of information. To many who have since accepted that account, the back-channel tactic was evidence of Mr. Kissinger’s drive to obtain power if Nixon was elected. While there is no evidence that he supplied classified information to the Nixon campaign, there have long been allegations that Nixon used precisely that to give back-channel assurances to the South Vietnamese that they would get a better deal from him than from Johnson, and that they should agree to nothing until after the election.

Mr. Ferguson and other historians have rebutted that claim, though one of Nixon’s biographers found notes from H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s closest aides, in which the presidential candidate ordered his staff to “monkey wrench” peace talks.

Whatever the truth, Mr. Kissinger was on Nixon’s radar. And after the election, a new president who had often expressed his disdain for Jews and Harvard academics chose, as his national security adviser, a man who was both.

Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to run national security affairs covertly from the White House, cutting out the State Department and Nixon’s secretary of state, William P. Rogers. Nixon had found his man — a “prized possession,” he later called Mr. Kissinger.

While the post of national security adviser had grown in importance since Harry S. Truman established the role, Mr. Kissinger took it to new heights. He recruited bright young academics to his staff, which he nearly doubled. He effectively sidelined Mr. Rogers and battled the pugnacious defense secretary, Melvin R. Laird, moving more decision-making into the White House.

(…)

Staff turnover was high, but many of those who stayed came to admire him for his intellect and his growing list of achievements. Still, they were stunned by his secretiveness. “He was able to give a conspiratorial air to even the most minor of things,” Mr. Eagleburger, who admired him, said before his death in 2011.

Poking fun at himself in a way that some saw as disingenuous, he often told visiting diplomats that “I have not faced such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”

Nixon had built much of his campaign around the promise to end the war on honorable terms. It was Mr. Kissinger’s task to turn that promise into a reality, and he made clear in a Foreign Affairs article, published as Nixon was preparing to take office, that the United States would not win the war “within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”

In the 2018 interview, he said the United States had misunderstood the struggle from the start as “an extension of the Cold War in Europe.”

“I made the same mistake,” he said. “The Cold War was really about saving democratic countries from invasion.” Vietnam was different, a civil war. “What we did not understand at the beginning of the war in Vietnam,” he went on, “is how hard it is to end these civil wars, and how hard it is to get a conclusive agreement in which everyone shares the objective.”

(…)

Mr. Kissinger’s pursuit of two goals that were seen as at odds with each other — winding down the war and maintaining American prestige — led him down roads that made him a hypocrite to some and a war criminal to others. He had come to office hoping for a fast breakthrough: “Give us six months,” he told a Quaker group, “and if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence.”

But six months later, there were already signs that the strategy for ending the war would both expand and lengthen it. He was convinced that the North Vietnamese would enter serious negotiations only under military pressure. So while he restarted secret peace talks in Paris, he and Nixon escalated and widened the war.

“I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Mr. Kissinger told his staff.

Mr. Kissinger called it “war for peace.” Yet the result was carnage. Mr. Kissinger had an opportunity to end the war in peace talks early in Nixon’s presidency on terms as good as those he ultimately settled for later. Yet he turned it down, and thousands of Americans died because he was convinced he could do better.

As Mr. Kissinger sat with his big yellow legal pads in his White House office, scribbling notes that have now been largely declassified, he designed a three-part plan. It consisted of a cease-fire that would also embrace Laos and Cambodia, which had been sucked into the fighting; simultaneous American and North Vietnamese withdrawals from South Vietnam; and a peace treaty that returned all prisoners of war.

His notes and taped conversations with Nixon are riddled with self-assured declarations that the next escalation of bombing, and a secret incursion into Cambodia, would break the North Vietnamese and force them into real negotiations. But he was also reacting, he later wrote, to a Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensive early in Nixon’s presidency that had killed almost 2,000 Americans and “humiliated the new president.”

Mr. Kissinger later constructed a narrative emphasizing the wisdom of the strategy, but the notes and phone conversations suggest that he had routinely overestimated his negotiating skills and underestimated his opponents’ capacity to wait the Americans out.

It was the bombing campaign in Cambodia — code-named “Operation Menu,” with phases named “Breakfast,” “Lunch” and “Dinner” — that outraged Mr. Kissinger’s critics and fueled books, documentaries and symposiums exploring whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into a country that was not party to the war. Mr. Kissinger’s rationale was that the North had created supply lines through Cambodia to fuel the war in the South.

(…)

It took until January 1973 for Mr. Kissinger to reach a deal, assuring the South Vietnamese that the United States would return if the North violated the accord and invaded. Privately, Mr. Kissinger was all but certain that the South could not hold up under the pressure. He told John D. Erlichman, a top White House aide, that “if they are lucky, they can hold out for a year and a half.”

That proved prescient: Saigon fell in April 1975, with the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and more than three million North and South Vietnamese had died, and eight million tons of bombs had been dropped by the United States. But to Mr. Kissinger, getting it over with was the key to moving on to bigger, and more successful, ventures.

When Mr. Kissinger was writing campaign speeches for Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, he included a passage in which he envisioned “a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union.” The strategy, he wrote, would allow the United States to “improve our relations with each as we test the will for peace of both.”

He got a chance to test that thesis the next year. Chinese and Soviet forces had clashed in a border dispute, and in a meeting with Mr. Kissinger, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, spoke candidly of the importance of “containing” the Chinese. Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to make an overture, secretly, to Beijing.

It was a remarkable shift for Nixon. A staunch anti-Communist, he had long had close ties to the so-called China lobby, which opposed the Communist government led by Mao Zedong in Beijing. He also believed that North Vietnam was acting largely as a Chinese satellite in its war against South Vietnam and its American allies.

Nixon and Mr. Kissinger secretly approached Pakistan’s leader, Yahya Khan, to act as a go-between. In December 1970, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington delivered a message to Mr. Kissinger that had been carried from Islamabad by courier. It was from the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai: A special envoy from President Nixon would be welcome in Beijing.

(…)

Over the next two months, messages were exchanged concerning a possible presidential visit. Then, on June 2, 1971, Mr. Kissinger received one more communication through the Pakistani connection, this one inviting him to Beijing to prepare for a Nixon visit. Mr. Kissinger pulled Nixon aside from a White House dinner to declare: “This is the most important communication that has come to an American president since the end of World War II.”

(…)

In Beijing he made a presentation to Mr. Zhou, ending with the observation that as Americans “we find ourselves here in what to us is a land of mystery,” he recalled in a 2014 interview for the Harvard Secretaries of State project. Mr. Zhou interrupted. “There are 900 million of us,” he said, “and it’s not mysterious to us.”

It took three days to work out the details, and after Mr. Kissinger cabled the code word “eureka” to Nixon, the president, without any advance warning, appeared on television to announce what Mr. Kissinger had arranged. His enemies — the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, the Democrats, his liberal critics — were staggered. On Feb. 21, 1972, he became the first American president to visit mainland China.

The Chinese were a little stunned, too. Mao sidelined Mr. Zhou within a month. After that, no Chinese ever mentioned Zhou Enlai again, Mr. Kissinger told the Harvard project. He speculated that Mao had feared that his No. 2 “was getting personally too friendly with me.”

(…)

“That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he wrote in “On China,” referring to domestic strife in both countries and a common interest in resisting Soviet advances. But he also insisted that he had not been seeking to isolate Russia as much as to conduct a grand experiment in balance-of-power politics. “Our view,” he wrote, “was that the existence of the triangular relations was in itself a form of pressure on each of them.”

Historians still debate whether that worked. But there is no debating that it made Mr. Kissinger an international celebrity. It also proved vital for reasons that never factored into Mr. Kissinger’s calculus five decades ago — that China would rise as the only true economic, technological and military competitor to the United States.

Nixon’s announcement that he would go to China startled Moscow. Days later, Mr. Dobrynin called on Mr. Kissinger and invited Nixon to meet the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in the Kremlin. The date was set for May 1972, just three months after the China trip. “To have two Communist powers competing for good relations with us could only benefit the cause of peace,” Mr. Kissinger noted later. “It was the essence of triangular strategy.”

To prepare for the summit, he flew to Moscow, again in secret. Nixon had agreed to let him go on the condition that Mr. Kissinger spend most of his time insisting that the Soviets restrain their North Vietnamese allies, who were mounting an offensive.

By then, however, Mr. Kissinger had changed his mind about how much control the Soviets had over the North Vietnamese, writing to his deputy, Alexander M. Haig, “I do not believe that Moscow is in direct collusion with Hanoi.”

Instead, he sought to reinvigorate negotiations, which had been stumbling along since late 1969, with the aim of limiting the number of ground-based and submarine-launched nuclear missiles that the two countries were pointing at each other and curbing the development of antiballistic missile systems. Mr. Kissinger achieved a breakthrough, writing to Nixon, “You will be able to sign the most important arms control agreement ever concluded.”

That may have been overstatement, but Mr. Brezhnev and Nixon signed what became the SALT I treaty in May 1972. It opened decades of arms-control agreements — SALT, START, New START — that greatly reduced the number of nuclear weapons in the world. The era known as détente had begun. It unraveled only late in Mr. Kissinger’s life. While Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden renewed New START in 2021, once the war in Ukraine started the Russian leader suspended compliance with many parts of the treaty.

To Mr. Kissinger, there were superpowers and there was everything else, and it was the everything else that got him into trouble.

He never stopped facing questions about the overthrow and death of Mr. Allende in Chile in September 1973 and the rise of Augusto Pinochet, the general who had seized power.

Over the next three decades, as General Pinochet came to be accused — first in Europe, then in Chile — of abductions, murder and human rights violations, Mr. Kissinger was repeatedly linked to clandestine activities that had undermined Mr. Allende, a Marxist, and his democratically elected government. The revelations emerged in declassified documents, lawsuit depositions and journalistic indictments, like Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), which was made into a documentary film.

(…)

Nixon, too, was alarmed, according to a White House tape that Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archive, cited in his book “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” It quotes Nixon as ordering the U.S. ambassador in Santiago “to do anything short of a Dominican-type action” to keep Mr. Allende from winning the election. The reference was to the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Mr. Kissinger insisted, in a memoir and in testimony to Congress, that the United States “had nothing to do” with the military coup that overthrew Mr. Allende. However according to phone records that were declassified in 2004, Mr. Kissinger bragged that “we helped them” by creating the conditions for the coup.

That help included backing a plot to kidnap the commander in chief of Chile’s army, Gen. René Schneider, who had refused C.I.A. entreaties to mount a coup. The general was killed in the attempt. His car was ambushed, and he was fatally shot at point-blank range.

(…)

In 2001, General Schneider’s two sons filed a civil suit in the United States accusing Mr. Kissinger of helping to orchestrate covert activities in Chile that led to their father’s death. A U.S. federal court, without ruling on Mr. Kissinger’s culpability, dismissed the case, saying that foreign policy was up to the government, not the courts.

Mr. Kissinger, in his defense, said his actions had to be viewed within the context of the Cold War. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he said, adding half-jokingly: “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Chile was hardly the only place Mr. Kissinger was accused of treating as a minor chess piece in his grand strategies. He and President Ford approved Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in December 1975, leading to a disastrous 24-year occupation by a U.S.-backed military.

Declassified documents released in 2001 by the National Security Archive indicate that Ford and Mr. Kissinger knew of the invasion plans months in advance and were aware that the use of American arms would violate U.S. law.

“I know what the law is,” Mr. Kissinger was quoted as telling a staff meeting when he got back to Washington. He then asked how it could be in “U.S. national interest” for Americans to “kick the Indonesians in the teeth?”

The columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times, “That was Kissingerian realism: the view that the United States should overlook brutalities by friendly authoritarian regimes because they provided ‘stability.’”

It was a familiar complaint. In 1971, the slaughter in East Pakistan that Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had ignored in deference to Pakistan expanded into a war between Pakistan and India, a nation loathed by both China and the Nixon White House.

“At this point, the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger only got worse,” Dexter Filkins, of The New Yorker, wrote in discussing Professor Bass’s account in The New York Times Book Review in 2013. “They dispatched ships from the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, possibly for an attack — a maneuver that could have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two Communist countries proved more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, when India crushed the Pakistani Army and East Pakistan declared independence,” becoming the new nation of Bangladesh.

(…)

Still more declassified documents revealed how Mr. Kissinger had used his historic 1971 meeting with Mr. Zhou in China to lay out a radical shift in American policy toward Taiwan. Under the plan, the United States would have essentially abandoned its support for the anticommunist Nationalists in Taiwan in exchange for China’s help in ending the war in Vietnam. The account contradicted one he had included in his published memoirs.

The emerging material also revealed the price of an American-interests-first realism. In tapes released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2010, Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that antisemitism in the Nixon White House may have partly been to blame.

“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” David Harris, the committee’s executive director, said.

(…)

Mr. Kissinger was aware of his contentious place in American history, and he may have had his own standing in mind when, in 2006, he wrote about Dean Acheson, secretary of state under Truman, in The Times Book Review, calling him “perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history.”

“History has treated Acheson more kindly,” Mr. Kissinger wrote. “Accolades for him have become bipartisan.”

Thirty-five years after his death, he said, Acheson had “achieved iconic status.”

(…)

One student asked him about his legacy. “You know, when I was young, I used to think of people of my age as a different species,” he said to laughter. “And I thought my grandparents had been put into the world at the age at which I experienced them.”

“Now that I’ve reached beyond their age,” he added, “I’m not worried about my legacy. And I don’t give really any thought to it, because things are so changeable. You can only do the best you’re able to do, and that’s more what I judge myself by — whether I’ve lived up to my values, whatever their quality, and to my opportunities.””

[tbookblurbs]

A Master of Djinn - P. Djèlí Clark

4.5/5 - classic murder mystery with magic; LOVED steampunk Cairo; Hadia <33 my beloved <33

SLIGHT spoilers below!

Fantabulous first full-length novel from Clark! I really enjoyed the characters and getting to walk around this alternate history Cairo with the characters.

Steampunk/magic earth in 1912 was a lot of fun, and I love the amount of foreign policy thrown in. Like, yes, Jim Crow America would react violently badly to a new potentially powerful minority. That's just a background detail, but Clark nails every one like it on the head. I also loved the way that djinn and magic were woven into everyday life. It just felt so real, which is really the ultimate standard for magical realism as far as I'm concerned.

The characters themselves were also super endearing. Fatma and her love of impeccable suits and a cane with a secret knife in it. Siti and her allure and uncanny (literally inhuman) sense of timing. Zagros and his love of a good book ordering system! Fatma and Siti's situationship!

But the character whom I loved the most was easily Hadia. A new agent, thrust in with a partner whose respect she desperately wants on top of battling the still ingrained misogyny in Cairene culture - there was simply no scenario in which I wouldn't love her. I also love how involved she was in the feminist politics outside of the story and how she kept trying to coordinate her hijab to match Fatma's suits!

Anyway, this was a superb first outing and if y'all ever liked steampunk (I'm thinking specifically The Girl in the Iron Corset) then you will love this novel!

[piracytheorist]

Macabre Theme and Variations (2/15)

Fandom: Spy x Family Word count: 2k for this chapter | 4.4k so far | 64k in total Rating: T Warnings: Non-permanent character deaths, graphic violence

Summary: Twilight wakes up. He works on his mission. He dies. He comes back and does it all over again. Each time a little different. (Inspired by the film Happy Death Day)

AO3 Read from the beginning: Tumblr | AO3

~

Chapter 2: Da Capo

da capo = from the beginning

~

Borf!

Twilight's eyes snap open, unmovingly staring at the ceiling for two seconds.

He takes a few deep breaths.

A nightmare, Twilight. Not your first, not your last.

He rubs his face as he sits up, then looks at the clock. Ten past five in the morning, and his alarm didn't ring.

He furrows his brows at it, standing up at Bond's insistent tapping on his door.

Friday, the day of Anya's school play. It's today, isn't it?

He did set up the alarm, didn't he? Was he that tired yesterday?

He opens the door and is immediately greeted by the sight of a very sleepy Yor colliding with the wall next to the bathroom door. She shakes her head, eyes still closed, then walks successfully into the bathroom.

Loid is left to stare at the closed door.

Didn't that just happen...?

He makes a sound that's one part sigh and one part yawn, rubbing the limited sleep from his eyes. That dream was unusually, uncomfortably realistic. Most of his nightmares consist of vague experiences and situations, ones that he immediately dismisses as unreal once he wakes up.

It's a little harder doing that with his recent dream.

He works out, leaving out some exercises he has no time for. He showers, starts making breakfast, turns on the radio.

"The city of Bonnburg is increasing its security exponentially as it prepares for Mr. Windsor's expected visit on Tuesday. The foreign minister will be meeting with Minister Brantz to discuss a new proposal regarding Westalis' foreign affairs policy."

His hands freeze as he looks up. Wasn't that the same exact announcement on the morning news in his dream?

He looks at the clock. Just a few seconds to 06:48.

Anya wakes up first, running to the bathroom with almost tangible excitement. She comes out with a "Good morning, Papa!" and hugs Bond.

Loid stares at her over his shoulder, hands still frozen.

Anya smells the air. "Papa, is there a fire?"

He startles, turning forward to look at the frying pan. Half of the omelette is starting to burn – luckily, it's salvageable.

Yor comes out. "Today is the day!" she says, and he hears the smile in her voice.

He keeps his back at them, pretending to take his time finishing off their breakfast as he gathers himself.

Dreams... one usually forgets most of their details after they wake up, and the longer one stays awake, the more they forget about it.

Somehow, the words he's hearing right now don't feel like they came from a dream. It's like he's experienced that before, just a day ago.

He gives Anya and Yor a subtle glance as he brings them their plates. They're talking about the school play, Yor mirroring Anya's passion over it.

He sits down and starts eating silently. Sure, that dream felt abnormally realistic, but there was a part of it that he can safely dismiss as mere wishful thinking: Donovan Desmond attending the performance.

There is no way he'd consider that an important event to attend.

There's no other explanation. His subconscious probably constructed a possible scenario of how the day would go; Anya's enthusiasm is no surprise, she's been like that for more than a week now, same with Yor for the past two days.

As for everything else... that's probably him being too confused by the realism of the dream that once something happens now he incorrectly remembers it as part of the dream.

He sighs and finishes his meal. He's probably just shaken by it. As many nightmares as he's had over his years, a very selective few of them ended with him dying. If it's death he sees, it's usually of other people.

It's nothing to obsess about. He's got work to do today.

Anya is nearly jumping up and down in front of the entrance, waiting for Loid and Yor to get ready so they can take her to the bus stop. She almost skips up the steps to the bus.

"Be careful not to injure yourself today at school," Loid tells her. Then, after a cautious pause he adds, "It is your big day after all."

"Yup! See you later, Papa, Mama!"

Suddenly, his eyes jump to the front of the bus. One, two, three, four; the engine finally starts up at the fifth attempt, and the bus is off.

Wait. How could he predict that the engine wouldn't start immediately?

"Well, have a good day at work!" Yor says, turning around.

"Thank you, Yor. You too," his reply comes automatically, his voice almost robotic.

He starts walking only out of instinct to not stand out. He eventually shakes his head, picking up the pace.

Just coincidences, Twilight. Move on.

Twenty-five minutes past noon he leaves for a "home visit", but instead goes to his meeting with Franky.

Who gives him the exact same intel that Twilight is sure he already knows before he opens the file.

He rubs his fingers over his eyes. Is this a dream too? Is he still sleeping and the scenario simply repeating?

"Everything alright?" Franky asks him.

Twilight looks at him, hand over his mouth now. "Didn't we meet yesterday?"

"Yesterday? No. It was three days ago, and you were in disguise."

He looks back at the file. Its weight, texture and even smell feel familiar, although he's not supposed to have seen this particular envelope with those particular papers in it before.

"You alright, man?"

He shakes his head again. "Yeah. Just a little tired."

"They really work you to the bone, don't they?"

"They're not being demanding out of spite. Peace demands it."

"You know, you might do a better job protecting the peace if you were a little better rested."

"Duly noted," he says and turns around, back to the hospital.

The same names in his appointments today, too.

He takes a deep breath. Relax, Twilight. You already knew what people you would be seeing today, which means your subconscious knew, too.

He keeps that internal voice up when Anya insists on going to the theater with her prince costume on.

"No," Loid tells her. "You might get it dirty or ripped."

Everyone will stare at you. It's fine if it's on stage, but outside of it you'll just attract unwanted attention.

Anya squints at him, nods, puts the costume back in the bag.

He looks up in frustration. Has his caution started turning into paranoia? Franky is definitely right about how long Twilight works and how little he sleeps, but it's nothing new, nor something that easy to change with the way things are currently.

They reach the theater. Yor offers to go backstage with Anya to help her dress, asks him to go get their seats.

The parents of Anya's classmates are all there – apart from that one – and Loid engages in a-little-too-predictable small talk with them.

He gets to his seat, eyes flying towards the box seats he remembers the Desmond pair sitting before. It's empty, though it's not the only one. They're still the most expensive seats, even for a school play of first graders.

Yor arrives, beaming widely. "I hope she does well!" she tells him.

"Me too," comes the automatic response. He looks back at the stage. Part of his job was to study the play beforehand so nothing from it would come as a surprise, either in the dream or now. But his dream self was right – he should study the children's performances so he'd have at least something of a conversation starter with their parents.

A baby starts wailing a few rows behind them, and Loid has to consciously think to relax his fists.

Coincidence, coincidence. You're tired and confusing things.

The bell rings. The lights go off. The curtain opens.

Twilight swallows hard at the sight of the door to those box seats opening.

Donovan Desmond and his wife. And his three bodyguards. The same three from before.

He puts his fist against his mouth, faking focus on the play, while he struggles to calm himself down.

If this is still a dream, how are so many things making sense? He checks his watch, looks away then checks it again; same time, a sign of wakefulness.

If he were honest, Donovan attending is the thing that makes the least sense. It almost sounds like hopeful thinking on Twilight's side.

Hope. He fights back a snort.

A few scenes into the play, the sudden silence comes in again. Damian has turned to his right side for the first time and noticed his parents are actually there. The boy blushes, Anya looks around, looks at Loid.

You'll help him?

She steps in front of Damian. "Oh, Sec—Princess, tell me again about that curse!"

"Did she just help him?" comes Yor’s smiling whisper.

He throws a quick glance at Donovan; there's that obvious tension.

The play ends, the audience cheers for Damian and even more for Anya.

Twilight's confusion doesn't matter; he still has the role of the proud father to play, so he smiles widely, while Yor nearly bursts from pride.

And Desmond's eyes are narrow, his clapping slow and dull.

Backstage, children laugh and scream, some cry. A few parents hug their kids and congratulate them.

Anya runs to them with her ever-waving prince's red cape behind her. Yor hugs her, Anya nearly blanches from the force of the hug, and Loid steps in to release her.

"That was a great performance, Anya," he says, patting her head... again.

Now you'll say you're tired and want to go home?

Anya looks at him with wide eyes, though her smile hasn't faded. "Can I stay in my costume?"

Oh. That's new. It'll be faster if we let her stay like this for now, I still have to catch Desmond before he leaves...

Anya plops her head on Yor's shoulder. "Mama, I'm tired. Can we go?"

"Don't you want to talk to your friends?" Yor asks.

Anya shakes her head, bumping her on the shoulder. "I'll talk with them tomorrow."

“Tomorrow is Saturday.”

Anya smiles. “Monday, then.”

Loid looks at the girl, more confused than relieved this time. Has he gotten so used to her unpredictability, that he's started to predict it? That would be such an oxymoron.

The Desmonds stand in the same quiet corner of the foyer, again, only father and son. And bodyguards.

Loid gives a quick look around, suddenly feeling his breath pick up. Would it be possible, that his dream would predict his death by suicide bomber?

The man from his dream is nowhere to be seen. Twilight didn’t get a good look at him, but his build, high-collared shirt and blue cravat would give him off immediately.

He turns his attention back to Desmond, who gives him that fake, discomforting smile and nods in greeting.

Loid's smile feels a little more forced this time. In his decade of working as a spy, he's dedicated multiple hours every single day to working through possible scenarios for his missions, so that he'd never be surprised by anything. His success relies on being able to predict his target's reactions.

Yet, this level of predictability unsettles him.

With the two Desmonds looking at them, he has no other choice but to walk towards them with his wife and daughter.

"Mr. Desmond. Congratulations on your son's performance."

"Likewise." The same controlled – and controlling – low volume in the noisy foyer.

Right now, wasn't it?

Then, a small change. Anya gasps and her hand grasps on his pant leg. Her eyes are wide, staring at nothing.

Loid's hand instinctively goes to cover her head as the shiver runs down his spine.

He looks up, and there he is. The slim arms and legs and the big shirt and jacket that cover up what's a set of packed bombs on his torso.

Noticing Loid's look, the man sprints at them. Desmond's men raise their guns, one of them pulling Donovan back.

The man lets go of the detonator in his hand.

Flash. Burn. Crack—

BANG!

~

A/N: For me, checking the time is a telltale sign of dreaming vs reality. In my dreams, clocks and watches show different times whenever I look at one, and digital clocks and watches sometimes show irrational times, like 32:65 or something. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but I decided to make it so for Twilight so he’d have something to ground him to reality.

[mariacallous]

Foreign policy is likely to feature prominently at the Republican presidential primary debates. At the debate in August, a question on whether the candidates would support continued U.S. assistance to Ukraine produced a firestorm. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had previously suggested that Russia’s war in Ukraine was not a “vital” national interest, appeared skeptical, calling on Europe to do more instead. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was more direct in opposing such aid, calling it “disastrous” for the United States to be “protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border.” Former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, on the other hand, expressed strong support for assisting Ukraine, effectively standing behind President Joe Biden’s efforts to counter Russian aggression while imploring the United States to do even more.

On the other side of the aisle, some Democrats have been wary of Biden’s policy on Ukraine, as evidenced by a letter (that was later retracted) sent to the president by progressive Democrats, calling for a diplomatic end to the conflict and potential sanctions relief for Russia.

In today’s polarized political atmosphere, such cross-cutting views may appear confounding. On most domestic policy issues, whether political leaders have an R or a D next to their name is often a pretty good guide to their take on any particular issue. But when it comes to foreign policy, the normal rules of politics do not apply. Instead, of much greater relevance is where a political leader falls on the foreign-policy ideology spectrum.

The schools of thought that make up this spectrum, reflecting fundamentally different views about the U.S. role in the world, are highly influential but not very well understood.

In seeking to differentiate between foreign-policy positions, the media often resorts to cliches, such as “hawks versus doves,” or buzzwords, such as “isolationist” and “neoconservative.” However, these terms tend to be oversimplified or exaggerated and convey little useful information. International relations theories are not all that helpful either. “Realism” is routinely conflated with an academic concept that predicts how nations can be expected to behave, rather than how they should. And other theories, such as “idealism” and “constructivism,” offer limited utility in understanding real-world decision-making.

Yet there are critical differences in how policymakers view the world and are seeking to influence the direction of U.S. foreign policy. There is a clear dichotomy, for instance, between those who believe that U.S. influence is mostly positive and that the United States should play an active role in global affairs and those who believe that U.S. hubris more often leads to bad outcomes and want to scale back the country’s overseas commitments.

There is a significant divide between those who believe that the United States should prioritize efforts to advance democratic values and norms and those who believe in defending more narrow strategic interests. And there are disparate views on whether the United States should stand firm against adversaries, such as Russia and China, or should seek to find common ground.

I have delineated six distinct foreign-policy camps that represent the dominant strains of thinking on the U.S. role in the world. These camps can be placed along a spectrum of international engagement. Four of them fall on the more assertive side of this spectrum, constituting “internationalists,” who believe that the United States should exercise its influence and be actively engaged in global affairs. And two of the camps are “non-internationalists,” who believe that the United States should scale back its global commitments and adopt a less forward-leaning foreign policy.

1. Unilateral Internationalists

Defining worldview: Unilateral internationalists believe U.S. primacy and freedom of action are paramount and prioritize unilateral U.S. action, unconstrained by alliances or international agreements, to advance strategic interests. While President George W. Bush came close, especially during his first term, no U.S. president has directly embraced this school.

Key attributes:

View China and Russia as the greatest challenges to U.S. primacy in the international system and seek to exert maximum pressure to counter U.S. adversaries and project American power

Prioritize U.S. national interests, even if at the expense of allies, and favor strategic interests over democratic values or a “rules-based order”—but support U.S. alliances while skeptical of allies’ willingness to act

Are distrustful of the United Nations and international agreements and favor U.S. withdrawal from international institutions where necessary to avoid restraints on U.S. power and sovereignty

Support using military force to advance U.S. interests

Prominent voices: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton

Recent U.S. presidents: None

Republican candidates: None

s the second most assertive of six camps.

2. Democratic Internationalists

Defining worldview: Democratic internationalists believe that defending democracy is essential to maintaining U.S. and global security and prioritize working with like-minded allies to advance shared values and a rules-based democratic order. This school has been predominant among elected U.S. leaders—across both political parties—since President Harry Truman declared it was the policy of the United States to help “free and independent nations to maintain their freedom.”

Key attributes:

View strategic competition between democracy and autocracy as the major fault line in the international system and support proactive measures to defend against revisionist autocracies, namely China and Russia

Are strong proponents of democratic alliances and solidarity and are eager to maintain the United States’ role as the “leader of the free world”

Support robust efforts to advance democratic values and human rights and to hold autocratic regimes to account for war crimes and violent oppression

Are willing to consider use of force if necessary to defend democracy and the rules-based order

Prominent voices: Madeleine Albright, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Chris Coons, G. John Ikenberry, Hal Brands

Recent U.S. presidents: Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Joe Biden

Republican candidates: Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence

ost assertive of six camps.

3. Realist Internationalists

Defining worldview: Realist internationalists believe that U.S. power should be utilized to defend more narrow strategic interests and prioritize pragmatic engagement with all nations to help preserve global and regional stability. Former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger were quintessential practitioners of this school, which was also embraced by the presidents they served.

Key attributes:

View great-power rivalry as inevitable in the global system and support U.S. alliances and active efforts to deter rival powers and maintain global order

Are willing to engage adversaries and work with all nations, regardless of regime type, to advance strategic objectives

Are prepared to make mutual accommodations with rivals, or seek to divide them, to achieve a stable balance of power

Are inclined to “accept the world as it is” and are wary of U.S. intervention and democracy promotion efforts

Support a strong U.S. defense posture and are willing to use force when required to defend vital national interests

Prominent voices: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Robert Gates, Richard Haass, Stephen Krasner, Charles Kupchan

Recent U.S. presidents: Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush

Republican candidates: Ron DeSantis

4. Multilateral Internationalists

Defining worldview: Multilateral internationalists believe that peaceful coexistence with other nations should be a key objective and prioritize working through the U.N. and other multilateral institutions to solve global challenges and uphold international norms. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy was steeped in this school, now represented by former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is currently serving as the United States’ chief climate negotiator.

Key attributes:

Are wary of great-power rivalry and strategic competition and are eager to “extend a hand” and find areas of common ground with adversaries

Support active U.S. engagement to advance global norms, good governance, and human rights

Seek to cooperate with all nations to address transnational challenges, with a particular priority on climate change

Prefer to engage through inclusive institutions but support working with U.S. alliances to foster a rules-based order

Are disinclined to use military force and will consider it only when authorized by the U.N. Security Council

Prominent voices: John Kerry, Bruce Jones

Recent U.S. presidents: Barack Obama

Republican candidates: None

Non-Internationalists

1. Retractors

Defining worldview: Retractors believe that the world is taking advantage of the United States and support a more transactional foreign policy that seeks to retract the United States from global commitments and maximize pecuniary benefits. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy epitomizes this school. But its adherents date back to Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan in the late 1990s and the America First movement of the 1930s that sought to keep the United States out of World War II.

Key attributes:

Are deeply cynical about values and norms and seek and are prone to conspiracy theories and suspect the role of the “deep state” in manipulating U.S. policy

Are critical of alliances and disdainful of U.S. allies, particularly in Europe, and believe efforts to cooperate through international institutions are naive and self-defeating

Seek to “make deals” with autocratic regimes and are dismissive of democratic values and international norms

Emphasize economic protectionism and closed borders to prevent others from “ripping America off”

Believe the United States is militarily overcommitted but support occasional limited military actions to “act tough” and demonstrate U.S. prowess

Prominent voices: Michael Anton

Recent U.S. presidents: Donald Trump

Republican candidates: Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy

2. Restrainers

Defining worldview: Restrainers believe that the United States is overstretched and overcommitted and support a more restrained foreign policy that significantly reduces the country’s global footprint. While still largely on the margins, this school has gained some prominence in recent years, as reflected by the emergence of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and its adherents.

Key attributes: 

Are distrustful of U.S. power and influence in the international system and believe that the United States has no standing to promote democratic values or a rules-based order, given its own flawed democracy, hypocrisy, and imperialism

Believe the United States has picked unnecessary fights with adversaries and that its overseas military posture, alliances, and sanctions policies are often overly provocative

Are wary of “inflating” threats posed by China and Russia and favor diplomatic efforts to cooperate with adversaries and reach a mutual accommodation and view a nationalistic foreign policy as arrogant and distasteful

Seek to reduce the U.S. military presence overseas and to scale back commitments to NATO and other alliances and vigorously oppose the use of force

Prominent voices: Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Bacevich, Stephen M. Walt, Stephen Wertheim

Recent U.S. presidents: None

Republican candidates: None

Several key points follow from this analysis. First, admittedly, the edges of these camps are fuzzy, and policymakers may often find themselves straddling one or more of these camps, especially on specific issues. Nevertheless, these six schools are sufficiently discrete and represent the primary worldviews that are influencing the contemporary debate on how the United States should conduct its foreign policy.

Second, many of these schools tend to cross partisan lines. Democratic internationalism, for example, has been enthusiastically embraced by political leaders on both sides of the aisle and has strong bipartisan constituencies, as reflected in pro-democracy institutions such as the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute. Realism has also had a long tradition in U.S. foreign policy, resonating with national security practitioners across both parties. Similarly, the restraint school draws support among both progressives on the left and libertarians looking for Washington to scale back its global commitments. On the other hand, unilateral internationalism has found a home mainly among conservatives, while multilateral internationalism draws support mostly from liberals. In recent years, retraction has become the policy of choice among pro-Trump Republicans.

Third, determining where recent U.S. presidents fall on this spectrum is not axiomatic. While they may be inclined toward a particular camp as they enter office, most presidents are not purists, and as they govern, many find themselves running up against practical and political realities that make it difficult to maintain a consistent and predictable foreign-policy governing philosophy.

Barack Obama, for example, seemed drawn toward realist internationalism, pursuing a “reset” in relations with Russia and later declining to commit U.S. force to hold Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accountable for his use of chemical weapons. But given the priority Obama placed on engaging adversaries such as Cuba and Iran and working through the United Nations, the main thrust of his foreign policy appeared more consistent with multilateral internationalism.

George W. Bush also straddled various camps. In launching the global war on terrorism, Bush seemed determined to assert U.S. primacy and appeared to be leaning toward unilateral internationalism. But with his emphasis on democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan, his signature Freedom Agenda, and his call for “ending tyranny in our world” in his second inaugural address, Bush’s overall worldview appeared to be more grounded in democratic internationalism.

Where Biden falls is still up for debate. Currently, the Biden national security team is split between realists, who pressed for Biden to withdraw from Afghanistan and reengage with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Sultan, and democratic internationalists, who championed the president’s initiative to organize a Summit for Democracy. However, given Biden’s steadfast commitment to work with NATO to defend a democratic Ukraine and his conviction that the world is facing a “global struggle between democracy and autocracy,” the broad arc of the Biden administration’s foreign policy so far seems to be more consistent with democratic internationalism—though a more definitive judgment will have to wait until his presidency concludes.

So where does this leave the current slate of Republican candidates? Pence and Haley, as well as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, all of whom have called for standing up against Russian aggression and have denounced China’s human rights violations, are squarely in the democratic internationalist camp. Donald Trump, of course, has his own lane. DeSantis and Ramaswamy, on the other hand, appear caught between realism and Trumpian retraction, as they battle for support among the Republican rank and file who are skeptical of U.S. global engagement. DeSantis favors a pivot away from Ukraine and toward China—a very realist way to think about trade-offs. Ramaswamy, who has called for a strategy to split Russia and China, also sounds like a realist at times, but his stance on extricating the United States from any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, potentially ceding Taiwan to China, and putting the “interests of America first” seems to suggest he is veering toward retraction.

While voters may not consider foreign policy to be central to their vote for the next president, how U.S. leaders choose to engage in the world is critical to the security and prosperity of the American people. By gaining a clearer understanding of the most influential foreign-policy schools of thought, voters—and indeed the candidates themselves—will be in a better position to make informed choices.

[rollercoasterwords]

hi!! i've been thinking of applying for an international studies degree at uni, so i was just wondering what you thought of your course?

hmmmm well overall i enjoyed international studies but. i do not want 2 ever study it in a formal academic setting ever again. a lot of that is just down to personal preferences tho (this got really long lmao i'm so sorry)

i majored in IS at a usamerican university so i can't really speak to what expectations u should have for an IS program outside the states (or even necessarily what to expect other than like. what i got at my specific college lol) but!! while i really enjoyed a lot of the subject matter in learning about international relations, getting to study a lot of history and foreign policy, etc, a lot of the main frameworks used in IS are frameworks that i.....really do not like. right now in a lot of the world liberalism seems to dominate perspectives on international relations, and historically realism has been like....the foundational framework in the field. there are many more scholars who use feminist or marxist or post-structuralist etc etc frameworks that i jive with more, but a lot of IS even at some of the higher academic level lacks any critical anaylsis of colonialism or capitalism and the way they underly many of the assumptions in the field about how states will/should interact with each other. and my experience of IS at a usamerican college was (predictably) very western-centric and specifically US-centric.

like -- an example of what i'm talking about; you might get scholars researching "terrorism" without any critical analysis of where "terrorism" comes from as a label, what context it was created in, how it's been used in the past, who gets to use it, what forms of legitimacy or illegitimacy it perpetuates as a label, etc etc. or you might get scholars studying "development" without any real analysis of the ways that "development" is a very political term that oftentimes assumes all states should follow some sort of linear path based largely on states for whom colonization was an essential part of speedrunning that "path" towards "development"

and like i don't wanna undersell bc as i said there are TONS of scholars who ARE doing really great analysis that is very much questioning preconceptions in the field and helping to reframe the way we think, so if u are really interested in IS there is definitely a growing branch of the field that is breaking away from these sorts of necolonial western-centric assumptions + frameworks. my area of focus was latin america, and i spent most of the last year of my degree writing about how traditional conceptualizations of state security perpetuate gendered violence, specifically at the us-mexico border. and so i got to immerse myself in a side of the field that i really loved, and that was great!!

but the thing that really sort of sealed the deal for me on deciding i don't want to pursue IS for any more advanced studies was my senior thesis. up until that point, because i was a dual IS-history major, most of my papers had been more humanities based, but for my senior thesis i HAD to use social science methodology, where you're picking variables and trying to measure them and draw conclusions etc etc, and i just.... hated it. i think social science research certainly can be very important and informative, but everything i wanted to study was too nebulous of a concept to really measure in any meaningful way--and i think a lot of IS research can kinda run into that issue, because, again, if you're gonna measure something as nebulous as "democratic freedom" or "development," it's like.....what assumptions are you beginning with about what defines those concepts and how we measure them?

anyway in the end i kind of rebelled a little bit and designed a study based on the guidelines we had to follow where i basically went "if we measure development based on this notion that it's a linear process we can measure in the first place, we'd expect to see this in this country! but wait! we don't!! perhaps because the notion of development in and of itself is based on neocolonial assumptions and it's stupid to act like we can measure it or predict how certain states are going to act just bc The Western World acted that way!!" and my professor got a little annoyed w me and felt like i was being presumptuous and not giving enough credit to the scholars in the field who are treating that question seriously, which looking back i probably was a little bit, but for the most part i stand by my paper <3

anyway. that experience cemented for me that i wanted to stick firmly to humanities and cease any dabbling in social sciences moving forward, simply bc i do not enjoy using that research methodology. but if ur interested in social science + enjoy the methodology, or are more interested in quantitative than qualitative research, then u would not have that same issue! my advice 2 anyone interested in IS is just to engage w postcolonial, feminist, and anticapitalist writing + scholarship so that u are not just accepting questionable assumptions when u inevitably run into them in the field. also be ready to have classes w some really annoying conservatives who think that international relations is a zero-sum game (á la realism) and some really annoying liberals who think that institutions like the UN are flawless deities who would save the whole world if only everyone agreed to play a little bit nicer (a lá liberalism)