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Foreign Affairs Washington’s Long Road to Alienating Russia The U.S. has badly mismanaged relations with Moscow since President Clinton. (Ralph Alswang/White House Photograph Office via Wikimedia Commons) An especially damaging example of Washington’s lack of strategic empathy or even basic consideration regarding another major country has been its belligerent display of power and contempt toward Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Most analysts who examine the onset of this “second cold war” have concentrated on the rising Russian–Western tensions over Ukraine, especially since that country’s U.S.-backed Maidan Revolution in 2014.   The focus on Ukraine during the post-2014 period is understandable, given that a full-scale proxy war between NATO and Russia over Ukraine’s geopolitical status is now taking place and alarming threats are being hurled from various capitals. But the deterioration of relations with Moscow on the part of the United States and its key European allies began long before 2014 and has involved issues not directly related to Ukraine. Moreover, policymakers in Washington deserve most of the blame for the onset of the second cold war, an outcome that is doubly tragic because it was so unnecessary.   Moscow’s acceptance not only of Germany’s reunification but of a united Germany’s membership in NATO signaled the potential for an entirely new era in Russian–Western relations. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact military alliance confirmed the Kremlin’s new, much less aggressive political and security orientation. Any lingering doubt about the possibility of warmer relations should have vanished at the end of 1991, when the USSR itself dissolved and a noncommunist Russia became the principal successor state. Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense in both George W. Bush’s administration and Barack Obama’s administration, candidly describes in his 2014 book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, some of the serious U.S. policy missteps. Gates recalled that in one of his early reports to Bush, “I shared with him my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War and then in the dissolution of the Soviet Union….”  In an even more candid comment, Gates added: “What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41 [George H. W. Bush] left office in 1993.” Saying the bilateral relationship had been “mismanaged” is putting matters gently. Indeed, even during the elder Bush’s tenure, hawkish elements within the U.S. policy hierarchy worked hard to sabotage a Western rapprochement with Russia. The elder Bush’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, suggested that the United States not be content with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but work to fragment Russia. Fortunately, the president and some other key advisers, most notably Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, opposed such an openly confrontational approach. Instead, they soothed Moscow and led Kremlin leaders to believe that Washington would not make any move to expand NATO beyond the eastern border of a united Germany. How sincere they were about easing Moscow’s security concerns remains uncertain to this day. In any case, President Bill Clinton’s administration adopted a noticeably less accommodating stance toward Russia. This phase of Washington’s Russia policy was characterized by a lack of strategic empathy and tone deafness. Key policymakers, such as Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and Czech-born U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, were thoroughly marinated in the Cold War era’s anti-Soviet conventional wisdom. They transferred their ingrained hostility toward the USSR to a newly democratic Russia with scarcely any hesitation. Albright and her supporters were exceptionally receptive to requests from anti-Russia figures in Poland, the Baltic republics, and other Eastern European countries to join NATO—especially after she became Secretary of State in 1997. It was hardly a secret that Boris Yeltsin’s administration (and most other Russians) would regard NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe as an extremely hostile act. Indeed, Yeltsin warned Clinton about the danger of a negative reaction from both his country’s population and political elite during a private summit discussion.   Instead of heeding Yeltsin’s warning, Clinton submitted a treaty to the U.S. Senate approving the addition of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to the alliance. NATO expansion was underway. Meanwhile, Washington and its European allies also were beating up on Serbia, Moscow’s principal remaining political ally in Eastern Europe. As former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock points out, Russian public opinion shifted from being strongly favorable toward the United States to being strongly hostile during the 1990s because of such actions. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, endorsed subsequent phases of NATO expansion, ultimately bringing the rest of the former Warsaw Pact countries into a U.S.-led, blatantly anti-Russia military alliance. There were other, more mundane military measures that also antagonized Moscow. Gates specifically stated that “U.S. agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries” constituted a “needless provocation.” Indeed, the “rotations” soon were so continuous as to constitute de facto permanent U.S. garrisons in those two countries—something that U.S. officials had repeatedly assured Moscow informally was not Washington’s intention. Not content with the level of provocation that the multiple rounds of NATO expansion had caused by incorporating former Warsaw Pact members and establishing an ongoing U.S. military presence in those new Eastern European members, Bush then proposed to offer Georgia and Ukraine membership in NATO. By that time, though, Moscow’s objections to U.S. policy were becoming loud and emphatic. Even some longtime key U.S. allies, most notably France and Germany, balked at adding corrupt and politically volatile Georgia to NATO. They also argued that it was at the very least premature to suggest bringing Ukraine into the fold. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2007 address to the Munich Security Conference should have made it quite clear that the Kremlin would not tolerate NATO membership for either Georgia or Ukraine.  Moscow then exploited a clumsy bid in August 2008 by Washington’s Georgian client regime to suppress the de facto independence of two secessionist entities: South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia responded to Georgia’s ill-advised military offensive by sending Russian troops pouring into that country. The Kremlin’s action was a milestone confirming that Moscow would no longer passively accept further NATO expansion. Putin’s use of force in Georgia should have made it clear to all concerned that his warnings were not a bluff.  Instead, the United States and its NATO allies continued to ignore or dismiss such indicators. Recklessly, they next proceeded to assist anti-Russia factions in Ukraine to overthrow the elected, pro-Russia government in Kiev and install an obedient pro-NATO replacement. Russia responded by seizing the strategically crucial Crimea peninsula from Ukraine and supporting separatist Russian speaking populations in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Moscow also sent a modest contingent of its own troops into the Donbas to back the secessionist factions. The Western powers embraced an escalatory strategy of their own, both by imposing severe economic sanctions on Russia and by supporting Kiev’s increasingly brutal crackdown on the Donbas rebels.  Russian–Western relations gradually but inexorably deteriorated thereafter and then utterly plunged in February 2022 when Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine, while NATO members began to give huge quantities of military hardware and economic aid to Kiev. The confrontation between Russia and NATO took the form of a proxy war with disturbing potential for escalation into a direct conflict, making the second cold war even more dangerous and volatile than the original.   Examining the early stages of the West’s post-Cold War confrontation with Russia underscores how easily it could have been—and should have been—avoided. Policymakers in the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations deserve history’s harshest judgement for sheer ineptitude in the arena of foreign affairs. The post Washington’s Long Road to Alienating Russia appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign policy Germany Must Rearm No self-respecting great power should be in the position where Berlin is now.  (Photo by WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images) “Germany has been periodically mature and powerful—but never together”, a German diplomat told me over a quick dinner in Washington, DC, which is hauntingly beautiful on an autumn Friday night, with most people leaving town after work. It is a bitter reflection, made with an implicit sigh of repressed anger. A Polish court ruled in the morning that the Ukrainian man allegedly responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline will not be extradited to Germany. As the noted scholar and sage of “rules-based order,” Thucydides, once wrote: The weak suffer what they must.  “If Ukraine and its special forces, including the suspect, organised an armed mission to destroy enemy pipelines, these actions were not unlawful. On the contrary, they were justified, rational, and just,” the court ruled. The judge added, “The German nation was from our point of view hostile towards Ukraine as it was cofinancing the enemy—Russia.” One of course marvels at the pretzel logic, while also appreciating that, in a classic fashion, this is a sovereign judgement and ruling from a “court” in the original sense of the term.  International law is anything but customary and is almost always inevitably subservient to the balance and distribution of power. If there’s anything that is a lesson from this sorry episode, it is that the Germans, failing to act in a mature way, have now lost all real power as well as respect in Europe.  Consider, from Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk: “Polish court denied extradition to Germany of a Ukrainian national suspected of blowing up Nord Stream 2 and released him from custody. And rightly so. The case is closed.” The finality is palpable. Or from Vice Premier Radek Sikorski: “When a foreign aggressor is bombing your country you may legitimately strike back by sabotaging the aggressor’s ability to finance the war. It is called self-defence.”  It doesn’t take a genius to question the logical ends of those assertions. Poland, Germany, and NATO are not officially at war with anyone, much less with Russia. Is the destruction of sovereign financial assets by an agent of a third party in open seas an attack on sovereignty, or is it not? Is an Ukrainian agent destroying a sovereign property of a NATO member country, an attack on NATO? Can Germany seek Article 5 consultation? Given that the European Union still buys Russian energy, will Germany conduct such an operation on Polish soil in future under any pretext? If Poland buys any Chinese goods, no matter how small, can the U.S. harbor German agents who destroy Polish property? Will any other power, not just the U.S. or China, but Turkey or India, allow this to happen to their sovereign financial assets? If the rules-based order is harboring agents blowing up sovereign financial assets, the bill must come due someday.  But what does Tusk’s “rightly so” imply? Poland’s primary opposition to Nord Stream wasn’t because it is Russian energy or that it profits the Russian war machine—Poland continued to benefit from Russian gas even after the war broke out, and it has been reported that they did not stop after Nord Stream was bombed. Poland’s objection was that the pipeline bypassed Poland.  Germany’s central desire towards institutionalizing peace on the continent suffers from the same predicaments and disadvantages as those of the reigning global hegemon, just on a smaller continental scale. The logic of a post-war European political union was to hide and in some ways temper both German financial hegemony and ethnic Pan-Germanism under obtuse, multi-layered rules and performative subservience: a legalist mix of Friedrich Naumann’s liberal central European empire and Richard von Kühlmann’s concept of “limited sovereignty.” Germany tried military hegemony twice and it never worked well for anyone, least of all for the Germans. It was as cursed by fate, too powerful and not mature enough. This time, it wanted to be a mature responsible power.  But the logic of power and empire dictates that you cannot be a vegetarian predator. America can perform subservience to the whims of EU and NATO occasionally to achieve long-term political alignments; the entire world still understands where the real power is. Germany, on the other hand, was the first country to disavow hard power since 1989, followed three and a half decades later by giving up nuclear energy independence. The result is a strange dynamic: Germany, the economic and manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, is surrounded by small protectorates with blood-animosity over distant past historic sins who simultaneously are egging on Germany to rearm, spend, and protect them, while harbouring fugitives who destroy sovereign German wealth.  And Germany has allowed itself to be chained this way. While “chain-ganging” is bad enough in foreign affairs, somehow it feels far worse and unnatural when it is accompanied by a small protectorate’s sanctimony. This is clearly unsustainable. Germany must rearm. But even now, the Bundeskanzler is instinctively trying to square the circle to couch the need for German hard power, under the rules of the EU: Spending money is not enough; there needs to be a Europe-wide debt adjustment, a European stock exchange. But why? If Poland, the largest net beneficiary and recipient in terms of nominal figures, receiving the highest total amount of EU funding, can simply ramp up to spending 4 percent of GDP on defense, Germany can too. It certainly doesn’t need European affirmation; it simply needs to reverse domestic policies, cut regulations for foreign start-up investments, invest in nuclear energy, and return to mandatory conscription.  Germany already has friends in the current U.S. administration who are begging Berlin to return to a 1989 force posture. An American desire to “shift the burden” and encourage Germany to rearm rapidly, should, if not for anything, rectify this decades-old unnatural order in Europe. The post Germany Must Rearm appeared first on The American Conservative.

America Joe Rogan’s Unprincipled Immigration Politics ‘FanDuel Americans’ aren’t woke, but they’re not right-wing either. (Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC) Popular podcaster Joe Rogan this month condemned President Donald Trump’s deportation actions. “The way it looks is horrific,” said the former Trump supporter. He said the aggressive efforts to remove criminal aliens upsets “everybody who has a heart.” Instead of mass deportations, Rogan argues Trump should offer amnesty to illegal aliens. It’s confusing that Rogan is shocked by the man he endorsed acting on his chief campaign promise. It’s not like Trump hid his desire to remove millions of illegal aliens from the country.  But Rogan isn’t alone in his criticism. Other “Brocasters,” such as Theo Von, also lambast Trump’s immigration moves. Zach Bryan, one of the most popular musicians for bros, even released a song condemning ICE.  The Brocasters and their young male audience played a significant role in Trump’s 2024 win. It’s notable that these prominent figures are turning on the president over his primary issue. It begs the question if “FanDuel Americans”—the normie young men who cast their ballots for Trump—share Rogan’s view and whether the president may lose these bros merely for deporting illegal alien rapists and murderers. Last year I coined the term to describe a demographic that was open to backing Trump but much less right-wing than they are sometimes portrayed. They’re young and not woke. They aren’t reactionaries and don’t desire a counter-revolution. They’re even fine with many of the changes that characterize multicultural America. What they want is a country that allows them to earn a living and have plenty of amusements free of politics. Namely, they want to get woke out of the way of placing parlays on FanDuel. They’re not extremely political. Their primary interests are sports, making money, and having a good time. They get their news from Barstool and Joe Rogan. They don’t see Trump as the anti-Christ. They see him as the better alternative to the nagging liberals who imposed white privilege training and mandatory pronouns on them. They weren’t bothered by the calls for mass deportations during the election. Trump received a tremendous level of support from this demographic, unsurprisingly given the warm reception he received on the campaign trail from leading Brocasters. Exit polls show that Trump won a majority of men under 30 in 2024, a rare feat for a Republican. Following the impressive result, there have been a slew of media reports on how young men are turning to the right.  But a different picture is starting to emerge. Trump’s youth support has sagged as of late. In February, a majority of young voters approved of him, with over 60 percent of men under 30 holding a favorable view of the new president. By late July, Trump’s approval among young men had plummeted to 27 percent, one point lower than for young women. It’s improved a bit since then, but the president’s approval is still far from the February high. The economy is the primary reason for the drop in approval, but young people aren’t showing much enthusiasm for Trump’s immigration agenda either. In a recent New York Times poll, over 60 percent of voters under 30 oppose mass deportations. That contrasts with the majority of the general population that supports the measures. Nearly 60 percent of this demographic agreed with the statement that the U.S. government “is mostly deporting people who should not be deported.” Meanwhile, 51 percent of Americans think Trump is deporting the people who should be deported. The poll did not break down the age demographic by gender, so young men could be closer to the general population in their views than their female peers. But young men who previously supported Trump may agree with Rogan on the issue. Rogan’s agenda for immigration is basically to the establishment consensus of the Obama era. We deport a few criminal aliens, we get some beefed-up border security, and then we give the majority of illegals a “pathway to citizenship.” This is supposedly a centrist view between the open borders of Joe Biden and the mass deportations of Donald Trump. The problem is that this view was rejected at the ballot box in both 2016 and 2024. It’s a view Rogan himself rejected when he endorsed Trump. The president still boasts strong support among the public for his immigration agenda. It’s just not as strong among the Brocaster audience. Even if enthusiasm for mass deportation is cooling among FanDuel Americans, it’s too hasty to conclude that this issue will doom Republican chances among this demographic. For one, their main issue is the economy, not immigration. If they have good jobs that allow them to place more bets and go out on the weekend, their approval for Trump will likely continue to go back up. They’ll not care so much about the ICE raids they see on TikTok and Reels. They’ll be too busy having a good time to concern themselves with this matter. This is not the demographic out protesting ICE. There are no typical bros trying to free criminal aliens and blocking ICE vehicles. It’s pretty much entirely elderly resistance liberals, Antifa types, and local Hispanics from the community getting raided. While they might disagree with the videos they see, FanDuel Americans are not bothered enough to go out and protest. That’s not their thing. They’re busy with other stuff. Like Rogan and Theo Von, their immigration views aren’t set in stone. Brocasters are upset about the deportations because of the videos they see and how quickly they forget the effects of open borders under Biden. It can easily shift in the other direction if their mind is fixated on other angles. Last year, Rogan was excoriating the Biden administration for flying illegals all over the country. Now he wants them given amnesty. Their stance is determined by fleeting emotions rather than firm principles.  While young men could easily return to the MAGA fold, it’s worth remembering that they’re not as right-wing as some conservative commentators imagine them to be. Too often, the American right mistakes the opinions seen on X with those of Zoomer men as a whole. They forget that X is a niche platform and that many of these BASED posters are older than Zoomers. X isn’t real life. It’s true that fully engaged young conservative men—the ones who consume a lot of political content and join Turning Point USA—are significantly more right-wing than the millennial conservatives were a decade ago. The recent “racist messaging scandal” within the Young Republicans illustrates this. But they’re not the majority of their peers. They’re a fraction. The majority are FanDuel Americans, not BASED and Redpilled Zoomers. That’s better than young men being woke, of course. But it’s necessary to keep in mind. If they were “extreme” right-wingers, they would revolt against the Brocasters turning on Trump over deportations. Instead, many of them are still listening to Rogan as they place their bets on this week’s NFL games. The post Joe Rogan’s Unprincipled Immigration Politics appeared first on The American Conservative.

A risk. The post The song Queen almost released instead of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ first appeared on Far Out Magazine.