Greetings Friends (apologies for the Mercator projection which is still funny to me), Rare Burst of Inspiration post used to happen once every other year or so; the perils of aging. US Foreign Policy has been dreadful for roughly 30 years with some rare exceptions, I don't think much of Clinton's tenure but there are pretty good defensive arguments for what he did in the moment and the uniqueness of unipolarity so despite Black Hawk Down he wasn't that bad strictly from a foreign policy perspective; Bush Sr. and Reagan were both quite good at foreign policy; and Nixon the beloved was the best since Polk the actual best President. I guess Trump or someone in Trump's circle also thinks Polk is the best president hence the land grabbing tendencies or desires. Kind of an uncommon perspective but as we'll see a lot of my train of thought when it comes to how the world works recently becamse reality instead of theoretical "whenever this nonsense crumbles"........................................................................................................................................................................................................I'm more interested in discussing the current state of affairs than giving an overall discussion of how stupid the previous foreign policy decision makers were but essentially COVID destroyed the rules based order and the War in Ukraine/10/7th took it out back and obliterated it. There could have been either precautions to prevent this from happening or it could've never been structured in such a foolish way to begin with but essentially Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and so on were always stupid and this was already proven by WW2 and we didn't need to reiterate that process a hundred years later....................................................................................................................................................................................................................Now for a Biden retrospective, I think up until October 7th Biden was actually quite a good President and he did an excellent job in the early days of the Ukraine War, whether the Ukraine War is strategically smart from a non European perspective is another issue but assuming you want to support Ukraine in a defensive war a lot of that credit should go to Biden and Wesley Clark and so on. That said October 7th was an unmitigated disaster and led to the worst public facing genocide in 30 years, it's possible Iran will genocide its own populace at a faster tick soon but until then that statement holds up. Under Biden it really did not look like there was any chance the War in Gaza would ever end and Israel would continue doing preposterously evil things continuously but under Trump it seems to have a chance of restoring the pre October 7th order which is still bad but at least not horrifying............................................................................................................................................................................................................Here we have the first Trump foreign policy move of destroying Iran's Nuclear Facility at Fordow; in a vacuum this was a smart move done quickly but because of its proximity to genocide its kind of hard to evaluate. Also Iran will eventually rebuild its Nuclear program (*if the regime doesn't fall), but it might take like 10-30 years. In any case its still better than Iran and Israel exchanging missiles/F-35 strikes every few months, overall a solid move; doesn't seem like a regime change move in Iran would work anywhere near as well as the Venezuela one but it's hard to tell if Trump is operating on pure bluster in this case or not............................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as Venezuela's concerned I should point out that the previous leader of Venezuela Hugo Chavez was very anti-US but he was also a competent, popular leader and the country was doing perfectly fine under his rule. Nicolas Maduro was/is an incompetent dipshit that was extremely unpopular in his country, this is a big reason why a huge risk like using helicopters to extract a foreign hostile head of state went so well. So while this move looks on paper possibly quite foolish it went just amazingly well and if you were theoretically planning a Coup in 3 years (who would ever do such a thing) a good way to get the military on board is doing a flawless military operation that makes the US military seem terrifying to all but the strongest powers. This is a 10/10 for Trump in general, he probably got pretty lucky a helo didn't get shot down but it was going to work even if that had happened so maybe it wouldn't have had that much fallout depending on how poorly that aspect had gone...................................................................................................................................................................................................................Onwards to Greenland discussion; I don't think its smart to threaten your ally and demand their land and so on in general and I think the way Trump is going about doing it is both stupid on the surface and in reality. However, the Arctic ocean is in the process of melting and eventually will be a major trade route thus Greenland and Northern Canada will likely become a lot more prosperous in 50-100 years assuming no nuclear apocalypse; so Greenland isn't a bad piece of land to target acquiring on paper. Even if Trump does nothing and this whole situation is just seen as a farce there is at least a precedent of a US president demanding Greenland in the past for some other future president to utilize in the future. From a NATO perspective they have a new "enemy" to rally against and might actually become militarily competent again (Ukraine isn't in NATO yet) without the aid of the US; obviously Europe having a strong military has never caused any issues historically. So while this seems generally a pretty stupid move from Trump it could work out in the end, I may or may not be alive at the point when it becomes relevant but also projecting the future currently beyond a few months seems foolish (whereas you could foresee a Taiwan or Ukraine conflict from 15-25 years away before, now there could be a conflict anywhere on the planet at any time); insert proverbial Lenin quote waiting for decades and nothing happens, wait a week and then decades happen.
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