In an editorial in the print edition of Reason, Matt Welch takes me to task for “celebrating” the candidacy of Donald Trump, who he calls a “false prophet of anti-interventionism.” Reason’s editor cites one of my more hopeful predictions about the beneficial consequences of the Trump Effect on American politics:
“’If Trump gets the Republican nomination the neocons are through as a viable political force on the Right,’ Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo enthused at the end of February. ‘And if Trump actually wins the White House, the military-industrial complex is finished, along with the globalists who dominate foreign policy circles in Washington.’”
A few hours of pure delight at the Biblical Museum of Natural History was one of the dividends of my recent trip to Israel. Open since 2014 and housed, at least for the time being, in a warehouse in the industrial section of Beit Shemesh, the museum kept children and adults equally fascinated. (Full disclosure: I serve on the museum’s Board in a voluntary capacity.) The installation houses lots of animals, live and preserved, and is hugely interactive. The large python in the photo may be the star of the show, but he is far from the only act.
The museum is the brainchild of Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin. Or maybe not. Some of us suspect that his wife, Tali, grew tired of their backyard housing a growing menagerie of specimens and made him upgrade. If so, the public is the clear winner. It has shown its appreciation by coming in droves: secular, dati-leumi, haredi. Tours can be tailor-made to suit the needs of different groups. One element that is totally absent, however, is controversy. While Rabbi Slifkin does not avoid that in some of his writings, none of it enters the museum.
If anything, the opposite is the case. The one bit of preparation needed for a visit to the museum is the recitation of birkas ha-Torah! The tour is a non-stop Torah learning experience, explaining passages in Tanach and maamarei Chazal at every station along the way. It is overflowing with Torah content, presented through a vehicle of interaction with animals, something that always works with kids. All visitors learn about animals that appear in Tanach – and why, as well as which ones lived in Israel during different periods of our history.
I took two families of my grandchildren along, and every one loved the experience. A week or so later, I participated in the Museum of the Bible (DC) tour of Israel and Rome, and told one of the participants about it. She then took her family (not Orthodox affiliated), which had an equally enthusiastic reaction.
With Chol ha-Moed approaching, families search for activities that are entertaining, but fit the Yom Tov mood by offering more than distraction. It is hard to imagine a more suitable Chol ha-Moed family outing for those in Israel than a few hours at the Biblical Museum of Natural History.
This week, SU-24 fighter-bombers buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Baltic Sea. The Russian planes carried no missiles or bombs.
Message: What are you Americans doing here?
In the South China Sea, U.S. planes overfly, and U.S. warships sail inside, the territorial limits of islets claimed by Beijing.
In South Korea, U.S. forces conduct annual military exercises as warnings to a North Korea that is testing nuclear warheads and long-range missiles that can reach the United States.
U.S. warships based in Bahrain confront Iranian subs and missile boats in the Gulf. In January, a U.S. Navy skiff ran aground on an Iranian island. Iran let the 10 U.S. sailors go within 24 hours.
But bellicose demands for U.S. retaliation had already begun.
Yet, in each of these regions, it is not U.S. vital interests that are threatened, but the interests of allies who will not man up to their own defense duties, preferring to lay them off on Uncle Sam.
And America is beginning to buckle under the weight of its global obligations.
And as we have no claim to rocks or reefs in the South China Sea — Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines do — why is this our quarrel?
If these rocks and reefs are so vital they are worth risking a military clash with China, why not, instead, impose tariffs on Chinese goods? Let U.S. companies and consumers pay the price of battling Beijing, rather than U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
Let South Korea and Japan build up their forces to deal with the North, and put Beijing on notice: If China will not halt Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons program, South Korea, and Japan will build their own nuclear deterrents. Half a century ago, Britain and France did.
Why must we forever deter and, if need be, fight North Korea?
And why is the defense of the Baltic republics and East Europe our responsibility, 5,000 miles away, not Germany’s, whose economy is far larger than that of Russia?
Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, U.S. presidents refused to take military action in Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Poland.
When Moscow intervened there, the U.S. did nothing. When did the independence of Eastern Europe become so vital an interest that we would now risk war with a nuclear-armed Russia to ensure it?
Under Article 5 of NATO, an attack upon any of 28 allied nations is to be regarded as an attack upon all.
But is this the kind of blank check we should give Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, a few months back, ordered a Russian fighter plane that crossed into Turkish territory for 15 seconds be shot down?
Do we really want to leave to this erratic autocrat the ability to drag us into a war with Russia?
When Neville Chamberlain in 1939 handed a war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, who also had an exaggerated opinion of their own military power and prowess, how did that work out for the Brits?
America should not write off the Baltic Republics or Eastern Europe. But we should rule out any U.S.-Russian war in Eastern Europe and restrict a U.S. response to Russian actions there to the economic and diplomatic. For the one certain loser of a U.S.-Russian conflict in Eastern Europe — would be Eastern Europe.
As for Iran, the U.S. intelligence community, in 2007 and 2011, declared with high confidence that it had no nuclear weapons program.
Since the Iran nuclear treaty was signed, 98 percent of Iran’s enriched uranium has been shipped out of the country; no more 20 percent enriched uranium is being produced; the Arak reactor that could have produced plutonium has been scuttled and reconfigured; and nuclear inspectors are crawling all over every facility.
Talk of Iran having a secret nuclear-bomb program and testing intercontinental missiles comes, unsurprisingly, from the same folks who assured us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The goal is the same: Stampede America into fighting another war, far away, against a nation they want to see smashed.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, this country has been steadily bled and slowly bankrupted. We are now as overextended as was the British Empire in the 1940s.
And like that empire, we, too, are being challenged by nations that seek to enlarge their place in the sun — a resurrected Russia, China, Iran. And we are being bedeviled by fanatics who want us out of their part of the world, which they wish to remake according to the visions of their own faiths and ideologies.
Time for a reappraisal of all of the war guarantees this nation has issued since the beginning of the Cold War, to determine which, if any, still serve U.S. national interests in 2016. Alliances, after all, are the transmission belts of war.
This is not isolationism. It is putting our country first, and staying out of other people’s wars. It used to be called patriotism.
On Sunday Ukrainian, prime minister Yatsenyuk resigned, just four days after the Dutch voted against Ukraine joining the European Union. Taken together, these two events are clear signals that the US-backed coup in Ukraine has not given that country freedom and democracy. They also suggest a deeper dissatisfaction among Europeans over Washington’s addiction to interventionism.
According to US and EU governments – and repeated without question by the mainstream media – the Ukrainian people stood up on their own in 2014 to throw off the chains of a corrupt government in the back pocket of Moscow and finally plant themselves in the pro-west camp. According to these people, US government personnel who handed out cookies and even took the stage in Kiev to urge the people to overthrow their government had nothing at all to do with the coup.
When Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was videotaped bragging about how the US government spent $5 billion to “promote democracy” in Ukraine, it had nothing to do with the overthrow of the Yanukovich government. When Nuland was recorded telling the US Ambassador in Kiev that Yatsenyuk is the US choice for prime minister, it was not US interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine. In fact, the neocons still consider it a “conspiracy theory” to suggest the US had anything to do with the overthrow.
I have no doubt that the previous government was corrupt. Corruption is the stock-in-trade of governments. But according to Transparency International, corruption in the Ukrainian government is about the same after the US-backed coup as it was before. So the intervention failed to improve anything, and now the US-installed government is falling apart. Is a Ukraine in chaos to be considered a Washington success story?
This brings us back to the Dutch vote. The overwhelming rejection of the EU plan for Ukrainian membership demonstrates the deep level of frustration and anger in Europe over EU leadership following Washington’s interventionist foreign policy at the expense of European security and prosperity. The other EU member countries did not even dare hold popular referenda on the matter – their parliaments rubber-stamped the agreement.
Brussels backs US bombing in the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of refugees produced by the bombing overwhelm Europe. The people are told they must be taxed even more to pay for the victims of Washington’s foreign policy.
Brussels backs US regime change plans for Ukraine and EU citizens are told they must bear the burden of bringing an economic basket case up to European standards. How much would it cost EU citizens to bring in Ukraine as a member? No one dares mention it. But Europeans are rightly angry with their leaders blindly following Washington and then leaving them holding the bag.
The anger is rising and there is no telling where it will end. In June, the United Kingdom will vote on whether to exit the European Union. The campaign for an exit is broad-based, bringing in conservatives, populists, and progressives. Regardless of the outcome, the vote should be considered very important. Europeans are tired of their unelected leaders in Brussels pushing them around and destroying their financial and personal security by following Washington’s foolish interventionism. No one can call any of these recent interventions a success and the Europeans know it.
One way or the other, the US empire is coming to an end. Either the money will go or the allies will go, but it cannot be sustained. The sooner the American people demand an end to these foolish policies the better.
A few hours of pure delight at the Biblical Museum of Natural History was one of the dividends of my recent trip to Israel. Open since 2014 and housed, at least for the time being, in a warehouse in the industrial section of Beit Shemesh, the museum kept children and adults equally fascinated. (Full disclosure: I serve on the museum’s Board in a voluntary capacity.) The installation houses lots of animals, live and preserved, and is hugely interactive. The large python in the photo may be the star of the show, but he is far from the only act.
