“The end of war really meant the beginning of a self-righteous appeasement in which decadent states besotted with their own moral high ground sacrificed the weak to the strong in exchange for maintaining the moral illusion of their peacemaking.” – Daniel Greenfield, The End of International Law
h/t Adrian
Si vis Pacem, para Bellum.
Worked then, works now, never fails.
Life is a series of lessons.
Lessons will be repeated until learned.
History is largely ignored now….
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Recommended reading…..THE ART OF WAR…T’sun T’su
(circa 200 BC)
“Always leave your enemy a means of escape.”…is but one example..
Military officers have to study history; unfortunately, their political masters do not.
A post-American world means the end of international law.
Good. It’s not the US taxpayer’s job to finance TEAM AMERICA WORLD POLICE. What is this writer proposing? That America ‘get tough’ with Russia and possibly provoke WW3 over the Ukraine? He probably knows that’s stupid so like all neocons he retreats into platitudes and mutterings about ‘Munich this’ and ‘Chamberlain that’.
On that note, I’d like to point out that Chamberlain is one of the best and underrated leaders of history. He kept Britain out of war for the wrong reasons but it was a damn good thing he did. He also applied the opposite of The New Deal and that allowed Britain’s economy to recover. If idiot Churchill had his way a depressed Britain would have picked a fight with a still-united Nazi-Soviet alliance.
prevention is always better and cheaper than corrective
and a neo-con (like KKK) is a lieberal construct, it was coined to describe centrist democraps
The loss of 58,850 American soldier’s lives pales in comparison to the five or six Viet Nam/Laotian/Cambodian lives lost in the pre and post American war period. Viet Nam was partitioned to satisfy French colonist interests at the end of WWII.
The protesters stopped after the American troops left, but the killing in Viet Nam and neighbouring countries continued adding additional millions to the lives already lost.
My answer at a conference on War of what should have been done in Viet Nam is in the Powell Doctrine. Use overwhelming force. Carpet Bombing Hanoi and all ships entering it’s harbor with military goods in 1965 would have saved far more lives than all the caviling and caterwauling of the protesters and craven politicians.
This would be especially true for the number of American soldier’s lives. Cheers;
That is a powerful essay, echoes my own thoughts but written far better than I ever could. It is SO discouraging to see the hundreds of blog posts today claiming that Putin is the loser, that Putin is the weak one,and Obama,with his shining moral purity,is strong.
” International law is a Potemkin village. A hollow facade upheld by the might of the United States. A post-American world means the end of international law.”
God, what a windup, and what a truth. After America it’s going to be a long time before the planet sees the peace,freedom,and prosperity we have enjoyed so much the last 70 years because America WAS the world’s policeman.
The big mistake was the Yanks electing a man who was ashamed of that fact.
Correction: five or six million Viet Nam/Laotian/Cambodian lives My apologies
Putin is the loser. Russia’s economy is in crisis-even one of Putin’s ministers admitted as much. As the world’s money supply tightens up and hydrocarbon production increases, Russia will come to pieces.
The big mistake was the Yanks electing a man who was ashamed of that fact.
No the big mistake was in going bankrupt paying for other nation’s defenses.
The ‘Sudetenland Principle’ is alive, well and living in the 21st century.
SS Sicherheitsdienst or KGB/FSB modus operandi seem to be very effective ‘teachers’ to the populations who allow themselves to be gulled into imperial obeisance.
So the Berlin 1936 Olympic games become the rehash to the Sochi 2014 Olympic games.
And the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Agression Pact is rehashed in the Budapest Memorandum 1994.
Hey its all good, join “Lord Vlader” and the Spetsnaz on the dark side links… so is it the KGB (Kind Good Boys) or the FSB (Fearsome Secretive Bastards)?
And now for our next installment “Lord Vlader” and Barrack go golfing in Yalta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRQyS_8sShw
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
The only thing I would quibble with is the notion that it is the responsibility of the US to maintain the sovereignty of other nations. Few, if any, of the former Soviet occupied states have done much to defend against the inevitable. Mind you, the argument can be made that the US offered protection, but all these nations should have known better than to trust anyone else to defend them. They willingly turned a blind eye to history and went about spending way beyond their means on toys and comfort instead of their own survival.
The COLD WAR is over and yer side lost….
Brave Russians protect oppressed Crimeans from fascist grandmother
I agree, this is a powerful essay.
In particular, the following struck me, “Alexander Cadogan’s blunt statement remains relevant today. The Pax Americana is over. We have been living on bluff and Putin called it.
Our response will be a variation on the Stimson Doctrine in which we will refuse to recognize Russia’s puppet regime in Crimea, just as we refused to recognize the Soviet annexations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. There will be endless debates over whether the Ukrainians had it coming and praise for our wise leaders who kept us out of war.
Eventually war may come anyway.”… Always has, always will, and we are mostly defenseless.
And this, “International law is a Potemkin village. A hollow facade upheld by the might of the United States. A post-American world means the end of international law.” A post-Roman world was also chaos.
Chamberlain was no Churchill.
There is nostalgia still among far too many Canadians for the “peace-keeping” work of our “blue berets”, who file reports and support the local economies in a variety of trouble spots around the world. It is sad, however, that our armed forces have spent blood and treasure (though a tiny fraction of what was lost in a month in World War I) on a place like Afghanistan.