Month: June 2016

The Accidental Superpower was written two years ago, and its author, Peter Zeihan, is probably feeling pretty good about himself right now.  Donald Trump, of all people, is calling Emperor NATO naked, and is prospering as a result.  Of the three Presidential candidates, only the Democrat is even nominally invested in the Old World Order represented by NATO.

I think there’s an excellent chance Libertarian Gary Johnson will make the debates this fall.  One of them will be devoted to foreign policy, and only the Democrat will argue for international military engagement, and will do so tepidly, at best.  Trump will strut and fret, but the guy to watch will be Johnson.  Unlike Trump, he’s thought seriously about politics for a long time.  The arguments he will make for American military disengagement will be coherent and reasonable.  And they are what the American people want to hear.  They’re what the American people have always wanted to hear, from the founding of the Republic and Washington’s Farewell Address.  Nothing’s changed in over 200 years.  We have the enormous good fortune to live on a continental island, with neighbors far weaker than ourselves.  We don’t need to fight wars unless we choose to do so, and the people of this country vote against war just about every time they can.

Most of the Founders didn’t even want an army.  Why did we need an army?   We weren’t going to invade anybody, and nobody was going to invade us.  What we needed was a navy, and once we had one it was no worries, mate.  When you rule the waves, as Britain did for over 100 years, and you live on an island, you can’t be invaded.  Armies can’t swim, and paratroopers can’t conquer countries.

I have a hunch Johnson understands all this, and will communicate it quite effectively.  I’m very much looking forward to the reaction he gets.  I’ll bet the people, if not the pundits, will get it.  It’s really just common sense.  Even Trump gets it.

The case for war is commercial.  To the extent that the Iraq Wars made any sense, it was that they occurred where all the oil is, and we needed the oil.  But now we don’t need the oil anymore.  Without it, our friends and trading partners would be in big trouble, and we wish them well in securing a secure source of hydrocarbons.  But we won’t fight a war for them.  It’s not our job, man.

I hope Johnson points out that NATO is a misnomer.  It’s not a mutual defense treaty.  It’s a unilateral security guarantee by the United States, the only military superpower in the world.  And we give it for free.  Trump wants to get paid for it.  He’s a mercenary at heart, and making mercenaries of our soldiers is no problem for him.

Johnson doesn’t want to get paid for it.  He wants to withdraw it.  The only reason to keep this commitment is to ensure peace in Europe, which is good for business.  A war in Europe would hurt our economy very badly, but it wouldn’t kill us.  We only get killed if we fight a war for their security, even though they won’t fight for it themselves.  No mas.

There’s a reason neoconservative poster boy Bill Kristol is the last diehard looking for a warhawk independent.  To him, Johnson’s foreign policy is just as bad as Trump’s.  But the neocons are in a lonely place right now.  They may be going extinct before our very eyes.  They were helpful in the Cold War, and have been a nuisance ever since.

I gave up on this election when Cruz dropped out, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.  This election won’t produce the change we need, but it will hopefully send a powerful message.  It already has.  Bushism is deader than a doornail.  Dole, McCain and Romney were Bushites, and we’ll never nominate one of those losers again.  Cruz and Trump were the last two standing, and both represented the repudiation of Bushism.  Our 2020 candidate will be an unvarnished conservative.

But not a hawk.  No one picked up any votes in the entire Republican primary by hawkishness.  Lindsey Graham represented that wing of the Party  —  it doesn’t even count, it’s so small.

Trump has proven the power of American nationalism as well.  He’s crude about it, but he hits the right chord.  Our 2020 candidate must be a nationalist free trader.  Free trade, but on our terms.  Free trade, as long as it’s good for us.   We don’t expect subsidies, and we won’t hand them out, either.  Our attitude in international negotiations should be real simple  — what’s in this for the American people?

And it’s the same with immigration policy.  It should be based on one principle  — what’s best for the people of this country?

I guess our 2020 candidate will sound like a rational Trump.  That’s my real problem with this dude.  He gives my ideas, and his, a bad name.  But I’ve got Johnson to vote for.

I feel like a guy who’s been married for 50 years, and is being unfaithful for the first time.  But, hell, I’m really a Libertarian at heart.  Better late than never.

 

 

What the hell good does it do when the Republicans control the Senate?  They roll over like whipped dogs at the first sign of a fight.  It’s easy to blame the Leader, McConnell, but he’s a symptom, not the disease itself.  The disease is lily-livered milk toast so-called moderates who are the balance of power in the Republican Senate Caucus.  A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and some of the Republican Senatorial links are made of linguine.

Take Lisa Murkowski.  Please.  Match her room temperature IQ with a hamster’s need for approval, and a desperate desire to be considered enlightened, and you get a Democrat in disguise.  Like many people who are in stations far above their capacity, Murkowski compensates by her arrogance, and her air of entitlement.  She’s just a lousy politician, all the way around.  I’ve known a lot of politicians in my time, and she’s about the worst.

Mayor Dan should beat her.  He’s no Marco Rubio, but he’s got enough of the old blarney in him to be an easy guy to like.  He had, or has, an Irish pub in downtown Anchorage called McGinty’s.  A guy that opens up an Irish pub is probably an all right guy.  There’s no one like an Irishman at being a politician.  I shook the hand of the best of them all, John F. Kennedy.  He was impossible not to like.

Ivan Moore runs a Democrat poll called Alaska Survey Research.  He tilts far to the left in his polling.  A week out, he called Begich a seven or eight point favorite over Sullivan.  He was off by ten.  So he has Murkowski and Mayor Dan tied at 51% approval, but with Murkowski with an eleven point higher negative.  (Hat tip to midnightsunak.com)

So, as the gun goes off, they’re tied.  There are a lot more Alaskans who don’t know Mayor Dan than don’t know Murkowski, so he gets to introduce himself to these people, by campaigning.   And spending money on media, money that needs to be raised.  A lot of money has been raised to try to take down RINO’s that weren’t as bad as Murkowski.  These people need to understand the golden opportunity that Mayor Dan represents.  But time is short, so we’ll just have to see.

The only time I spent any real time with George, Mayor Dan’s father, was at the end of the ’94 race for Governor.  Jim Campbell, who had a hardware store in Spenard, was the Republican, and he refused to go after the Democrat, Tony Knowles, about things Knowles had said about the Permanent Fund.  The things Knowles had said were enough to sink him, but Campbell wouldn’t do it.  I didn’t really know George Sullivan, but I called him up, and asked him what he thought, and he agreed with me.  So he arranged a meeting between me, Campbell, and George.  And George and I laid it out for him.  He had to expose this part of the Knowles’ record.  But he wouldn’t do it.  He said he didn’t want to run a negative campaign.  I’ve always wondered if he was afraid of something in his past.  He lost by about 600 votes, and I don’t think I ever saw George again.  Except I do see some of George in Mayor Dan, and I do believe George saw some of my Uncle Fritz in me.

This is going to be fun.

Original Dan Sullivan was Mayor of Anchorage, just like his dad, George.  He’s a solid, mainstream Republican conservative, as was his father.  He’s a fourth generation Alaskan, with roots in Valdez, Nenana and Fairbanks.  He’s 64, happily married for over 30 years, with a daughter and God knows how many nieces and nephews from his eight siblings.  And he’s got that Irish in his eyes.

I really like this guy, although I’m not sure I ever met him, but I did know his father.  He didn’t get into politics until he was 47, in 1999, when he ran for Anchorage Assembly.  Babbie and I left Alaska in 2001, so we never ran into each other, as far as I know.  But I knew all about his father, especially from my Uncle Fritz.

I don’t know all the details, but when Uncle Fritz came to Alaska after the war he drank like a fish and was a large, angry and violent man.  I’ve always believed that there were a lot of people like George Sullivan, who, after serving in the Aleutians became a Federal Marshall (just like his own father), tried to keep Uncle Fritz out of serious legal trouble.  They were almost all WW II vets themselves, and they all understood what my uncle had gone through in the war, and they respected him for it.   And Uncle Fritz always had nothing but good things to say about “Sully”.  In fact, to tell you the truth, I never heard anybody say anything bad about George Sullivan.  He was one of those natural born Irish-American politicians, and a man of intelligence and integrity.

This is the first time I’ve really felt the urge to return to Alaska.  The primary is on August 16th, so the next eleven weeks are going to be intense up there.  Murkowski has over $3 million, and Mayor Dan is starting from scratch.  But as soon as I get the green light, I’ll be trying to raise some bucks on his behalf here in the Lower 48.  As soon as he gets a campaign manager and a finance chair I’ll try to be of assistance in any way I can.

Political amateur Joe Miller beat Murkowski in the primary six years ago, and I’m not aware of anything she’s done to endear her to the conservative base of the Alaska electorate since then.  She may have bagged some pork, but that’s not what Alaska needs right now.  Substantively, she has no accomplishments in her fourteen year career.   The WSJ once dubbed her father, Frank, a Republican “utility infielder” in the Senate, and he shines in comparison to his dimwitted daughter.

Dan says he’ll run a positive campaign, and that’s smart.  Murkowski’s ineffectiveness in the Senate is glaringly obvious, and she is such a transparent airhead that even low information voters can see she has no business in the United States Senate.  But she’s a woman and a mother, so you can’t throw punches.  In her case, it’s not necessary.

The thing is, I love politics, I’ve been at it a very long time, and I have a lot of ideas.  I’ve known Lisa Murkowski since she was a 21 year old volunteer on her father’s campaign for the Senate in 1980.  And while I’ve been gone for fifteen years, I still know a lot about Alaska politics.

When I got to Juneau in ’83 I made a lot of friends who had been in the Legislature for a long time, and they used to tell me stories.  One of my favorites was about Mayor Dan’s father, who had been appointed to fill a vacancy in the House.  When the Good Friday earthquake hit South Central in “64, Governor Egan called a bunch of legislators up to his office to share the small bits of information he had.  Communication to Anchorage had been cut off, and nobody knew how bad it was, only that it was very bad.  Somebody made a wisecrack about how Anchorage kind of had it coming, and this totally pissed off George M. Sullivan.  He had a wife, nine kids, and innumerable friends and neighbors who were unaccounted for, and you couldn’t help but fear the worst.  He got up and knocked this guy flat on his ass, right there in the Governor’s Conference Room.

Anchorage’s sports arena is named for George M. Sullivan.  That’s where we have our boxing matches.  He was a great man, and a great Alaskan.

 

When Francis Fukuyama declared history to be at an end, he was speaking as a political scientist.  But political science is bunk.  Geopolitics and oil are what’s real.  And now that Americans have begun to realize that North American energy independence has at last arrived, the postwar world order will collapse.  It’s not just NATO.  As Peter Zeihan points out in his marvelous The Accidental Superpower, the postwar world was created by the United States acting in its own self interest.  That self interest was first and foremost devoted to fighting the Cold War.  For that we needed allies around the world, and these allies needed a secure supply of energy, and access to the American market for exports.

25 years after it ended, we’re at last coming to grip with the fact that the world order we created to fight Communism is no longer in our self interest.  Zeihan all but says it flat out:  we don’t really need to be involved in most of the world.  The world may need us, but we don’t need it.

If you like statistics read his book.  We are not an export economy.  Exclude what we export to Canada, Mexico, and Latin America, and it’s not that big a number.  The world needs our market a lot more than we need its.

I haven’t finished the book, and I’m not sure what specific trade policy Zeihan recommends.  But, no matter.  I’m a free trader, but I want fair trade, and I think there’s a very good argument that the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to help big American business more than the American worker and consumer.  It’s an extension of Bretton Woods, which was a 1944 gift to a war torn world by the American economic colossus.   But the world has healed, and the burden is too heavy.

I highly recommend this book.  He writes entertainingly, and knows a lot.  He’s certainly an original thinker.  He thinks Poland should seek an anti-Russian alliance with Sweden, and Sweden should go nuclear.  Poland’s got to do something.  We’re not going to fight the Russians for them, or anyone else.

The world of the future as Zeihan sees it is all hell breaking loose, all over the globe.  Except the USA.  We’re in the catbird seat.

Politically, the nice thing about all this is that the Libertarian candidates, Johnson and Weld, are both smart enough to understand this, and to explain it to the voters.  If they make Zeihan’s analysis the center piece of their foreign policy it will have an impact.  Trump doesn’t read books, and is ignorant, but the fact that he wants out of NATO means he has the right policy in his gut.  But he isn’t smart enough to talk about it, and the Libertarians are.

People should understand geopolitics more.  The United States is uniquely blessed by geopolitics.  We have no enemies, everything we need, and two oceans for defense.  My God, what more do you want?  Why in the hell are we running all over the world getting into wars?

Germany is the tragedy of the 20th century.  In 1914 she was in the catbird seat.  She had everything she needed, and was so strong that no one wanted to fight her.  She had absolutely nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by war.  But to war she went, and from there it’s been one damn thing after another.

We’re in the same position the Germans were in in 1914.  Why in the name of God would we ever go to war?  We want to rule the waves, and control the sky, and own space.  And we have legitimate interests and friends around the world.  But none of that is worth an actual war.

Reagan Project Co-founder Darren has been to London on business, and has connections there that are important to him.  We are the daughter of Great Britain.  I think we should fight to protect Britain and the Anglosphere.  They’re our cousins.  And Israel, of course, if absolutely necessary.  But that’s it.  Everybody else is on their own.

It will be a libertarian world.

The student of American politics should begin by reading Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America.   Woodard is no conservative, but he’s smart as hell, and knows his subject in detail.  He doesn’t make the point himself, but a central lesson of his wonderful book is that this country is one that requires federalism in order for it to work.  There are eleven American subcultures, and we’re quite different from one another, always have been, and should plan on being so in the future.  What makes sense in Texas doesn’t work in Maine, and vice versa.

I think maybe that’s why everybody is so pissed off.  I know that’s why I am.  I’ve never cared for authority, and the idea that some pinheaded bureaucrat in D. C. has some control over  my life drives me to drink.  I figured this was the year we all got together and started rebelling against these bastards, but that was B.T., before Trump.  Now it will have to wait until 2020.  Even if the blowhard is elected, he won’t accomplish anything, and we’re probably going to be in worse shape than we are  now.

For our purposes, 2020 may, in fact, be ideal.  Peter Zeihan, in The Accidental Superpower, says that 2020 is the year when everything starts going to hell. That’s the year when Boomers really start retiring en masse, and the demographic problems of an aging population and shrinking work force really take hold.  This seems like a very smart guy, and I’m only half way through his book, but everything he says so far makes sense to me.  That’s how I can tell if a guy really knows what he’s talking about.

I had a nice talk with Jeff Fields of the Texas Public Policy Institute.  They may  be more tightly involved with the Task Force than they thought.  That’s very good news.  Jeff will be travelling to Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana promoting Article V.  Jeff can’t figure out why there should be any problem in some of these states.  He’ll learn, soon enough.  To tell you the truth, I’d rather not travel to any more State Capitols to talk to legislators.  Jeff sounds like he’s primed to go, and will do a better job than I did.

The best part of Zeihan’s book is his analysis of the source of the post war world order  —  America as the world dominant superpower.  But those days are over.  The Free World got a free ride on the backs of the U. S. taxpayer, and that’s going to end.  It no longer makes sense for us.  We’re energy self-sufficient, and can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.  Local powers need to develop their own defenses.  This idea  —  that NATO is dead   — is going to take a while for people to digest, and adjust to.  By 2020 it will be obvious.

I haven’t read the part of the book where he talks about international trade, but I’m pretty sure he thinks the U.S. is getting the raw end of the deal, giving everyone else a free ride.  Maybe that’s why nobody’s heard of this book.  He’s like Trump, but with real brains.  For all I know, he may be right.

NRO’s Jonah Goldberg had a piece out today about Constitutionalists.  I like that word.  And the thing is, if you can say it, you’re smart enough to be one.