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What is culture war? If I look at the Western world I see things moving in cycles. At one moment we are very prudish and a few generations later everything sexually is allowed. It is probably just a matter of time before we go back to prudish. The constant is maybe that we are very moralistic and want to convince other people that we are right.
Unfortunately today we are simultaneously prudish and permissive, with "banter" outlawed in the workplace yet pornography for all. One wag described it as "a dildo in the handbag but dragging a fainting couch behind".
The moralising is performative, purely transactional, and out of self interest, and has been a feature of Bongland and its satellites since at least the Victorian era. Even Engels wrote about it scathingly in 1845 in "The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat" in his essay Condition of the Working Class in England.
Globalization as always, operating under the same ownership, with plenty of new (darker and more exotic) faces in management. The owners disagree on a few things but are in agreement about the need for maintaining control. The managers are incentivised by the options on offer...possible membership in the oligarchy for the most reliable subordinates or at least safety from the degradation of joining the masses.
The rest is PR developed for the prejudices of the consumers of audiovisual and digital entertainment (in which I include graduate level elite education). If you don't know how the decision-makers get their money or how they preserve it forget about figuring any of it out. If you are not already getting the BBQ you are livestock and there is always a special place on the grill for all of us.
Unseen? No...the baby is out and was born fighting. Mestizo Jacksonianism .Old Hickory with a blend of Mexican and Asian genes added to the original. Aerospace with the sensibility of the Border region between England and Scotland.
As Obama, Hilary and Harris age they will prepare for Hell by watching Trumo and Co flourish.
Commenting from Australia through a haze of MAGA propoganda on my feed, but it seems to me like everything's going to quiet down a bit internationally.
Pleasing Trump's ego seems pretty easy, at least as far as every country can choose to get in his good graces, regardless of deep state interests. The major players, Russia, China, much of the third world, seem variously interested in a brief return to the status quo to regroup, especially China with mounting domestic problems and a need to get exports out to prevent deflation. Add that Trump's term has been centred around turning the focus inwards. Adversaries are surely thinking about helping this along, getting a reprieve.
I think if these countries do escalate shenanigans Trump will be persuaded to keep US presence as invasive as ever. If I were in a hostile country I'd be hoping my leaders don't test what Trump's willing to do with his large mandate and reinvigorated military.
That does bring up a counterpoint, that they might escalate in hope of shattering the weak Dem dominated US before Trump has a chance to focus on reform.
I could give a pretty nuanced take based on anecdotal experience in the Gulf but I don’t think it’s interesting to anyone but myself - always happy to hear what you think though.. good luck
Can you share any of it? I understand that you would need to be careful, and might be better off not commenting at all.
I'd expect that the spectacle of Western woke would horrify, titillate and unsettle many in the Gulf, confirming old ideas about the West as immoral and disturbed. But there would be plenty who would be moved to adopt positions across the spectrum. As always, the public/private divide makes overt acknowledgement of what anyone there really thinks a challenge.
That's an interesting starting analysis, and agree that Hollywood seems to be devolving towards toy stories since almost everything else has been mined. You might want to widen the time frame and not leave out any years (big fan of Dune Part 1 here, which was released in 2021 and did well).
In Thailand, it hit me how some of the Woke Agenda seems to have been inspired by the peculiarities of Thai culture, probably brought back by young western backpackers who were allowed to stay on the cheap for extended time in this exotic tropical paradise and take it all in:
- Ladyboys and all varieties of trans and gender-neutral people are quite ubiquitous and socially integrated.
- They farm and eat bugs!
- There is no manifestation of visceral racism, agism, sexism or xenophobia on the part of poor young girls and ladyboys on offer in the open-air girlie bars!
Neocon is just a dysphemism for American Foreign Policy. Trump is the same as all those who came before him. It was Trump who armed Ukraine, and Trump who was carpin' and bitchin' about Nordstream and Germany at the UN. Biden just continued where he left off.
Another misconception is his "disbanding of NATO". Trump has absolutely no intention of disbanding NATO, just that America must no longer pay for it. Trump wants to run it as a NY mafia protection racket, not an inherent cost of the US empire. Essentially it is Trump's European version of Mexico and the wall; expand NATO to subjugate Europe, and Europe must pay for its subjugation.
Everything points toward Trump being more transactional, and if he doesn't get his way, possibly as interventionist or most certainly the threat of such. Ergo his apparent solution to the decline of dollar usage, due to the war in Ukraine, is to slap tariffs on the countries that don't use it, not to adjust US foreign policy.
Turbo America will continue, just with the pawl moving to a different tooth of the ratchet.
Apparently Obama provided financial aid to Ukraine but balked at sending lethal aid for fear of provoking Putin, as well as concerns about arming the Banderites, because at that point in time the whole "far right" schtick was just getting up and running for the Trump era. That of course was public facing policy and internal US clown show politics, and I dont know what was going on behind the scenes.
Regardless of this, the point stands. All POTUS', including Trump, are the same when they step over the US border; all escalate conflict and only de-escalate in order to escalate elsewhere.
Uh, no. Something very different will happen. It will happen here in America first. The final snap of order will be when Business As Usual is attempted and it explodes. After that… le deluge…
It will be very bad for the world if this isn’t channeled into Space as Musk and others want.
Is Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou there? They are currently in Budapest so I assume they are attending the conference. If so, tell them I said hi!
My initial thought was that Trump would insist on an end to Israel's wars with Hezbollah and Hamas, as he wouldn't want to inherit Biden's mess. However after talking with some Israeli acquaintances they seem to think Trump will mostly ignore the conflict. So far, Trump's cabinet is mostly full of Israel supporters, with the only dovish voice I've seen floated is Thomas Massie for a role in the agriculture department. Seems like the war will go on.
Trump said several times during his campaign that he would negotiate a settlement to end the Ukraine war. But with the recent wins on the battlefield by Russia, and Ukraine's use of American weapons to hit Russian territory directly, I think it's going to be nearly impossible to salvage anything that looks like a win for Ukraine and by extension the US.
I could be wrong but from the US side of the Atlantic it seems Trump has never been well loved in Europe. In his last term Trump was on much weaker footing internationally as he was beset by domestic troubles stirred up by the Democrats and the State Department was openly undermining him on policy. With the Democrats chastened by the election, and Trump's apparent plan to clear out the bureaucracies and appoint loyalists, I expect European leaders to be more deferential than in 2019, the last real year of Trump's first term. There's also the fact that Europe is in a much worse place economically vis-a-vis the US than in 2019. If Trump and Putin decide to split Ukraine down the middle and the US sticks the bill for reconstruction on Europe, European leaders can bleat all they want but there is nothing they can do about it.
I already congratulated you on xitter but Congrats on the panel!
How could Trump possibly end the conflict in the Middle East? At most he could constrain Israel, even attempt to cripple it by forcing the Israelis to fight wars on their own territory rather than on the territories from which their enemies launch attacks, but America can not prevent the war from going on.
The Iranian push for regional primacy is a defining feature of Tehran 's foreign policy. The Palestinian jihad (Resistance Incorporated) is permanent and goes on until Israel is destroyed or the Palestinians driven west of the Jordan. The Lebanese do not want a peace deal with Israel, they just want Iranian, US and EU cash in return for hosting the forward deployments of the 'Axis of Resistance'.
Europe is a crap-hole of client states, a welfare sink for the Third World and a swiftly weakening centre of manufacturing. The Euros are free to scream and yell, whine and make faces. So long as they rely on hydrocarbons from the US or its clients in Western Asia they will bow to Orange Man.
The Palestinian resistance has now become more than politics but idealogical. Even if they were driven out of the ME, the movement will live on. It's taken on a force of its own.
Maybe one of the good things to potentially come out of the Israeli war in Lebanon is perhaps the Lebanese will be able to transcend their sectarian identities and create a stronger a civic-based identity. It'd be great for Lebanon to become a relatively stable, non-sectarian state for Christians.
Agreed on both points. The Palestinian cause is a Rohrschach blot. It serves to license the expression of strong feelings. The cause will flourish. The Palestinians will not.
Sectarian feeling is integral to Lebanon. Prospects for lasting change are poor. Any chance of Lebanon being a Christian country ended when the French expanded its borders. The French carved up their Mandate, just as the UK did when it created the Emirate of Jordan from land excised from Palestine.
The alternative to sectarianism in Lebanon and Syria is either fascism or a parody of European race based nationalism. Which is what the Ba'athists and some of their allies offer.
As for stability, the Lebanese gave up any hope of that in the 70s. A state that allows foreigners to take over its territory, that allows third parties to wage war on its soil, as Lebanon does, is beyond repair IMHO.
I didn't say Trump could end all conflict in the Middle East. I said Trump could end Israel's current wars with Hamas & Hezbollah. Withdrawal of US diplomatic and military support would end any military action by Israel within a month or so. Withdrawal of US trade would probably end Israel within a couple years. This hasn't happened because Israel is useful strategically and it has the strongest ethnic lobby in US history protecting it.
N.B. that I began my comment by using the definite article.
Trump cannot end either Israel's war or the war waged agaunst it. The war is existential. So long as Israel exists regional rivals will seek to destroy it. The Palestinians define themselves by their enmity with any form of Jewish statehood. This is widely supported by the masses across the entire Muslim world. Zionism is a concrete repudiation of the Pact of Umar imposed upon the Jews of the Islamic world.
The US can turn on Israel. It has done so on any number of occasions. Harry Truman did in 1948 by imposing an arms embargo that lasted decades. Eisenhower did in 1956 by ordering the US Navy to sink Israeli ships in the event of war in 1956. Johnson did in 1967 when Washington declined to honour its commitment to ensuring navigation for civilian shipping to all countries in the Straits of Tiran. Clinton turned on Israel by forcing the Israelis to hand over control over the West Bank and Gaza to the PLO. Obama went further by forcing the Israelis to accept a maritime border deal with Lebanon that favoured the Lebanese.
Were Washington to break with Israel the Israelis would certainly have difficulties. But an isolated Israel, cut adrift from the US, would end up complicating US policy. In the long term Israel's interests probably lie with India and Russia.
My #1 issue : K-12 Schools, because if children in the west spend their formative years in madrassas where they are inducted into a pseudo-religious moral framework that seeks to dismantle the white male cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy, a.k.a. Western Civilization, then there is no hope for any of our nations to act in their own best interests. Eric Kaufman writes about this at length - we cannot trust that people will magically become conservative as they age.
Here in Canada, public schools have adopted Paolo Friere's Critical Pedagogy and are focused on "Conscientizing" their captive audience of children into Critical Consciousness, a.k.a. wokeness. Conservative politicians are beyond clueless, and most parents have no idea what's going on except when exceptionally outrageous things make the news like the hentai gigaboobs shop teacher or Palestinian protest songs in Arabic for Remembrance Day - where Canadian war dead were described as "some white guys who did something related to the military".
I hate the term "culture war" because firstly, in Canada it's totally asymmetrical - there's no meaningful opposition to the wokes, and schoolboards are 100% dominated by deranged revolutionaries and used as a training ground for the NDP (woke socialist party). Secondly, "culture war" leads people to dismiss this as unimportant, but it is *extremely important* - academics have taken a back seat with literacy and numeracy rates plummeting, and students are being inducted into the worst kind of woke socialism. How is a nation supposed to survive if it's children are raised to hate their history and want to "dismantle" their civilization? It sounds dramatic, but this indoctrination starts in kindergarten, and is being done as if it were a religion, in an explicit attempt (they proudly say this) to mold children's minds while they are still young. The purpose of education in the Frierian model is not about academics, but shaping children into social justice revolutionary agents in order to "transform" society, i.e. to destroy our civilization and build a progressive utopia from the ashes.
Regarding "in which direction do you think the USA will be headed in terms of foreign policy: a) more of the same b) more interventionist c)more transactional d) more isolationist e) a combination of the above" the best response would be e.
The process of decision on foreign policy is not transparent. We know that there are various clans that push in this or that direction and have different priorities. We know that Commander in Chief has a lot of power when it comes to foreign policy, but how is one to determine when will Trump jump in and do his show ( like he did with Rocket Man ) and when will he just listen to this or that adviser or feel pressured by the media?
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Niccolo soldo- writer, fisted by focoult. Outstanding
Lol. You beat me to it. On a panel with distinguished academic sounding titles. Niccolo: “Writer Fisted by Foucault.”
I like reading the expression 'Fisted by Foucault' among the professors and directors of such-and-such
Edit: too late with my witty observation, so let me just congratulate you on your impending Eurocrat think-tanker arc. <3
I’m sure he’ll make a good fist of this topic. Looking forward to the post that follows.
What is culture war? If I look at the Western world I see things moving in cycles. At one moment we are very prudish and a few generations later everything sexually is allowed. It is probably just a matter of time before we go back to prudish. The constant is maybe that we are very moralistic and want to convince other people that we are right.
Good luck with your panel discussion!
Unfortunately today we are simultaneously prudish and permissive, with "banter" outlawed in the workplace yet pornography for all. One wag described it as "a dildo in the handbag but dragging a fainting couch behind".
The moralising is performative, purely transactional, and out of self interest, and has been a feature of Bongland and its satellites since at least the Victorian era. Even Engels wrote about it scathingly in 1845 in "The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat" in his essay Condition of the Working Class in England.
10 likes if possible for the dildo-fainting couch quote.
"One wag described it as "a dildo in the handbag but dragging a fainting couch behind"."
Hilarious. I must remember this.
The moralising is performative;
“a dildo in the handbag but dragging a fainting couch behind".
Brilliant. Stealing. Thank you 😊
Excellent point “The constant is maybe that we are very moralistic and want to convince other people that we are right. “
New order, old order. I get confused.
Globalization as always, operating under the same ownership, with plenty of new (darker and more exotic) faces in management. The owners disagree on a few things but are in agreement about the need for maintaining control. The managers are incentivised by the options on offer...possible membership in the oligarchy for the most reliable subordinates or at least safety from the degradation of joining the masses.
The rest is PR developed for the prejudices of the consumers of audiovisual and digital entertainment (in which I include graduate level elite education). If you don't know how the decision-makers get their money or how they preserve it forget about figuring any of it out. If you are not already getting the BBQ you are livestock and there is always a special place on the grill for all of us.
"If you are not already getting the BBQ you are livestock and there is always a special place on the grill for all of us."
Indeed.
Dawg. What existed is gone.
Something dies, something unseen is born and it marches under the 🩸flag of Pallas Athena…
Trump for example has picked a young and vigorous cabinet for the most part. Especially Hegseth and Gabbard.
GWOT veterans got 🩸 in their eyes.
Must mention a very energized Musk…
Unseen? No...the baby is out and was born fighting. Mestizo Jacksonianism .Old Hickory with a blend of Mexican and Asian genes added to the original. Aerospace with the sensibility of the Border region between England and Scotland.
As Obama, Hilary and Harris age they will prepare for Hell by watching Trumo and Co flourish.
Commenting from Australia through a haze of MAGA propoganda on my feed, but it seems to me like everything's going to quiet down a bit internationally.
Pleasing Trump's ego seems pretty easy, at least as far as every country can choose to get in his good graces, regardless of deep state interests. The major players, Russia, China, much of the third world, seem variously interested in a brief return to the status quo to regroup, especially China with mounting domestic problems and a need to get exports out to prevent deflation. Add that Trump's term has been centred around turning the focus inwards. Adversaries are surely thinking about helping this along, getting a reprieve.
I think if these countries do escalate shenanigans Trump will be persuaded to keep US presence as invasive as ever. If I were in a hostile country I'd be hoping my leaders don't test what Trump's willing to do with his large mandate and reinvigorated military.
That does bring up a counterpoint, that they might escalate in hope of shattering the weak Dem dominated US before Trump has a chance to focus on reform.
Make Australia Great Again?
Alas, I see no leaders, no organisation. Control is comprehensive. Australia's future may have been lost in the past.
I could give a pretty nuanced take based on anecdotal experience in the Gulf but I don’t think it’s interesting to anyone but myself - always happy to hear what you think though.. good luck
Can you share any of it? I understand that you would need to be careful, and might be better off not commenting at all.
I'd expect that the spectacle of Western woke would horrify, titillate and unsettle many in the Gulf, confirming old ideas about the West as immoral and disturbed. But there would be plenty who would be moved to adopt positions across the spectrum. As always, the public/private divide makes overt acknowledgement of what anyone there really thinks a challenge.
I'd like to hear about other parts of the world. Please share.
Related to this, I wrote a post on the decline of American soft power, focusing on Hollywood, a few months ago:
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/american-soft-power-is-decreasing
"Hollywood appears to be on a path of decreasing global influence, and with it, America may experience a slow but steady decline in its soft power."
That's an interesting starting analysis, and agree that Hollywood seems to be devolving towards toy stories since almost everything else has been mined. You might want to widen the time frame and not leave out any years (big fan of Dune Part 1 here, which was released in 2021 and did well).
Thanks. I'll probably do an updated post in a few months.
Congrats!
In Thailand, it hit me how some of the Woke Agenda seems to have been inspired by the peculiarities of Thai culture, probably brought back by young western backpackers who were allowed to stay on the cheap for extended time in this exotic tropical paradise and take it all in:
- Ladyboys and all varieties of trans and gender-neutral people are quite ubiquitous and socially integrated.
- They farm and eat bugs!
- There is no manifestation of visceral racism, agism, sexism or xenophobia on the part of poor young girls and ladyboys on offer in the open-air girlie bars!
Just a pedestrian observation …
Truly Pedestrian, why you’d make a modern day Dashiell Hammett,
I can see the dimly lit smoky bars, the ah “femme” fatales…
I really should have 🤖 AI merge Dashiell Hammet (Sam Spade, Bogart Private Eye) with Madame Butterfly….
… but I might cause The Singularity (AI Consciousness occurs) and we’d have Skynet in Drag… not that we aren’t there now…
The Dame
It’s always the Dame.
(Even when it’s not)
https://chatgpt.com/share/673ffa35-dd90-8002-9d57-287f91f6b7e8
Neocon is just a dysphemism for American Foreign Policy. Trump is the same as all those who came before him. It was Trump who armed Ukraine, and Trump who was carpin' and bitchin' about Nordstream and Germany at the UN. Biden just continued where he left off.
Another misconception is his "disbanding of NATO". Trump has absolutely no intention of disbanding NATO, just that America must no longer pay for it. Trump wants to run it as a NY mafia protection racket, not an inherent cost of the US empire. Essentially it is Trump's European version of Mexico and the wall; expand NATO to subjugate Europe, and Europe must pay for its subjugation.
Everything points toward Trump being more transactional, and if he doesn't get his way, possibly as interventionist or most certainly the threat of such. Ergo his apparent solution to the decline of dollar usage, due to the war in Ukraine, is to slap tariffs on the countries that don't use it, not to adjust US foreign policy.
Turbo America will continue, just with the pawl moving to a different tooth of the ratchet.
Ukraine was either armed or in the process of getting armed well before Trump's first election. Arms sales take decades of planning.
Example: One can point to the sale of Raytheon's Patriot to Poland (https://www.army-technology.com/news/us-approves-sale-of-48-patriot-batteries-to-poland-in-15bn-deal/?cf-view) which may be 2023 news, but by tracking the unclassified Federal line item budget, plans for opening up sales to Poland started in the early Aughts.
Apparently Obama provided financial aid to Ukraine but balked at sending lethal aid for fear of provoking Putin, as well as concerns about arming the Banderites, because at that point in time the whole "far right" schtick was just getting up and running for the Trump era. That of course was public facing policy and internal US clown show politics, and I dont know what was going on behind the scenes.
Regardless of this, the point stands. All POTUS', including Trump, are the same when they step over the US border; all escalate conflict and only de-escalate in order to escalate elsewhere.
Uh, no. Something very different will happen. It will happen here in America first. The final snap of order will be when Business As Usual is attempted and it explodes. After that… le deluge…
It will be very bad for the world if this isn’t channeled into Space as Musk and others want.
Will the panel discussion be videoed?
Is Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou there? They are currently in Budapest so I assume they are attending the conference. If so, tell them I said hi!
e) A combination of the above, tilting towards a) more of the same unless being c) more transactional becomes a necessity.
My initial thought was that Trump would insist on an end to Israel's wars with Hezbollah and Hamas, as he wouldn't want to inherit Biden's mess. However after talking with some Israeli acquaintances they seem to think Trump will mostly ignore the conflict. So far, Trump's cabinet is mostly full of Israel supporters, with the only dovish voice I've seen floated is Thomas Massie for a role in the agriculture department. Seems like the war will go on.
Trump said several times during his campaign that he would negotiate a settlement to end the Ukraine war. But with the recent wins on the battlefield by Russia, and Ukraine's use of American weapons to hit Russian territory directly, I think it's going to be nearly impossible to salvage anything that looks like a win for Ukraine and by extension the US.
I could be wrong but from the US side of the Atlantic it seems Trump has never been well loved in Europe. In his last term Trump was on much weaker footing internationally as he was beset by domestic troubles stirred up by the Democrats and the State Department was openly undermining him on policy. With the Democrats chastened by the election, and Trump's apparent plan to clear out the bureaucracies and appoint loyalists, I expect European leaders to be more deferential than in 2019, the last real year of Trump's first term. There's also the fact that Europe is in a much worse place economically vis-a-vis the US than in 2019. If Trump and Putin decide to split Ukraine down the middle and the US sticks the bill for reconstruction on Europe, European leaders can bleat all they want but there is nothing they can do about it.
I already congratulated you on xitter but Congrats on the panel!
How could Trump possibly end the conflict in the Middle East? At most he could constrain Israel, even attempt to cripple it by forcing the Israelis to fight wars on their own territory rather than on the territories from which their enemies launch attacks, but America can not prevent the war from going on.
The Iranian push for regional primacy is a defining feature of Tehran 's foreign policy. The Palestinian jihad (Resistance Incorporated) is permanent and goes on until Israel is destroyed or the Palestinians driven west of the Jordan. The Lebanese do not want a peace deal with Israel, they just want Iranian, US and EU cash in return for hosting the forward deployments of the 'Axis of Resistance'.
Europe is a crap-hole of client states, a welfare sink for the Third World and a swiftly weakening centre of manufacturing. The Euros are free to scream and yell, whine and make faces. So long as they rely on hydrocarbons from the US or its clients in Western Asia they will bow to Orange Man.
The Palestinian resistance has now become more than politics but idealogical. Even if they were driven out of the ME, the movement will live on. It's taken on a force of its own.
Maybe one of the good things to potentially come out of the Israeli war in Lebanon is perhaps the Lebanese will be able to transcend their sectarian identities and create a stronger a civic-based identity. It'd be great for Lebanon to become a relatively stable, non-sectarian state for Christians.
Agreed on both points. The Palestinian cause is a Rohrschach blot. It serves to license the expression of strong feelings. The cause will flourish. The Palestinians will not.
Sectarian feeling is integral to Lebanon. Prospects for lasting change are poor. Any chance of Lebanon being a Christian country ended when the French expanded its borders. The French carved up their Mandate, just as the UK did when it created the Emirate of Jordan from land excised from Palestine.
The alternative to sectarianism in Lebanon and Syria is either fascism or a parody of European race based nationalism. Which is what the Ba'athists and some of their allies offer.
As for stability, the Lebanese gave up any hope of that in the 70s. A state that allows foreigners to take over its territory, that allows third parties to wage war on its soil, as Lebanon does, is beyond repair IMHO.
I didn't say Trump could end all conflict in the Middle East. I said Trump could end Israel's current wars with Hamas & Hezbollah. Withdrawal of US diplomatic and military support would end any military action by Israel within a month or so. Withdrawal of US trade would probably end Israel within a couple years. This hasn't happened because Israel is useful strategically and it has the strongest ethnic lobby in US history protecting it.
N.B. that I began my comment by using the definite article.
Trump cannot end either Israel's war or the war waged agaunst it. The war is existential. So long as Israel exists regional rivals will seek to destroy it. The Palestinians define themselves by their enmity with any form of Jewish statehood. This is widely supported by the masses across the entire Muslim world. Zionism is a concrete repudiation of the Pact of Umar imposed upon the Jews of the Islamic world.
The US can turn on Israel. It has done so on any number of occasions. Harry Truman did in 1948 by imposing an arms embargo that lasted decades. Eisenhower did in 1956 by ordering the US Navy to sink Israeli ships in the event of war in 1956. Johnson did in 1967 when Washington declined to honour its commitment to ensuring navigation for civilian shipping to all countries in the Straits of Tiran. Clinton turned on Israel by forcing the Israelis to hand over control over the West Bank and Gaza to the PLO. Obama went further by forcing the Israelis to accept a maritime border deal with Lebanon that favoured the Lebanese.
Were Washington to break with Israel the Israelis would certainly have difficulties. But an isolated Israel, cut adrift from the US, would end up complicating US policy. In the long term Israel's interests probably lie with India and Russia.
My #1 issue : K-12 Schools, because if children in the west spend their formative years in madrassas where they are inducted into a pseudo-religious moral framework that seeks to dismantle the white male cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy, a.k.a. Western Civilization, then there is no hope for any of our nations to act in their own best interests. Eric Kaufman writes about this at length - we cannot trust that people will magically become conservative as they age.
Here in Canada, public schools have adopted Paolo Friere's Critical Pedagogy and are focused on "Conscientizing" their captive audience of children into Critical Consciousness, a.k.a. wokeness. Conservative politicians are beyond clueless, and most parents have no idea what's going on except when exceptionally outrageous things make the news like the hentai gigaboobs shop teacher or Palestinian protest songs in Arabic for Remembrance Day - where Canadian war dead were described as "some white guys who did something related to the military".
I hate the term "culture war" because firstly, in Canada it's totally asymmetrical - there's no meaningful opposition to the wokes, and schoolboards are 100% dominated by deranged revolutionaries and used as a training ground for the NDP (woke socialist party). Secondly, "culture war" leads people to dismiss this as unimportant, but it is *extremely important* - academics have taken a back seat with literacy and numeracy rates plummeting, and students are being inducted into the worst kind of woke socialism. How is a nation supposed to survive if it's children are raised to hate their history and want to "dismantle" their civilization? It sounds dramatic, but this indoctrination starts in kindergarten, and is being done as if it were a religion, in an explicit attempt (they proudly say this) to mold children's minds while they are still young. The purpose of education in the Frierian model is not about academics, but shaping children into social justice revolutionary agents in order to "transform" society, i.e. to destroy our civilization and build a progressive utopia from the ashes.
Regarding "in which direction do you think the USA will be headed in terms of foreign policy: a) more of the same b) more interventionist c)more transactional d) more isolationist e) a combination of the above" the best response would be e.
The process of decision on foreign policy is not transparent. We know that there are various clans that push in this or that direction and have different priorities. We know that Commander in Chief has a lot of power when it comes to foreign policy, but how is one to determine when will Trump jump in and do his show ( like he did with Rocket Man ) and when will he just listen to this or that adviser or feel pressured by the media?