Ben Friedman
@BH_Friedman
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Policy Director @defpriorities . Former stopper and B-Side Lounge patron. For restraint, pluralism, and the Celtics.
DC mostly. Boston in spirit.
Joined February 2017
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"For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early." At least the Post is reporting on this sentiment, which prominent people assured me doesn't exist when I recently criticized it.
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My favorite genre of Trump tweets is where he finds out what his administration is doing and says he's stopping it.
The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to
@starsandstripes
magazine under my watch. It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!
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Afghanistan is arguably at peace for the first time in 40 years because the government we backed lost.
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This is how to tell the military to commit and tolerate war crimes.
BREAKING: President Trump has granted a pardon to a former first lieutenant in the US Army who was convicted in 2009 of unpremeditated murder after killing a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist prisoner in Iraq.
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The same people who say Russia was always lying about seeing NATO expansion as threatening are now talking about using this war to foment regime change in Russia and see no contradiction there.
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As Coronvirus hits Iran, remember: US sanctions make medical supplies unattainable for many Iranians due to shortfalls and high prices. US officials refused to reassure banks that they could process medical purchases without sanction.
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What a feckless little parting shot from the Trump admin. This does nothing for US security or Yemenis but will presumably create a minor hassle for the Biden people tasked with undoing it to undo any successful disruption of humanitarian aid.
Scoop: The Trump admin is set to designate Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels as a terror group, a move that is likely to disrupt aid efforts & upend UN-backed peace efforts in the war torn country, officials & diplos say.
@columlynch
,
@RobbieGramer
& me
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It blows me away how the case against leaving Afghanistan depends on pretending that up until two weeks ago it was basically a nice liberal place untroubled by massive human rights abuses, terrorism, assassinations, or disharmony among occupying powers.
In many respects,
#Afghanistan
represents the 1st real implementation of the "ending forever wars" doctrine.
The results so far?
- Crumbling of a democratic government;
-
#Taliban
rule;
-
#AlQaeda
ecstatic;
- Emergency mass evacuation;
- Unprecedented transatlantic divisions.
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Evidently the US military was creating fake persons on social media to do pro-Ukraine propaganda, a category of disinformation I was told didn't exist.
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Pompeo’s blustering that he’s not taking ethics advice from Senator Menendez is funny because he had the guy he’s supposed to take ethics advice from fired for investigating his ethics.
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Is it still forbidden to say that unconditional and seemingly bottomless western support might encourage Ukrainian overreach in diplomatic efforts at a settlement and tragically prolong the war?
Ukraine says the war won't end until Crimea is returned and Russia pays reparations.
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Very predictably, attacking the Houthis failed to stop them from attacking shipping, and they have instead escalated; now they are targeting US ships. Now we are left deciding whether to back down and look feckless, or pointlessly escalate.
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The people who think the war in Ukraine should continue until the government of Russia is overthrown basically all insist that NATO expansion was never the slightest threat to Russia. What a world.
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This is right, but also:
-Every single leader of a US adversary is widely cast as irrational in US media: Kim Jung Un, Saddam, Qaddafi, Milosevic, the “Mullahs,” the Taliban, Assad.
-This portrayal is way to oppose diplomacy: if they’re crazy you can’t negotiate with them.
1. The debate surrounding Putin's "rationality" suffers from a serious conceptual problem that is leading many to dangerously alarmist conclusions.
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This is most consequential with regard to coronavirus, but applies to basically whatever Trump gets interested in—ie North Korea, where he put on a show of diplomacy that disrupted the real thing without accomplishing anything. He plays President just enough to screw things up.
“Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job.”
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People arguing that Biden should’ve renounced the withdrawal deal and stayed in Afghanistan include the Presidents of the CFR and Brookings, AEI’s foreign policy head, two of Trump’s national security advisors and a helluva of a lot of other foreign policy insiders.
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In case you lost the plot, US policy in Syria is now to fight a little war with Iran-backed militias in order to safely fight a little war against ISIS bands already hunted by everyone else in Syria including the government we oppose and the Iran-backed fighters we're attacking.
U.S. military now says it has used Apache attack helicopters, AC-130 gunships and M777 artillery in the last 24 hours in its continuing battle against Iranian-linked fighters in Syria. Size and scope of the operation appears to expanding.
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McMaster was on CNN saying the ISIS-K did the Kabul airport bombing at the Taliban’s direction without noting that they’re violent antagonists.
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The point of this article is actually: "what if we're already in a world war with Russia? Can't we just go balls out?" It's difficult to overstate how asinine dangerous this thinking is.
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This is from someone who repeatedly says that Putin is crazy. The way this hustle works is you assume Putin is rational when you advocate measures to deter him and call him irrational when someone you disagree with proposes negotiating with him.
Given how poorly the Russian army has performed in Ukraine, Putin would be crazy to attack a NATO country right now, an alliance with multiples of firepower, manpower, and sophistication beyond the Ukraine military.
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The Biden people must really appreciate the lectures on ending wars right from these hawkish Brits, who are known globally for their graceful exits from imperial errors.
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Iraqis say an ISIS cell, not Khataib Hezbollah backed by Iran, fired a rocket killing a US contractor December 27. So maybe the US killed a bunch of people, almost had a war with Iran and got a bunch of US soldiers injured based on bad intelligence.
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Pence's resolve face needs some work. Less Dad catching you smoking and more "I think we both know how this ends." E.g.
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Everyone writing how Tulsi Gabbard lied about biolabs in Ukraine, aped Russian propaganda or whatever: how about using her actual words and saying how they're false? I just read like 5 articles on this just associating her with Russian lies without bothering with what she said.
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I understand why people are skeptical that just pulling the possibility of NATO expansion to Ukraine wound prevent a Russian invasion (even though no one says it’s this simple) but I cannot understand the hostility to trying, as part of a diplomatic package. It seems deranged.
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Saying that a foreign leader is irrational or crazy is not just wrong almost every time, it’s a way to deny that their actions are explicable, to prohibit understanding, which is sort of the opposite of journalism.
The prevailing belief from experts the last few weeks is that Putin wouldn't try something like this. Not a criticism of expertise but it's a reminder that rational people analyzing things do not take into account enough the possibility that some autocrats are crazy.
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Flynn skating after pleading guilty lying to the FBI about talks with the Russian Ambassador and admitting to being a secret agent of Turkey thanks to Trump, Barr and hack judges' help is an extraordinary case of power trumping justice.
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Using Ukraine to bleed Russia also bleeds Ukraine. Remember the loudest advocates for Ukraine are not its best advocates.
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In a sense, this appears to tell us what we already knew: the war in Afghanistan is a disaster, and US officialdom cooked the books to sell it. But it’s something to see how thoroughly people who supported the war in public trashed it in private.
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I am not at APSA, but I saw this via text and question the idea that asking people not to use urinals is in fact an act of respect for all attendees.
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John Bolton didn’t just pretend to have evidence that Cuba had biological weapons in 2002. He berated and tried to fire intelligence analysts who challenged him on it.
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Glad everyone is pointing out that bombing cultural sites in Iran would be terrible and illegal, but a culturally sensitive war on Iran that avoids bombing its landmarks would also be terrible and illegal.
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This is silly. South Korea is a democracy and doesn't need to sign up for a Cold War with China to stay one. This is about demanding fealty, not democracy.
"A democracy like Korea cannot pretend that it is somehow in between the United States and China. It has to make the decision that it is going to be on the side of
#democracy
." –
@FukuyamaFrancis
Read the full interview with APARC's Gi-Wook Shin ⤵️
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“NATO now largely exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”
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Don’t tell me there’s no hawkish foreign policy establishment or that its leaders are just upset about *how* the war is ending.
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Those saying he had it coming: who cares? What feels good and what makes sound foreign policy are different. We killed two people with a large number of people eager to avenge them with a small number of troops on the ground to manage that. We lit a fire without an extinguisher.
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Managing to screw the Kurds AND ruin relations with Turkey without getting US forces out of Syria would be a magnificent act of foreign policy incompetence.
Dealing with
@LindseyGrahamSC
and many members of Congress, including Democrats, about imposing powerful Sanctions on Turkey. Treasury is ready to go, additional legislation may be sought. There is great consensus on this. Turkey has asked that it not be done. Stay tuned!
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This story suggests a lot of Western European support for Ukraine is a performance for Washington more than a response to real security fears.
“'If America folds, we fold,'"said a senior German official."
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Calling what Russia's doing in Ukraine, which is indeed awful, a Holocaust doesn't just trivialize the Holocaust, it's a road to World War III. Because how do you not risk everything to stop the Holocaust?
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A decade ago, Obama had just announced the surge in Afghanistan and said we'd start pulling out troops in 2011 and be out by 2014. A year ago, Trump's decision to abruptly pull out US forces out of Syria was causing a DC freakout and SecDef resignation. US wars don't end anymore.
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“We’re watching several decades of chaos devolve into chaos right at the end—I mean, who could’ve seen that coming?”
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To my great frustration, reporting on Flynn's crimes and pardon inevitably leaves out how, alongside his retracted guilty plea about lying to the FBI, he admitted to being an unregistered agent for Turkey. It's unclear if the pardon covers that felony.
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Liz Cheney on Meet the Press says the world hasn’t been so dangerous since World War II, which is inherently absurd, while claiming that American leadership is back under Trump, stabilizing the world. Hard to reconcile the two ideas.
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Rough day for the Ivies now that the only person on a major ticket with a degree from one is Trump.
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In times like these, US foreign policy goes into justice mode (how do we punish aggression) and largely abandons its already insufficient concern about practicality (how punishments serve US policy ends beyond pure retribution). So we do counterproductive stuff that feels right.
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It is stunning how many people paid to opine about US foreign policy think its purpose, essentially, is to punish the wicked, whatever the consequences. You’d think everyone would see what a profoundly irresponsible approach to policy that is by now.
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If we have to coerce Taiwan into properly defending itself maybe we shouldn't defend it.
I completely agree.
I also support targeted sanctions to induce Taiwan to move toward asymmetric defense. Taiwan is important. Americans would die in its defense. Ergo we should do everything needed to get them to build a strong defense.
@matthewstoller
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My point isn’t that the establishment is totally unified on Afghanistan. Failure there eventually, finally created some discord. My point is there is an establishment, and it’s very pro war compared to anything else—the public, other countries, academia, common sense.
Call it what you want, but professional incentives and social milieu do unify DC foreign policy insiders around some hawkish beliefs—what used to get called an operational code. But it isn't totally fixed, and the wisdom of war Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is an example of change.
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Hard to think of an idea as historically vacuous and destructive as big powers shouldn't encourage negotiated ends to unjust wars.
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Who brags about their humility?
Swagger (def.): To represent America with pride, humility, and professionalism. We've done it.
#Swagger
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This is true, and it shows how Trump’s foreign policies, as opposed to his some of his rhetoric, were always more establishmentarian than either his harshest critics or fiercest advocates like to admit.
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The fact that people who said to freak out harder about terrorism are saying we’re overreacting to coronavirus shows how much ideology drives risk perception.
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The Biden administration deserves credit for staying focused on the national interest and getting out despite the chorus of Washington establishment howls lamenting the war’s end.
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I wish Ambassador Taylor didn't frame his problem with trading aid to Ukraine for dirt on Biden largely as a betrayal of our sacred duty to defend Ukraine. You can be against giving lethal aid to Ukraine and against extorting it for campaign help.
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It's more like an act of a fealty to a militant minority of attendees.
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Naked corruption. Openly using the powers of the office for personal enrichment.
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Note that the people being lambasted these days for being Russian 5th columnists and isolationists are by and large in favor of continuing heavy military aid to Ukraine and want it to win, just not at any cost. The acceptable opinion space is narrow.
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Basically we stole oil from Iran for profit and the further immiseration of two countries' populations based on the inane theory that doing so will cause them to hate their governments, not us, and overthrow them.
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For all the valid concern about this and questions about what Biden is up to, it remains quite ambiguous whether we would actually defend Taiwan, given the specter of major and nuclear war. Maybe now we're into non-strategic ambiguity.
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Hiding in the corners here is an impolitic point: the US view on the best war outcome might not fully align with Ukraine's, whatever Jake Sullivan says. For those taking the view above, that means using Ukraine to grind Russia, but it could also mean pushing them to settle.
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Leaving aside Coons’ error—Saudi Arabia technically isn’t a US ally—his idea that we should have a war for it because alliances are just generally good shows how the US entraps itself in real and informal alliances and risks war against its interests.
just two dudes hanging out, gassing up another american war in the middle east (maybe!)
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This is at least the 3rd time Biden has said this nonsense that Jews can't be safe without the state of Israel. Someone needs to walk him through how he's the president telling a group Americans they have to rely on another country for their security.
So my president wants me to think that I’m not safe in the United States but for Israel? Actually I’m less safe because of Israel. Keep your Zionism to yourself Joe.
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5 days after the US Secretary of State told the UN that “human rights and dignity must stay at the core of the international order.”
The U.S. blocked the UN Security Council from issuing a statement aimed at reducing tensions between Israel and Palestinians, diplomats say.
Sources told
@AFP
that 14 out of 15 Sec. Council members were in favor of the statement.
The U.S. also blocked a similar text on Monday.
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Trying to read Petraeus' we could have won Afghanistan if we tried harder piece with an open mind is hard with sentences like this: "In the end, the outcome came down to a lack of American strategic patience." When does patience get strategic? 30 years?
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The pretension that Trump, who jacked up defense spending, hired HR McCaster and Jim Mattis, opposed no wars except past ones, and kept the ones he got, was such a threat to the national security state that they had him arrested is preposterous mythology.
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I’d appreciate it if everyone could do their professional ass kissing on Facebook or LinkedIn and leave twitter for fighting about shit. Thanks.
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Susan Rice here pretends that the US was neutral in the Syrian civil war—as if you can intervene in a civil war without helping a side—and forgets to mention how the US armed and trained rebels trying to overthrow Assad, some of whom are now helping the Turks attack the Kurds.
When Pres. Trump decided the US should simply get out of Syria, did he have a point?
@AmbassadorRice
says no: He's betrayed US allies and given a "get out of jail free card" to the ISIS fighters they're holding.
See the full interview on GPS, at 10 am and 1 pm ET Sunday on
@CNN
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I don't like it how that Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign liberally calls Americans traitors, especially for having with meetings with countries we're not at war with.
@NBCNews
So, a group of anonymous US tankies discussing Ukraine with Russia behind Ukraine’s back? There’re another words to describe it: treason, betrayal, and pure imperialism.
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Credibility arguments for staying in Afghanistan shouldn’t be taken this seriously. Who really counts on the US to endlessly fight failed wars? Who really thinks leaving Afghanistan imperils NATO? Resort to desperate, bad-faith arguments is the news here.
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Samantha Power on NPR’s
@1A
says she wishes she’d more forcefully told Obama not to go to Congress and just bomb Syria after its 2013 chemical weapons use out of concern for America’s standing in the world, which to her apparently is harmed by congress voting on wars.
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Russia's will probably invade Ukraine tonight, and most of the US analysts meant to inform the public about foreign policy are going to pretend the US did what it could to exhaust diplomatic options and that it somehow proves it NATO expansion was never an issue.
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But Trump hasn’t brought any troops home,
@nytimes
. That’s just something he says. Quit feeding this myth.
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Pompeo and Trump should be pressed to explain how keeping Iranian healthcare workers from getting masks so they don’t get coronavirus advances our security.
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How the White House press corps came to be like the fifty most hawkish people in America outside of like AEI is something I’d read a couple dissertations about.
Today the White House press corps is continuing to ask why the US is sending javelins etc but won’t send fighter jets.
“Why are you holding back?”
Psaki continues to explain why they don’t want to escalate.
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It's almost like a plea from the Pentagon to cut its budget, especially the units that conduct theatrical military operations for PR.
Blue Angels and Thunderbirds over the Brooklyn Bridge 💪🏼🇺🇸💪🏼
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If someone says the future of Europe, democracy, or the international order or something similarly melodramatic is at stake in Ukraine, it's ok to ignore them on the grounds they're full of shit, running for office, or sniffing glue. Life is short.
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Pretty stunning how an anarchist position, abolish/ defund the police, has taken off on social media. I don't want police to murder people, but also would like to hear something more than "good luck" if I call 9-11. Is that reactionary?
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How about we end a war or two, bring the troops back, and then have the stupid parade?
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The fact that Tom Barrack and Michael Flynn stood to profit from a Saudi nuclear program not only gave the Trump administration more reason to coddle Saudi Arabia, it also maybe created a corrupt incentive to ditch the JCPOA and make Iran more hostile.
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We agreed not to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty at Budapest in 1994, not to defend it by force. We did not extend deterrence. Ukraine only undermines US credibility to defend actual allies when people pretend it’s one.
If Russia invades a non-NATO partner vital to US-led operations in Iraq/Afghanistan, whose integrity we guaranteed in 1994 and defense we materially support, so soon after the abandonment of our allies in Kabul, the damage done to US credibility and hegemony will be immeasurable.
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There ought to be congressional hearings to figure out what policy has CBP turning away Iranian students with visas and basically harassing Iranian-Americans and Iranian green card holders. Why is it especially bad at Logan
@AyannaPressley
?
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Unbelievable shit that barely registers as news: Trump invented a recent conversation with Prime Minister Modi about India’s standoff with China, according to Indian officials, who say their last conversation, on April 4th, was about hydroxychloroquine
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I debated John Bolton at a private event in 2014, and he was still hopping mad that Robert Gates, in his telling, had talked Bush out of bombing Iran. If Trump goes another few days without bombing, maybe Bolton will be pissed enough to quit. He set everything up so carefully.
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I have an oped out with
@NBCNewsTHINK
arguing that, while it's natural to sympathize with Ukraine, the US should stop pretending we might defend it against Russia.
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An Iran-backed militia isn’t equivalent to Iran. Iraqis generally don’t like having their country occupied or when occupying forces bomb people there without their government’s permission. Real Iraqis stormed the embassy. Blaming Iran is a way to dodge the implications of that.
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It is quite inconvenient for everyone shouting that NATO had nothing to do with the war that Biden said this.
Biden to Zakaria: "The very first time I met with Putin two years ago in Geneva, and he said, I want commitments on no Ukraine in— in NATO, I said: We're not going to do that because it's an open-door policy."
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Lindsey Graham calling for Putin's assassination is beyond reckless. This isn't just because Russia might retaliate if someone does it or that it will lock in paranoid hostility, but also because it tells Putin complying with western pressure to end the war is pointless.
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The
@nytimes
just won’t stop claiming that Trump seeks to end US entanglements in the Middle East as he keeps digging the US deeper into them.
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From promoting the Iraq war by claiming al Qaeda was working with Saddam, to smearing people as antisemitic, to turning the Atlantic into the Weekly Standard, with hysterical opposition to exiting Afghanistan, to PBS. What an indictment of US media.
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Here's Evelyn Farkas, an explicit advocate of having World War III over Ukraine, in the Times to warn that US advocates of eventually maybe pushing negotiations to end the war are just stooges repeating Putin's prescribed lines. Perfect.
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Russia's airstrike on Turkish forces today in Idlib shows the stupidity of the recent U.S. decision to "stand behind" Turkey there. Turkish forces prolong the war, make things worse for civilians, and risk war with Russia. We should press for their exit.
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God love the foreign policy thinking that believes in only half of the security dilemma, that nuclear deterrence works for adversaries but not us, and that our crazy threat perception is sensible while adversaries are all paranoid lunatics. True 🇺🇸 exceptionalism.
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To the extent continuing this war gave us added credibility, it would be a worse than useless variety that tells clients they needn’t bother with building capable, independent combat power, they can steal aid money forever, and US leaders will never pull the plug.
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The US has enough trouble with coronavirus and Trump doing his thing without this sort of hysterical nonsense: "This might be the most dangerous moment the United States has ever faced." Take a deep breath, CNN.
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In both 2022 and 2023, if this budget holds, US military spending will be higher in real terms than any point during the Cold War. That is, adjusting for inflation, US defense costs more than it did during the Cold War peaks; Korea and Reagan's build-up.
The "national defense" spending figure for 2023 released today is $813 billion. The widely-reported $773 figure, I believe, is just the Pentagon, excluding DOE nukes and other "defense" odds and ends outside DOD.
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This assassination is stupid in that blowback is likely and it will likely help Iranian hardliners who want nuclear weapons. It is also criminal, and Congress could investigate if any US officials were involved / had advanced knowledge.
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Bomb the snow.
Dana Perino says the I-95 traffic jam happened because the left won't let cops have "military-grade equipment"
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To be clear, Cohen's argument, which is made a lot, is that because Russia wants us to worry about nuclear war, no good American should worry out loud about it. No debate allowed about nuclear war or whatever else if it might help an adversary.
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This story shows WH officials are after McMaster. Besides that, it's too fraught with anonymous agendas to trust.
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