Old disagreements or successful, new relationships?.

 Aneliese Bernard, a former senior State Department official dealing in African Affairs is quoted, by PBS, as saying that "We can’t deny that our deteriorating relationships in other parts of the world: the Gulf, Israel and others, all have an influential impact on our bilateral relations in countries in West Africa.”  I agree, wholeheartedly with that assessment and fully expect to see some form of the Russian Wagner Group in Niger in the not too distant future.

The American public refuses to see what is happening across the entire foreign relations spectrum.  We are losing our influence in country after country, and various foreign antagonists are ineffectively, repeat ineffectively, replacing us.  I fully expect the deterioration in our international position to continue and metastasize as the world falls into more and more chaos.  This trajectory, combined with our own internal confusion, is extraordinarily dangerous in a world full of nuclear weapons.  We must not let details continue to confuse and blind us about the sea change that is going on in the world around us, and we can not take any solace from the fact that Russia, China and Iran are no more effective than are we.  The enemy is chaos, not any particular individual international player.

Neither of our two presidential aspirants, nor anyone else that I know of, for that matter, sees the situation the same way that I do.  Biden is the wishy-washy one, Trump the braggadocio, but neither has the foresight to see beyond gaining the right to sit in the White House and play with the knobs and dials of the American body politic.  If I am forced to choose, I will choose Trump, but I do not expect him to do anything other than, at best, postpone the continuing deterioration of our position in the world.  Political stability can not be attained by ignoring the lousy living conditions and aspirations of far too many humans all over the world, including those existing in the "shit hole" countries, and in those countries currently suffering an adversarial relationship with us.

I am as nationalistic as the next American citizen, but I am also a realist.  The reason Putin, Xi and the Ayatollah are threatening war with us is because we can not find a way to live together on an increasingly small chunk of space matter.  We are, today, trying to win old disagreements, when we should be focused on building successful, new relationships that fit conditions in today's world.  None of it is because we have the wrong individual sitting at the Resolute Desk.  The individuals that we select to lead us are selected because they reflect us.  In order to change the way Washington looks at our problems, we have to change you and me.  If we do not do that, the inevitable, repeat inevitable, outcome is, sooner or later, nuclear war.  I believe that to be stupid beyond belief.