President Jimmy Carter, was, in my opinion a wonderful humanbeing and a failed president. Very few commentators are addressing what I consider to have been the most significant foreign affairs failure during his presidency - Iran. Carter presided over our government during the period that an anti-American Islamist government replaced an archaic imperial dictatorship allied with this country. Iran then transitioned into the formidable problem that it is today, linking unrest in the Middle East to problems in Europe and the Far East. I was serving in Stuttgart, during this period of time, at the military headquarters that should have handled the hostage problem, but we were cut out and it was mishandled directly out of Washington. Washington bungled it, but all of that, miserable as it was, is not my basic critique. America failed to support Iran's move into the modern world. The failure was larger than just Carter. We were, as a nation, content with a relationship with a government that was failing to answer the problems of the country adequately to resist the coup. It is a storyline often repeated with diverse details all over the world and it reflects what I consider to be our, your and my, greatest weakness.
We tend to rely on tactics when we should be developing strategy. Whether we choose to accept it as fact or not, the world is overpopulated with humans. The vast majority, if not the entirety of humanity, is inherently greedy. The existing pool of humanity includes vast differences in the quality of life. A time honored method for redressing this imbalance is war. All of this at a point in the evolution of humans where we have developed nuclear weapons. Today, several governments, hostile to us, possess the ability to destroy us - lock, stock, and barrel. The single most powerful deterrent to war between us is the fear of mutual devastation. The worry that I have is the fragility of the argument against conflict. Vladimir Putin literally has his finger on the nuclear option. So do Xi Jin Peng, and Joe Biden. I don't trust any of them, and I have no way of knowing who will be replacing them down the road. It just takes one fool to trigger a cataclysmic event that may well solve the overpopulation problem, but it will bring with it far more than we are bargaining for as we quibble about the piss-ant subjects that seem so important to us now.
President elect Trump brags that there was less world conflict under his watch than under his successor. True, but his "solutions" only go so far. We, you and I, need leadership that will move us away from the present morass of confusion, past MAGA, to a people bent on improving the lives of all people clinging to this spinning rock wandering around aimlessly in an empty eternity. In order for that leadership to appear we, you and I, out here in the hustings, have to demand it.
Trump is an improvement over Biden, but we still have one hell of a lot further to go if we are to do what needs to be done to avoid an atomic stupidity, let alone create a world worth living in. The sign on the bathroom door is not as important as having a bathroom with a door on it.