re: #7 Unabogie

It’s disconcerting to me that any overreaction by Israel to an attack from Iran will in any way affect the standing of our country, which is not responsible for either. The problem is that both the Left and the Right have a vested interest in casting Biden as having control over the situation and failing to fix it.

You’re forgetting the that entire artifice of US international power is that the US has the ability to fix this kind of thing, and the our relations with client states is justified by the idea we have some kind of leash on them such the action is moral. That centrists suddenly want nuance is just…funny…because centrism has devoted decades of energy to rejecting systemic analysis of problems in favor of heroes-and-villains narratives, baking them into primary education. The idea that “the Left” has somehow arrived at the notion that the President can do something via irrationality just doesn’t bear up when the nation in general visualizes the President as singularly capable of fixing things…which was a big part of both voting for Obama and Trump, both selling the vision of sole individuals as primary actors in history, rectifying the country.

All this is extra fucking weird since “Iran sells weapons to bad people and thus is culpable in their badness” is a load-bearing argument in the sphere of American influence, and getting mad about the inference “America sells weapons to Israel and KSA and is culpable in their badness” is, well, the lacy slip of realpolitik showing.

Centrism always pulls this shit: sure we’ve been in charge since WW2 but actually we’re not fucking up, we’re being totally reasonable and finding common ground with the party that’s been using fascist talking points since 1950. And when something misfires: like the obvious “don’t buy gas from the giant nationalist dicatorship, that will go badly once they have enough money” or “don’t give the monarchists will oil a chance to socially engineer the Islamic World to prevent Communism” the center does what it always does:

t would be vastly better if the Left was interested more in solving problems than they are.

At the risk of overstepping my importance—I’m nobody—the Left’s point is that you can’t solve problems “as they are” because people with power have no incentive to solve them and are perfectly comfortable with a back-and-forth of low-level destruction of unimportant people.

Appealing to “realism” has been a bad-faith proposition since Reagan, since the people condescendingly taking that position are also the people actively ruling out all possibilities they find inconvenient. Particularly in foreign relations, where things barely change with the party in power.

And that’s what’s going on right now: America companies sell arms to people that blow up human beings in ways that are embarrassing to the rules-based international order—an unforced error compounding how we gutted the rules-based international order to lose two wars and generally look stupid blowing up kids— and the American government gives coupons to those countries while claiming that there is a larger stability (Picture not Found) that must be maintained…which sounds reasonable if you live inside a house of whig-colored glass where you never encounter the thought that American interests creating the crisis it must now police—with a lot of help from the KSA, and in the case of Iran, oil companies—and thus it’s stance of “stay the course” kind of seems like stalling tactics ticked-off in lives of random Arabs.

If you want people to respect realism, you can’t constantly hide behind a fiction in which past “realistic” choices haven’t created current consequences.