Speakers: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs from the All In Pod Summit and the late Professor Stephen Cohen during a panel at the 92nd Street “Y” in New York from 2018 - at the height of Russia/gate.
Trish’s Monologue: failing foreign policy leads us to the unthinkable.
Reading: Nuclear War — A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen — Trish reads the prologue.
This week we deep dive the precarious state of the world with the Middle East on fire and Ukraine apparently lobbing missiles deep into Russian territory. There are credible concerns about a nuclear escalation. Hear the late Stephen Cohen, a highly respected Russian Studies expert with a prescient warning from six years ago. John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs — two important foreign policy experts bring dire warnings from the All In Podcast summit.
Over the weekend, Israel hit Lebanon and Ukraine hit Russia with explosions people thought might be tactical nukes — highly unlikely but the world is so unstable, the impossible now seems about to happen.
American foreign policy is off the rails. Exhibit “A” is the Harris campaign boast about getting an endorsement from Dick Cheney, considered an ogre leftover from the Global War on Terror but now dusted off as an emeritus statesman by Kamala’s campaign. The mind boggles.
As Vice President under George Bush, Cheney was the driver behind the lies that lead to the Iraq War debacle — something a few Democrats did speak out against. My how times have changed. Cheney’s courtship of the Dems is a deep state play that exposes much and relies on the short memories of the public and the news media. In 2008, Atlantic Magazine began a searing takedown of Cheney with this:
When Vice President Dick Cheney left office, his approval rating stood at a staggeringly low 13 percent. Few political figures in history have been so reviled.
His role in tricking the country into attacking Iraq stands out but so does his support for the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib.
President Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the Iraq War, as do the members of Congress who voted for it. But Dick Cheney’s role in the run-up to war was uniquely irresponsible and mendacious. And after the invasion, he contributed to the early dysfunction on the ground. Even Iraq War supporters should rue his involvement.
The most succinct statement of his misdeeds comes from “The People v. Richard Cheney,” a 2007 article by Wil S. Hylton. The piece recounts how Cheney undercut the CIA by instructing subordinates in that agency to stovepipe raw intelligence directly to his office. He also worked with Donald Rumsfeld to establish an alternative intelligence agency within the Pentagon. Both of these actions directly contributed to the faulty information that informed the decision to go to war.
Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decision making, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.
After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the Founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail.
You’ll recall that part of his scheming involved some of the very people Bari Weiss and others are cheering on now because of their support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Cheney enablers like Douglas Feith and Condoleezza Rice may soon appear as Harris foreign policy advisers. Call them what you will — neocons, war hawks — but in the end, Deep State covers it all.
A friend sent me a video this morning of a German politician and former journalist who is raising the alarm about the dangerous state of the world. Dr. Gabrielle Krone-Schmalz said:
The younger generation, for whom peace has become something to be taken for granted is so focussed on the issue of climate change that there is no room left for the issue of war and peace. It should be clear to everyone if peace doesn’t work out, especially considering nuclear weapons, that the climate doesn’t matter anymore either.
Clarification — someone on X had a go at me over the weekend for saying something like I hope Israel succeeds, as if I am no longer critical of the dangerous and immoral way it has been behaving. My point was that I want Israel to survive the suicidal approach it is taking, not that I approve of it. Badly phrased. And I think perhaps not even possible at this point.
Stay critical.
#truthovertribe
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