Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Scott Lively on U.S. Foreign Policy


Scott Lively on U.S. Foreign Policy

What's next for the Committee to Elect Scott Lively?

Scott Lively
As you know, I deplore the "political game" and will continue to speak to you plainly and act forthrightly regarding my views and intentions.
The day after the November election I switched my enrollment from Independent to Republican and am contemplating a run for Congress against Richard Neal.  I have not made a firm decision, but am leaning in that direction.   
There are a number of reasons why I would pursue Congress rather than a state office, but one of them is my interest in foreign policy and concern about the disastrous actions of the Obama administration around the world.  I am posting an article below that closely reflects my views on one aspect of the problem. 
I am especially concerned that the Neoconservatives (read Republican liberals) have aligned with the Obama administration re Russia and are jointly waging a campaign of anti-Russian propaganda designed to deceive conservatives into supporting a hot war with Russia.
This is a not only very dangerous game geopolitically, it is robbing social conservatives of their most valuable potential alliance in the world today.  American and Russian conservatives could today be cooperating together to roll back liberalism around the world.  Instead, the cultural Marxists of both major US political parties are trying to drive a wedge between us with the absurd lie that Russia is trying to revive the Soviet Union.  
Neither Russia nor its president are without flaws, and it is as impossible to defend them against a campaign of relentless criticism as is is anyone else but Jesus Christ.  That's the psy-ops mind game the elite media plays: a rhetorical blitzkrieg of misrepresentations, double standards and sophistry.
But if we ask the simple question "Which countries of the world and their current leadership align most closely to the goals of Biblical Christianity and of ideological conservatism?" it's a whole different ballgame.
If we rank the current leaders and countries of the world by that standard Putin and Russia rank high on the list -- certainly much higher than Obama and his version of America.  Indeed, is there any world leader speaking in defense of persecuted Christians in the Middle East like Putin has?  Is there any other "first world" nation standing up against the homosexual agenda like Russia is doing?     
In any case, please read the following article.  And if you're interested in keeping the Committee to Elect Scott Lively alive please consider making a donation here:   http://livelyforgovernor.com/donate.htm  We're still using the Lively for Governor website until we can raise funds to create a new site for 2015/16, but the donations go directly into our general fund.
I also have a new email account for this election cycle: CTEScottLively@gmail.com
Blessings,

Stratfor’s George Friedman and Realism in American Foreign Policy

By Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.
George Friedman’s December 2014 interview with the Kommersantnewspaper in Moscow, republished in English on Russia-Insider and other alternative media, has attracted considerable attention among pundits. The founder and CEO of Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, an information and analysis service, made a number of remarkable assertions on the origins of the present confrontation with Russia over Ukraine which the chatting classes simply could not ignore.
Among the gems, we find Friedman’s matter-of-fact statement that the United States was behind the coup d’etat of February 21, 2014 which overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich and brought to power the extreme nationalists and pro-Western forces of the Maidan. He tells us that in doing so the United States was merely looking after its national interests and serving its hundred-year-old policy of preventing any nation from becoming a hegemonic power on the European continent, which Russia was showing a potential and an intention to achieve.
The origin of U.S. misgivings over Russia, the determination that Russia had to be contained or disrupted or distracted by new security threats Friedman identifies with the Syrian conflict a couple of years ago, was when Russia demonstrated it was capable of exerting significant influence and acting contrary to American plans in the Middle East, an area of strategic importance.
His reputation for heading a “Shadow CIA” (Barron’s description of Stratfor) made Friedman’s stress on Realpolitik drivers for U.S. foreign policy appear to be the voice of Washington, telling us the real story of what is going on.
In Friedman’s analysis, there is no personal dimension. Obama is bound hand and foot; he is doing what any American president would have to do in the face of rising Russia. There is no “Tsar Putin,” no “mafia state.” Instead Friedman says simply: “It's a matter of the fundamental divergence of the national interests of two great powers.”
Friedman’s statements are all the more intriguing to commentators on Russian-American relations, because they run roughly in parallel with the explanations of the conflict which that consummate practitioner of Realpolitik, Vladimir Putin, gave repeatedly in his major public appearances from October to December last year.
The problem with taking Friedman as the ultimate insider is that what he is saying runs smack into the conventional wisdom of the chief actors in Washington responsible for formulating and approving our foreign policy, as well as for explaining it to the nation: the President, the presidential administration, the Secretary of State and his assistants, the U.S. Senate. That wisdom states flatly that Realpolitik, balance of power thinking are shop-worn remnants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this view, we have moved on to values-based foreign policy, otherwise known as Idealism or Liberalism.
This dogma was so entrenched that when the Russians made their move in the spring of 2014 to change European borders ‘by force’ (if we believe the Washington narrative) and take back Crimea, it sparked a debate among the court philosophers of our foreign policy establishment. Was Realpolitik making a comeback and putting in question the End of History beliefs of the Neoconservatives, the key promoters of Idealism?
In his contribution to the debate set out by Foreign Affairs magazine in its May-June issue - “The Return of Geopolitics” – Princeton professor G. John Ikenberry reminded us that the global architecture of financial, defense and other liberal institutions that the U.S. put in place at the start of the Cold War had continued to build out after the Cold War ended. They managed geopolitics as designed, maintained the American empire even if this was not understood by Francis Fukuyama’s followers, who saw a conflict-free future now that ideology-based conflicts had been resolved once and for all.
However, the September-October issue of FA carried an article by University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer (“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault.”) in which Liberalism/Idealism is described as ideological blinkers of our political leadership that led us to misjudge the Russians on NATO and cross their red lines, leading to the present confrontation.
In the rebuttal to Mearsheimer in the November-December issue ofFA, Michael McFaul denounces Realpolitik generally, while Stephen Sestanovich claims that the US, like Russia, is not a pure play in its foreign policy, and that it follows national interest, meaning old-fashioned power politics, even if it talks a Liberal policy line.
What are we to make of this?
It raises the question of who really is in control of U.S. foreign policy. Is it the silent minority who believe in an interest-based policy, or is it the voluble majority who insist that democratic, free market values must drive policy, that peaceful relations are only possible between states that the U.S. qualifies as democratic and that other regimes must be overthrown.
And why does this matter? It is important because the Realist school, by its nature, looks for compromises in a context of ever changing alignments between states, whereas Idealism, with its emphasis on universal values, leaves no room for compromise and flux.
It would be very reassuring if the President, John Kerry, Samantha Power and Susan Rice spoke like George Friedman. However, they do not, and this is one of the reasons why serious observers of the present confrontation like Mikhail Gorbachev are expressing alarm over the possibility of the present Cold War moving into new directions, namely a hot war between the U.S. and Russia, with unforeseeable and possibly catastrophic consequences.
Source: Scott Lively email message, via Last Days Watchman
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