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.
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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