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The Russian Mirror

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A recent article in the New York Times about Russia’s “intelligence state,” authored by John Sipher, a former chief of station for the CIA, provides a valuable mirror for the American people. The problem is that American statists cannot see it as a mirror. While Sipher’s article clearly demonstrates that American statists, especially conservative ones, can see the wrongdoing of foreign totalitarian or authoritarian regimes with great clarity, they have a moral blindness when it comes to recognizing wrongdoing by their own government. Even worse, they defend wrongdoing by their own regime (which they can’t see as wrongdoing) as a way to combat foreign wrongdoing. In fact, they come to view their own wrongdoing as something good when it is being used to oppose wrongdoing by a foreign regime. Sipher labels Russia’s (and, before that, the Soviet) governmental system an “intelligence state.” He’s critical of it, and rightly so. It is a type of governmental system that engages in ...

Trump and Maduro, Birds of a Feather

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Even while still keeping U.S. troops mired in America’s forever wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, President Donald “America First” Trump is threatening to order his army to invade Venezuela in order to oust Venezuelan dictator Vincente Maduro from office and install a pro-U.S. puppet in his stead. As Ronald Reagan might have put it, “There he goes again.” In 2017, Maduro used his federal judiciary to annul the Venezuelan National Assembly. He then engineered a new congress that consisted of his lackeys. Not surprisingly, Maduro’s actions received condemnation from all over the world. The head of the OAS called it a coup and declared it to be the final blow to democracy. The U.S. government said it was a “serious setback for democracy in Venezuela.” In 2019, the U.S. Congress voted to reject Trump’s request for funding for his immigration wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump’s response? It was no different in principle from that of Maduro. No, Trump didn’t ...

Donald Trump, America’s Elected Dictator

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After losing his battle against Congress to secure funding for his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, President Trump is declaring that that the congressional rebuff is irrelevant anyway. The reason? Trump is declaring an “emergency” under the “National Emergencies Act,” which, he says, authorizes him to spend U.S. taxpayer money on the wall without congressional authorization. He’s going to have the U.S. military, which will dutifully follow his orders, construct his Berlin Wall. Trump’s action is the very essence of dictatorship. Check out other dictators around the world — Maduro in Venezuela, Ortega in Nicaragua, Diaz-Canel in Cuba, Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, el-Sisi in Egypt, and Zi in China. They don’t have to jack around with congresses. They have the authority to just act or order. That’s what makes them dictators. In their customary blind support of their great leader, Trumpistas will say that Trump can’t be a dictator because he was democratically elected. ...

U.S. Indifference to Life in Venezuela

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By encouraging the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, to declare himself the rightful president of Venezuela, President Trump (“Mr. America First”) has shown, once again, his interventionist colors. More important, he and his interventionist advisers have shown their total indifference to the value of human life in Venezuela. By creating a situation in which two different public ...

The Korean War: The Moral Bankruptcy of Interventionism

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An article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Remembering the Forgotten War” demonstrates perfectly the moral bankruptcy of the philosophy of foreign interventionism. Calling for the Korean War to become more highly remembered, the author, Hampton Sides, extols some of the popular justifications for subjecting U.S. troops to death, injury, and maiming in the Korean War. Hampton tells the ...