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Welcome to my blog http://www.skegley.blogspot.com/ . CAVEAT LECTOR- Let the reader beware. This is a Christian Conservative blog. It is not meant to offend anyone. Please feel free to ignore this blog, but also feel free to browse and comment on my posts! You may also scroll down to respond to any post.

For Christian American readers of this blog:

I wish to incite all Christians to rise up and take back the United States of America with all of God's manifold blessings. We want the free allowance of the Bible and prayers allowed again in schools, halls of justice, and all governing bodies. We don't seek a theocracy until Jesus returns to earth because all men are weak and power corrupts the very best of them.
We want to be a kinder and gentler people without slavery or condescension to any.

The world seems to be in a time of discontent among the populace. Christians should not fear. God is Love, shown best through Jesus Christ. God is still in control. All Glory to our Creator and to our God!

A favorite quote from my good friend, Jack Plymale, which I appreciate:

"Wars are planned by old men,in council rooms apart. They plan for greater armament, they map the battle chart, but: where sightless eyes stare out, beyond life's vanished joys, I've noticed,somehow, all the dead and mamed are hardly more than boys(Grantland Rice per our mutual friend, Sarah Rapp)."

Thanks Jack!

I must admit that I do not check authenticity of my posts. If anyone can tell me of a non-biased arbitrator, I will attempt to do so more regularly. I know of no such arbitrator for the internet.

Showing posts with label Pat Buchanan. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Buchan - America's Unsustainable Empire ... Thx Paul C !

America's Unsustainable Empire

By Patrick J. Buchanan

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Tuesday - April 24, 2018

Before President Trump trashes the Iran nuclear deal, he might consider: If he could negotiate an identical deal with Kim Jong Un, it would astonish the world and win him the Nobel Peace Prize.

For Iran has no nuclear bomb or ICBM and has never tested either. It has never enriched uranium to bomb grade. It has shipped 98 percent of its uranium out of the country. It has cameras inside and inspectors crawling all over its nuclear facilities.

And North Korea? It has atom bombs and has tested an H-bomb. It has intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can hit Guam and an ICBM that, fully operational, could hit the West Coast. It has shorter-range missiles that could put nukes on South Korea and Japan.

Hard to believe Kim Jong Un will surrender these weapons, his ticket of admission to the table of great powers.

Yet the White House position is that the Iran nuclear deal should be scrapped, and no deal with Kim Jong Un signed that does not result in the "denuclearization" of the peninsula.

If denuclearization means Kim gives up all his nukes and strategic missiles, ceases testing, and allows inspectors into all his nuclear facilities, we may be waiting a long time.

Trump decides on the Iran deal by May 12. And we will likely know what Kim is prepared to do, and not prepared to do, equally soon.

France's President Emmanuel Macron is in D.C. to persuade Trump not to walk away from the Iran deal and to keep U.S. troops in Syria. Chancellor Angela Merkel will be arriving at week's end with a similar message.

On the White House front burner then are these options:

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Will North Korea agree to surrender its nuclear arsenal, or is it back to confrontation and possible war?

Will we stick with the nuclear deal with Iran, or walk away, issue new demands on Tehran, and prepare for a military clash if rebuffed?

Do we pull U.S. troops out of Syria as Trump promised, or keep U.S. troops there to resist the reconquest of his country by Bashar Assad and his Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah and Shiite allies?

Beyond, the larger question looms: How long can we keep this up?

How long can this country, with its shrinking share of global GDP, sustain its expanding commitments to confront and fight all over the world?

U.S. planes and ships now bump up against Russians in the Baltic and Black seas. We are sending Javelin anti-tank missiles to Kiev, while NATO allies implore us to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance.

This would mean a U.S. guarantee to fight an alienated, angered and nuclear-armed Russia in Crimea and the Caucasus.

Sixteen years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, we are still there, assisting Afghan troops against a Taliban we thought we had defeated.

We are now fighting what is left of ISIS in Syria alongside our Kurd allies, who tug us toward conflict with Turkey.

U.S. forces and advisers are in Niger, Djibouti, Somalia. We are aiding the Saudis in their air war and naval blockade of Yemen.

The last Korean War, which cost 33,000 U.S. lives, began in the June before this writer entered 7th grade. Why is the defense of a powerful South Korea, with an economy 40 times that of the North, still a U.S. responsibility?

We are committed, by 60-year-old treaties, to defend Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand. Voices are being heard to have us renew the war guarantee to Taiwan that Jimmy Carter canceled in 1979.

National security elites are pushing for new naval and military ties to Vietnam and India, to challenge Beijing in the South China Sea, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.

How long can we sustain a worldwide empire of dependencies?

How many wars of this century — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen — turned out to have been worth the blood shed and the treasure lost? And what have all the "color-coded revolutions" we have instigated to advance "democracy" done for America?

In a New York Times essay, "Adapting to American Decline," Christopher Preble writes: "America's share of global wealth is shrinking. By some estimates, the United States accounted for roughly 50 percent of global output at the end of World War II. ... It has fallen to 15.1 percent today."

Preble continues: "Admitting that the United States is incapable of effectively adjudicating every territorial dispute or of thwarting every security threat in every part of the world is hardly tantamount to surrender. It is rather a wise admission of the limits of American power."

It is imperative, wrote Walter Lippmann, that U.S. commitments be brought into balance with U.S. power. This "forgotten principle ... must be recovered and returned to the first place in American thought."

That was 1943, at the height of a war that found us unprepared.

We are hugely overextended today. And conservatives have no higher duty than to seek to bring U.S. war guarantees into conformity with U.S. vital interests and U.S. power.

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SOURCE: Columns

TOPICS: 9/11, Afghanistan, Bashar Assad, Donald J. Trump, Emmanuel Macron, France, Iran, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, National Security, NATO, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, South Korea, Syria

Image Source: Pixabay

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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Trump incited "Nationalism" ... Thx Air C!

What Trump Has Wrought

BY PAT BUCHANAN

APRIL 5, 2016, 5:00 AM

As Wisconsinites head for the polls, our Beltway elites are almost giddy. For they foresee a Badger State bashing for Donald Trump, breaking his momentum toward the Republican nomination.

Should the Donald fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot, 1,237, there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race.

But this city of self-delusion should realize there is no going back for America. For, whatever his stumbles of the last two weeks, Trump has helped to unleash the mightiest force of the 21st century: nationalism.

Transnationalism and globalism are moribund.

First among the issues on which Trump has triumphed — “We will build the wall — and Mexico will pay for it!” — is border security.

Republican candidates who failed to parrot Trump on illegal immigration were among the first casualties.

For that is where America is, and that is where the West is.

Consider Europe. Four months ago, Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year for throwing open the gates to the “huddled masses” of the Middle and Near East.

Merkel’s Germany is now leading the EU in amassing a huge bribe to the Turks to please take them back, and keep them away from the Greek islands that are now Islam’s Ellis Island into Europe.

Africa’s population will double to 2.5 billion by 2050. With 60 percent of Africans now under 25 years of age, millions will find their way to the Med to cross to the Old Continent where Europeans are aging, shrinking and dying. Look for gunboats in the Med.

If immigration is the first issue where Trump connected with the people, the second is trade.

Republicans are at last learning that trade deficits do matter, that free trade is not free. The cost comes in dead factories, lost jobs, dying towns and the rising rage of an abandoned Middle America whose country this is and whose wages have stagnated for decades.

Economists who swoon over figures on consumption forget what America’s 19th-century meteoric rise to self-sufficiency teaches, and what all four presidents on Mount Rushmore understood.

Production comes before consumption. Who owns the orchard is more essential than who eats the apples. We have exported the economic independence that Hamilton taught was indispensable to our political independence. We have forgotten what made us great.

China, Japan, Germany — the second, third and fourth largest economies on earth — all owe their prosperity to trade surpluses run for decades at the expense of the Americans.

A third casualty of Trumpism is the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus among liberal interventionists and neoconservatives.

Trump subjects U.S. commitments to a cost-benefit analysis, as seen from the standpoint of cold national interest.

What we do we get from continuing to carry the largest load of the defense of a rich Europe, against a Russia with one-fourth of Europe’s population?

How does Vladimir Putin, leader of a nation that in the last century lost its European and world empires and a third of its landmass, threaten us?

Why must we take the lead in confronting and containing Putin in Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia? No vital U.S. interest is imperiled there, and Russia’s ties there are older and deeper than ours to Puerto Rico.

Why is it the responsibility of the U.S. Pacific Fleet to defend the claims of Hanoi, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Brunei, to rocks, reefs and islets in the South China Sea — against the claims of China?

American hawks talk of facing down Beijing in the South and East China Seas while U.S. companies import so much in Chinese-made goods they are fully subsidizing Beijing’s military budget.

Does this make sense?

Patriotism, preserving and protecting the unique character of our nation and people, economic nationalism, America First, staying out of other nation’s wars — these are as much the propellants of Trumpism as is the decline of the American working and middle class.

Trump’s presence in the race has produced the largest turnout ever in the primaries of either party. He has won the most votes, most delegates, most states. Wisconsin aside, he will likely come to Cleveland in that position.

If, through rules changes, subterfuge and faithless delegates, party elites swindle him out of the nomination, do they think that the millions who came out to vote for Trump will go home and say: We lost it fair and square?

Do they think they can then go back to open borders, amnesty, a path to citizenship, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and nation building?

Whatever happens to Trump, the country has spoken. And if the establishment refuses to heed its voice, and returns to the policies the people have repudiated, it should take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

Also by Pat Buchanan

PAT BUCHANAN

Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

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