J D Vance on "Moralizer" Foreign Policy

This is a good summary of how to conduct foreign policy.  Note well:  it's the method used by Reagan and Trump.  Bush I, Bush the Dumber, Clinton, and Obama all used the moralizing emotional inanity.  Cost the US a lot of lives and money, (but made the military-industrial complex rich.  Just ask Dick Cheney.)

...The most important thing is to separate moralizing from strategic interest. The media always accused Trump of being a “Putin stooge” or being “pro-Russia” for saying that he had a good relationship with Putin. It’s just such a preposterous argument. To be an effective negotiator, you need to accept that the other party has distinct interests. You don’t have to agree with what they want to accomplish. But if you walk in to a foreign policy dispute obsessing over who the ”bad guy” is, you’ll make stupid decisions. Trump is maybe the first American president of my lifetime who understood this.

Most right-wing media sells Trump short on foreign policy. You hear all the time that Putin would have never invaded Ukraine because “Trump was strong.” That is true, but Trump was also smart! He didn’t antagonize every world leader. He accepted that other countries — even those led by evil men — have strategic goals that we need to acknowledge. Remember how every media outlet attacked Trump for being evil because he said something polite about a rival’s leader? Trump’s response was always: “it’s actually important to be able to talk to people.” This is just so obvious, yet 99 percent of the establishment ignored it.

A lot of things flow from this. For example, because very few people in the current establishment think strategically — but they can moralize all day long — we should inherently mistrust them and give them as little power as possible. We should avoid military conflict if possible, because the mediocrities in that same establishment are driven more by emotional considerations than the interest of their country.

Another way of putting this is: what’s in our interest as a country? Escalation with Russia brings a ton of risks. The barrier to get involved is extremely high. What do we get out of it? Protecting democracy? There are a lot of dictatorships, and we shouldn’t go to war with all of them. Ensuring the safety of this or that population of innocents is certainly an admirable goal, but it doesn’t justify starting a major war. The closest I’ve heard to a real strategic argument is that unless Putin is stopped in Ukraine, he’ll march all the way to Paris or Berlin. I’m skeptical of this argument, but at least it’s better than “Putin mean; Zelensky nice.”

One could add this:  if the US is going to war, it must go only to WIN, hard and fast.  It must also have an exit plan just as hard and fast.  Patty-Cake war doesn't work, and like it or not, most countries cannot handle "democracy."  We don't do so well with it, either.

That's not how McConnell and Girly-Man Graham see it, which is a very good reason for them to leave office.  The sooner, the better.