Another excellent article from Thom. But I have to comment on the “tankie” thing. I respect Thom very much, but I also respect Noam Chomsky. Is Chomsky one of the tankies Thom refers to?
Chomsky and others have pointed out that a deal was struck in February 1990 between then US secretary of state James A. Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev.…
Another excellent article from Thom. But I have to comment on the “tankie” thing. I respect Thom very much, but I also respect Noam Chomsky. Is Chomsky one of the tankies Thom refers to?
Chomsky and others have pointed out that a deal was struck in February 1990 between then US secretary of state James A. Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev would allow German reunification. In return NATO would not expand eastward. Gorbachev kept his end of the deal. We have not kept our end. Recently, before Putin invaded Ukraine, Biden was publicly advocating for Ukraine to join NATO.
Chomsky can hold two ideas at once:
1. The west DID provoke Putin by violating the 1990 agreement.
2. This provocation does not justify the invasion.
Would Putin have invaded if NATO had not expanded? Perhaps. But violating the agreement didn’t help the situation, and it gave Putin an excuse to violate the Budapest Memorandum.
Yes, agreed, the tankie thing is unfortunate. Who are the "comparable" tankies? Seems to me that all recent developments even before the war seemed to show that democrats generally (a) want to work closely in tandem with Liz Cheney on the military budget, (b) often promote CIA-veteran war and surveillance hawks as candidates, (c) favor a big, bloated "defense" budget, and (d) will attack their own if they don't subscribe to the foregoing. The analysis could and should be broader. Eg, the importance of international oil and gas pipeline politics is overlooked or understated in mainstream media, and has driven a lot of our increased "defense" spending.
Those who followed these developments recall that Ukraine would have been excluded by Russia's latest pipeline to Germany, a pipeline that was openly deemed absolutely unacceptable to American business interests (regardless of how Germany might have felt or decided!) - just before the invasion by Russia took place. And how that little pipeline just happened to blow up one day, due to reasons and forces that no American media seems to have any interest in, other than Seymour Hersh.
To start with, I like to think I keep up pretty well, but I don't "get" the "tankie" reference. Would appreciate it if (anybody?) could explicate. Second, I think a lot of your (accurate) observations about Democratic (the party) politics are under the category of bully-victim pandering, i.e. they think they will lose all electoral potency if they dare to cross the military-industrial complex and their knee-jerk constituency. Third, I think I saw a PBS report (pretty "mainstream") that concluded it was the U.S. that took out the Nord Stream.
Another excellent article from Thom. But I have to comment on the “tankie” thing. I respect Thom very much, but I also respect Noam Chomsky. Is Chomsky one of the tankies Thom refers to?
Chomsky and others have pointed out that a deal was struck in February 1990 between then US secretary of state James A. Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev would allow German reunification. In return NATO would not expand eastward. Gorbachev kept his end of the deal. We have not kept our end. Recently, before Putin invaded Ukraine, Biden was publicly advocating for Ukraine to join NATO.
Chomsky can hold two ideas at once:
1. The west DID provoke Putin by violating the 1990 agreement.
2. This provocation does not justify the invasion.
Would Putin have invaded if NATO had not expanded? Perhaps. But violating the agreement didn’t help the situation, and it gave Putin an excuse to violate the Budapest Memorandum.
Yes, agreed, the tankie thing is unfortunate. Who are the "comparable" tankies? Seems to me that all recent developments even before the war seemed to show that democrats generally (a) want to work closely in tandem with Liz Cheney on the military budget, (b) often promote CIA-veteran war and surveillance hawks as candidates, (c) favor a big, bloated "defense" budget, and (d) will attack their own if they don't subscribe to the foregoing. The analysis could and should be broader. Eg, the importance of international oil and gas pipeline politics is overlooked or understated in mainstream media, and has driven a lot of our increased "defense" spending.
Those who followed these developments recall that Ukraine would have been excluded by Russia's latest pipeline to Germany, a pipeline that was openly deemed absolutely unacceptable to American business interests (regardless of how Germany might have felt or decided!) - just before the invasion by Russia took place. And how that little pipeline just happened to blow up one day, due to reasons and forces that no American media seems to have any interest in, other than Seymour Hersh.
To start with, I like to think I keep up pretty well, but I don't "get" the "tankie" reference. Would appreciate it if (anybody?) could explicate. Second, I think a lot of your (accurate) observations about Democratic (the party) politics are under the category of bully-victim pandering, i.e. they think they will lose all electoral potency if they dare to cross the military-industrial complex and their knee-jerk constituency. Third, I think I saw a PBS report (pretty "mainstream") that concluded it was the U.S. that took out the Nord Stream.