Monday, February 17, 2014

"To Hell With Them" Waxing?

Though they have a way of pulling you back in, and in no small part the Pacific Pivot is fed by a desire just to not think about the 5th FLT AOR - but - regardless what the foreign and defense policy grandees say; perhaps as a whole we have reached the point of acting on the groundswell of, as Jonah puts it - "To hell with them."
... not just among self-described hawks. There’s even a version of that attitude among doves. Though they probably wouldn’t say, “To hell with them,” they share a similar attitude that there’s little the U.S. can do for the Arab and Muslim world.
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All you need to do is read the headlines coming out of the Middle East and feel like, “I’ve seen this movie before.” And thanks to fracking and other technological boons, the fact that we’re becoming less and less reliant on Middle Eastern oil only serves to undermine arguments that we need regional stability at any cost.

You can’t prove a negative, but my hunch is that support for Israel or South Korea, never mind our NATO allies, remains quite strong. If real friends were threatened, the American people would support coming to their aid. It’s just that there’s a growing — or, in many cases, deepening — sense that we don’t have real friends in the Muslim world.

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