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Foreign-policy sleepwalking: Wake up to Germany no longer being such a good ally
[The Hill] A line in the sublime Hilary Mantel trilogy of Henry VIII’s fixer, Thomas Cromwell, perfectly encapsulates the highest aspirations of the political risk profession. The goal must be always to "Study the world without despising it. Understand the world without rejecting it. Have no illusions, but have hopes. Do not sleepwalk through life." During my decade in senior Washington foreign policy circles, during the bad old days of the Iraq War and the bipartisan utopian efforts at nation-building that followed, just such intellectual sleepwalking fast became a nightmare. The besetting sin of our foreign policy elite is intellectual sclerosis — that what once worked during the halcyon days of our Cold War supremacy is carved in stone, forever being the way for America to operate. The strong, usually unspoken belief of our foreign policy blob remains the misguided notion that foreign allies invariably will knuckle under to American blandishments and do as we say. To put it mildly, after living and working for the past 14 years in Europe, this is simply not the world I wake up in every day. Posted by: Besoeker 2020-09-17 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=582525 |