Norman Mailer writes at one point in The Armies of the Night that, whatever else the Vietnam War did, it brought the American Left back together again.
For the decades before the war, after all, the Left had fractured down the middle over the issue of communism and the Soviet Union. "Consider a countdown of the punches," Mailer writes; "famine in the Ukraine; Moscow trials; Hitler-Stalin pact; slave-labor camps; Cold War"—and on.
For my sins, I still occasionally check in on that podcast I was ranting about a few weeks ago—the one that features a couple of leftist bros I used to admire from the good old days of the fight against the neocons.
This time, they were out with a new episode reporting on a bunch of corruption scandals and mob hits in Ukraine (some with shadowy alleged ties to state security forces), which they claim are being under-reported in the Western press.
Back in the late'40s, when he was slowly divesting himself of his earlier pacifism and becoming a reluctant Cold Warrior, Dwight Macdonald felt called upon to explain in print whether there was any daylight now between his position and that of President Truman.
Macdonald explained that there still was; and it consisted chiefly in the fact that the means by which the U.S. government proposed to prosecute the Cold War were wrong, in his view—because they would make enemies of those he called "the chief victims of Stalin's system"—"namely the people of Russia."
The recent death of Lindsey Graham prompted me to recall that ugly episode from the early weeks after the October 7 massacre, when he appeared to justify the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in retaliation.
In one interview, Graham was asked: "Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government in which the U.S. would say let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?"
The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know.
Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form.
Earlier this week, a group of nearly 200 economists and businesspeople signed an open letter on the future of AI, entitled "We Must Act Now."
The statement is a model of strategic ambiguity—that sort of deliberate fuzziness as to key details that is often required to reach a consensus viewpoint that a large committee of people might be willing to get behind.
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is one of these classic and famous books that's just faintly disappointing once you actually get around to reading it. I came to it knowing that it was supposed to be the definitive critique of U.S. foreign policy that launched the whole genre of New Left historiography. I found it instead to be somewhat leaden and clumsy in its prose, and basically focused on the wrong questions.
To be sure, the core of William Appleman Williams's thesis is inarguable. The basic "tragedy" of American foreign policy, as he sees it, is that our nation proclaimed the ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, but then we lived to contradict them.
