{"id":14942,"date":"2012-05-07T09:13:14","date_gmt":"2012-05-07T13:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14942"},"modified":"2018-01-15T13:53:01","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T18:53:01","slug":"welcome-to-the-foreign-policy-theater-of-the-absurd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/05\/07\/welcome-to-the-foreign-policy-theater-of-the-absurd\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/justin\/2012\/05\/06\/foreign-policy-theater-of-the-absurd\/\" target=\"_blank\">Justin Raimondo<\/a> on the recent spat between Russia and NATO:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A Russian general has threatened military action if the US and its NATO allies go ahead and build a \u201cmissile shield\u201d in Eastern Europe: \u201cA decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,\u201d say Russian chief of staff Nikolai Makarov. That the \u201cshield\u201d is of dubious effectiveness, and is mainly a cash cow for US defense companies, are not factors the Russkies are willing to take into consideration: their main beef seems to be the implied insult of Washington claiming the shield isn\u2019t designed to protect against future aggression emanating from Moscow, but against an alleged Iranian missile threat to Europe. Hey, they seem to be saying: what about us? Aren\u2019t we a threat, too?<\/p>\n<p>Well, no &mdash; they aren\u2019t. Russia\u2019s population is falling rapidly, and their economy isn\u2019t doing too hot, either. What the oligarchs didn\u2019t loot and spirit out of the country has been either seized and mismanaged by the state, or else is part of the burgeoning black market. The last thing Moscow needs is an empire: they can barely manage what they already have. That hasn\u2019t stopped Washington from manufacturing a phony narrative that imagines a \u201cresurgent Russia\u201d motivated by revanchism and a desire to refight the cold war.<\/p>\n<p>So here we have the spectacle of a phony threat being uttered as a response to yet another phony threat: the Russians aren\u2019t going to preemptively attack Poland, and neither they nor the Iranians represent a real danger to the West. Yet the actors in this little drama are intent on playing out their roles to the end, no matter how disconnected from reality their actions and pronouncements may seem.<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Justin Raimondo on the recent spat between Russia and NATO: A Russian general has threatened military action if the US and its NATO allies go ahead and build a \u201cmissile shield\u201d in Eastern Europe: \u201cA decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,\u201d say Russian chief of staff Nikolai Makarov. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,5,1119],"tags":[287,709,220,228],"class_list":["post-14942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-military","category-russia","tag-iran","tag-missiledefence","tag-nato","tag-poland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3T0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14942"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41771,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14942\/revisions\/41771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}