Thank you for your FoxNews response here, Mr. Hughes. But as a retired Army JAG Officer, who served (serve) as a Guantanamo Defense Attorney which made me curious of how it was that the U.S. so readily adopted a genuinely “Fascist” form of “legal jurisprudence” upon 9/11, I was compelled to study “Political Theory” in the program where Hannah Arendt once taught after I retired, so I earned a M.A. in Politics (Theory) which included history courses on historical Imperialism. Which along with Bill Polk’s mentorship in International Relations, gave me an extensive and more expansive understanding of U.S. foreign policy than the typical college graduate. As I continue to audit foreign policy/Law graduate classes at the Univ. of Minn., I can attest to the ignorance of graduate students on any foreign policy knowledge beyond “American Exceptionalism Myth!” So as a courtesy to someone I assume is a "youngster," and therefore unaware of U.S. Strategic Theory, as articulated most notably by Thomas Schelling during the Cold War, and how absolutely ruthless that was, but made "respectable" by the Conservative Movement out of which Trumpism evolved, with Schelling's “Operational Code” continuously U.S. policy, without break, to the present, I share some information on that below. Beginning with West Point’s celebration of Schelling, the inspiration for “Dr. Strangelove,” though that goes unmentioned here: Quote: "Moreover, he was one of the intellectual fathers of strategic deterrence. While the subject has virtually disappeared from policymakers’ discourse on national security and playbooks on military planning, that does not mean that his ideas are not still applicable in a world that is vastly different than the Cold War era." and, “The power to hurt is bargaining power,” Schelling wrote. “To exploit it is diplomacy, vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” A glance around the globe would suggest American bargaining power is dwindling because today’s adversaries no longer subscribe to the same cost–benefit philosophy of our previous enemies, who arguably were more rational. As an Israeli military specialist told The Economist, “Deterrence needs an address.” Now we’ve given it an “address,” or more correctly, two addresses: Moscow, and Beijing, as we always intended during, and since, the end of the Cold War, as “announced” as the "Cheney/Wolfowitz Doctrine.” But to give “credit” where truly it is due, call it the Kendall/Burnham Doctrine, as first publicly articulated on the pages of National Review magazine as the founding of the “Conservative Movement” by disgruntled CIA officers. “Disgruntled” as they denounced the Eisenhower administration for only “containing” the USSR when it should be “rolling it back.” While suppressing harshly any dissent to that policy, as their proxy Joe McCarthy called for. With Burnham’s and Kendall’s (and the “Bills,” Buckley and Casey) fantasist schemes of military conquest of the world, which they sold to a gullible public, as “Conservatism.” Especially in the beginning to the Republicans who had its own “tradition” of extreme militarism/imperialism going back at least to the 1890s, whose elected President, Eisenhower, they denounced as too much of an “appeaser.” With that “brain infection” eventually including virtually all of the Republican Party and increasingly, more and more of the Democrats, by way of Barry Goldwater, and his influence on his ideological colleague and friend in the Democrats, Scoop Jackson. With Goldwater’s SSCI mentoree now in the WH. But this is the kind of blatant obtuseness I would expect from the USMA and authors with their backgrounds:"Deterrence is also about resolve. As Schelling tells us, it is all about divining one’s intentions, not only those of the enemy but our own, which in turn shape the adversary’s. “Nations,” he wrote, “have been known to bluff; they have also been known to make threats sincerely and change their minds when the chips are down.” The single biggest challenge we face is our inability to read our adversaries’ intentions—from Russia’s weaponization of cyber-espionage to China’s militarization of man-made islands in the disputed South China Sea.” That highlighted sentence is never applied to understanding how it has been our “intentions” as the “World’s Sole Superpower,” fully revealed with our War of Aggression against Iraq in 2003, and openly written of how that wasn’t the limit of our “appetite for conquest" (see PNAC), as an article Chas shared a few days ago explained in re Iraq, which have “shaped our (so-called) adversary’s" intentions. Which if we had minds to think and eyes to see, it would be clear to us, that our global “intentions,” with Iraq as the beginning, were fully revealed as identical to this: https://read.gov/aesop/063.html But like the proverbial “Good German,” we refuse to see our “true nature.” Every day, if we read “critically,” we can see our “National Security State” media, such as Defense News, reveals our “War Preparedness” (a beloved concept to the Republicans going back to their constant incitement of getting the US into WW I, immediately, with their promotion of “War Preparedness Doctrine,” which eventually prevailed, as bi-partisan policy, as it has today), beginning as persistent "war incitement.” Now having escalated into the next “phase” of the war against “Russia/China, already “kinetic” on the part of the U.S. against Russia, as Trump set in motion with his escalation of “War Preparedness” against Russia/China, with massive increases in military spending, creation of Space Force (getting the “high ground), and encirclement of each (remember USMC Gen. Bergers “War Against the Blob, in the Indo-Pacific :-) But here is some material on U.S. “Strategic Theory,” or “Operational Code,” for those who are ignorant of their U.S. government’s means of aggression. Which when you know this, you can no longer be a “Good German,” meaning someone deliberately/intentionally ignorant of the war crimes their government commits.
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