This is a stupid tweet. And everybody who expected anything but extreme escalation from Russia is stupid. This is why we need the Humanities. We need people who specialize in regions and countries. We need experts.
“Expert” has become a dirty word because of COVID, and this is massively unfair because throughout COVID actual experts were doing extraordinary work. All of my early knowledge about COVID came from scientific research I was reading daily. For instance, experts knew and put it in writing that children neither suffered from nor transmitted COVID by May of 2020. All of the bashing of experts was done by people who can’t tell an expert from a WashPo journalist.
In any case, there used to be highly educated, intelligent people advising US presidents. Philip Bobbitt is one such person. I found out about the impending destruction of the nation-state from one of his books. He knew and was advising several presidents in a row about it.
Then, the whole concept of inviting knowledgeable people to explain how things work somehow disappeared. And as a result, we ended up divorced from reality and subsumed in the most bizarre and groundless fantasies.
And yes, Humanities betrayed their purpose by turning themselves into a cudgel of political partisanship. We are all suffering as a result. But that’s exactly why real experts should be supported, encouraged, and listened to.
This “all Putin needed” at the beginning of the tweet above is so moronically dumb that one’s blood goes cold. Yet this utter misunderstanding of Russia’s behavior and motivation is widespread. As a result, we have the president wasting months in humiliating discussions of ceasefires that feed the Russians’ ego and achieve absolutely nothing else.
Clarissa's Blog 
General Patton distrusted Russia in 1945. He knew it was bad, and he said it. “after all this bloodshed, we’ve lost the war.” Eisenhower shut him down.
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That was a terrible mistake.
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The Humanities have been rotten since the left gutted it, and you of all people should know that.
Patton was a fearless general. But Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. He understood the situation in Europe, but also knew about the ever increasing casualties in the Pacific. The military was not certain that the Allies could withstand the expected losses necessary to invade and subdue Japan. Sure Churchill saw the Russian threat, but Roosevelt was already weak and dying, the last bloody thing anybody needed was a war with Stalin.
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I call BS on this premise. You don’t need experts to tell you a tyrant who has proven to be hellbent on reconstituting something like the Soviet Union wasn’t going to stop because you asked nicely.
Trump and team were just stupid and inept, and no amount of “experts” was going to change that.
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It’s not just Trump, though. The entire US foreign policy towards Russia has been deeply moronic since 1990. It’s not one administration. It’s every administration. And at this stage the issue becomes very noticeable.
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ah I see. yeah, you are very right on this point. Not only towards Russia but towards China as well. It’s ridiculous the West subsidized China’s growth for so long, only to now start seeing the consequences. Also the Iraq war.
You’re definitely right, US foreign policy has been led by morons for decades now.
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