A gladiator style duel to the death between heads of state would be much more humane than the civilian toll of “modern” warfare. But nobody who chooses not to step into the coliseum should be afraid of death by our “civilized” states.
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An extremely cynical perspective could be that Graham knows calling for the assassination of a volatile world leader with a track record of taking out his opponents might result in that unbalanced leader making a proactive decision to strike first, i.e. GOP Graham could be deliberately goading Putin to assassinate Biden.
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I wonder how he’d have reacted if leaders of other countries had suggested the assassination of some of the war criminals from our country?
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I mean I love Psaki and all, and maybe this was taken out of context but, but wow. Advocating for (or direct involvement in) the killing of foreign leaders or regime change is basically the last 100+ years of US foreign policy in a nutshell.
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And after Putin gets “taken out” who will run Russia?
Perhaps figure that out first before calling for his head.
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For now he’s just being suspiciously belligerent.
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I take it with a unstated “under the current administration” (with the implication that this is how it should be, as is the wont of most POTUS’s for better or worse).
Which I’ll accept as a step toward progress because, yeah, Huckleberry’s opinion aside world leaders shouldn’t be going around poisoning and shivving foreign and domestic opponents like we’re still in the days of the bloody Borgias.
Biden obviously understands that someone in his position in the 21st century should be more responsible than to call for that, especially given the existence of NBC weapons and the possibility of a world war. Graham not so much.
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Such perspectives are no longer extreme.
Anything is possible (see above), but if that is truly Graham’s goal, then he’s an imbecile and his “great” plan was flaccid from the get-go; Graham is no Machiavelli. Since the Biden-led push for deep, comprehensive, economy-killing sanctions, Putin must have considered that such a move was intended to put pressure not just on him, but also on powerful Russian insiders to think hard on reining him in and in ways up to and including assassination… something long ago normalized in Russia’s world.
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In real politics, there’s a huge gulf between advocating and wanting.
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Indeed, [quote=“wazroth, post:10, topic:217381, full:true”]
… in Europe.
[/quote]
Yes, because the US has no history of getting rid of inconvenient foreign leaders. none at all /s
Well, the media has done a good job of making Putin out to be a comicbook supervillain, whose actions are irrationally evil, beyond understanding and taking place in a vacuum unconnected to recent or distant feopolitical history (which is a doing a disservice to comicbook villains really; most have more convincing backstories than what the media has afforded Putin). Which is not to say there’s a narrative that justifies Putin’s actions in Ukraine, but people should at least understand how we arrived at this point.
The historian Timothy Snyder was recently on the Exra Klein show. The theme of the episode seemed to be “bad ideas”-- intellectual frameworks that rob us of clarity and freedom.
From the episode:
So let’s go back to more familiar things like, is it NATO expansion, yada, yada. You know, whereas clearly like that geopolitical framework, it’s very comfortable for us because we want it all to be reasonable.
It’s also very comfortable for us because it allows us as Americans to think that, you know, we’re at the center of things. But it’s obviously nonsense. I mean, whatever Putin is doing with respect to Ukraine, it can’t be motivated geopolitically. Because geopolitically speaking, all that he’s doing is pushing his country faster and faster into being a vassal of China. That’s the main geopolitical outcome of this. This staring at NATO and staring at Ukraine, as Mr. Putin invites us to do, is fine.
But any sensible analysis of Russian geopolitics would begin from the fact that they have a long border with a very powerful neighbor that basically sees them as a source of natural resources and that every time Russia antagonizes the West, it deprives itself of the ability to balance between China and the West. So Mr. Putin’s geopolitical legacy is that he’s accelerated the process quite drastically of turning Russia into a kind of appendix to China. So, I mean, I don’t think geopolitics is much of a starter. I just think it’s where we find ourselves more comfortable. It’s kind of default for us. It’s a place where we feel OK.
He goes on to explain that Putin’s probable reasoning is laid out in “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” which is absurd, and the philosophy of Ivan Illyn, which tends to start from a position completely opposite to that e.g. John Rawls’ Theory of Justice
That philosophy starts from the position that you don’t think about other people at all. You don’t think about ethics at all. The only thing that matters in the world is God. And what matters with God is that he’s left us behind this kind of spoiled world.
And the only way — and I’m shortening it a bit here, but this is the basic idea. The only way to repair the world, to heal the world, to bring all the pieces back together is for there to be a certain kind of Russia.
And that Russia, how do we know it’s the right kind of Russia? We know it’s the right kind of Russia because it doesn’t have any fragmentation in itself. In other words, there’s none of this messy business about counting votes. There’s none of this messy business about people having different opinions.
There’s just a leader. And the leader, by way of his clear decisions and actions, asserts, embodies, creates this unity on the scale of a nation. That’s when we can tell that it’s the right sort of Russia, the kind of Russia whose mission it is to bring a sort of unity to the world.
So, I mean, that’s all in its way perfectly consistent and interesting. But you’re right that it’s hard to throw a bridge from any kind of pragmatic liberal tradition over to that sort of metaphysic, which is beginning from the premise — you know, Rawls is basically beginning from the premise like, hey, if we could see each other’s point of view, we could sort things out.
I guess that is a comic book villain-- if you read existentialcomics.com.
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Yeah, it was a very succinct dissection of the US’s foreign policy, although, yes, many US presidents would neversay the quiet part out loud.
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The standard Eastern European despot comic-book villain is Doctor Doom
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What duck?
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I have a couple of thoughts on this: 1) it’s not a good look for an elected member of a liberal democracy to call for the assassination of a world leader. It’s just not; and 2) be careful what you wish for. A power vacuum in Russia could create worse problems.
What people should hope for is a bloodless coup, where Putin is incarcerated and put on public trial for his war crimes, and a new representative government instated in Russia. I realize that’s too much to hope for, but that’s what I’m hoping for.
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8 posts were merged into an existing topic: And Whatabout Your Black People…?
Both parties and almost all other governments know it is not a Good Idea to let the people figure out there is a super simple way to get rid of dictators and crazies in power.
I always regarded this law as a sort of professional courtesy to other elites in the power structure: “We won’t assassinate you even if you eat children for breakfast or shell hospitals and nuclear power plants when invading other countries without provocation. and we expect the same courtesy for you.”
But it’s OK to kill his soldiers by the thousands if needed.
Maybe we’d have less of this war nonsense if the Dear Leaders of the world faced the same risks they demand of their troops.
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That’s pretty much what it is, an aspect of the Westphalian sovereignty system.
Of course it’s regularly violated in many forms but assassinating foreign leaders as a regular and open aspect of international statecraft is frowned upon.
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