| | | I also disagree with Kissinger on Crimea.
Putin is indeed a thug and a murderer, a despicable human being, but that fact should not drive our policy.
The world is full of leaders who are thugs and murderers. Except for AMLO, every single Mexican President of the past century was a corrupt thug and assassin. We ignored that fact because Mexico is extremely important to our national security. And we’ll ignore it in the future.
Virtue-signaling is extremely dangerous because it cannot help but be selective. We cannot virtue-signal on every single global thug and assassin, e.g., Mexican presidents, leaving the virtue-signaler open to a valid charge of hypocrisy, which is virtue-destroying.
Biden virtue-signaled re: the Kashoggi murder. What has that gained us? Salman’s upraised middle finger to America at a time when we need Saudi oil. It gained us Saudi support for petroyuans, and a $10bn refinery in China for Russian oil financed by the Saudis. The enormous resources we spent over decades to secure Saudi oil are now gone with the wind, thanks to an very ill-advised episode of virtue-signaling.
That is why Biden publicly calling Putin a war criminal is a bad idea. This kind of personalization might be good domestically but it is poison diplomatically.
He need to know when to STFU but he’s too stupid to do so.
Virtue signalers also have the consistency of gnats. If things in Ukraine slow down to a less lethal conflict, a slow slog, the media will stop its emphasis on Putin, and the signalers will go to the Next Thing that will make them think that they are the next iteration of Mother Theresa. |
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