Is Trump embracing aggressive withdrawal?

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Sorry, I keep forgetting that as a millenial, when you ask for a source you're expecting something that will resolve the issue for you with incontrovertible proof.

Really?  Is that a feature of millennials?  I must have missed that part of the book. 

Quote:As a boomer, I'm used to reading multiple sources and resolving things for myself through judgement and deduction.

Deduction, eh?  I'd love to see the chain of reasoning on that one.  I dunno, a Wikipedia article and a blogpost filled with a bunch of hear-say (no doubt a phrase of Millennial origin)?  This looks less like "judgement and deduction" then a quick sloppy search through the first couple of Google search pages looking for the first thing that confirms your biases.  John is a big fan of that one, too.

Quote:When you ask for a source from me, please keep in mind it is likely to be data to consider and work into your own world view, not a completely new gestalt to adopt.

Was there data?

Quote:The Russian military is easily capable of seizing one EU state at a time until it gets to Germany if we don't have those weaker states' backs.  There's no evidence that any of those weaker states play "fast and loose" with Russia unless you count wanting to avoid becoming a Russian puppet state as "fast and loose".

Capable of seizing AND holding?  We've had quite a bit of difficulty with the latter ourselves, what makes you think the Russians are so much better at it?
He hasn't even seized Eastern Ukraine, or Georgia.  Just a couple of tiny regions that wanted to be seized (and most of those are still notionally independent).  Bit premature to start worrying about his impending world conquest, isn't it?

Quote:I think you have a distorted view of what the Cold War was like.

The Cold War was not a time of high military commitment on the part of the US.  In fact, the balance of terror from relatively cheap nuclear weapons meant that the requirements for conventional military capability expensive both in terms of money and lives was limited to relatively small, contained engagements.

The end of the Cold War greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear holocaust, but the downside was that it substantially increased the scope for conventional conflicts that would previously have been subsumed into the largely peaceful nuclear balance between the US and Soviet spheres.  It's no coincidence that within a couple years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US was invading Iraq.

Oh yes, the Cold War was characterized by comparatively limited engagements like Korea, Vietnam, and an enormous build-up of conventional forces on either side of the Iron Curtain.  Nothing like the mass carnage of Iraq or the rest of the GWOT.  God knows, neither side would have been willing to deploy conventional forces into Afghanistan during the Cold War. 

Quote:However, when the Cold War ended, the opportunity arose for the US becoming the hegemon for a global system of maritime commerce.

Is THAT when that started?  I'm sorry, I was young, I apparently missed the enormous buildup of US naval forces during the 90s.

Quote:So we have a choice.  We can accept the responsibilities of being a global maritime hegemon and facilitate a prosperous system of global commerce which we can turn to our own advantage to whatever extent we are willing to.  Or, we can allow the world to balkanize into less prosperous regions, allow ourselves to devolve to the level of other regional powers like China and Russia, and likely set ourselves up for a subsequent period of interregional warfare as the global regional system shakes itself out.

Oh my God, The Stupid, it burns!!  
We already accepted the responsibilities of global hegemon, decades ago.  That's why we have ships in the Black and South China Seas in the first place.  The material underpinnings of our national power have been decaying for years (particularly in relative terms), which is why I am recommending that we quit while we're still ahead, shore ourselves up, rather than go through the usual cycle of hegemonic war and decline that all previous hegemons have undergone.

Quote:It doesn't cost us anything to be the global maritime hegemon.  Yes, we spend the direct monetary system benefits on military power, but so what?  Military power isn't a bad thing, especially if it's free.

Yup, our defense budget is negligible.  Especially those supplemental wars we have been engaged in almost continuously for the last couple of decades.  They basically pay for themselves. 
What's the weather like on your planet?  Presumably not warming, right?

Quote:As for trading assembly line jobs for higher value knowledge worker jobs in financial services, health care, and the associated information technology, why is that a bad thing?

Oh sure, that's what everybody is doing right now, right?  There's been no fall-off in workforce participation, no stagnating of median incomes (adjusted for inflation) or surge in debt.  The economy is booming, right?  Everybody just shifted right into the new value-added positions with no disruption.

Quote:Abandoning the world is not the solution.  Doing a better job of making sure more of the benefits of global free market commerce flow to us and not just to the rest of the world is.

Yup, there are no intermediate states between what we are doing and total autarchy.  We're either invading Iraq and moving naval forces into the Western Pacific or we are enabling Hitler and sticking our heads in the sand.  Got it. 

Quote:Parallels aren't necessarily exact repetitions.  Putin has been slower and more constrained in his aggression because the US has been more constraining than Britain was in the 1930s.

Is that why?  Do you have actual evidence to support that, or are you just going to make a claim about what you believe to be true and if I ask back it up with the first thing you find on Google?

Quote:There's little doubt he would have taken over the rest of Georgia had the US not demonstrated backing for the Georgian government.

Really?  'Murca scared him off?

Quote:And let's not forget that the Ruhr was German and Austria and the Sudeten were majority German if you consider Crimea to have been majority Russian.  Even Danzig was "a longrunning historical part of the" German state.

And had he confined himself to that I doubt anybody would have really cared.  I am still not seeing a pattern of megalomania here.  I mean, the US has been bombing and invading Muslim countries for a while now, does that mean we are engaged in another Crusade?

Quote:None of which is to say we need to destroy Russia.  What we should do is continue to prevent him from overreaching so as to prevent him from precipitating another world war.

I haven't seen much evidence of him overreaching.  He fought a very limited war with Georgia, seized the Crimea with hardly a shot fired, and has offered very limited support to two rebellious provinces in the Ukraine.  Even his Syrian intervention seems to have been quite limited and well-executed.  Personally, I am a lot more worried about us precipitating a world war then the other way round.

Quote:Again, I advertised a source on what "probably" happened, not proof, and that's what I gave you at the link.  Friedman is pretty accurate on this stuff, as evidenced by his having founded both Stratfor and GPF, which people actually pay for, unlike the stuff from people here.

I am actually a subscriber to Stratfor, and have been for years now.  George Friedman is always interesting to read, even if you should take him with a grain of salt (as you should anybody, really).  I was just looking for something a little more substantive.
If that's what you have, well, I'm not really sure it adds anything to what was already reported in the press.  But thanks for making the effort.