Tuesday, July 03, 2018

History behind the headlines

a lot of what is going on in the world can be best understood as countries trying to revive their lost empires, from the Caliphate to the Persian empire to Mother Russia to the Ottoman empire to the European Union to the Middle Kingdom of China.

StrategyPage gives a good summary of history here.

and yes they notice the odd man out: Americans who want nothing to do with them:


Meanwhile the United States, where millions of people fled to over the last four centuries trying to escape all these old world empires are now dealing with a movement by some of the descendants of these imperial refugees to revive imperial links with the rest of the world. But there are so many to choose from.
...But many Americans don’t want to Make America Imperial. There are still a lot of new arrivals who have recent personal experience with this stuff and will tell anyone who will listen that all this empire building does not end well. .... So Americans seek to Make Reality Great Again, at least once they agree on which interpretation of reality to use.

they also note the good news (a lot less war thanks to the "Great Nuclear Truce") and the low grade rebellion in Iran. Neither of these stories have been noticed in US headlines.

they go into details about individual conflicts, so it is a long essay: I advise you to download and read it at your leisure.

Here is the part about the Philippines: lots of stuff about the war against the Islamic terrorists in the south. However our main problem is corruption: (and the corruption is what allowed the drug cartels and smugglers to have so much power).

 And yes, Duterte is "anti American", but SP don't give the reason why ( interfering with local issues, most recently their hate campaign by their paid and wanna be cool types against Duterte's war on the drug cartels, as well as pushing the "American girl" to become president).

but they do admit:
Duterte may not be the solution to the many problems the country faces but he is the most radical, and promising, one to come along in decades.

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