@John No one says the job is easy. The Israel/Palestine conflict is old and intractible, but Oct 7 and Gaza are new events. Israel is perpetrating a conflict more brutal in character than anything Western powers have supported or engaged in since Indochina, and the US has chosen to own that. I’m on your side here. I will vote for Biden and encourage others to. I favor sustaining and reforming Pax Americana rather than overthrowing it. 1/

@John But this is a moment when the global security order is severely challenged, when sustaining a normative consensus in favor of the US-led order against temptations offered by emerging, resentful new contenders is essential. You can draw all the moral distinctions you think appropriate. I’ll agree with some of them. But the case Biden had begun to make, that the US is “back” as a force for order worthy of the world’s respect has been eviscerated by these new events and the US response. 2/

@John That’s not a normative claim. It’s a descriptive claim. Perhaps it is mistaken. I have been known to be. But I think events in Israel / Palestine and this administration’s effective endorsement of them have rendered restoring near consensus to the order that has kept a broad peace since the Cold War, and really since WWII, much, much more challenging than it had been on October 6. /fin

@John I support the US / Western role in Ukraine. The tragedy is that US / Western support of Israel, which has chosen to turn Gaza into a new Aleppo or Grozny, undermines our ability to draw a clear moral distinction between what we support and what we are opposing in Ukraine. Yes, you can try to draw distinctions, like Russia was the aggressor and violated a sovereign border. I’ll agree. 1/

@John But if you want to be the “forces of light”, you can’t also be doing logistics for the wanton bombing of a civilian population, and the intentional destruction of a territory’s housing. 2/

It’s a terrible criterion to imagine that, if a democracy chooses to do a thing, that somehow makes it right. When a democracy chooses to perpetrate atrocity, it is no less atrocity. 3/

That said, Israel/Palestine deserves none of whatever limited normative deference is due a democracy, because roughly a third of the inhabitants of that territory are disenfranchised and roughly half lack equal protection under its laws. 4/

I once had a friend try to persuade me that China qualifies as a democracy, because tens of millions of members of the CCP can vote within the party. Doesn’t work. Apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve deference to the democratic legitimacy of its choices because it was a democracy for its white population. 5/

Again, even if Israel were a full democracy, that wouldn’t justify its adopting Assad/Putin tactics to pursue its objectives, morally, or politically in the eyes of the Global South, whose support or at least acquiescence we’ll require if we wish to continue to maintain the post Cold War security order. 6/

We need to be able to draw a sharp distinction between forces of light and forces of darkness. Setting aside the darker parts of our past, calling ourselves reformed, we could pretty credibly do that, viz Ukraine and Russia or even China and Taiwan. Biden was making real progress rehabilitating “the West” and “democracies”.

Until we started arming the perpetrator of a new mass atrocity. Then, to much of the world and much of our own publics, it all comes to seem like a lot of cant. /fin

@_dm @ouguoc I’m not sure I give very much credit to the international institutions or governance structures (in large part because the US has been undermining them rather than reinforcing them for two decades, maybe they could’ve grown into themselves). I think US hegemony has played a positive role mostly by very basic mechanisms: a hegemon provides order, and has an interest in the stable prosperity of the domain it superintends. 1/

@_dm @ouguoc As ugly and imperfect a hegemon as the US has sometimes been, I see the unraveling of hegemony as a severe threat to these goods. I’d rather an evolution of stable hegemony to a more just order than surviving (maybe) thru the chaos of a contested world in hope of something better on the other side. I hope the US will find means to reinforce stability by acceding to a more shared hegemony, so the structure of global order does not become a military contest (more than it has already).

There’s the meme in Democratic politics that’s like “why don’t voters understand the economy is good when the stats say it is and when polled they say they personally are doing well?” 1/

I think it’s geopolitics and environmental. When the apocalypse feels close at hand, you just don’t describe it as a good economy, regardless of this quarter’s GDP. 2/

Pax Americana is under siege. Israel has undermined the moral basis, and Republicans have undermined the political basis, for our role in Ukraine, dramatically increasing the likelihood of global chaos, and frankly diminishing our collective will to resist it. 3/

Global temperatures have been off the charts — average, sea surface temperatures — extreme events of one sort or another are tangible threats to nearly everyone, we are in uncharted waters testing the resilience of ecosystems we depend upon utterly. 4/

In the face of all this, “why aren’t consumers optimistic now that inflation is subsiding without a recession” just misses the point, every point. /fin