Ya, I think that JFK and LBJ were the ones who ramped up our presence there to its highest levels of around 180k troops.
It is perhaps a fair statement that it didn’t have as large an impact down the road as Iraq though. I’ve never really thought about what kind of broader impact Vietnam had beyond its effects on US morale.
More like 500k troops c. 1969, IIRC. At its peak, the war in Vietnam was a ginormous drain on the US.
Obama’s “red-line” in Syria sure did a number on American credibility.
Only at the time. Now we have no credibility on anything at all so it hardly matters.
JFK and LBJ and their evil advisors were responsible for a terrible, stupid, and totally unnecessary war that killed tens of thousands of people, wasted billions of dollars, and poisoned the national soul for two generations.
But that was 50 years ago. Half those democrats were the parents of today’s Trump supporters. The entire racist south was Democratic back then, still cursing GOP carpetbaggers and muttering about how they would rise again someday. And the GOP still had Eisenhower’s respectability behind it, even if Eisenhower himself was a RINO in period terms. It’s a completely different world with completely different parties now.
Yeah. Misguided and mistaken as Obama’s foreign policy was (almost as bad as LBJ’s) it pales to insignificance compared to both Bush’s before him and Trump’s afterwards.
It’s not like American presidents have much history of good foreign policy to look to for inspiration, though. Outside of often vague and usually only partially successful attempts at securing free trade, American foreign policy consisted pretty much of the Monroe Doctrine (an Anglo-American declaration of what amounted to indirect control of the Western Hemisphere), and, um, well, that’s it, really. Even the Mexican War was a by-product of domestic policy much more than any consideration of what we would call foreign affairs.
With the Spanish-American War, though, we got hooked into the Pacific big time, and the ramp up of our trade with Asia, which had been present before but now really took off, we perforce had to deal with the rising sun folks, whose empire was kick-started by none other than the West’s forcible opening of Japan to the international economy.WWI was an aberration, with our intervention a product largely of European propaganda successes, Wilson’s sort of wonky idealism, and some other stuff sort of specific to the time. But until really 1940, when the Germans overran France, we didn’t start to actually define a foreign policy as such, and even then, Roosevelt had to navigate some difficult isolationist and Nazi-phile waters when it came to Europe.
Post WWII, the Cold War gave us a ready-made policy, oppose the commies. Containment, the Marshal Plan, and the Truman Doctrine were not really policies so much as programs or reactions to events, but they sort of served as the guideposts we operated under for the next half century. Once the Cold War ended, though, we were right back to square one. We had a vague sense of being committed to free trade (which usually meant “trade that benefits us”), an even vaguer sense of supporting “democracy” (a sense undercut severely by the Cold War and our embrace then of really nasty anti-communist regimes), and, well, not much else.
I would argue that Reagan effectively substituted a new militarism as our new foreign policy, or at least a big component of it, and that Bush Sr. refined that and fitted it in to a neo-liberal (or neo-conservative, the choice is yours) globalist vision that had very clear goals for a particular elite, but nothing at all suitable as policy guidance for the actual United States of America as a nation. Presidents since then simply went with the flow, even Clinton pretty much following the same script.
tl;dr, we don’t have a foreign policy, in the way it’s generally known, a set of principles that a country uses to guide its actions towards considered and well understood national goals. Instead, we have a lot of ideas used to sell actions that benefit the few to the bulk of the citizenry who are bought off with militarism, jingoism, feel-good bravado, and fear mongering.
In that climate, it’s amazing that Obama did as well as he did, even if he still didn’t do very well.
Obama might have succeeded in Syria were it not for Russia, IMO. Had he acted faster he might have gotten there first before Russia had a chance to.
Or, alternately, the Arab Spring was always too weak to be successful, even with a strong US/Western commitment.
still going after everyone who has ByLock installed…
“We’ve seen the slow rise in governments not really trying too hard to break the security of an app, but instead switching to just identifying who has the app, and intimidating or arresting them,” O’Brien said. But no government has done it as widely, or as publicly, as Turkey. “Turkey,” he said, “seems to have jumped two steps ahead of everyone else.”
Opinion:
"Almost everyone agrees that Turkish democracy has been subject to a serious and prolonged assault in recent years.
What, however, deserves serious consideration is not the extent to which this assault has injured Turkish democracy, but the more basic issue of whether the victim is still clinging to life, whether what began as an assault is now better characterized as the mutilation of a corpse."
The main opposition party’s rallies were targeted and monitored by a trojan smartphone spyware app spread by the government.
“Turkish officials used the program “Finspy” by Finfisher, based in Munich, to spy on members of the CHP primarily during the march, called the “March of Justice,” which lasted for three weeks. […F]ake Twitter accounts posted links to websites that promised to inform protesters about the demonstration if they downloaded a smartphone app. The app included Finspy software and allowed the Turkish government to gain real-time access to the smartphone owners’ contacts, photos and videos.”
"Turkey’s finances could deteriorate quickly should the authorities fail to ease pressure on the lira and borrowing costs, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said.
[…]
Turkey’s lira slumped to a fresh record low of 4.66 to the dollar on Tuesday on concern that the central bank is unwilling or politically unable to raise interest rates to stem the currency’s decline and rein in double-digit inflation and a widening current account deficit. "
https://ahvalnews2.com/turkey-economy/turkeys-finances-could-worsen-rapidly-sp-says
Look at the change in exchange rate graph with US$ in the last year!
(from https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDTRY:CUR)
I have seen a lot of exchange rate cartoons and memes in the last few weeks, so it seems to be in the mind of a lot of Turks, more than just the ones travelling overseas. (3 dk. is “3 minutes”)
This is what civil wars are made of. There’s no question that Erdogan will win the election. The question is how much fraud it will take to get him over the line.
I’m sure the appropriate people will “do what is necessary.”
Great guy. Very strong. We should do that in America.
-Trump next week
Just testing, like you do, 3 days before the election
“A pro-government television station accidentally aired “results” showing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being re-elected with 53 percent of the vote in the early hours of Thursday morrning, left-nationalist news website OdaTV said .”
https://ahvalnews2.com/2018-elections/turkish-tv-station-airs-results-3-days-election
I think it was last week some state media place ran how he won with 53% of the vote or something. Only the election hadn’t taken place yet.
Guess what he got in the vote? 53%. Nice round number.
Blockquote With virtually all votes counted, Erdogan had 53 percent against Ince’s 31 percent, while in the parliamentary vote the AKP took 42.5 percent and its MHP nationalist allies secured 11 percent, outstripping expectations.
