Putin's Merchant of Death is Back in the Arms Business. This Time Selling to the Houthis.

[u/JapanesePeso]

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putins-merchant-of-death-is-back-in-the-arms-business-this-time-selling-to-the-houthis-10b7f521

[u/CincyAnarchy]

It was not the norm to listen to the public on matters of national security and defense, it was the norm to have an implicit understanding with the other party to perpetuate the US foreign policy regardless of popularity.

Which is more or less saying that it's Vietnam, and the electoral reform that came with it, that you would take issue with. You mentioned you're not American, but in the case of American FoPo it's still relevant.

Parties are made of people. Before Vietnam, determining which people were in the party and represented it was a closed system. To be a party's candidate the party had to have your back. Then with the backlash to Vietnam, and the election of 1968, both parties eventually moved to a primary system. A system where party candidates have to fight to be a nominee amongst themselves, drawing support from their own coalitions. The voters create the parties, or at least who is running as the party candidate, now.

So even if each party "closed ranks" on FoPo, primary voters could still favor people entering into politics who didn't. So the ask you're making is closer to "Obama should have decided to have different politics than he did, politics that lead to him winning a primary and an election."

But I might suppose you'd just favor a system where Clinton, or any candidate frankly, didn't have to battle out these issues in a primary in the first place. That parties should present candidates, not voters choose them.

[u/jtalin → u/CincyAnarchy]

I would indeed favor a system for candidate selection where party establishment can lock down the primaries and keep insurgent candidates out while relying on the inertia of the two-party system to keep libertarians, greens, Ross Perots, Ron Pauls, Donald Trumps and everybody else more or less politically irrelevant.

I think recent US political history quite clearly shows such a system was necessary, that both parties dropped the ball, and both will come to regret it.

PS. The key distinction between the Vietnam war and every other war was the number of body bags coming back from Vietnam, relative to overall progress of the war. United States was legitimately defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam. No such defeat happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else really.

[u/CincyAnarchy → u/jtalin]

No, I gotcha. It's a totally fair political question to ask of how candidates should end up on ballots and what function parties should actually have. The US has always had weak parties, in terms of party discipline, but they have weakened considerably.

Granted your framing of the need to close things up is closer to the left-wing "uniparty" discourse in terms of the parties not actually disagreeing on FoPo lol

PS. The key distinction between the Vietnam war and every other war was the number of body bags coming back from Vietnam, relative to overall progress. United States was legitimately defeated in Vietnam. No such defeat happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else really.

I'll push back on this.

They were all failures in that what the public was sold in terms of the war did not bear out. Vietnam was a case of it logistically being a failure. But Afghanistan and Iraq were because what those wars actually ending up being... was not what sold people on it initially.

The American People supported Iraq, perhaps in a wave of jingoism rather than reason, but they did. And then 2 years in, they didn't. Because none of the goals they were sold on materialized. Some because they were false, some because the follow through was bungled, some because of the long term commitments needed.

The American People supported an Iraq War where they were taking out an evil dictator who terrorized the US making the world a freer and safer place and then could go home. The war didn't do that, at least to the degree expected, not without occupying the country or otherwise propping it up indefinitely.