Required Reading

Orson Scott Card rips a new one for Brent Scowcroft:

When our soldiers go off to kill and die, they had better be dying for something that actually matters or we won’t stand for it. Stalemates feel like losing; realpolitik feels like we’re no better than the cynical 19th-century border-drawers who got the world into such an ugly shape in the first place.

Americans will not long endure a government whose goal is a “balance of power.” We don’t want power to be balanced. We want to feel like our power is enormously lopsided, but that it is used exclusively for either a noble cause or our own direct national defense.

What is more, “realism” does not work. It cannot work, because the equations of power-balancing are fully readable by our enemies and opponents and rivals. When they know that we will go this far and no farther, we become predictable to them.

And when we are predictable, then our enemies are free to act as they wish within the safe, “realistic” boundaries we have laid out for them.

Read the whole thing here.