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Books To Guide You After Huck’s Holocaust Gambit

by John on 07/27/2015

After examining the reasons behind Mike Huckabee’s “holocaust” attack on the Iran nuke deal, I wanted to share two great books I reviewed that you need to look at.

The first is The Accidental Superpower by Peter Zeihan. Here is my review.

The other book is America in Retreat by Bret Stephens. Here is my review of that book.

Reading them will help undercut the political silliness we’re getting in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal. Some takes on these books:

  • Both writers come up with different backgrounds: Zeihan has what I would call a more libertarian point of view; Stephens is a conservative hawk.
  • Zeihan believes the next 20 or so years will be challenging for the US but we will come out much better than the rest of the world. Not only do we have a solid economic foundation, but Zeihan thinks the tipping point is shale oil. It frees us from the past and from the Middle East.
  • Stephens is pessimistic and pushes for a more muscular and active military and foreign policy by the United States. His belief, and history backs up a lot of this too, is that when the United States retreats from regions of the world, bad things happen.
  • I probably lean more towards Zeihan than Stephens. I think the world is changing drastically and there is no way the US can stop these new world trends: aging societies; scarcity of natural resources that are being fought over; and technology that reduces jobs in developed countries while leveling the playing field for developing and what were once Third World countries.
  • Because we are aging as a country and we will see a massive amount of money going toward Medicare and caring for Baby-Boomers, the amount of money US taxpayers can spend on foreign aid and a continued worldwide military build-up doesn’t add up. We can no longer be the world’s cop. Since Bretton Woods, as Zeihan writes, the US taxpayer has insured the world’s commerce by having a cop on the beat for the world economy. This is the 21st Century and no longer just Post World War II.
  • And I think Zeihan has found the pulse of many in the United States. We are tired of being on-call for the world’s problems. We see that in the polls that show most Americans favor the Iran deal. I hear people say, “Let them figure it out themselves” meaning Iran and Saudi Arabia. Others say if they want to kill themselves over their religious indifferences that is not our business.
  • The other theme Zeihan has hit is that Americans are ready for retreating. And that’s where shale oil comes in. We don’t need Saudi crude as much. We can take care of ourselves thanks to fracking and the deposits in North America. Add this to the fact we’re tired of the Middle East, a region that does not agree with much of what we believe, then you can understand how many Americans want to stay at home.
  • But that type of thinking of taking our toys and going home can be dangerous. This is where Stephens’s book and his warnings should be heeded. All it takes it another 9/11 and we are back defending our shores and ideals. The reality is these terrorists like ISIS attack us to get us engaged in their battles to try to drain us of our assets. So being on-guard isn’t a bad thing.
  • Granted, Stephens wants to see military spending to increase. But since we have this aging and Medicare problem, Stephens’s theory also has a math problem.

 

 

 

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