"To put it bluntly: the United States seems to be racking up enemies at a pretty rapid rate."
The enemies, they are racking themselves up, it just seems to have taken a long time for the messages from the nervous system to reach the DC brain. (It's been a mere 17 years since the RF and the PRC decided to make nice with each other after many decades of being angry dogs on opposite sides of the fence.)
As for Saudi, they are an asshole autocracy, just like Iran is an asshole theocracy (or is it the other way around?) - the problem with it is that we're allied with the one who is determined that we should fight the other one while incessantly trying to pull political levers inside the US. All our allies execute some form of that but not all of them simultaneously love our weapons and seem pretty keen on the idea of the US (or Europe) being destroyed - because infidels. Egypt, at least, is not trying to also fund annoying terrorists, and they have pretty cool pyramids.
I don't see where Afghanistan figures in much of anything at all, except as an adjunct to Pakistan, which also loves our weapons and really loves terrorists.
elm
it isn't that we might have to ally with somebody we don't like very much, it's that the rationales for our current choices do not make a hell of a lot of sense
One idea that has appeared in some Biden admin documents has been ally-shoring (I'm thinking specifically of the DoD supply chain report) but while those concepts work into some Presidential statement, e.g. US-ROK cooperation, they seem to lose our when the rubber meets the road, e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act's domestic content provisions.
I'd be curious what you think about that approach to resolving some of the contradictions of the strategy. I think ally-shoring or friend-shoring more broadly faces the same priorization among enemies problems you raise here but I tend to think it is at least a step in the right direction.
There's a straightforward answer to the problem of US policy in the Middle East, in the absence of any democratic allies. Leave them to sort it out themselves. https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-falsity-us-interests-the-mideast-7595
"To put it bluntly: the United States seems to be racking up enemies at a pretty rapid rate."
The enemies, they are racking themselves up, it just seems to have taken a long time for the messages from the nervous system to reach the DC brain. (It's been a mere 17 years since the RF and the PRC decided to make nice with each other after many decades of being angry dogs on opposite sides of the fence.)
As for Saudi, they are an asshole autocracy, just like Iran is an asshole theocracy (or is it the other way around?) - the problem with it is that we're allied with the one who is determined that we should fight the other one while incessantly trying to pull political levers inside the US. All our allies execute some form of that but not all of them simultaneously love our weapons and seem pretty keen on the idea of the US (or Europe) being destroyed - because infidels. Egypt, at least, is not trying to also fund annoying terrorists, and they have pretty cool pyramids.
I don't see where Afghanistan figures in much of anything at all, except as an adjunct to Pakistan, which also loves our weapons and really loves terrorists.
elm
it isn't that we might have to ally with somebody we don't like very much, it's that the rationales for our current choices do not make a hell of a lot of sense
One idea that has appeared in some Biden admin documents has been ally-shoring (I'm thinking specifically of the DoD supply chain report) but while those concepts work into some Presidential statement, e.g. US-ROK cooperation, they seem to lose our when the rubber meets the road, e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act's domestic content provisions.
I'd be curious what you think about that approach to resolving some of the contradictions of the strategy. I think ally-shoring or friend-shoring more broadly faces the same priorization among enemies problems you raise here but I tend to think it is at least a step in the right direction.