"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

Ah, great man theory.

There's a reason most remotely competent historians abandon this model of reasoning by the end of their first year of graduate study.

Certainly history is sometimes influenced dramatically by highly capable people. Of course, hereditary monarchy being what it is, just as often key decisions are made by rulers who aren't very capable at all.

See, for instance, the July Crisis.

I suppose I would also note that 'high IQ' does not appear, to me, to be the only form that 'highly capable people' take.  The compression of every virtue to intelligence obscures more than it clarifies.

@BretDevereaux ^^^100%

People that take IQ scoring serious in the year of our Lord 2025 are extremely unserious individuals and anything written after the statement “high/low IQ” should be disregarded regardless of who is typing

2) Big wars of conquest are bad for Americans, even when they happen far away, because they disrupt those supply chains that stock our groceries, supply our consumer goods, and provide markets for our products.  We want to discourage those sorts of wars. 5/

And 3) state stability generally - countries have borders, those borders don't change, those states are responsible for the people in them - is good for Americans, because stable states are good economic partners.

On this basis was our modern, post-WWII prosperity built. 6/

The major challenge we face are 'revisionist' powers, who want to disrupt one or all of these.  Russia evidently wants to reconquer Eastern Europe - left unchecked that would mean a series of massive wars which would disrupt trade and make life more expensive for Americans. 7/

Of course the last time we let that happen it was Germany and in the end not only did John Q. Taxpayer get asked to foot the bill to stop them, but almost 300,000 Americans died doing so. 8/

Consequently, the United States has set up systems of alliances like NATO (see: https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/) to prevent such massive wars, because really big wars are costly and destructive and thus bad for the average American, even if we don't fight in them! 9/

Likewise, the People's Republic of China is a revisionist power, with active territorial disputes with India, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bhutan, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia.

We do not want China to resolve those disputes by force (read: conquest), for the reasons above.10/

Part of the way we *avoid* a war in the Asia-Pacific region is by communicating our commitment to the 'rules-based international order' to China, so they understand that we would impose big costs, making it not worth it for them to use force. 11/

But to do *that,* we have to show commitment to that same international order elsewhere!  Which means supporting declared friends and allies in places like Ukraine and Israel.

Of course, helping Ukraine also directly reduces the Russian ability to damage the system! 12/

Of course all of this is built on the insight - learned in 1917 and again in 1941 - that when the United States decides to go isolationist and disengage and let the other major powers do what they want abroad, we end up getting dragged in later anyway and at greater cost. 13/

I don't think its an accident that 'why do we really need the international system' has emerged as a strain in US politics as the last generation that remembers WWII has mostly passed away.

Folks, we built that system because WWII suuucked. Deeply bad for average American. 14/

Now there are also moral reasons to defend Ukraine: it is a weaker, democratizing power unjustly attacked in a naked war of conquest by a strong, authoritarian country bent on enslaving its people.

Helping Ukraine is the right thing to do.

But it is also the smart thing. 15/

I think when it comes to Israel, both the moral and strategic case are more complicated and it is not, in fact, clear to me that it is either morally correct or in the American interest to back Israel as we do, as I discussed here: https://x.com/BretDevereaux/status/1725211294968791529  16/

For the moral case, while it is clear that Hamas is horrific and odious, Israel has not recently been a good steward of the peace process.

In the strategic case, it's also not clear they are committed to defending the rules-based order (West Bank settlements are illegal!) 17/

But Ukraine is clearly the front line of an effort to upend the US-led world order, to reintroduce wars of conquest which would, by causing large-scale economic disruption, make the Average American poorer. Much poorer if it led to us being dragged into another Great War. 18/

If I may be extremely blunt: however irritating you found the inflation that resulted from the disruption of Ukrainian grain exports - how much worse do you think it would be if we let Russia rape and murder all of the Ukrainian farmers instead of just some of them? 19/

So to sum up, the experience of the last c. 110 years has been to confirm that maintaining the rules-based international order is, in the long run, very good for the Average American, because the alternative is Very Bad for that same average American...20/

...and compared to what supporting that order has demanded in the past, our support of Ukraine is a remarkably low price to pay for a remarkably outsized geopolitical gain - an opportunity to protect our system, that benefits us, on the cheap.

We ought to seize it. /end

Addendum: Doubtless some of you have noticed, "hey, the Iraq War seems inconsistent with all of this."

Yes, correct.  That is one reason - of several - that it was not, in fact, a good idea to invade Iraq in 2003.