Compendium #3

This site is not the only place to find my writing; I have been published at numerous other outlets across the web. In this recurring series, I’ll post some choice passages from these outside pieces and show you where to find the rest. Think of this as a mere tasting of the full smorgasbord. Without further ado, here’s Compendium #3, covering October 2023 through early December 2023.


Accusing Israel of Genocide Is a Moral Outrage, National Review, October 26, 2023

In this piece for National Review, I discussed the bogus claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in its war with Hamas, as well as the idea that it was a state founded on that infamy. In reality, Israel is the target of a genocidal ideology, not the perpetrator.

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The Sky Isn’t Falling

For those who decry Western support for Ukraine, everything is a precursor to World War III. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.


If you’ve been around the internet at all over the past year and a half of war in Ukraine, you’ve likely seen breathless claims that Western aid is pushing us to the brink of a third world war. These terrified statements are the bread and butter of those who wish to see military aid to Ukraine reduced or stopped entirely. Some are pure isolationists, others are useful idiots for Russia, more are skeptics of American military power, and yet others are more vituperative Asia-firsters. Regardless of their personal ideological predilections, these commentators are aligned in their fearmongering over drastic, rapid escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War into a broad-based, global, nuclear-tinged Armageddon. Despite differences in motive, the Ukraine doves all sing from the same hymnal. The refrain is simple. Every Ukrainian advance: World War III. Every new weapons system delivered to Kyiv: World War III. Every response to Russian aggression: World War III. Every revelation of Western support – intelligence, economic, or otherwise: World War III.

They’re certainly consistent, but are they correct? That answer is a resounding nyet. This argument is merely a brickbat with which to attack Ukraine hawks; it has no relation to either the current day or the historical reality. This bedwetter caucus not only misrepresents the escalation dynamics of the Ukraine war, but also of both World Wars. On top of that, they fail to understand the significant differences between the present conflict and those of the past. In short, their argument is fatally flawed. Let us count the ways.

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BRICS Without Mortar

Despite its recent expansion, the BRICS ‘alliance’ is nothing more than vaporware. Claims of the death of the American-led world order have been greatly exaggerated.


In geopolitical commentary circles, much has been made of the recent expansion of the Global South-centered multilateral association known as BRICS. This grouping of developing world nations is named after its early members – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – and has long been touted as the future pivot of geopolitics, economics, and world organization, displacing the regnant Western-led order. Now that the loose partnership has grown beyond its acronymic members to include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Argentina, the usual skeptics and opponents of the postwar system – isolationists, the horseshoe of far-right and far-left, self-proclaimed ‘anti-imperialists’ (merely anti-American), useful idiots – have gone into overdrive.

BRICS has been lauded as a full-on movement against the power of “Global NATO,” meant to proffer a more benign, anti-Western vision to reshuffle the world order. BRICS would be an alternative to the hegemony of American interests in international organizations, creating something akin to a new version of the Cold War Non-Aligned Movement – a group that, in contrast to its branding, served Soviet interests. According to the proponents of this idea, BRICS shows that legacy world institutions – including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization – are not irreplaceable and should be reformed to focus on “equitable, inclusive” outcomes. They point to the many initiatives undertaken by the bloc to compete with the liberal order: a massive submarine cable project, the New Development Bank meant to rival the World Bank/IMF, and a push for de-dollarization of international trade. The addition of new members to the group has produced headlines like “American Power Just Took a Big Hit” (in the New York Times) and claims of a “rebalance” of the world order and the replacement of the US dollar as the global currency by a BRICS-created option.

But are these dire predictions of doom for the world system we so benefit from actually accurate? Will the 21st century be one led by a solid BRICS alliance?

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Flights of Geopolitical Fancy

Magical thinking will not end the war in Ukraine, no matter how many times you click your heels.


The war in Ukraine has been raging for a considerable duration now – 500 days if you date it back to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022, or nearly a decade if you start with attacks on Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands, have been killed on the battlefields; civilian and solider, Russian and Ukrainian alike. Ukraine has been devastated economically, both by military attrition and deliberate, targeted Russian assaults on key civilian infrastructure. Genocidal massacres have been carried out by Russian forces, cementing names like Bucha in the historical record. Nations around the world have aided the Ukrainians in their brave resistance to Muscovite domination. Others have supported Russia’s revanchist claims. Suffice it to say, this war is as real as it gets.

Still, far too many distant observers of the conflict – politicians and commentators both – tend to engage with it on a purely fictionalized level. They do not conceive of the Russo-Ukrainian War as a real event impacting millions of lives every day, but as an abstract concept to be argued over on the internet. This abstraction from the ground level paints a flawed picture of reality and leads to magical thinking, an approach that is highly imaginative, yet entirely untethered from the realm of the possible or probable. This magical thinking is the antithesis of level-headed analysis and prompts the errors of bad strategy, foolish rhetoric, and visions of the war’s end that fail to take into account the realities of the conflict.

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The Rational Policy Podcast Episode 17 – Foreign Telegram, May/June 2023

The Rational Policy Podcast is back with another installment of the Foreign Telegram! A lot has happened abroad in the months of May and June 2023, and host Mike Cote brings you all of the most important news. Three subjects really made a huge impact over the past two months: elections in Turkey, a potential US-China rapprochement, and the Russia coup that wasn’t. Listen in to get the key information and geopolitical perspective on these critical topics and what they mean for the United States and the world.

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/sxtqrjhF5Ab


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