{"id":107617,"date":"2020-11-25T11:21:10","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=107617"},"modified":"2020-11-25T11:21:10","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:21:10","slug":"i-used-to-like-mattis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=107617","title":{"rendered":"I used to like Mattis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then I saw this headline from Military.com<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Mattis Calls on Biden to Scrap ‘America First’ Policy, Slow Pullout from Afghanistan<\/h3>\n

Da fuq? American First should be every Americans’ agenda. It wasn’t until after WWII that we even considered world affairs our business. Many, if not most, Americans supported isolationism until after the war when we became the UN\/world police. Now it’s like we have some obligation to the world to sacrifice of ourselves for them, even when they don’t want nor ask for our help.<\/p>\n

I’ve never understood why people here in the US take such an issue with Trump saying American should come first. He’s the President of the United States. If the head of state for the country isn’t putting his country first, then he’s not much of a leader. All of our former, current, and future adversaries put themselves first religiously and without apology.<\/p>\n

From the article;<\/p>\n

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has broken his silence on the election with a public call to President-elect Joe Biden to alter the course of current defense policy.<\/p>\n

Alongside three co-authors, Mattis published a piece in Foreign Affairs on Monday warning against abrupt departure from Afghanistan and calling for the elimination of “America First” as a tenet of defense strategy.<\/p>\n

“To dismiss U.S. involvement today in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere as ‘endless’ or ‘forever’ wars — as both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden do — rather than as support to friendly governments struggling to exert control over their own territory misses the point,” Mattis and his co-authors wrote. “It is in the United States’ interests to build the capacity of such governments to deal with the threats that concern Americans.”<\/p>\n

As defense secretary, Mattis was the main architect of the National Defense Strategy, which directed the military to prepare for potential conflict with Russia and China. But Mattis and the others urged Biden and his new national security team to give the NDS a major rewrite and soften the confrontational tone.<\/p>\n

“In January, when President Joe Biden and his national security team begin to reevaluate U.S. foreign policy, we hope they will quickly revise the national security strategy to eliminate ‘America first’ from its contents, restoring in its place the commitment to cooperative security that has served the United States so well for decades,” the authors wrote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Afghanistan is our country’s longest war by a large margin. With no clear indication of what victory looks like, there’s zero end in sight. By any objective measure, Afghanistan is an endless war.<\/p>\n

If it’s support for A-stan that they want, we’re still leaving behind at least 2,500 Americans to assist the locals under Trump’s pull out strategy.<\/p>\n

I’m 100% in favor of supporting our allies. I think we can all agree on that. What that support looks like is the question. Do we provide free security for our allies and lose American blood and money fighting someone else’s battle? At some point you have to let your children free to make their own mistakes, it’s the only way they learn.<\/p>\n

Like a mother bird kicking her babies out of the nest to teach them to fly, we cannot keep putting our blood and money behind other people’s fights. They don’t have any skin in the game if we’re doing all the hard work for them. If we haven’t taught them how to fight their own battles after 19 years, then we aren’t ever going to.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Jeff LPH 3 for sending me the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Then I saw this headline from Military.com; Mattis Calls on Biden to Scrap ‘America First’ Policy, … I used to like Mattis<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,301,237,406,400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves","category-afghanistan","category-big-pentagon","category-guest-link","category-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107619,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107617\/revisions\/107619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}