Why ‘Commander’ is Biting
by Brian Patrick Bolger (December 2023)
Imagine being a dog at the White House. Your owners delegate all their responsibilities as dog owners to FBI officers, maids and gardeners. Various weird people turn up at the mansion, such as ‘The Squad,’ Kamila Harris and, late at night, Hunter. Commander is a German Shepherd with a fool proof nose. All the scents of Cocaine in the White House would send anyone loopy. The Squad have probably told Commander that male dogs can have puppies and its ok if he is not attracted to bitches. Its fine if he starts dating a male poodle. His previous dog Major’s bad behaviour was put down to him inhaling something ‘toxic’ in the White House whilst a pup. Major also managed to ‘fracture his foot’ whilst in the shower with Joe. The previous dog, another German Shepherd called ‘Champ’ was also biting security guards. There seems to be a trend here. But I’ve had a German Shepherd, I know lots of people having German Shepherds, and guess what? They don’t bite anyone. There is just something weird about Democrats and their dogs. Bill Clinton slept with his dog ‘Buddy’ when Hilary was away. Then there was Franklin D Roosevelt’s dog ‘Major’ who ripped the pants off British Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald. Now, Major and Commander have been removed from the White House. But the buck stops with a dog’s owner.
Now the dog situation could be extrapolated to international affairs. Biden, the bemused President surrounded by a confused world biting and lashing out. The US foreign policy is in tatters with raging fires on several fronts, from Ukraine to Israel. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the US exercised a de facto authority over the western hemisphere. Now , the sunsets and tides on the old empires are in abeyance. Monroe is receding as regional ‘grossraums’ or civilisational states such as China, India and Russia attempt to defer. The Europeans are in structural decline, with lowering FDI and productivity. Western states are crippled by dysfunctional liberal regimes which elevate mediocrity to positions of influence. The breakdown of Westphalia* is visible in the encroachment of Russia into Europe and the rise of aligning populist states and populations grown nauseous by multiculturalism.
There seems no US leadership ‘policy’ as such except for shipping weapons and funding a war which was has gone cold turkey as strategic partners bail out. Policy is out of sync with new realities in the Middle East. Rather than the diplomacy of a Metternich, or Napoleon meeting Alexander on in a raft on the Neiman River in 1807 over good wines and fine fayre, we have half-baked civil servants such as Blinken and Cleverley touching down in Tel Aviv for a 15 minute sortie. Its a bit like playing the same Poker hand, over and over, whilst bleeding cash but acting like a high roller. Cynics would say it was Hunter Biden’s links to a Ukrainian oil giant which drives policy, or the entire Keynesian war economy of the twenty first century which sees shares skyrocketing amidst devastation and death. The only beneficiaries of British and US foreign policy seem to be Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon Technologies. It is a culture of nihilism with no guiding telos and no leadership.
In situations of crazy dogs snapping and biting there is usually only one solution. The owner should be put down.
* Treaty of Westphalia 1648. Movement towards embryonic nation states out of the moribund Holy Roman Empire.
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Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as The American Spectator, Asian Affairs, Deliberatio, L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica, The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Merion West, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, Visegrad Insight, The Hungarian Review, The Salisbury Review, The Village, New English Review, The Burkean, The Daily Globe, American Thinker, The Internationalist, and Philosophy News. His new book, Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century, will be published soon by Ethics International Press.
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