Foreign Policy Game: Cruz talks, Carlson scores

Tucker Carlson is the iconic voice of Republican conservatism in the United States. He often elicits a strong reaction because he sometimes takes an unconventional position. Carlson is that rare personality, no matter how logical or illogical his words are, always seemingly honest and sincere. Since April 2023, when he was asked to leave Fox News, Carlson had no boundaries on his toes, his declaration of independence.

As an independent broadcaster, Carlson also dares to break many rules, not just because he has long been a media culture. He also developed a habit of challenging the country’s main political culture. Shortly after leaving Fox, he dared to give a long interview in the Kremlin, with the man never heard in the American media: Russian President Vladimir Putin conducted a long interview in the Kremlin.

Carlson certainly learned that refusing to talk freely with Putin is part of a strategy to put Western commentators in charge of explaining Putin’s secret ideas. They know what he really thinks, so why bother the man himself? This is an effective strategy. For example, how many times we hear from politicians and the media, Putin once fully integrated Ukraine into his Russian mother, who would set out to conquer Poland, the Baltic state, probably Finland, and then send his tanks to Champs-elysée in France. Emmanuel Macron seems to believe this. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte also early Defense Newswarning: “Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to ‘wipe the map of Ukraine’ and possibly after the rest of Europe next.”

Carlson has since conducted long informal interviews with important figures in politics. Amid the Middle East crisis, Carlson last week interviewed conservative Republicans and a hopeful Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who was a president.

During the interview, Carlson dared to accuse Cruz of being the new fuse, ready to intervene and attack foreign countries with the most vulnerable moral principles. Carlson claimed at one point: “You are saying we are making moral cases.” He also pointed out that the reason for the attack on Iran is similar to the Iraq case twenty years ago and is based on lies. Cruz insists that he is not a neoconservative, Cruz object: “I’m not in a moral game. I’m in the United States’ game.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smemfve0l5e

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In the game:

A popular expression in the United States, designed to designate people to engage in professional activities, is considered a field of sport or competition rather than a profession, because in American culture, everyone’s role in society is a way to win at the expense of “losers” of everyone else.

Context Comments

Cruz is even more serious about using easy-to-understand metaphors to express his views. The expression of “in-game” features American English for at least a century. It usually comes in a negative form, a form of denial: “I’m not in the X game”, which is similar to “I’m not in the business of X”.

Cruz’s denial of participating in the Dordrogation Game provides us with a lot of information about two things: American political culture and Cruz’s own lack of seriousness. The game produces results (wins or losses) and points. However, these results are different from those of international conflicts and have no permanent impact on society. The Senator’s statement expresses a discussion of the issue is just a game, no serious bets. But what he calls out is foreign policy – more specifically war and peace – a stake is always a serious area. However, we should point out that marking something in the United States as “foreign” means it can only have marginal interests.

Another difference will help understand how American political culture distinguishes between serious and trivial people. Cruz would never want to talk about what “game” he was in when discussing immigration policy. Immigration is a “serious” problem that we should never think of when it comes to playing games. Americans see foreign policy as distractions, such as a team sport. When the war begins, a new season begins. When it’s over (often not done these days), the season is over.

In the same conversation, Cruz has no contradiction with his denial of playing moral games. Once, to prove our aggressiveness, he blurted out: “This is the people Iran wants to kill, all Jews and all Americans.”

In other words, he conceived Iran’s emerging regime change strategy with the moral obligation to punish immoral governments. His reason for doing so was that people thousands of miles away were eager to kill Jews and Americans. Carlson laughed at any basic facts he had about Iran, including the size of its population. Obviously, Cruz is not trying to explore the implications of verbal threats that Iranians have easily produced in the past. Whether it is a “moral game” or a “Middle East Oil Control” game, for him, it’s just who will win or lose. There is nothing to do with who will win next year’s Super Bowl.

History

Every culture on Earth, throughout history, has created, adapted or adopted popular games in which people compete mentally and physically prove their abilities alone, collectively or both. The Egyptians and Sumerians invented and played board games five thousand years ago. The game provides a threat-free opportunity to simulate, experiment, understand and ultimately master complex human activities. Throughout history, these have been directly or indirectly related to religion, sex and marriage, business, and of course war, which most directly imply war in chess games. Although they have no applicable purpose, the skills developed are therefore often played a role in implementing strategies for survival and social organization.

The game is built around formal rules and strictly defined environments, aiming to avoid confusion with social, political and economic realities. But the relationship between game and life history develops over time. In modern culture, especially in the West, the boundary between these two areas of competitive activity seems to be collapsed. Cruz provides an example that might happen. By entertainment political reality is a game, a game where there are winners and losers, rather than as a social ballet to weave a complex social structure, our understanding of how the world works will be reduced. In each society, complementary forces interact in various ways to promote information, goods, language, wealth and art). If the distinction between social interaction and game disappears, the political concept of society will inevitably be confused with the violence of war, ultimately with deadly forms of competition.

Our age elevates the idea of ​​national security to everyone’s highest core value. This is often an expanding effort to breed physical and technical means of protecting the current state of government. Monitoring status has become a universal ideal. US President Donald Trump clearly shared this mentality. But so is former President Joe Biden.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff now presents in the media an example of Trump’s rhetoric captured on calls from the past week until he decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear website. Litany first said: “Are they going to win? Is this winner? Is this game over? They’re so good. It’s really a show.” Trump said the day before the authorization bombing: “If we do that, it has to be perfect. It has to be victory. It has to look perfect.” The president covered it all up and concluded, “In, boom, go out.” In the American movement, that’s the plan “buzzer.”

Once upon a time, countries would often try some form of diplomacy before they begin war. If it fails, the war will follow. During the war, they will prepare for a diplomatic movement to resolve the war. This is not what happens in the game. Moreover, the fact that we no longer see diplomacy at work before war, and that war does not “end the game”, tells us that civilization has adopted a new set of rules: there are no other rules besides the logic of force. “Peace” in the eyes of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will “may be right.”

Despite his different styles, Biden also cuts foreign policy to one game. After taking office in January 2021, he repeatedly claimed that the world is a competition between two teams: a democratic country and a dictator. This explains why he did not sit down and finalize the European security framework as Putin asked. The game will be a proxy war.

When Trump uses formally programmed negotiations as a simple forgery in his game strategy, allowing Israel to attack Iran with the pretext of force, he further conducts serious diplomacy. The attack included an attempt to assassinate Iran’s chief negotiator.

After the past two U.S. presidency, it seems obvious: about the fate of the Biden team relentlessly calling it a “rules-based international order.” For this command, this is indeed the “end of the game”.

* (In the time of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American, journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of common terms that articulate their hidden meaning in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published it as a book, as a book, the devil’s desire, our interest in 1911. We continue to work hard, and his title is his title. News readers The Dictionary of Fair Observer Devil)

((Lee Thompson-Kolar Edited this. )

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of fair observers.