Lose slowly so no one back home notices

Mark Steyn writes, "One of President Trump's great contributions to the public discourse is that he sees people as winners (him) or losers (Crooked Hillary. Sad!) and that he would prefer America to be in the former category. That's why his decision to string along with existing Afghan policy is so unTrumpian: If there is any US strategy left in the Hindu Kush, it's to lose so slowly no one back home notices.

...~I clarified my own position on this existential struggle after last year's grisly 9/11 anniversary observances":

We run around fighting for worthless bits of barren sod like Helmand province in Afghanistan, while surrendering day by day some of the most valuable real estate on the planet, such as France and Sweden...

In Afghanistan, we're fighting for something not worth winning, and we're losing. In Europe, Islam is fighting for something very much worth winning, and they're advancing. And, according to all the official strategists in Washington and elsewhere, these two things are nothing to do with each other.

"Thus Senator Graham - a genial fellow who's reliably wrong about everything but is consistent at least in one respect: He's an open-borders fanatic at home and abroad. He believes everyone's borders should be open to Americans in boots, and he believes all America's borders should be open to everyone. So he's latterly been the Republican frontman of so-called bipartisan "comprehensive immigration reform". Don't worry about it, because we're going to be able to "vet" everyone."
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Reducing violence by giving a speech?

Mark Steyn writes:

Of his talks with Vladimir Putin, the president said, “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Putin aims to reduce the violence by getting his boy Assad to kill everyone he needs to. Obama aims to reduce the violence by giving a speech about the “intolerance that fuels extremism” — or is it the other way round? The world understands that Putin means it and Obama doesn’t — just as in Afghanistan everyone knows the Taliban means it and the fainthearted superpower doesn’t.

Americans seem not to have noticed that the U.S. has just lost yet another war. But in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, they noticed, and they will act accordingly. On the wings of love, up and above the clouds, Obama wafts ever higher on his own gaseous uplift. Down on solid ground, the rest of the world must occasionally wonder if they haven’t confused the U.S. delegation with the world’s most empty-headed boy band.

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