Obama's Foreign Policy

[Townsend]

Come on now.  You knew I couldn't hand out a compliment to Obama without a requisite back-hand bitchslap.

Sure sure. 

So I was thinking about all the jokes coming Oklahoma's way over the last...well, decades I guess.  I'm looking at the Republican field and I'm pretty sure the USA would be an international Oklahoma.  Europe would be the new East Coast and China/Japan would be the new West coast.  The USA would be the flyovers because everyone would see us as a land full o'loons with one of them in office.

Canada could be the new Maine.  "SometAAAHHms, dead is betta."

[we vs us]

Now, what's the payback for the U.S.'s $1 billion investment in a Libyan regime change?  

I've been actually thinking about this question since the run-up to Iraq, where Cheney was promising a shady sort of thing where somehow the captured oil wealth would pay for the war itself and I realized that . . . in every modern conflict since, well, WWI at least, the idea of plunder as major conflict motivator has completely gone away.  Of course, after WWII, a huge exception has to be made for the Soviets, who literally dismantled German factories and transported them brick by brick back into Russia.  But aside from that I can't think of any modern war outside of some of the African conflicts where capturing wealth was primary.  

But I realized then that the gains in modern warfare and geopolitics are never 1 for 1.  You never get reimbursed straight away.  And the folks who get reimbursed aren't the citizens of the country going to war, but the country's private industry.  Back in the day we used to call that Colonialism, whereby the Dutch East India Company (or similar) snaps up the mineral rights, plunders the resources, enslaves the natives, and in general takes anything of value.  Nowadays, I think the economic implications are more indirect, and we fight to open up markets to globalism.  

[Townsend]

the folks who get reimbursed aren't the citizens of the country going to war, but the country's private industry.  

A form of trickle down?