State Department Seeking China Clout

The girl from (fill in Rustbelt hometown) wants a diplomatic third way for her State Department in dealings with China, a relationship which she describes as "the world's most important". Engagement with the burgeoning Communist superpower thus far has been dominated by a two-pronged military and economic approach led by the Defense and Treasury departments respectively. The military makes sure to stay on top of capabilities for sending China back to the Stone Age, while Treasury takes on most of the diplomatic burden, focused so much on commerce as that channel tends to be. So instead of Hillary Clinton wearing a funny hat and having her picture taken shaking hands, you get Timothy Geithner going out of his way to flatter a Chinese counterpart at his own expense, which he made a point of doing this week while considering the merits of a politically toxic proposal on changes to reserve currency.

But the State Department wants a piece of that action, and they're going to get it. Let's just hope there won't be too many cooks in the kitchen. Hillary's been a good role player in the Senate, when her own, ruthless ambition hasn't gotten in the way. If she can define her role her and be faithful to it, then all the better for US/China relations.

Shitloads More to Afghanistan

Joe Biden may not consider thousands more American troops a full shitload, and I don't want to put words into his mouth, but it's certainly a shitload more than he was calling for according to Bill Gertz today, reporting from Inside the Ring. The Vice-President and Hillary's number two in the State Department weren't looking to scale up the effort in Afghanistan to any significant degree at all, it appears, beyond keeping it from becoming an al Qaida Magic Kingdom.

Although Mr. Obama made assurances he would place uncommonly high stock in Joe Biden's foreign policy advice, that did not appear to persuade him away from an ambitious nation-building agenda in this, his first deployment of military servicemen. The President must have been convinced by Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to the region, and David Petraeus, architect of restorative feats in Iraq, that a comprehensive, rehabilitative approach to what is widely considered Hell on Earth is preferable to periodic, low-maintenance policing. In other words, exactly the same argument that won over President Bush with respect to Iraq---unless you believe he went there for the earl, in which case take your head out of your ass.

Observers of the scene will remember how Democrats, including all of those mentioned above, made a lot of noise over the last several years about how Afghanistan was the good war, and if only Democrats were in power, we'd pull out of Iraq and "surge" in Afghanistan (because wild-eyed critics of the project in Mesopotamia are no slouches in the War on Terror since they'd gladly blow tons more goat herders into smithereens if only they got the chance). Well, now Iraq is stabilizing, but still requiring our commitment, Afghanistan truly does look like it's backsliding, and we're out of fucking money. So we're doubling down on our attempt to break a thousands of years long series of failures to tame a region which has been called, with good reason, "the graveyard of empires".

This is now Barack Obama's war.