He had some interesting insights at his conference.
** On Saturday morning, May 3, one of Wall Street’s most prominent billionaires — Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett — sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s steep new tariffs during the company’s annual shareholder media.
Buffett, according to Forbes, told attendees that “trade should not be a weapon” for the United States, which “should be looking to trade with the rest of the world.” And he described tariffs as “an act of war, to some degree.”**
When Buffett is actually saying something you know it is serious.
Sorry Bob, but I must say that is a dismally telling statement, revealing much of why I find myself often disturbed by your tone when I am seriously considering your texts.
Politics derives from the Greek polis, meaning both a city and the people constituting that city, and polis derives from an extremely ancient indo-european root meaning “the safe place”, “the place the people gather”, that is to say, the opposite of war.
But that can be the case. You’re old enough to remember the Cold War, I assume. And then there’s the current geopolitical struggle with China which we discuss here from time to time.
I see your point but the way I see it is war is a failure of politics. When one side thinks they are strong enough to take the other side or if they just get fed up then war insues. That is why Trump is saying if Iran does not negotiate with him he will bomb them. Iran is weak and he knows he can get away with it. Why didn’t he tell Russia that he was going to bomb them or China that he was going to bomb them? They are refusing to negotiate.
But once you go to war all politics with that party ends, the goal is to take them over.
One more point we never went to war with Russia, they just called it a cold war but war was never declared and we haven’t declared war on China either.
It is a continuum rather than an either-or. There are economic sanctions and outright blockades. There is ‘accidentally’ dragging your anchor across undersea cables. One could even blow up an undersea pipeline without declaring war. There are cyberattacks. The Stuxnet virus caused a lot of damage to the Iranian nuclear program. There is asymmetric warfare such as the Second Intifada. Et cetera.
None of that is politics (except as part of the still distant possibility of having Pufendorfian “international politics” ultimately replacing our current still utterly Macchiavelian “Realist” “international relations”). The continuum is of various differing forms of in the use of power on the spectrum of full out hot war (threatening end of world with current technical capabilities) down through medium war where the parties are terrorized from full escalation, to cold wars of espionage, sabotage, deprivation of resources, and various forms of isolation. The term “cold war” captures a part of that spectrum.
The EU showed and still shows the possibility of actually shifting from war to politics. The UN showed the impossibility of doing that worldwide in our epoch of mankind.
All of it is, as you exactly correctly declare, on a continuum, but not between politics and war, but rather cold war with hot dollops here and there, and WAR.
C’mon man those are our global politics. The problem in this discussion is thinking it is American politics as opposed to human and global realities. Whether politics or war or any sort of continuum human beings do things for power and wealth. The apes are physically weaker but militarily more powerful and mechanized.
We have some principles that are written down. We are dropping them. That is sickening. If we must puke upon American politics this is the rub.