(... except when you have to ?) George Friedman in his peice at Stratfor wants this old and glib defeatist rubric (allegedly uttered by Douglas MacArthur to JFK and kinda quoted more recently in the movie " Princess Bride "), elevated to "a principle of U.S. foreign policy". It looks to me more like a thin and easy assertion of tactical rhetoric masquerading as grand strategy (how apt therefore that its source should be the egomaniacal MacArthur). The more compelling proposition is probably something more like: now that China is a real military threat to the US, a land war in Asia is more likely than ever to be a disaster. This is just a statement of the obvious. Friedman's (and MacArthur's) proposition however seems to wilfully elide some more important issues. Firstly, to publicly proclaim such a doctrine would be to unilaterally substantially weaken the US's ability to influence events in Asia. And that is just plain dumb. Secondly, it bespea...
Stirring grist, grizzle and gore to flavour the stew.