So why have we gone so many years with meaningless gestures and endless, useless statements? It all goes back to what one Soviet employee once said: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” That is the system built since the 1980s, where diplomacy is simply play-acting. People were shocked by Ronald Reagan bombing Libya and Trump turning General Soleimani into a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Remember when John Kerry promised that if the Obama administration were to respond in Syria (after Assad blew past Obama’s “red lines”), it would be a little pinprick of an attack? This is how things have been done: talk big and do nothing.
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