Christmas Chatter

You're invited (bring a Christmas jumper)

Below the fold, paid subscribers will find a link for tomorrow’s Chatham House livestream with

Lorenzo Warby

& yours truly.

We’ll be discussing our recent pieces, both here and elsewhere, as well as having a bit of a year in review.

My recent publications include this interview with

Triggernometry

’s

Konstantin Kisin

for Liberty Fund’s Law & Liberty magazine, this review (for Quillette) of

Helen Pluckrose

’s Counterweight Handbook, and this appearance (discussing Jamie Oliver’s recent Australian “cultural appropriation” travails) on Spectator TV.

For his part, Lorenzo wrote an absolute banger here on the US election (which, among other things, got Instapundit-ed). This did mean a bit of a binfire around these parts, but a genuinely interesting one. Lorenzo also wrote a fascinating piece at his place on how Homo sapiens settled the entire planet, among other things revealing that the earliest settlement of New Zealand (by the Maori) occurred several centuries after the Normans rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral.

Elsewhere,

Louise Perry

made extensive use of one of my arguments in an excellent & thought-provoking piece on Lily Phillips—a woman who has spent some weeks now as Twitter’s main character.

Finally, I want to try to articulate something that has been bothering me since quite a lot of people outside the US flipped their wigs over the election result in the US, often over foreign policy.

Trump, allegedly, was going to tell Netanyahu to forget the hostages and finish the job pronto, all the while selling Ukraine down the river because he’s still personally furious over the Biden family’s corrupt dealings there.

Both of those claims may, in fact, be true. Israel’s willingness to negotiate with hostage-takers is politically unusual. It has probably prolonged the Gaza conflict and led to more civilian deaths. Trump—and even more his incoming VP—so despise “forever wars” they may just drop Ukraine in it and wash their hands of the place.

The issue I want to work through is this: it is completely unreasonable for partisans in those two conflicts to expect American electors to vote on foreign policy when elections in the US—as in every other liberal democracy—are won and lost on domestic issues, and are always and everywhere national affairs.

Australian cartoonist Alan Moir captures some of the sentiment I’m describing; note Uncle Sam’s very Australian paper ballot. We inevitably view elections in other countries through the prism of our own.

I have long loathed it when foreigners try to tell Australians how to vote (this happens sometimes, largely over the country’s abrogation of the Refugee Convention). I am of the view that the same courtesy should be extended to Americans, but am open to being persuaded otherwise.

This came to mind in response to reading this piece (by the FT’s Janan Ganesh) on the rightness of Trump and the wrongness of Merkel. If the paywall boots you out, the heart of Ganesh’s piece is below.

For those of you who are new subscribers, a brief background: because this Substack is free, to reward paid subscribers for their support, we do live-streamed Chatham House Rules chats.

This means no information from or quotation of—and this doesn’t just apply to Lorenzo or me—is to be attributed to any participant in the call, outside the call. We do not want any of our supporters sacked for “something they said on the internet”.