‘Strategic Stupidity’
I am a dual citizen of the United States and France. Of course the whole world knows the obvious, that my US president Joe Biden is a senile old fool. But it is not so obvious that my French president Emmanuel Macron is a sophisticated and clever fool, but a fool nonetheless.
Over the past several weeks Macron has been formulating a public policy he called “strategic ambiguity.” The idea was to scare Putin and the Russians that the French army might or might not show up in Ukraine to stop the Russian advance. In Macron’s mind, the Russians would be afraid to attack a NATO member’s troops, though they would not be in Ukraine as NATO. In the last couple of days there was a report that a first contingent of soldiers from the French Foreign Legion (not French citizens) had been embedded in a Ukrainian unit.
While acting with ambiguity might make sense in a Pariasian dalliance it makes little sense in geopolitics. Take the example of WWI. From Wikipedia we find this standard view of the causes of WW I, “Other factors that came into play during the diplomatic crisis leading up to the war included misperceptions of intent (such as the German belief tha
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