Maybe British Lord David Cameron should replace U.S. President Joe Biden?
After all, the presidency is effectively vacant and the British foreign secretary (and former prime minister) is full of advice for the U.S. Congress.
First of all, the noble lord said, the United States must spend money—lots of it.
The Senate had just passed a bill calling for nearly $100 billion for various things, including aid to Ukraine.
That will all be borrowed money, of course, but no matter.
When you are shouldering a $34 trillion federal debt, what’s another $100 billion among friends?
Now, Lord Cameron said, it was time for the House of Representatives to stand up and pass his “simple test.”
You have the power of the purse. Appropriate the money, he instructed.
Otherwise, you will be like Neville Chamberlin capitulating to Hitler in the 1930s.
Listen up, class. This will be on the test: “I do not,” quoth Lord Cameron, “want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in the 1930s.”
Gosh.
I couldn’t tell whether the newly minted life peer thought that the “appeasing-Hitler-was-bad-move” gambit was the only historical reference the rubes from Washington would recognize.
Another possibility is that he himself, like so many pundits on the world stage today, was utterly captivated by that cliché and so, whatever the crisis, played that movie over and over in his head, starring himself, of course, as Winston Churchill facing down the little man with the funny mustache.
For some reason, she did not like to be told that unless the U.S. Congress behaved and did what their betters in Whitehall told them to do, they would be just like those feckless fretters who appeased the Nazis.
Ms. Greene might take some solace from knowing that Lord Cameron was not singling out the U.S. Congress for his interventions.
The state of Israel is also the beneficiary of his wisdom and counsel.
You will recall that in October 2023, the Sunni Islamist terrorist organization Hamas mounted a surprise attack on southern Israel from its stronghold in Gaza.
They raped, mutilated, and murdered more than 1,200 civilians, including infants and the elderly, and took hundreds back to Gaza as hostages.
In the past, Israel has responded vigorously to Arab attacks but pulled back when “international opinion” (that’s periphrasis for “U.S. dollars”) said “OK, you’ve taught the Arabs a lesson. Now stop.”
This time, however, the Israelis seem determined to destroy Hamas and prevent a recurrence of the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
At first, world opinion, appalled by the savagery of the attack against Israel, supported its efforts to extirpate the terrorists.
But within days, the cry went around that Israel’s response should be “proportionate.”
What is the “proportionate” response to the indiscriminate slaughter of more than a thousand innocent civilians?
In fact, the Israeli military has proceeded with extraordinary care to minimize civilian casualties.
Of course, since Hamas has located its military infrastructure alongside—or underneath—hospitals, mosques, and residential structures, some civilian casualties are unavoidable.
This has troubled Lord Cameron, who recently assured Parliament that he had personally insisted that Israel initiate a pause in its military operations, a hiatus, he said, that he hoped would evolve into a permanent cease-fire.
I cannot blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for disagreeing.
The moral, or part of the moral, is that the elites who presume to run the world from their privileged eyries are like life according to Macbeth: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
