Tarot Card Diplomacy

 Tarot Card Diplomacy - The American Conservative

Where foreign relations make no sense and the rules of cause and effect do not apply

"Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, and suddenly whatever was received wisdom last week is cancelled, and we are playing with a whole new set of rules. The endless shuffling of hypocrisies and non sequiturs in the West, the nonsensical sloganeering that changes from one moment to the next, is best compared to drawing at random from a deck of tarot cards. Each frame of the geopolitical saga as it unfolds on cable news is completely unrelated to anything that came before or will come next.

"Tarot card after tarot card, pundits and mic’d-up professors on the TV augur the meanings of the current crop of images and sound bites. Deeper and deeper we are all led into tarot card diplomacy, where foreign relations make no sense and the rules of cause and effect do not apply. The only ones who can interpret the tarot cards are the ones who pull them out and arrange them on the table. What do the goings-on in the world mean? No one really knows. Only the cards can help us divine the import of all the wild stuff that happens in each news cycle. Tarot card diplomacy—the weird geopolitical science practiced by the woke West.

"This week I watched people wearing shoes and clothes made by Uyghur slaves taking videos on slave-made phones of themselves dumping Russian vodka into storm sewers across America. They then struck a further blow for freedom by posting their videos onto the most censored platform since Pravda. They uploaded their staged rage to websites using software made by companies for whom “free speech” and “hate speech” are synonyms. All of this was coordinated by search engine companies that make special programs to help Chinese thought police to control 1.4 billion people.

"Freedom." . . .