Vital and Urgent Priorities in America's Place in the World

 

At the center of the book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" the author says we must learn to separate the Vital from the Urgent and live our lives taking proper care of both. The reason we can't is the tyranny of the urgent. 

When there is a fire on the stove we have to put it out before we can think about remodeling the kitchen to be more efficient. Social media makes the urgent loom much larger than Stephen Covey could have imagined when he wrote his book. I can see and sympathize with the urgent plight of the people of Afghanistan. 

But America also needs to keep its commitments to other allied nations, and I would add to fix prior betrayals. What America has done to the Kurds in the last three decades needs to be fixed. It does not have the videos of the current crisis, but we left the Kurds in Iraq to be gassed and slaughtered by Saddam Hussein in 1991. Our failed "nation building" strategy left the Kurds isolated in 2003 and after. Then the last President betrayed the Kurds in Syria after one phone call with Erdogan. Unlike the current President, he was not surprised by events, he did not give a fuck about the Kurds or any commitment we made to them. 

And while we focus on Afghanistan while showing the world we are incompetent, what happens to Taiwan? Does China think we would come to Taiwan's aid? And Ukraine? What would stop Putin from moving into Ukraine in force? The Baltic states have authoritarian Belarus and Russia as neighbors to the east and increasingly authoritarian Poland to the south and west.