While my adolescence may not have been quite as adventerous as Tim’s, I had my share of boneheaded moments. I also have quite a few memories where I kept my friends out of serious trouble, and my friends did their best to keep me out of serious trouble.
When I was 19, I was in a car driven by my buddy Ray. Ray was and still is a hot head. We got rear ended by a little sub-compact driven by a seventeen year old and three idiot passengers. Ray and the driver started yelling at each other and initiating standard male primate threat and dominance display behaviors. I was ready to brawl, and we could have take them. Thanksfully a cop came by, and started to collect information. However one of the idiot passengers now that he had the safety of a cop near by decided to start escalating the verbal taunting and got under Ray’s skin. I knew Ray well, and I knew when he was about ready to start a fight as his frustration coping mechanisms sucked. He was about ready to start swinging with a cop 6 feet away — this would be an extremely easy way to get an assault charge that Ray really did not need at the time. The cop was mostly oblivious to the dynamic so I decided that talking Ray down would not work, so I grape vined Ray’s leg, and put a partial choke on him. That involuntarily calmed Ray down. The cop saw that, was surprised and came over to me quickly and asked what the hell was I doing. I responding that I thought my friend was about to start a dumb fight, so I was trying to keep my friend out of trouble. The cop accepted that answer and backed the idiot kids up another fifty feet.
Six months later, during an epic road trip, I introduced my girlfriend to my boys. She was hot, she was smart, and as my friends quickly deduced, she was not good for me. They drank her family’s beer, ate their food, and enjoyed their company for the two days we were visiting. They held their tongues until we piled into the 1984 Toyota van and got to the second stop light from her house and they let me know that they understood why I was with her, but it would be in my long term interest to get the hell out. I ignored them for another two years but at the end I saw what they were seeing.
Good friends are supposed to protect you from yourself when you are making dumb decisions.
That applies to the guys I grow up with and to international allies as Daniel Larison points out:
you realize that Cohen is judging the state of the “trans-Atlantic alliance” solely on whether or not it can be used to wage war on a country that poses no real threat to Europe nor America. Britain didn’t “abandon” the U.S. at “crunch time.” It’s not as if the U.S. came under attack and then Britain ignored its treaty obligations. Britain opted out of a punitive American war of choice. One might as well pretend that Eisenhower “abandoned” Britain and France when he opposed their attack on Egypt. This sort of thing makes sense only to someone who thinks that alliances require a government to endorse the least defensible mistakes of their allies.
Good friends are good friends because they’ll tell you that you’re being stupid. That applies to 19 year olds full of piss and vinegar and that applies to major powers as well.