Saturday, April 02, 2022
Waking Up from 1989--or not
The collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1989 convinced most of the West that the world was now headed in the same direction, towards worldwide capitalism and democracy.
No one who knew anything was convinced of this nonsense at all. Only idiots like Francis Fukuyama.
Things had looked roughly the same 80 years earlier, in 1909 or so, another optimistic moment in which at least one observer, Norman Angell, argued that great-power war had become obsolete.
This is also a piece of utter nonsense: nothing looked roughly the same 80 years earlier at all.
Then the First World War broke out, first in Eastern Europe, and then all over the continent because of imperial Germany's great power ambitions.
Germany's second rate great power ambitions, by themselves, had nothing to do with causing WWI. Other greater power players had ambitions, fears, interests, and concerns far overriding those of 'Imperial' Germany.
After the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires at the end of that war, the victorious allies looked forward once again to a long peace, but the Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany doomed those hopes as well.
The British, French, and nascent Italian, empires were also ruined beyond repair by WWI.
No one, anywhere, looked forward 'once again' to a long peace, especially erstwhile imperial powers, France least of all.
Both Nazi Germany and the Depression grew out of WWI, and did not come as an unpredictable and irrational surprise to scotch post WWI optimism.
1909 was not an optimistic moment, for anyone, in the first place.
Only fools like Angell had looked forward to one in 1909.
The United States entered WWI, belatedly, mainly to welcome the Russian revolution, and to join with it, in Wilsonian revolutionary self-determination, to end these warring Western Civilization empires, from which America had rebelliously sprung, and not because of German submarine warfare per se at all.
The League of Nations failed to prevent small and then large wars in the 1930s.
The League was queered by the US itself, "crippled at birth" as Weinberg put it, by the absence of the US itself (its major leftist sponsor), and by the justified exclusion of Russia.
For a long time, the US was the only rogue country that recognized and would deal with that rogue Bolshevik bitch!
Nationalist libertarian self determination bi lateralism, and its corollary elective nationalist isolationism, contradicts multilateralist left universalist liberalism.
As a Paris 1919 official put it, newly liberated ethnic nationals were "vicious from the moment of their birth". Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919
The US foreign policy establishment, we can now see, looked forward in the early 1990s to the complete hegemony of American values and interests, enforced when necessary by military power.
The so-called US foreign policy establishment has long been connected with, and subsumed within, what Quigley and others called The Anglo-American Establishment, the title of his book, going back to 19th century benevolent paternalistic, at first 'conservative', white race, Western imperialism, a la Cecil Rhodes, et al..
Paul Wolfowitz put this one paper late in the Bush I administration, and no subsequent administration has really abandoned these dreams.
This document:
https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf
George H. W. Bush had fought the first Gulf War with the united support of the UN, but Bill Clinton decided to fight Yugoslavia for Kosovo without it.
The Anglo-American establishment, a bastard joinder in the first place, no more believed deeply in multilateralism than in Clinton's unilateralism against the Serbs.
Clinton also gave us NAFTA, and BLOCISM, rather than multilateralism. It is useful to recall that he had been a Rhodes Scholar.
One has only to read Quigley's Chapter, "Foreign Policy: 1919 - 1940", to get a sense of where some of these American Establishment and Anglo-American Establishment ideas came from, and what they have caused.
He also tried and failed to straighten out Somalia, and expanded NATO.
Clinton also gave us the WTO, a CFR, Round Table, Rhodes Milner Group universalist globalist equalitarianist biggie!
Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives
The neocon movement as DK pointed out was started by Orthodox Jews. It appears to still be run by them, with the likes if Kushner. It is hard to paint Orthodox Jews as imperialists for anything much but the State of Israel, but moving the capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was emblematic.
returned to power under George W. Bush and wrote a national security strategy declaring, among other things, that the US would attack any nation that was trying to build weapons the US did not think they should have.
In an age of American led nuclear, and now biological and cyber weapons proliferations (having long offshored biotech virology weapons-level research, and much of weapons-level cyber IT tech as well, to China, for example) , what choice does any power now have?
After 9/11 they implemented that policy in Iraq, with disastrous results,
Iraq was a faux implementation of that policy, an excuse, a pretext, really, where no such weapons were being produced in any event...
and decided to try to establish a new friendly government in Afghanistan.
Our involvement with Bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan later turned out disastrously for us in many different ways as well....
Meanwhile, initial attempts in the 1990s to use billions of dollars to integrate Russia into the world economy ended very badly, and Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 1999.
Using our billions to integrate Russia into an anti communist globalism, after just having sided with the Muslims, using more billions, against it, was farcical in the extreme....
The concept of a boomed non-communist world economy itself has been a guiding catastrophic, suicidal, and delusional tenet of the Milner and post Milner Group LIEO American Establishment and Anglo-American Establishment West since before WWII.
Bush II continued expanding NATO, and at the end of his term tried to bring Georgia and Ukraine into it as well.
every regime that followed this NATO EU UN gravy train of so called security was seeing dollar signs in free security, one sided trade, and US subsidies, nothing more, and nothing lasting whatsoever.
Future historians, I think, will see that the collapse of Communism
communism did not collapse...
encouraged a new phase of American imperialism
America has generally been ideologically, economically, and theologically anti imperialist, from its beginnings up through the 21st Century, and as Sir Michael Howard noted refused to prop up Western Imperialism, "against which it had been the first to rebel", both before and after WWII...
focused on the Middle East.
Foolishly having focussed on the Middle East, while all Asia has developed to confront us, vastly more empowered by us, has been the biggest legacy of the Cold War.
That trend continued under Barack Obama, who encouraged the Arab spring, took steps to overthrow Qadaffi in Libya, and committed the US to the overthrow of Assad in Syria.
The Bushs/Obama, dumb and dumber; but it was not what I or anyone else in the West would call imperialism, unless they are BLM NYT The 1619 Project negroes or liberal white Stokelys, Africans, Chinks, Hindus, Muslims, or other colored disgruntled deplorables.
Sick of its elites adventures, the American people in 2016 barely elected Donald Trump, who wanted to end the imperial era.
The American people were sick of its elites' failures, and its failed, and inherently contradictory, founding ideology.
There was no imperial era, and Trump was not against imperialism as such.
It, imperialism, never really began here, in fact the opposite, anti-imperialism, began here.
Whatever DK here calls imperialism had most always been bi partisan, not Republican only, except for Lincoln's Union, the first nation-state of terror, as Bobbitt noted in The Shield of Achilles, p. 217. I think it improper to call it imperial.
He had nearly pulled out of Afghanistan when he left office, and he apparently had thought seriously about leading NATO.
The US government did recognize a potential Chinese threat all this time, largely, I suspect, because Taiwan remains the principal reason for the maintenance of the US Navy.
DK misses the enormous threat of China by isolating it to Taiwan, and then says that is the principle reason for maintaining a US Navy. None of this makes any sense.
The US has been trying to build a new anti-Chinese alliance in Asia,
largely in its traditional way, by trading away American interests as carrots, while having already given away its ass in its enormous pro China trade since Nixon, in the first place; long long story.
yet we also hoped--and may still hope--that China's increasingly important place in the global economy,
we put them there to screw ourselves and our posterity, as someone like Pillsbury makes crystal clear. But our blunders re China go back to the 19th Century;
Kennan talks about the early 20th Century, Stalin led State and Executive Departments ending up promoting Mao against Chiang. See Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin; Stalin's Secret Agents, Weinberg, V. II .
will dissuade it from dangerous military adventures.
Its increasingly powerful position has made it ever increasingly dangerous and threatening since 1980, on our nickel!
The US refused, however, seriously to take account of who Vladimir Putin was and what his ascent to power meant.
See for example Michael McFaul, classic CFR, Rhodes scholar, St. John's College, Oxford, post Milner Group, Round Table Davosaur, etc.
See Russian reset, Wikipedia, McFaul's brainchild, Hillary used the term reset, and it meant overload to the Russians! What an idiot.
Stephen Kotkin, another locus classicus Davosaur, has been trying to undermine Russia his whole career, affirmatively and aggressively trying to train, arm, and Americanize Ukraine away from Russia for 20 years as he put it more or less.
Shortly after he took power in 1999, bombings of Moscow apartment buildings took several hundred Russian lives. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists--even though there was no ongoing war between Russia and Chechnya at that moment--and made the bombings his pretext to resume the war. He won it by leveling the Chechen capital, Grozny. I recently learned from this excellent episode of This American Life that evidence emerged almost at once that Russian intelligence had set off the fatal bombs in Moscow--and a longtime friend of mine, a Russian expert, confirmed that. Putin, in short, immediately revealed himself as a dictator who would murder his own people to create a pretext for territorial expansion--and it was no secret that he regarded the collapse of the USSR as a catastrophe. He soon began murdering political opponents as well, both inside and outside Russia,. Yet the West, noticing Russia's increasing role as an energy supplier--especially to Western Europe--refused to take him seriously as a long-term threat, and both George W. Bush and Barack Obama treated him as some one we could get along with, at least until the annexation of Crimea and hte beginning of the war against Ukraine in 2014. Donald Trump regarded him as an ally.
The shock within our media and foreign policy establishment at Putin's invasion of Ukraine is wondrous to behold. Many simply cannot believe that Putin would dare do something that we did not believe he should do. Many immediately began grasping at straws suggesting that he could not succeed, such as the hope that oligarchs might overthrow him.
"Professor
My suggestion here is now to add both racial, religious, and civilizational aspects to your LIEO account.
I would call what is rolling out The White Western Civilizational Civil War III, although beginning, not as WWI did, between Austrian Catholic and Slav Orthodox rebel elements, but rather with a Slav on Slav Civil War in East Ukraine, but then confronting a Catholic minority in the West of a torn country at the civilizational fault line.
All the best"
This is a real parallel to the response to Hitler in the late 1930s, when many hoped that "moderates" in the German government would restrain him.
Weinberg discusses this at several points. It was only recognized clearly by Britain by late 1939, to be a delusional pipe dream. See especially A World At Arms, p. 92, 94-95, 109, and earlier works.
Most of those who had held these appeasement hopes and views, in the early 20s and to the end of the 30s, were either in or under the control of the Milner Group, typified by Buckle, Toynbee, Raleigh, Parkin, Brassey, Grey, Lothian, Astor, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Hoare, etc., etc., since before the first World War. See The Anglo-American Establishment.
Putin, however, is obviously an outlaw determined to use terror to tighten his rule at home and force to expand it abroad History tells us, too, that that is not necessarily a self-defeating strategy. That is how the Russian empire was originally created and expanded, and then restored under the USSR. Our vision of a world in which such things do not happen is simply not self-actualizing in the real world.
Two years ago, a longtime friend of mine, a political scientist and retired Air Force colonel named Thomas Ehrhard, summarized the impact of post-cold war thinking on our military in this excellent article. Assuming--like the British government in the 1920s and early 1930s--that a great-power war was too unlikely to worry about, our military stopped preparing for one. That may be one reason why the Pentagon does not seem to be showing any appetite for intervention in Ukraine, the course of action which I continue to believe we should seriously consider. The battlefield news from Ukraine is still good, although the devastation of the major cities and the refugee crisis are horrifying. Unless the war ends with Putin's fall, however--an outcome that does not seem in the least likely--NATO will have to contend with very real threats to seize the Baltic states--which are far less defensible than Ukraine.
Putin has been much more patient and more clever than Hitler was. He spent years building up his economy and shoring up his domestic position. He was not, like Hitler, impelled by economic problems to expand rapidly. He did test the waters in 2014 and emerged relatively unscathed. (It isn't clear that the sanctions the west imposed at that time did that much harm.) The Chinese have also been patient. Yet Russia, and perhaps Chna as well, now feels entitled to use its military power to secure territorial ambitions. It's true that the US set the precedent for unrestrained use of its military power in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. I opposed two of those interventions but I will not make the popular era of assuming that we have no right to complain about Russia's aggression because of our own behavior. A Second World War solution to the problems of Russia and China--their conquest--is obviously impossible. We must figure out what we can do, and what we are willing to do, militarily, to stop their expansion if sanctions do not bring down Putin.
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