Cheerleaders for the Warfare State

Thursday, December 22, 2022 10:48 PM

Cunning is a poor substitute for sagacity.—La Rochefoucauld

Dear Friends + Interlocutors,

Where to start? I just finished speed-reading a tedious tour d’horizon of our troubled world as seen through the cracked lens of an up-and-coming Neoliberal foreign policy mastermind by the name of Hal Brands. 


It was written in the middle of October for Bloomberg. Dr. Brands is a Bloomberg opinion columnist in addition to being the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Brands must know something, of course, but his long-winded rumination is unpersuasive. It is, in fact, all wet. The obvious does not occur to him: that Washington must stop making enemies before it blows up the planet.

Somehow someway at some point, I must have signed up for subscriptions to Bloomberg and to Foreign Affairs, perhaps the two most proactive Neoliberal fountainheads in existence, aside from the agitprop-driven New York Times.

Yesterday in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, I came across the latest outburst from the acclaimed Neocon ideologue Robert Kagan. He and Brands have been drinking Kool-Aid from the same punchbowl. Lots of it.

Kagan, as you may remember, is the husband of Victoria “Fuck the EU!" Nuland, who teed up the Russo-Ukraine war in 2014 and didn’t look back. Kagan's narrative is smooth and disarming. Call it cartoon history, the received version.

[By the way, if Americans couldn't keep Ben Franklin's republic—now in shambles, almost unrecognizable—why should anyone believe them capable of safeguarding the so-called “free world”?]

Ms. Nuland performs heavy malfeasance in tandem with lightweight U.S. Secretary of State Antony “Blind Man” Blinken. She is the second official in charge at the State Department, where she tries hard to fly below the radar. Her track record has been ghastly.
 
When it comes to determining U.S. foreign policy, Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism have merged. The axis is perfected. Everyone is on the same page. 

Professors Brands and Kagan are intellectual enablers for covert and then, if required, unconcealed interference in the foreign policies of other countries, even into the internal affairs of other countries. 

Anything less, please be advised, must denounced as American isolationism, which is regarded almost as heretical as climate change skepticism. That is, disgraceful and pigheaded.

They believe U.S. interventionism—in practice, unbridled meddling—to be a Washington entitlement, a blessing of “American Exceptionalism”, instead of blatant busybodyism, a curse and madness.

It would be redundant to point out that the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. Congress fully embrace the Brands-Kagan attitude. Threats to America are incoming everywhere according to them, and the “free world” is at stake.

How myopic, self-centered, arrogant and dangerous this mindset is. Yet, it is taken for granted to be true at the White House, in the halls of Congress, at the Pentagon and the State Department.

By the “free world” the officials there mean the oft-cited, dollar-denominated “international rules-based order” which apparently leaves nothing to be desired or improved upon.

The fact that the liberal “rules-based order” is one-sided, self-serving to Washington, hypocritical in the extreme and just plain blarney cannot be denied by any unbrainwashed, objective observer in his or her right mind.

Indeed, outside the Washington beltway, outside the capitals of its European tributaries and its Far East outposts of Japan and Australia, the world is having second thoughts.

The unipolar moment and George H.W. Bush’s “new world order” is history. The track record of hot wars and non-stop punitive sanctions, lies and drone strikes, in the aftermath of the Cold War, is altogether horrible, not a pretty picture.

Did we deserve the blowback of 9/11? Did we need “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? Did we vote for a 20-year war in Afghanistan? Or the NATO bombing of Serbia and the decimation of Libya and Syria? Is this what a successful U.S. foreign policy looks like? If it is, you can have it.

The contrived Russo-Ukraine war now underway is the crowning Neocon-Neoliberal achievement and perhaps the last gasp—literally, if it ends in nuclear war.

One wonders how Biden, Blinken, Nuland can sleep at night, knowing what they know and what they did in 2014 to ignite a civil war in Ukraine and then, in a second act, to deliberately provoke Putin’s 2022 invasion.

Biden, Blinken, Nuland and their benighted cheerleaders own Ukraine. They created this situation. This is their war. Everything else is hogwash fed to the uninformed and ignorant, like what preceded it.

Patrick
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