During the de-colonization period of the post-WWII era and the subsequent blame game that characterized the cultures of victimhood to which we routinely have the luxury or torture of hearing, it became common parlance for the British and the Roman Catholic Church to be fingered as culpable for each and every act of colonial evil that had ever taken place in the modern history of mankind. Academics within Western intelligentisia such as Noam Chomsky have backed the theories of exploitation to the hilt such that Venezuela’s Chavez was inspired enough to give Obama a copy of Chomsky’s published work. Diplomats customarily have to show an attentive ear of empathy (or occasionally something much more accomodative than that) as seen in Hillary Clinton’s reminding an audience in Botswana that they were at least fortunate enough to discover diamonds after the departure of the Brits. Still, the Brits are lambasted continuously throughout various Continents and sub-Continents for such actions as using MI-6 as well as the CIA to overthrow an elected Iranian leader in the early 1950s and re-drawing the boundary lines of today’s Middle East according to their own colonial preferences.
It nevertheless at times becomes tiresome, exhausting, and draining for Western leaders as they listen to windbaggery going on ad nauseam about how all the ills for the developing world stem from exploitative actions taken by the West during imperial wars of prior centuries. This became extremely apparent when POTUS had to field a question in Mexico from a reporter regarding this year’s military coup d’etat in Honduras. The journalist asked the President what is the responsibility of the US to re-install the deposed Honduran President because the US is in fact to blame in her mind that is in whole and not in part for both the former minister’s accession to and then removal from office as well as being responsible for Central American misery and under-development at large.
Stateside observers thus feel compelled to decry the lambasting from the world ex-US as a combination of what some regard as European envy, anti-Americanism, and an overall trans-Atlantic clash of superiority complexes exemplified by the statement from Europe during WWII that Americans are “overpaid, overworked, over-sexed, and over here.” Going through London and various pockets of Western Europe from 2003 to 2008 was not an exercise in torture due to slowness or inefficiencies; it is a painful exercise resultant from the verbal assaults and discrimination that an American undergoes as a direct consequence of Republican Neorealism policies causing increases rather than decreases in anti-Americanism.
The journo’s query had such a pure audacity and intellectual arrogance to it that it prompted a sharp rebuke from POTUS who directly told the interrogator that the developing world simply “cannot have it both ways” in perpetuating an entitlement-oriented state of mind whilst simultaneously demanding not only post-colonial reparations but also apologies for the alleged maleovelence of past Western colonialism. POTUS implied that he was “tired” of hearing the incessant whining every place he visited as the windbaggery constitutes a veritable ghetto mentality which deifies the politics of grievance. Had the exchange taken place on the internet, one has to wonder whether or not another reply to the reporter may have simply been the acronym of STFU.
His comments in Mexico took place only a short time after he had to endure an almost ninety minute monologue and lecture from Putin who wove a long, long yarn under the identical thesis that the US had singularly been responsible for everything wrong in the world. More recently, the Chinese Premier delivered to POTUS a similar dissertation concerning US fiscal policy which really begs the intuitive follow-on as to why doesn’t the Premier just call in all the US debt obligations right now since their currency would not have to float at the same time thus giving them a double whammy in the Premier’s and PRC’s favor.
Professor Amy Chua of Yale in her book, World on Fire from a few years ago forecast the rise of the indigenous peoples in South America as part of a larger movement that would envelop the Andean natives revolt against the ruling mestiza minority in Bolivia among other places. Arguments have further surfaced on the Continent that the confiscation of haciendas ostensibly on behalf of the populace is not expropriation in the name of the state but rather reclamation of that which was previously taken by European settlers through the forcible use of black powder and the barrel of a gun. Likewise, in the US, some groups such as La Raza have occasionally spoken of la reconquista as the eventual re-conquest of the American Southwest back to geographic boundaries belonging to nation-states south of the US border.
These movements are known in comparative international legalese as irredentism where territories are re-aligned according to their original ethnic and political definitions prior to European colonization. Aside from what would it be like for the League of the South to get together in a friendly meeting with La Raza, is La Raza implicitly suggesting that a Second American Revolution and a Second US Civil War would lead to another Yugoslavia?
Scholars of international relations and political science are intimately familiar with assertions from the school of Realism that there is no plurality or commonality of mutual interests but rather that there is only the primacy and dominance of the national self-interest propagated into competition against other national and unitary interests of a disorganized global arena. By way of example, Neorealists point to the Chinese being the last holdouts as signatories to many multilateral statements as well as the inadequacies or failures of non-binding international agreements when contrasted against the quick efficacy, albeit wholly disagreable to the world at large, of unilateral action.
Disciples of such world views include Cheney who state that POTUS does not believe in the spreading of a Western system of values including democratization otherwise known as American exceptionalism, the origins of which stretch back to the Graeco-Roman and British Empires. Neorealists such as Charles Krauthammer point to a comment made by POTUS in Strasbourg where POTUS replied to a question regarding American exceptionalism that his belief in the doctrine was one which he held probably to the same extent that the Brits and the Greeks also believed in their own forms of exceptionalism.
Krauthammer implies that the response of POTUS was non-commital and what one would ascribe to a doctrine of moral relativism rather than the moral absolutism of Krauthammer’s like-minded thinkers in the thinning camps of American unipolarity. Krauthammer insinuates that only his concept of exceptionalism is acceptable because the answer expressed by POTUS in the mind of Krauthammer must be rebutted with, “if everyone is exceptional, no one is.” Other conditional clauses from Krauthammer include the doctrinal adherence to the contention that “if America wants stability, it will have to create it.” Primary to that conditionality is the necessity of using the military to create that peace through the waging of war whether it be from a just war or through a constant, forward presence in every theater throughout the globe.
Alternatives to Realism include International Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and an overall less Hobbesian view of man. Cheney’s twisted logic of a false choice implies that anything less than his own extraordinary renditions of Realism amount to the appeasement of a Neville Chamberlain a la Munich 1938 and the failed multilateralism of debating chambers with no teeth for enforcement purposes such as the Wilsonian-inspired League of Nations or the Oslo Accords that get violated and then reneged under Dubya and the Kyoto Protocol to which several countries with some of the largest carbon footprints are not signatories. The counter-argument to Cheney is that while the Persians invented the game of chess, Iran is still being afforded all opportunities through all diplomatic back channels to show for the record that everything was tried in earnest before anything more militaristic takes place.
Realists felt vindicated in the moral supremacy of their methods both at the end of the Carter years and then again in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their reason for doing so was the failure of detente and arms limitation talks to stop the spread of Communism and the Soviets when various treaties proved difficult to enforce and cheating was rampant as a backdrop against the Brezhnev Doctrine’s military interventionism into the crescent of crisis from Afghanistan all the way down into Angola and beyond. Hence the Reagan Doctrine was able to force the bankruptcy of the U.S.S.R at the expense of trebling the US national debt through an arms race and heightened use of covert action whilst these were all approaches eschewed by the moralizing and single-issue human rights orientation of Carter and Pat Darian at the State Department. Republicans are now conveniently arguing through doublespeak that POTUS needs to focus on human rights, the translation of which can only mean that they want a reincarnation of Carter and a strategy that they themselves would never seek.
Earlier this month, I attended a symposium where one of the panel’s moderators, Ileana Gordon representing her “democracy advocate NGO”, complained very loudly that dissident groups throughout the Middle East were “upset” that the same level of “support” was not flowing in their direction as much as it had been over the past seven years. The normal and customary domain of assistance to foreign dissident groups falls under the purview of the State Department and the CIA among other places but the implications of Gordon’s statement are multi-faceted. Aside from the obvious, a lateral takeaway is that in the case of another large scale attack along the lines of 9/11, the Neorealist opposition will seek to use that as justification for their level of interventionism and a replay in their minds of the Carter years when covert action and black ops were bad words.
Post-9/11, the Bush Doctrine emerged as the means whereby pre-emptive war would serve as mechanisms for supposedly just wars that were waged to stop weapons proliferation and also spread democracy during the process of a civilizational clash foreseen by the late Professor Huntington fifteen years ago between the West and the Islamic World. At present, the alternative to Realism and Neorealism includes “soft power” and smart power as outlined by the chief architect of Neoliberalism, Professor Joseph Nye. Strangely, the rumor mill has abounded with unconfirmed allegations that Hillary Clinton was not permitted by the Administration to bring Nye onto her team although it was thought of by many to be one of her very early pre-conditions for accepting the appointment to Secretary of State.
Sketches and outlines for an Obama Doctrine of renewed multilateral engagement first came to light in the addresses he made in Cairo and elsewhere throughout that region earlier this year. Furthermore, the combinations of hard, soft, and smart power became that much more visible after Obama’s speech this week before the Nobel Committee. The first third of the speech had the sound of something that one would have attributed to a protege of Dubya and Cheney but substantiating the rules for engagement in a so-called just war and then being even-handed in the acknowledgement of Gitmo’s anathema was not something that one can ever expect to see or hear from the Neorealists. As he wrote it himself rather than an internal staff-based speechwriter, greater color on the Obama Doctrine became clearer in what several have come to suggest as either pragmatic idealism or idealistic Realism.
Objectionable to the purely economic globalizers but still intrinsic with varying degree to the implementation of foreign policy, whether Neorealist or Neoliberal, is power projection where the military of a Great Power has a constant forward presence almost everywhere at all times such as Britain’s Royal Navy patrolling global waters in the last century. Neorealists of a US-centric, unipolar world in their minds such as Krauthammer’s describe the means to project power as “the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth.” The slightest deviation and dilution of such a strategy is unacceptable to unthinking Neorealist thought leaders and any point of view not uniformly consistent with their version of reality cannot be tolerated.
For the Neorealists, this translates into not only the most singular, certain, and over-riding component of all policy, foreign and domestic, but also that a permanent US military presence spread throughout the Middle East and everywhere else as part of a new Hundred Year War in civilizational clash between East and West that defines for them more than even globalization the epochal post-Cold War moment. Globalization is a side order but not the main dish for them.
The primacy of conflict rather than cooperation or global trade thus takes precedence in the minds of all Hobbesian Neorealists. A classic example of such interpretation is found even in a generation that preceded the legacy of Dubya with Jed Babbin, a former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense from the George H.W. Bush years. Despite the fact that Bush 41 spent time in China in an ambassadorial capacity, Babbin has published what he believes to be a serious treatise on…. pending armed conflict with China.
Neorealism thereby posits that there is no effective alternative to the primacy of a unilateral and unipolar stance in the strict context of bilateral relations where all matters are negotiated from the dictatorial position of a highly centralized and unitary executive authority with civilizational clash being their over-arching driver behind all foreign policy and foreign affairs. A bizzare argumentation of Krauthammer is that investment in energy-related infrastructure is “intervention” and a ”vast expansion of social services” that serves to “take away from defense spending.”
Therein lies the most outrageous double standard for the incongruencies of Republican Neorealist logic; it is acceptable to dispense and increase that dispensation for all expenditures of borrowed capital towards overseas militarism but it is not at all tolerable or admissible for any efforts to go towards a reformation in crony cartels of insurance companies protected by anti-trust exemptions while crumbling bridges and infrastructure derisively qualify under the misleading sloganeering-derived labels of “misguided industrial policy of central planning” and domestic welfare programs. In other words, despite the appalling and monopolistic inadequacies of unadulterated laissez-faire to the express benefit and sellout of the highest bidder, Republican Neorealism does not have the time of day for not only domestic policy of any kind but also anything at all outside the realm of the Pentagon’s adventurism in foreign lands and that truly is the most fantastically shocking and malignant neglect which Neorealism perpetrates and perpetuates at the expense of the bottom 99%.
With Cheney, the spouting much less cleverly asserts that there is an obligation to export his own and only his own definition of American exceptionalism but with a Divine Providence-type of special and Godly dispensation to bring said exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny through coercion and force rather than the soft power approaches of the Sunshine Policy and globalization-induced movements where the liberalizing and opening up of markets through the expansion of free trade as first outlined by Adam Smith many centuries ago. It is even moreso out of this world figuratively speaking that a former speechwriter to Walter Mondale such as Krauthammer would take his inspiration to the level of saying that post-Dubya policy of an emerging Obama Doctrine has wilfully “forfeited the mandate from heaven.”
Reflect on that statement for a moment. Krauthammer implies that the singular US policy mandate, non-existent as far as dometic nation-building goes, is the foreign policy imperative and modern day version of the White Man’s Burden from several centuries in the past. Twenty years ago subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Krauthammer penned a piece entitled somewhere along the lines of, “Universal Dominion: The Path Towards Unipolarity”. It is, however, as a result of all the above that the more recent enunciations of Krauthammer caused his former cohort, Francis Fukuyama, to observe that Charles had become “strangely disconnected from reality.”
Krauthammer goes further to explicate that after saving Europe twice from its own wars and strife, America is “the rarest of geopolitical phenomena, the accidental hegemon, and the reluctant hegemon.” An unwillingness for a continuation of militarism that was so repudiated in the elections of 2006 and 2008 constitutes, in the mind of Krauthammer, constitutes the “demolition of the moral foundation of America.” Chuckie, what are you smokin’? Is it as illegal as the territorial-sovereignty violating aspirations of yesteryear that you wish to revive from a discredited and deceased hinterland of Neorealism unchecked?
In Krauthammer’s hallucinogenic world of American centrality and unipolarity, Asian ascendancy does not count because it is nothing more than a replay of the Japan rising pheonomenon from twenty years ago as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center were being purchased by the Japanese – - just prior to the popping of the Japanese real estate and stockmarket bubbles culminating in the crash of Japan. Krauthammer opines further that European decline was “inevitable” due to the “civilizational suicide” of self-inflicted world wars that required American rescue whereas American decline is actively “chosen” by the detractors to Krauthammer’s ideology, a legacy of unquantifiable debt bequeathed to the Neoliberal succesors of Neorealist criminality. However, it is Neorealism and the likes of Krauthammer who have accelerated a decline that his philosophy helped to create two times over with statutory conditions satisfied for US federal bankruptcy in 1992 and then again in 2008.
Meanwhile, the false construct for Cheney is such that anything less than his own dispensation is necessarily declinist by definition and default which he then qualifies as a “post-American” and post-imperial condition that puts the republic at the risk of lowered “readiness” and subject to destruction by imminent threats. Meanwhile, the fallacies of Cheney’s diatribes do remind students of logic to re-examine the definition of a false syllogism. “Socrates is dead. All cats are mortals. Therefore Socrates is a cat.”
The rhetorical technique is used to firstly suppress debate and dissent and didactically leaves the impression that there is no alternative and not even a counter-argument to the one answer by dictat which they proffer through force. At many apparently irreconciliable levels, there can never really be any rapprochement between many econo-globalizers and national security hawks as a body because the former labels the latter as anti-globalizers which leads the hawks to lambast the free marketeers as deliberately weakening defense and counter-terrorist capabilities. Previously, nonetheless, globalizers were happy to accept the dual role of Cold Warrior and free marketeer but now eschew the activism of similarly armed engagement overseas.
What soft power and smart power bring to the table is that while personal piety can be indicative of both the Puritans or the Taliban, the alternative reformation of militancy is the antidote of modernity through exposure to the forces of capitalism and globalization rather than invasions and occupations. But Krauthammer cannot accept that option because the classical Hobbesian choice, opting between the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers, is to select authoritarian absolutism and confrontation over their perceived natural state of complete disorder and utter anarchy in a decidedly unipolar and US-centric world.
Neorealists rebut that newly liberalized export markets are opened up more quickly through force rather than through soft and smart power so the endgame is still the same; the only difference is the methodology deployed to achieve the same outcome. Such an argument is akin to saying that an unwilling rape victim is a more cooperative puta at gunpoint rather than trying to persuade her nicely of the benefits for closer intimacy.
Neorealism’s warped world of East versus West is where US foreign policy serves as the principled guardian of Western Civilization (although Krauthammer himself is a winner of the “Guardian of Zion” award from a non-US group), whilst contemporaneously spreading democratization through the offense of military tribunals, enemy combatants, invasions, occupations, and the once self-proclaimed but now moribund war on terror. By contrast, the current Administration has removed the phrases of enemy combatant and war on terror from all forms of discourse and policy.
Albeit having partly originated from the British texts of Hobbes and Hedley Bull, Neorealism in an American context more recently found its home in the militant anti-communism of Reaganites converted into neocon Neorealists; and after 1989, with the lack of an enemy, then an enemy must be created and with that, the Long War of James Woolsey. The morphing into militant militarism against the new enemy again seeks to project that forward military presence on a constant basis with an eye towards a permanent footing all across the globe, but most especially the Middle East. With soft power and smart power, however, one doesn’t seek to force feed democratization down someone’s throat; rather, the support for the opposition is first asked and only when requested does it becomes quietly offered through dissident groups who seek changes to their direct overseers in conjunction with the liberalization of previously closed trade markets.
Vis-a-vis the Arab street, what is the impact of the Long War as both interpreted and persecuted by Neorealists?
The use of force to coerce change as a means of creating peace through the waging of war also tries to marginalize extremist fringes within the Arab population. However, the strategy shows itself to have backfired in the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in the Occupied Territories which includes the world’s biggest concentrations camp of Gaza City. Contrary to the stated objective of pushing out Hezbollah into some area of intellectual purgatory, Neorealism has caused the groups to have widespread, mainstream acceptance throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah refashions itself as a political party with a complex and interdependent structure of elected Members of Parliament, TV stations, media outlets, “charities” alongside groupings of ”governmental Non Governmental Organizations.”
Likewise in the case of Hamas, they are able to garner more electoral support than Fatah throughout a majority of areas despite its reputational heritage being more militant. Hamas is now the elected government of Palestine despite all the efforts to isolate Hamas as a fringe element. So militancy versus militancy fosters more dischord rather than more of Krauthammer’s version of stability. Thus the extreme which began underground has now integrated itself into the everyday social and institutional fabric of Arab life and the blame game gets more ammunition with all the one-way directional finger pointing from the likes of Putin’s 60 minute monologues concerning Western guilt.
A Neorealist rebuttal is that an era of asymmetric warfare necessitates a response that is equally or more asymmetric. With Salafi Islam and Wahhabism where the alleged goals are violent jihadism exported globally, Neorealists such as Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes have popularized use of the term, ‘Islamofascism’ as a means to describe the aggressive, combative, hostile. and anti-Western stance taken by devotees of Salafism and separate but similar strains of later Wahhabi interpretations. Using the containment doctrine of preventing the spread of Communism first articulated by George Kennan in the mid to late 1940s, the rehabilitated Cold Warriors of today’s present Neorealists, seek the re-application of Kennan in a Second Cold War.
Republican Neorealism thereby seeks to supplant all forms of soft and smart power whilst preserving a market that is not free with monopoly-enhancing anti-trust exemptions only granted elsewhere to the sport of American baseball. With a double standard that expands inequities which do not naturally self-correct through leave-it-alone negligence, Neorealism has no problem with off-budget, off-balance sheet appropriations of $3 trillion towards overseas warmongering but domestic nation-building at home is labeled as interventionist and expansionary towards unneeded social services. Neorealists such as Krauthammer will speak oodles of creative destruction and innovation but his addresses are intellectually bereft of the foundational assumptions that drive “innovation economics” which is now an area of focus for Democratic thinkers where Republican thought is nowhere to be found.
In saying that POTUS has assisted in providing comfort to the enemy, former VP Cheney has accused a sitting President of treason, an allegation of which begs the question as to why then Cheney does not therefore seek the prosecution of POTUS in federal court although Cheney himself is perfectly viable as a defendant for the Hague. US Army recruitment is at a thirty-five year high because guys who can’t get an apprenticeship, a living wage or health insurance from a cartel protected by anti-trust exemptions are able to find all of the aforementioned benefits when enlisting in the military. It can only be the incredibly most disturbing inequity of Neorealism that an 18-year old should never become eligible for an apprenticeship and also be denied the mere ability to purchase health insurance from an unregulated cartel no less while unlimited and unfettered misadventurism in global warmongering should be available unconditionally to the whimsical discretion of reticent imperial ambitions.
Shooter Cheney’s Neorealism brings with it a new Hundred Year War or Long War as so labeled by former DCI James Woolsey while staffed with the fodder of a war machine continuously re-emergent from an American ghetto scene. Furthermore, when various Neorealists respond rhetorically, “What’s wrong with that?” to the question of their New Strategy for Securing the Realm stating that a primary focal point for US foreign policy is to ensure “that Israel is surrounded by democracies” as per the interview that took place between the late Tim Russert and Richard Perle seven years ago, additional inquiries are begged profusely such as earlier this decade when a very well-known former Republican presidential speechwriter asked why is it that the cavalry being sent off into the Middle and Near East are ”kids with names such as Murphy, McAllister, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown” but the war planners are known by the names of Perle, Wolfowitz, Kagan, and Feith?
Shooter had so many deferments during the Vietnam Conflict that he has never had to serve at all in the armed forces. For the Neorealists to fully appreciate the world as they see it, it can only be done by bringing back the draft and employing a military of conscripts comprised with the privileged sons of syndicated columnists and think tank academics who write of the need for widespread multi-front foreign conflagrations from the air-conditioned comfort of their plush city offices. No deferments, no draft dodgers, and no exceptions would be available for even the most well-to-do with diabetes and other chronic diseases as even they would be sent into the bloodied Hobbesian fields of Republican Neorealism’s chosen wars of a multi-generational, civilizational clash and outright social de-evolution.
