What is it about our

moat — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 19:17:01 +0000

In reply to New Year Reflections on the US Global Role & Its Limits

What is it about our contemporary political role that makes so much of what we attempt to do abroad ultimately self-defeating?

The disconnect Fallows observes between our form of life and the wars fought in our name reflects other disassociating elements that undermine the use of strategy as the essential method of preserving national interests. The recommendations Hart and Fallows make regarding specific protocols assume the existence of an agency that may not exist any longer.

The Cold War was the product of expanding the planning horizon far beyond any particular outbreak of conflict. Two essential components of the process were calculations concerning balances of power, exemplified by the language of Henry Kissinger, and the language of cultural supremacy that Reagan made his trademark. Both of these components were very active players at the end of WW2. They were uncomfortable bedfellows who worked together because they could not operate alone.

The matter of cultural supremacy was driven by conflicts in our own society. The witch hunts of the McCarthy era formed a looking glass for the wars we fought in other places. This points to an important difference between that time and the kinds of cultural wars being fought today. Our wars are no longer shaped by crises of national identity. Apart from a few sufferers of acute nostalgia, nobody is afraid we will become inadvertently Islamist if we fail to bomb the crap out of them.

In your discussion of the economic limits of empires, one missing element is the dynamics of competition between different empires. The events that lead to the 20th century experience of global war was the collision of hundreds of years of different groups grabbing low hanging fruit combined with the destructive power of the industrial revolution. The situation can be compared to one of those supermarket "fill your basket" competitions except this time, all the players get bazookas at the checkout stand before they head for the parking lot. The Kagan model associates properties to the "American System" that no longer belong to anybody alone but are characteristics of a global system of wealth. We are all "Americans" now. Don't tell the French. This observation is not the preface to a La Rouche type panegyric on the evils of multinational corporations but an objection to treating as the symptoms of empire what cannot be understood apart from the dynamics of the means of production we base our form of life upon.

In the wars Fallows talks about, it is not so much "us" that gets defeated but our partners. Or the partners start up a program that runs counter to the goals we gave them weapons and training to accomplish. If our strategy makers are going to take responsibility for these fiascoes, something about this basic connection to the people that get propped up has to change. We are all not Georgian. The nation will survive if Iraq dissolves into civil war again. For all the bluster of the Bush invasions, they made sure to only make wagers they could afford to lose. Obama used the same playbook in his movements in Afghanistan. He has seriously degraded the effectiveness of Al Qaeda but there is no corresponding group that has been built up as a consequence.

It is progress to stop calling wars that are not existential necessary but that alone will not reconnect us to the world where we spill our blood.

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What is it about our