April 19, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

“Slouching towards Armageddon”

American Foreign Policy’s Death Wish

 

Friends,

If Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) had their way American troops—boys, men, women, and, yes, transgenders—would not only be in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, “for as long as it takes” uttered an unchastened Cheney (re-affirmed in her congressional positions of power by gutless fellow Republicans), but everywhere else in the world where “the ‘democratic’ way of life” must be imposed by American might. And the result? A continuation of thousands of body bags, billions of dollars from an already desperate American middle class, and the destruction of indigenous cultures dating back thousands of years, to be replaced with feminism, same sex marriage and gender fluidity, and the fruits of robber baron capitalism.

The response of those two leaders and others in the Washington establishment bespeak the era of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton when Neoconservative scribblers like Bill Kristol and the late Charles Krauthammer (canonized now by Fox News), and the globalist policy wonks at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), ruled the roost…and America’s international role of spreading democratic, secularist…and ultimately anti-Christian…dogma was riding high. It was the time before the advent of Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again,” before the scales and blinders began ever-so-slightly to come off the eyes of millions of Americans.

Back in April 2014, at Communities Digital News, I noted that:

“Today, Republican Party leaders, like those over in the Democratic Party, endorse what they call ‘equality’ and believe generally in imposing ‘liberal democracy’ around the world. Recall leading Neoconservative writer Allan Bloom’s dictum that he famously penned a few years back, which serves as motto for most in the current Republican leadership: ‘And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable. World War II was really an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so’.”

Those Neoconservatives have never given up, and many of their major mouthpieces—a Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, the writers at National Review—became leaders of the Never Trump movement. Others, less honest and more corruptive and evil about their motives, with dishonest smiles on their faces, buried into the Trump administration (e.g., think here of a John Bolton or General Mattis) where they could subvert and impede even the slightest movement toward realism in American foreign policy. (My constant belief is that a major failing of Trump and his presidency was his inability to surround himself with advisors and officials who would genuinely carry out an America First agenda; many acted consistently and fervently to sabotage and undermine it.).

What I wrote back in 2014 came to mind during these past few weeks. And two events—two items in the news—triggered my thoughts.

First, came a subdued report earlier this month, barely noticed by national media that the much-ballyhooed accusations in June 2020 of the Russians paying financial bounties to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to kill American servicemen was essentially based on nothing—no solid intelligence –just the “assessment” of some of those same inflamed global policy wonks who continue to dwell in the bowels of the permanent managerial state bureaucracy. Remember how the media and politicians reacted last June and July? For days there was hardly anything else of any import on MSNBC or CNN. “The Russians are paying the Taliban to kill American boys!” cried Nancy Pelosi.  “Trump’s a Russian stooge!” bellowed Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff, “maybe taking direct orders from the Kremlin! He must be impeached!”

And so it went, with headlines on the national (and local) news for days and days. But now some of the media most culpable for spreading and propagating that falsehood—think here of The Daily Beast—casually admit (usually buried way back on page 13) that what they reported was wrong. Indeed, the US intelligence agencies have, surprise surprise, walked back the accusation. The story, they now maintain, “is, at best, unproven — and possibly untrue.” 

It was all political, but it also demonstrated once more the incredible power and reach of our corrupted Intel agencies whose ideological subinfeudation to and use by Neocon globalism remains unbroken and unbreakable.

The second item that caught my attention was a fascinating essay in The Asia Times (March 19), and the title tells all: “Life after death for the neonconservatives.” The author, David P. Goldman (from whom I would not have expected such realism), asserts that “[t]he obsession of American foreign policy after the fall of communism was [imposing] pro-Western democracy in Russia, and the foreign policy establishment have never forgiven Vladimir Putin  for returning Russia” to its older, pre-Soviet traditions. But now, “the obsession is back with Joe Biden—and with it, the neoconservatives who dominated the failed administration of George W. Bush. For several reasons, President Biden’s March 16 denunciation of Putin as a ‘killer’ without a soul ranks among the dumbest utterances ever by an American leader – and that’s a crowded field. To begin with, heads of state do not insult each other this way, except in wartime.”

Goldman continues that the idiotic and senseless American (and presidential) insults and the accompanying ratcheting up of tensions along the Russian-Ukranian border, largely pushed and encouraged by the US handing a blank check to Ukraine, have forced a wary Russia, the world’s second major power, into a reluctant alliance with China, the world’s third major power which is something that foreign policy realists have always dreaded and worked to avoid.

Not only that but Russia’s collaboration, at least tacitly, is needed for any lasting deal with a nuclear Iran. And there is little inclination now in Moscow to assist the Neocon blockheads at the State Department to facilitate this.

This latest bout with “Russians did it!” hysteria appears to be largely the result of the Intel agencies’ recent  “assessment” (March 16), once again charging those utterly beyond-the-pale demiurges from Moscow, who want to re-create the Soviet empire, “of operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy, and the Democratic Party.” As Goldman observes, that report is more of the same unsupported drivel, the fluff, we’ve been hearing for years from Democratic AND Republican political leaders. And a continuation of the fatal fascination that establishment Neocons have with Russia—“It won’t act like a responsible democracy! It wants to do its own thing!” Or, to paraphrase Allan Bloom, if they won’t do what we tell them to do, steps must be “undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.”

Despite their apparently weakened position after four years of Trump and a gradual realization among millions of Americans that Neoconservative solutions to global problems are not only wrong, but positively dangerous, they’re back and occupy positions of authority in the Biden presidency. Thus, while the administration tacitly encourages the BLM/Antifa mobs in our streets, pushes Critical Race Theory in our schools, and opens the floodgates for illegals at our border, we venture ever so close to world conflagration internationally.

During the Bush and Obama years the Neocon foreign policy establishment got the US to spend over $6 trillion for foreign wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Syria. And more than 801,000 people have died (up to now) as a direct result of the fighting (Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs). And at the same time, again Goldman: “America lost industrial jobs at the fastest rate in its history, and America’s trade deficit ballooned to $600 billion a year. It failed to export democracy, but also failed to export anything else,” except misery, dislocation and upheaval.

Goldman correctly labels the essential ideology of the Neoconservatives as “right-wing Marxism.” He continues:

“Being determines consciousness, taught Marx, and ideology arises from the social structure. For Marx, that meant that communism would create a New Man free of the vices of capitalism; for neoconservatives, it meant that the mere forms of democratic governance would create democrats.”

It took no less an observer than Joschka Fischer of the German [Leftwing] Green Party to notice what had happened and what my friend Dr. Paul Gottfried calls the “strange death of Marxism”:

“When I came to Washington as German foreign minister during the [George W. Bush] administration and met the neoconservatives, I instantly recognized them as the old comrades! I got the book by [neocons] Richard Perl and David Frum, An End to Evil, and took Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution from my bookshelf, and compared them page by page. Except for some changes in terminology, they were the same book.”

I am sure that Lindsey Graham and Liz Cheney would object strenuously to the comparison. And I am certain that Jonah Goldberg and the National Review crowd would cry “fascist” if made the butt of such a comparison.

But the comparison holds and will not go away. The establishment “conservative movement” long ago accepted the progressivist version of history and its idea of inevitability, and the national GOP has done its best to rationalize politically that vision. In the end, the conservative/Republican establishment—what Gottfried calls “ConInc”—and the post-Marxist Left emit from the same fetid and poisonous philosophical swamp. And, despite its protestations to the contrary and its sometimes defensive appearance against the rot, that pseudo-Conservatism is essentially antithetical to Western Christian civilization.

Until it is overthrown our precipitous decay will continue.