Explaining Humanitarian Adventurism
I received a “happy holidays” email from The Atlantic’s ubiquitous Steve Clemons yesterday. Normally I stop dead when I see the expression “happy holidays” but on this occasion I persevered and was rewarded with a bit of political folderol which was too deliciously bizarre not to share. Steve is a progressive who sees himself as a realist and who likes to suggest to his readers that he is a true Washington insider but not afraid to challenge the status quo. He does so gingerly, however, never wanting to offend anyone who is really important. He believes that Henry Kissinger is the greatest foreign policy genius to emerge since the Second World War.
Steve’s happy holidays message cites a recent article by Charles Kupchan, a former Clinton Administration National Security Council staffer, and quotes from it: “Progressive leadership at home is essential to the nation’s political and economic renewal, which in turn is the foundation for progressive leadership abroad. Since World War II, the United States has been dramatically successful in making the globe more stable, prosperous, and liberal. The recipe for ongoing success in this mission is no different than in the past: a solvent and centrist America reliant on a progressive combination of power and partnership to safeguard the national interest while improving the world.”
Having read that I was, as the English put it, “gobsmacked.” But more was to come. Steve approved, conceding that he “rides closely to Charles Kupchan’s thinking,” but he also added: “The dominant personality of the Republican and Democratic parties runs under two monikers — but is essentially tied to the notion that the US has a moral responsibility to re-order the internal workings of other nations that constrain the freedoms and rights of their citizens. The liberal (or humanitarian) interventionist school dominates the progressive foreign policy establishment and more significantly populates the power positions of the Democratic Party today than its rivals; and in the Republican Party, various strains of neoconservatism (there is now competition among the heirs of Irving Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter and other founding fathers) dominate.”
I submit this to the TAC readership to demonstrate what “progressive” foreign policy experts are thinking, significant because it is obviously what in line with what the White House sees as its appropriate international role. It demonstrates profound ignorance about what has been happening since the Second World War. Scary. Very, very scary.
The USA is the engine of permanent internationalist revolution. Progressives are holding water for usury.
Bravo, Philip. I agree: very, very scary “thinking” by these people (neocon warmongers and liberal interventionists). Dangerous and utterly delusional. And convenient cover for encouraging Israel to continue its insane Greater Israel programme.
Ironically, the US steadily undermines its economic strength by squandering vast sums on unnecessary weapons, foreign troop deployments and military adventures, etc. Such squandering is highly profitable for the middlemen who arrange it.
A close analogy would be Mao’s murder by starvation of about 60 million in order to fulfill his Communist dreams. If the US were to have stopped him it might have meant a thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union Union and China throwing bombs at us and in the end a much higher death toll. Hitler was close to getting nuclear weapons in 1945
Giraldi nails Clemons perfectly. To me he’s one of those now numberless Washington/New York/Boston guys who have … embraced their inner elitism.
“No!” that is, “No!” they say: “We are *not* going to let the fact that neither us nor our kids would ever be found within 1000 yards of a recruiting station much less any guns (and indeed can hardly stand to be outside of Harvard Square)! We’re the class who sits back (way way back) and hauls ourselves into the trenches of Georgetown cafes and The Majors’ editorial pages and Ivy-covered self-admiration roundtables every day and chatter and decide the moral failings and obligations of the rest of you and what sacrifices you consequently will be required to make.”
Just like that Gelb guy (head of THE establishment Council of Foreign Relations) who of *course* went along with Iraq, and who then published a simply incredible, mewling, self-pitying little piece explaining why we should feel for him for contributing to the senseless deaths of thousands of Americans for nothing because gee, he only went along with the disaster so as to keep him in the same company of Everyone Who Matters.
Great catch, Phil. I just wish someday during one of their oh-so-proper little circle-jerk roundtable appearances with each other someone would ask them why if their latest foreign cause is so crucial to the human soul neither themselves nor their children have picked up a gun or even a bandage, bought an airline ticket, and put their Brooks Brothers’-clad genitals on the line.
What’s stopping ‘em after all? Missing the next year-class of Burgundies?
“He believes that Henry Kissinger is the greatest foreign policy genius to emerge since the Second World War.”
Well, his appraisal is certainly much more modest than that of Henry Kissinger himself, who would certainly carry the timeframe back many centuries. His genius is certified by the fact that he was the one who set the Plumbers into being by complaining to Nixon about the “intolerable leaks,” yet he escaped any blame whatsoever for the Watergate mess. Now that is a sweet bureaucratic play.
This is chilling coming from a progressive. There is no place to go. Ron Paul is like a stopped clock that is right twice a day. His clock is stopped on “foreign policy” and everything else could have come from Glen Beck or Art Bell. Sad. Well, there is always Green.
Hold your horses Kim, your not getting away with smearing Ron Paul that easily. What are his position on “foreign policy” that you find troubling? As for the Glenn Beck Art Bell comment, Taki readers are very well aware of rationality, reason, and constitutional roots of Dr. Paul’s positions, such nonsense makes you seem foolish. Oh, and yes it is sad that there is ALWAYS green.
What was chilling was the nonchalance with which Clemons admits the ingrained warmongering of the imperial elite: “The dominant personality of the Republican and Democratic parties runs under two monikers — but is essentially tied to the notion that the US has a moral responsibility to re-order the internal workings of other nations that constrain the freedoms and rights of their citizens.”
I’ll bet he didn’t even bat an eyelash writing that. And it goes to show how delusional these interventionist liberals are that he could talk about some kind of BS moral imperative with a straight face, and not mention the obvious profit motives (for a small corporate elite) that drove Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter).
And Kim, really, however you feel about about Ron Paul (or libertarianism in general), it really isn’t valid to compare him to Art Bell, let alone to a dumb monkey like Glenn Beck. His libertarianism aside, Ron Paul is the closest thing to a real conservative that we have right now. And even at his most cynical, he is about a thousand times more principled than Beck.
Clemons proclaims what an angry electorate already thinks: that the Democrat and Republican parties are two heads of one hydra, and that their ruling elites haven’t registered the scale of the catastrophe they have visited either on America or the rest of the world.
The 21st century equivalent of Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles. Incredible. Thanks for the heads up, Phil.
Old China Hand – - Years ago, one could hope for the Republicans to try to force Israel to act in its own best interests, while the Democrats tended to be under the control of the Israel lobby. Now, both parties are under the control of the Israel lobby to large degree.