One of the great follies of the Left is the idea that they could play as an intelligent designer with society and mould or even outright reconstruct it in line with their utopian vision. This is not the most hubristic and nonsensical thing since at least they can purport to control the society they wish to immanentize into the chosen eschaton. ‘Tis not only folly but an invitation for poetic justice when one had deluded themselves into thinking that they can reconstruct the world, if not human nature itself, with those explicitly acknowledged as being outside one’s power to control, despite self-assurances of one’s power to sway and manipulate.
When it comes to antagonistic foreign relations, the belief that one could create a new world order by addressing issues only themselves and not any other country or power, is to admit that one blames America first for causing the problems to begin with!
If you seek peace, and the only problem is yourself, then the others must be blameless and only responding to your own wickedness. Fix yourself and they won’t be antagonists anymore! This is the foreign policy foundation that is sought to be imposed on us now.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, America emerged as the sole superpower. This was not, and still isn’t, a bad thing. Even before the formal collapse of the U.S.S.R., America was the cultural, economic, and scientific superpower. Indeed, it was those advantages that allowed the Soviet paper tiger to be crumbled into a ball for discarding.
Just because America’s sway is not absolute, and there are antagonistic powers with global aspirations, does not mean that we live in a multi-polar world where we have no choice but to be compelled into a forced equality when there is none, particularly against two moribund powers.
Yet it is that fiction that we must now be forced to construct and maintain. The idea that there are co-equal powers with their own sphere of influence so great and so firm in the continued future that the U.S. must retreat and tend to its own Mark Twain level rumors of immanent death and demise lest we become the Bethlehem towards which doom slouches.
This retreat seems plausible if one assumes that Russia and Communist China don’t wish to replace us as global powers, but only tend to their own sphere. This is contra-veri-normative at best. Russia seeks power not only in Europe or even just in the Middle East, but globally from Africa to the Americas. Communist China, similarly, seeks “Belt & Road” initiatives, amongst other means of influence, globally across not only Asia, but Africa and the Americas as well. The idea that they have only regional or restricted interests if left alone assumes that intentionally seeking global power and dominance is a trait they nor anyone else has… aside from the United States. This evil, then, is uniquely an American evil. In any clash, Russia and Communist China can not be at fault since they are declared to be free of this original sin of global animus, and thus must be responding to America and the animus that only it can create.
This is the argument that the far Left had during the Cold War and through the War on Terror. This argument of the Old Left is now the argument of the New Right.
Even absent the purported machinations of the United States of America, Communist China’s geopolitical interests are already global, including the Western Hemisphere, beyond any concern of American pig-dog imperialism. Pre-emptive retreat invites further advance from our enemy. There is no safe-space to protect us.
It is said that this is not a surrender, but an acknowledgement of “reality”, or at least the reality in some people’s heads. But, Is it really a surrender when it is being gleefully proffered? They want the U.S. to cease being a global power because they want the U.S. to be constrained and prevented from aggressing in that uniquely American way. Freed from provocation, the rest of the world would leave us alone as they are without this sin of animus, ‘twould seem. Yes, we can stand up and defend against some stray problem, but in reality there is no safe space and accommodation does not create one.
We either confront them over there or they confront us over here, and they are already confronting us over here. If we must engage in a manichean choice of either-or, then the choice is this: Either America leads the world or we cede control to Communists and a former KGB agent to be more virtuous in constraint than America is purported to be. Resist them over there at little cost or over here at high cost.
Some have become so hateful of “NeoCons”, that some seek a global triumvirate where “NeoCons” are constrained from acting globally by the Russians and Communist Chinese, whose only interests are deemed to be to simialrly be to constrain the “NeoCons” and “warmongers”. This is the projection and hubristic intelligent designer presumption where human nature is deemed to obey what the (un)intelligent designers fancy.
They see Russia & Communist China as good because it would help constrain America; they see Israel, Ukraine, & Taiwan as bad because helping them inhibits the constraint.
But we are not in some manichean world. You can’t have “good relations” with globally aspirational powers who want not to simply constrain you within your sphere of influence, but to fill the void that some Americans would so willingly give up, abet good relations on terms that you have preemptively acceded to.
If anything, it is the desire to recreate some purportedly wonder former golden age of peace and amity amongst equals each operating in their own sphere that is fanciful and unreal. Indeed, the desire to waltz in Vienna or create a new Westphalian peace are palpable amongst some. Yet they forget that Westphalia was a culmination of a destructive war fought to a de facto draw while in the present day we have not equals who are all equally willing to settle, but an America that some Americans wish to become small; that Westphalia created beneficial norms that all parties could agree on is another difference between our present situation where Russia and Communist China, nor Iran and others, would never hold themselves to. Similarly, the fames Waltz of Vienna was a divvying up of power by a coalition of victors that sought to prevent further war; the resulting 99 years of peace, give or take a war in the Crimea, was maintained by focusing the conflict of the powers’ spheres of influence away from their European borders and onto the rest of the world, with the Scramble for Africa being a a prime example of a distraction from power relations closer to home—a proxy for which we have no analog.
But we don’t’ live a a world of Vienna or Westphalia. We are living in a post-1848 world.
Still other fanciful historical recreations are a bit closer in time. More specifically the accommodationist mindset of the Nixon Administration and Kissinger. America felt weakened by the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union was on the march every where. Containment and fighting at most over the periphery was seen as the only option. Containment, or even entente over Victory, which seemed impossible less than two decades before it became not only possible, but certain. Of course, the modern day Nixonians prefer entente over containment, for containment itself is a form of aggression and warmongering.
Rather than being forced by conditions beyond our own control, some are demanding pre-emptive retreat due to histrionic declarations of weakness and immanent collapse and doom. We are, in this view, weakened by our evil, while our enemies are strong enough to, at the very least, stand up to us to ensure that doom. The pro-offered solution, then, is to rely on our enemies peaceful intentions and focus on immanentizing the domestic eschaton—which presumes the foreign eschaton, as far as it impacts America, needs only America’s brave will to accede to.
This requires the pro-offered peace being sold have the requisite buyers who are not only expressing interest in buying, but are wholeheartedly buying into what is being sold lock, stock, and barrel. A Pollyanna view, at best.
A little mood music:
