Daniel Larison has an excellent review of Stephen Wertheim’s recent piece in the New York Times (behind the paywall). Wertheim writes:
Never in the decades since the Cold War has the United States looked less like a leader of the world and more like the head of a faction — reduced to defending its preferred side against increasingly aligned adversaries, as much of the world looks on and wonders why the Americans think they’re in charge.
As Larison notes, we are “always on the lookout for adversaries” and “American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy…that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have.” We have always had a tendency to demonize our opponents, starting with hapless old George III. I fault our Puritan heritage for this, but then I fault them for most of our ills. It is only after the Second World War, I think, that we added a greater purpose to our habitual demonization; not just defeat, but domination.
Larison observes that “it doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies “(emphasis mine). This such a critical point. We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.
The desire for dominance is what got us to this place. The end of the Cold War, negotiated by George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, presented our military-industrial complex with an acute problem. With no dragons to slay, the drive for domination might falter, bases might be closed, and dividends to arms manufacturers could diminish. Of course, eventually, we came back around to our old enemy (which causes me to wonder whether the Cold War was ever really about Communism, or was it always just about the Russians?) Again, Larison:
Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated. Thus a weakened Iraqi dictatorship that didn’t fully control its own territory was turned into a global menace supposedly so grave that the U.S. insisted that it simply had to attack.1
In my previous post on NATO expansion, I simply constructed a timeline based on reading Glenn Diesen’s The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order. But in re-reading it, onc quote jumped out at me:
The justification of NATO’s post-Cold War existence was therefore to respond to the security threats that had been created by its expansion.
In short, NATO was created as a defensive alliance to protect Western Europe against Communism. Said Communist threat disappeared. NATO remained, however, and justified its continuation due to the existence of security threats. What were these security threats? They were nothing more than Russian apprehension about the motivations behind NATO expansion eastward. And so, Voila! The new enemy was created.
In 1997, former Secretary of State James Baker quipped, “The best way to find an enemy is to look for one, and I worry that that is what we are doing when we try to isolate Russia.”2 Indeed.
Larison’s examples remind me, in this age of political trials, that criminals of both the Clinton and Bush administrations still walk the streets free, all having successfully monetized their criminality. Just saying.
J. A. Baker, “Russia in NATO?” Washington Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2002); 93-103.
Well said. Agree. As I have been saying to the two or three that occasionally listen to me, how does it affect our national security if the color of the flag in the three countries you mentioned changes? It doesn’t affect it at all. If we had not decided to beat on the hornets nest and offer up ourselves as targets in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of lives would have been saved and millions of tax dollars never collected. Why does a democracy produce such atrocious leadership? Have you ever considered becoming Amish?