RadixJournal - The Warbloggers

00:00:00.000 What do you think about the whole kind of longer trajectory of American policy since 1945?

00:00:12.980 And, you know, when I was quite young, I can remember the Cold War and I can remember the Soviets.

00:00:20.140 I can remember, I've been doing a lot of nostalgia here today.

00:00:23.440 I can remember going to Neiman Marcus with my mother during Christmas.

00:00:27.080 And they were selling pieces of the Berlin Wall for like $50 or something.

00:00:33.280 Like, you can buy the Berlin Wall here at Neiman Marcus.

00:00:35.440 It was like the ultimate Fukuyama moment, you know, capitalism's triumph of communism.

00:00:44.400 But anyway, I can remember the Cold War, but there's this long trajectory of Cold War institutions,

00:00:53.380 NATO being preeminent, but all of these institutions that came out of the Second World War and Bretton Woods, the UN, etc.

00:01:04.300 And there was this period of the 90s when there was a real identity crisis with the United States Empire.

00:01:13.000 And there was an identity crisis along with a triumph.

00:01:16.940 I mean, this was the point of, you know, Krauthammer's unipolar moment where the world's no longer bifurcated.

00:01:23.680 There's one way.

00:01:24.540 This is Fukuyama-ism.

00:01:25.640 There's only one way.

00:01:26.920 Everyone is trying to get to liberal capitalist democracy.

00:01:31.100 And they only have some criticisms around the edges.

00:01:34.240 They're not willing or able to really criticize the core of it.

00:01:38.320 So it was a kind of triumph, but then you're ruined by your success.

00:01:42.040 There was a sort of identity crisis.

00:01:44.520 And 9-11 came in a way out of a dream for the American empire because it gave us the ability to create a new dynamic and long-lasting paradigm

00:02:01.180 for existing institutions and the U.S. military, that we're fighting these anti-civilizational forces that are taking over,

00:02:12.800 that are even coming here into the country.

00:02:15.480 And, you know, everything that was stated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the like, was we're in this for the long haul.

00:02:24.500 This is going to be, yeah, mission accomplished, sure, but this is actually going to be a very long war.

00:02:30.080 And in a way, a kind of last war.

00:02:33.060 This is it.

00:02:33.740 These are the last holdouts to Americanism.

00:02:37.960 And they are willing to do things that we aren't, that are sort of unimaginably evil and attack civilians and so on.

00:02:46.660 But it did come out of a dream in the sense that it was like the American empire could be motivated again.

00:02:54.700 We could start, we had a purpose and we were able to unify the country behind something for the first time since the Cold War as well.

00:03:06.780 So anyway, those are just some thoughts to maybe hopefully some of those ideas sort of get your mind started in terms of thinking about the broader trajectory of what we've lived through.

00:03:17.360 Yeah, yeah, I'll start with this entry point into that.

00:03:24.340 So I had initially done my, formulated my master's thesis around economic sanctions and the weaponization of sanctions, specifically looking at Syria as a case study.

00:03:36.060 And so through my research, I was trying to, then I was, got me into, I need to prove that the U.S. foreign policy or find evidence that the U.S. foreign policy has been to overthrow the Syrian government.

00:03:50.040 And this has been a consistent policy.

00:03:52.460 And, of course, I found that evidence from the 1950s forward.

00:03:57.740 I think there's something like 14 successful and unsuccessful coup attempts.

00:04:02.380 And then looking at their relationship with Israel as well.

00:04:06.420 And then through that, discovering, having to reread the Clean Break document and to restudy Project for the New American Century.

00:04:14.700 And I just got pulled into it, and I had kind of halfway through my master's thesis three weeks in, and I just had to basically throw it away and start from scratch with a couple weeks left.

00:04:27.340 And I just realized something, it just kind of hit me, that if you don't understand the power, where the center of power is, and how power is executed, and how it's leveraged, who holds it, how it reacts to other powers in the world, and who is the biggest hegemon is, of course, is the United States.

00:04:48.780 And I had to go back and study and understand what is the ideological motivation for U.S. hegemony.

00:04:57.320 What is the story? What is the narrative?

00:04:59.800 And I didn't want to, because it's like I had an adverse reaction to neocons during the whole Bush year.

00:05:06.220 So that was like apostasy for me.

00:05:07.980 I don't want to even look at it.

00:05:09.440 I'm not going to read the memoirs of Dick Cheney, or much less Charles Krauthammer, you know.

00:05:15.880 And then, so, but I just got sucked into it, listened to the speeches, and I'm like, actually, there is something here.

00:05:23.960 There is something coherent here.

00:05:25.780 There is a story here.

00:05:27.120 There is a narrative here.

00:05:28.660 And it's ideological, and it's drawing on aspects of U.S. history, and it's cherry-picking.

00:05:37.720 And this is what, when you read Krauthammer and some of his early essays, he absolutely predicted, in 1990, he predicted the unipolar moment.

00:05:47.320 He said how long it would last, and lots of things.

00:05:50.540 He was bang-on accurate when you look and read his old essays.

00:05:53.420 And so they had something going into the 90s there, as they were preparing to take power and to flip, you know, where the United States was heading after the Clinton administration.

00:06:06.200 But to be honest, Bill Clinton, as a staunch neoliberal, neoliberal foreign policy, the Warm-Up Act was the breakup of Yugoslavia.

00:06:16.200 Well, the first Gulf War was the onset.

00:06:19.720 That was the moment, the timing of that with the Iron Curtain falling.

00:06:24.440 But Yugoslavia was a big project, and that kind of broke the door down and broke down the kind of adherence to, strict adherence to international law. 0.94

00:06:34.560 That was the beginning of the rules-based international order, was NATO's operation on Yugoslavia.

00:06:41.540 But as I got in there and started reading more, and then all of a sudden, the other questions just became academic.

00:06:49.280 They just became information.

00:06:50.600 And then, but you had to find out, where does this come from?

00:06:55.100 Where does this neoconservative Pax Americana come from?

00:07:01.420 And it's not just American exceptionalism.

00:07:06.100 And I started with that term, Manifest Destiny.

00:07:09.760 And we read about that when we were in junior high history class in America as a normal part of your curriculum, just to understand Manifest Destiny.

00:07:17.960 And Manifest Destiny really wasn't about, that term wasn't born out of the foreign policy conquest.

00:07:26.480 This was about annexing the Western territories, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Texas.

00:07:35.000 And that's where that term came from.

00:07:37.360 And it was birthed by a journalist named John O'Sullivan in 1845.

00:07:44.340 And it was really out of a critique.

00:07:47.120 It was a critique because while the U.S. was trying to expand, they were constantly being thwarted by the British and the French.

00:07:53.100 So his argument was, their argument was, they are trying to get in the way of our Manifest Destiny to settle this continent.

00:08:02.100 And from that point, then came American exceptionalism after that, because there was a, after the Civil War, there was a gestation period where America was developing its identity as a continental country, as a continental power.

00:08:19.860 It's that settler, Puritan-driven, American settler, idealism, English-Protestant, you know, mentality, that attitude that had been established.

00:08:33.300 Then you're getting into the Industrial Revolution, and then you're getting into, when American exceptionalism kind of went international, was President McKinley.

00:08:44.180 And this is when the real, and it's funny, you look at that foreign policy, and below all of this talk about politics is economics, is hard economics.

00:08:55.240 And the U.S. started becoming a manufacturing powerhouse in the 19th century, but it started producing a surplus of goods.

00:09:03.300 So you had, what do you call it, deflation issues.

00:09:07.660 So it became clear to the leadership, we need to find new markets overseas.

00:09:13.580 And that's when coincided with the Spanish-American War, and they did establish these markets overseas.

00:09:20.260 And that helped to power a new phase in American economic expansion and political expansion.

00:09:28.340 And just the country became extremely wealthy during that period, and so wealthy that they were able to finance the First World War.

00:09:38.060 Because America didn't get into the First World War immediately.

00:09:41.660 But what they did, and this is what people don't realize, is that the dollar is a reserve currency.

00:09:47.440 It's long before Bretton Woods.

00:09:50.300 If you look at the total amount of trade globally around the First World War, the dollar was already beginning to eclipse the British sterling.

00:09:59.240 Wow.

00:09:59.340 What the U.S. did was a genius.

00:10:02.200 What they did, they basically used, in part by the Federal Reserve Act and turning it into a fiat empire, they were able to lend money to European powers who were fighting each other and taking payment in gold.

00:10:17.980 So America emptied out the gold reserves of Europe in the First World War, and that's how America accumulated massive gold reserves.

00:10:25.120 That's what filled up Fort Knox was World War I, and then by the time the Americans came in, everyone was in hock to the United States at that point. 0.91

00:10:33.540 Then they came in and basically, you know, very late in the game and managed to have a sort of key position, Woodrow Wilson, in kind of managing what the post-war system was going to be like, which didn't work out that well, unfortunately.

00:10:50.720 But America became a superpower before, during, and after the First World War, not the Second World War.

00:10:59.640 And that's really important that people understand that because there's a financial component there.

00:11:03.960 And how I learned and understood and appreciated a lot of this was during my international relations master's, I was reading Edward Hallett Carr, E.H. Carr, was a great British historian who's a great diplomat, very much a stalwart text for international relations, 20 years crisis.

00:11:24.920 And so he was in the interwar period, and so he was in the interwar period, and it just so happens this is very relevant to where we're at right now.

00:11:31.720 There's a lot of similarities between the interwar period, post-industrial revolution, a lot of changes going on.

00:11:39.000 The old systems of the old order is no longer functional and is begging to be replaced with something new, but nobody knows how that's going to take shape.

00:11:48.940 And a lot of monarchies quickly becoming democracies, the nation state, nationalism is a new thing as well.

00:11:59.780 So there's really a lot of things are in flux at that time.

00:12:02.680 And so like now, a lot of things are in flux now as well.

00:12:07.200 So that was, so American exceptionalism, understanding that.

00:12:11.460 And then, so where does neoconservativism come from?

00:12:14.620 It comes from not American exceptionalism, but American vindicationism.

00:12:20.580 And vindicationism is a type of American exceptionalism where you, it's almost like evangelical, evangelizing, that we have been successful, we have broken off from our colonial masters, we have built a powerful world power here, a pluralistic society where we have, everybody's free.

00:12:41.860 We freed the slaves, we freed the slaves, all of these things, we're leading in maritime power now.

00:12:46.740 I mean, so we are vindicated.

00:12:48.400 We're now going to proselytize to the world our success and our system is the best system.

00:12:55.880 And that kind of became the basis of the Truman Doctrine as well, you know, to be able to make democracies happen and be, and that, that was the basis of that kind of liberal idea of spreading democracy.

00:13:14.960 And that became the kind of raison d'etre or the raison d'etre of the United States on the surface in the foreign policy arena.

00:13:22.800 And then studying, you learn to become, if you're fluent in left liberal internationalism and you're fluent in right and realist politics and discourse, you then begin to see the foreign policy has been almost identical between John Bolton and Samantha Power.

00:13:43.700 So it is the same thing.

00:13:45.800 It's democracy promotion.

00:13:47.380 It's the freedom doctrine.

00:13:48.920 And that was one of the basis of the, the neoconservativism, which is really just a rehash.

00:13:53.900 So along the way, they all cherry pick various aspects of things that work for them, whatever the movement is, and then put it together in the kind of a new omelet, which kind of gets reified over time.

00:14:07.160 And that's what neoconservativism was.

00:14:09.640 It's really, you know, a lot of, we, we spoke about this on the spaces, how out of the University of Chicago, your alma mater, and all the great IR thinkers are coming out of there, but also the, the, the Trotskyites of the fifties and sixties rebranded themselves in the eighties and in the nineties as neocons.

00:14:30.020 And so also the Straussians who weren't exactly Marxist, I would say, and, and it, you know, what exactly Strauss believes is, is up for debate.

00:14:44.420 Let, let's put it that way.

00:14:46.060 But yeah, there's unquestionable, I mean, I felt marinating, I felt like I was marinating in that world when I was there.

00:14:53.940 And, and I've actually taken a lot from Strauss and so on, but let, let me jump in with a couple of things.

00:15:00.980 So, um, one event that I've always found quite fascinating is the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

00:15:11.440 And so that came after the Balfour, or was it, yeah, that was, Balfour was 1917, Paris Peace Conference was 1919.

00:15:20.480 Balfour Declaration was a sort of mission statement for Israel.

00:15:25.160 The Paris Peace Conference issued a mandate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

00:15:30.400 It was immensely influential in the Middle East.

00:15:33.800 It wasn't just, it wasn't just the Versailles conference, which is what's most remembered about, you know, dragging Germany over the coals and creating, uh, uh, revenge and, and putting revenge in their minds and so on. 0.77

00:15:46.100 Uh, but also it was, it was much bigger than that in the sense that it was the use of nationalism within an American hegemonic umbrella.

00:15:57.300 In the sense that, you know, in 1917, there was a Bolshevik revolution in Russia, it's going to smash the, the patriarchy and the monarchy and, and capitalism and everything.

00:16:09.140 But America had its own sort of Bolshevism, you could say that, that is a, and what I mean by that is a, is a global ideology that is politically disruptive, uh, but ultimately stable and ultimately serving Washington as opposed to Moscow.

00:16:26.820 And so in the Paris Peace Conference, uh, they recreated Poland, uh, they, they created Czechoslovakia, they created, um, the, what is it, kingdom of Croats and Serbs that would, you know, eventually, uh, you know, go into crisis as well.

00:16:44.300 And it was a sort of like, we're going, and they engaged in ethnic, um, redistribution, you could say ethnic cleansing, although it was, you know, largely peaceful and done with good and good intentions.

00:16:56.560 It was not, it was not, it was not done maliciously, but that's what it was.

00:17:00.720 Um, and so, and, and, and even in the, in the post 45 era, when you have Germans being expelled from the East and, and what, what is becoming the, the Soviet sphere, you have this remarkable thing that Tony Judd spoke about where these countries, after they defeated Hitler, they became ironically more ethno-nationalist.

00:17:24.500 Um, Jews had been, um, uh, oppressed, expelled, in many cases killed, um, Germans were returning to Germany.

00:17:33.300 It was almost in some sort of ironic way, the hyper-ethno-nationalist won, like Hitler won in some ironic way. 0.61

00:17:41.860 I, you know, don't, don't, don't, don't read, don't take that too far.

00:17:45.540 Of course, I'm, I'm just making a statement to, um, you know, illustrate a point.

00:17:50.640 Um, and so, but that also existed under the umbrella of American hegemony.

00:17:56.620 It existed as a market.

00:17:58.420 It also existed as a way of giving people a kind of Goldilocks amount of power, you know, just enough, but not too much.

00:18:08.000 You're no longer going to be oppressed, you're no longer going to be stateless, you're going to have a voice in your parliament, you can have a military, et cetera, but you're not the big kahuna. 0.94

00:18:19.380 And, and so that, that, you know, I think you're right to point this out, like the American century didn't begin in 1945.

00:18:25.860 Um, there's been a much longer attempt to open up markets, subjugate competing nation states and, um, open up that space on, you know, that benefits Washington directly as you, as you were, uh, you were pointing out.

00:18:45.340 But also carries with it a kind of hope or ideological oomph that actually is very compelling.

00:18:58.780 You know, I, I remember in the Bush era when I was rolling my eyes or, or, you know, making fun of all this freedom and democracy stuff.

00:19:08.980 The fact is that is a motivating thing.

00:19:13.900 That is something that when you're presenting yourself as operating with the best of intentions, it might cover up some war crimes, sure, but it also is a motivating force.

00:19:26.080 It's a kind of ideological, even religious like paradigm that you actually can rule the world this way.

00:19:34.420 Like there, there's, you know, there's, there's a reason why the Catholic church, it wasn't just an institution.

00:19:40.540 It had Christianity that it, you need an ideological kind of, um, political theology undergirding what you're doing.

00:19:49.080 If I were living in Poland after the first world war, I would be pro-American and I would love the idea of bringing back Poland as a nation state where, um, we can have a voice.

00:20:03.060 And there can be, uh, rules, uh, and so on.

00:20:07.780 I mean, likely if I were living in the middle East, I might be compelled to support America and regime change. 0.66

00:20:15.980 I mean, not certainly not everyone, but I can understand how people could take the side of that.

00:20:22.540 So it, it needs to have that religious like veneer or religious like animus at the heart of it.

00:20:30.180 And I guess maybe to bring us up to date, to bring us to 2025, do you think there's this danger with Trump where on the one hand, he's talking big and saying, you know, golden age, we're bringing back American exceptionalism, more exceptional than ever.

00:20:53.400 But if you look at other aspects of his rhetoric rhetoric and definitely his actions, it's this transactional, self-serving, kind of selfish, maybe even malicious attitude.

00:21:08.220 And I think that that's almost bringing this whole thing to a close.

00:21:14.080 You know, it's, in, in Trump's mind, we're all getting ripped off.

00:21:19.100 You know, the, the world is ripping us off.

00:21:20.860 And he's been saying that since the 1980s, like NATO is ripping us off.

00:21:25.340 You know, the UN, they, they're ripping us off. 0.98

00:21:28.080 You know, like we created that damn thing and we still run it. 0.96

00:21:32.140 The rules are, uh, completely on our favor. 0.98

00:21:35.040 It's like you're playing a baseball game and you have like 12 strikes and the other team has one strike and they're out or something.

00:21:41.380 It's, it's, it's a, an American institution.

00:21:43.580 It's not ripping us off anyway.

00:21:45.700 But the fact that he's so transactional and so sort of malicious, um, might this undermine all of the world order in the sense that American power is now not presented as something wonderful, something that's bringing democracy to you, something that's bringing hope or, or riches or Hollywood or whatever.

00:22:10.280 It's no longer bringing that to you.

00:22:11.920 It's, it's, it's instead like, give us your rare earth minerals and we might help out.

00:22:18.180 Those rare earths are back payment on the guns we sent you.

00:22:22.300 I mean, it's just sort of brutal, but, and I'm not, I'm not being a, um, Pollyannish here.

00:22:29.460 I, I, I, the opposite.

00:22:31.240 I'm saying that you can't have a realistic military strategy without political theology.

00:22:38.760 There, everything you do with, with bullets needs to be undergirded with Bibles to coin a phrase. 0.96

00:22:48.780 Like there, there has to be some compelling motive to it.

00:22:53.420 And the Soviet Union, when it started to lose that compelling motive, when being a Marxist was sort of uncool with the new left, or when the promise of socialism started to be a little too gray and boring and, uh, and so on.

00:23:11.140 What happened, boom, it, it, it, it vanishes.

00:23:13.960 And I think the American empire is in a similar danger.

00:23:18.620 If we don't have a compelling story, a bold, neoconservative vision of democratizing the planet, or some sense that we're special, some, some sense that this is a new Jerusalem given to us by God, where we can fully understand the meaning of the Protestant Reformation, which, you know, is something that motivating to, um, 18th century Americans.

00:23:42.760 Then it's going to collapse and all of this Trump realist stuff is, is actually bad policy precisely because it, it avoids the religiosity and, and heady quality of, of American foreign policy that just some thoughts.

00:24:01.460 Yeah. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll start off saying on the last point, I'll start from there and work back. Pete, Pete Hegseth, the new, uh, defense secretary, Fox weekend host turned defense secretary.

00:24:14.040 I mean, what a career jump. Um, and so he says, we're going to rebuild the U S military. We're going to rebuild it, make it more effective, more responsive. And my question is responsive to what effective for what you've got to have.

00:24:27.740 So we, you have to establish the political purpose of, you know, and you have to establish what you're talking about there, Richard is what is that national narrative? What is that story? What are people believing in? Because if you don't establish that you, you could, what are you building there? You know, you could be, you could have a revolution in military affairs and, you know, pink elephants here and there. Um, and it's not really going to suit anything that you're wanting to do anyway as a society and as a state going forward.

00:24:56.140 So that, that, that, that's typical. The problem, I think that neoconservativism fell down hard on was the, the, the real motivating factor was fear. It was fear. It was the clash of civilization. It was the hunt. They, they, they took Samuel Huntington and, uh, melded that with nine 11 and radical Islam. And that became the driving force of, of, of everything. 0.88

RadixJournal - March 11, 2025

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