I have a bone to pick with the Washington Post. A few
days back, as some of my readers may be aware, it published a list of some two
hundred blogs that it claimed were circulating Russian propaganda, and I was
disappointed to find that The Archdruid Report didn’t make the cut.
Oh, granted, I don’t wait each week for secret orders from
Boris Badenov, the mock-iconic Russian spy from the Rocky and Bullwinkle
Show of my youth, but that shouldn’t disqualify me. I’ve seen no evidence that any of the blogs
on the list take orders from Moscow, either; certainly the Post offered
none worth mentioning. Rather, what seems to have brought down the wrath of
“Pravda on the Potomac,” as the Post is unfondly called by many DC
locals, is that none of these blogs have been willing to buy into the failed
neoconservative consensus that’s guided American foreign policy for the last
sixteen years. Of that latter offense, in turn, The Archdruid Report is
certainly guilty.
There are at least two significant factors behind the Post’s
adoption of the tactics of the late Senator Joe McCarthy, dubious lists and
all. The first is that the failure of
Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions has thrown into stark relief an
existential crisis that has the American news media by the throat. The media
sell their services to their sponsors on the assumption that they can then sell
products and ideas manufactured by those sponsors to the American people. The
Clinton campaign accordingly outspent Trump’s people by a factor of two to one,
sinking impressive amounts of the cash she raised from millionaire donors into
television advertising and other media buys.
Clinton got the coverage she paid for, too. Nearly every
newspaper in the United States endorsed her; pundits from one end of the media
to the other solemnly insisted that everyone ought to vote for her; equivocal
polls were systematically spun in her favor by a galaxy of talking heads.
Pretty much everyone who thought they mattered was on board the bandwagon. The
only difficulty, really was that the people who actually mattered—in
particular, voters in half a dozen crucial swing states—responded to all this
by telling their soi-disant betters, “Thanks, but one turkey this November is
enough.”
It turned out that Clinton was playing by a rulebook that
was long past its sell-by date, while Trump had gauged the shift in popular
opinion and directed his resources accordingly. While she sank her money into
television ads on prime time, he concentrated on social media and barnstorming
speaking tours through regions that rarely see a presidential candidate. He
also figured out early on that the mainstream media was a limitless source of
free publicity, and the best way to make use of it was to outrage the tender
sensibilities of the media itself and get denounced by media talking heads.
That worked because a very large number of people here in
the United States no longer trust the news media to tell them anything remotely
resembling the truth. That’s why so many of them have turned to blogs for the
services that newspapers and broadcast media used to provide: accurate
reporting and thoughtful analysis of the events that affect their lives. Nor is
this an unresasonable choice. The issue’s not just that the mainstream news
media is biased; it’s not just that it never gets around to mentioning many
issues that affect people’s lives in today’s America; it’s not even that it
only airs a suffocatingly narrow range of viewpoints, running the gamut of
opinion from A to A minus—though of course all these are true. It’s also that so much of it is so smug, so
shallow, and so dull.
The predicament the mainstream media now face is as simple
as it is inescapable. After taking billions of dollars from their sponsors,
they’ve failed to deliver the goods.
Every source of advertising revenue in the United States has got to be
looking at the outcome of the election, thinking, “Fat lot of good all those TV
buys did her,” and then pondering their own advertising budgets and wondering
how much of that money might as well be poured down a rathole.
Presumably the mainstream news media could earn the trust of
the public again by breaking out of the echo chamber that defines the narrow
range of acceptable opinions about the equally narrow range of issues open to
discussion, but this would offend their sponsors. Worse, it would offend the
social strata that play so large a role in defining and enforcing that echo
chamber; most mainstream news media employees who have a role in deciding what
does and does not appear in print or on the air belong to these same social
strata, and are thus powerfully influenced by peer pressure. Talking about
supposed Russian plots to try to convince people not to get their news from
blogs, though it’s unlikely to work, doesn’t risk trouble from either of those
sources.
Why, though, blame it on the Russians? That’s where we move
from the first to the second of the factors I want to discuss this week.
A bit of history may be useful here. During the 1990s, the
attitude of the American political class toward the rest of the world rarely
strayed far from the notions expressed by Francis Fukuyama in his famous and
fatuous essay proclaiming the end of history.
The fall of the Soviet Union, according to this line of thought, proved
that democracy and capitalism were the best political and economic systems
humanity would ever come up with, and the rest of the world would therefore
inevitably embrace them in due time. All that was left for the United States
and its allies to do was to enforce certain standards of global order on the
not-yet-democratic and not-yet-capitalist nations of the world, until they grew
up and got with the program.
That same decade, though, saw the emergence of the
neoconservative movement. The
neoconservaties were as convinced of the impending triumph of capitalism and
democracy as their rivals, but they opposed the serene absurdities of
Fukuyama’s thesis with a set of more muscular absurdities of their own.
Intoxicated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies, they
convinced themselves that identical scenes could be enacted in Baghdad, Tehran,
Beijing, and the rest of the world, if only the United States would seize the
moment and exploit its global dominance.
During Clinton’s presidency, the neoconservatives formed a
pressure group on the fringes of official Washington, setting up lobbying
groups such as the Project for a New American Century and bombarding the media
with position papers. The presidency of
George W. Bush gave them their chance, and they ran with it. Where the first
Iraq war ended with Saddam Hussein beaten but still in power—the appropriate
reponse according to the older ideology—the second ended with the US occupying
Iraq and a manufactured “democratic” regime installed under its aegis. In the
afterglow of victory, neoconservatives talked eagerly about the conquest of
Iran and the remaking of the Middle East along the same lines as post-Soviet
eastern Europe. Unfortunately for these fond daydreams, what happened instead
was a vortex of sectarian warfare and anti-American insurgency.
You might think, dear reader, that the cascading failures of
US policy in Iraq might have caused second thoughts in the US political and
military elites whose uncritical embrace of neoconservative rhetoric let that
happen. You might be forgiven, for that matter, for thinking that the results
of US intervention in Afghanistan, where the same assumptions had met with the
same disappointment, might have given those second thoughts even more urgency.
If so, you’d be quite mistaken. According to the conventional wisdom in today’s
America, the only conceivable response to failure is doubling down.
“If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again” thus seems
to be the motto of the US political class these days, and rarely has that been
so evident as in the conduct of US foreign policy. The Obama administration embraced the same
policies as its feckless predecessor, and the State Department, the CIA, and
the Pentagon went their merry way, overthrowing governments right and left, and
tossing gasoline onto the flames of ethnic and sectarian strife in various
corners of the world, under the serene conviction that the blowback from these
actions could never inconvenience the United States.
That would be bad enough. Far worse was the effect of
neoconservative policies on certain other nations: Russia, China, and Iran. In
the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia was a basket case, Iran was a
pariah nation isolated from the rest of the world, and China had apparently
made its peace with an era of American global dominance, and was concentrating
on building up its economy instead of its military. It would have been child’s
play for the United States to maintain that state of affairs indefinitely.
Russia could have been helped to recover and then integrated economically into
Europe; China could have been allowed the same sort of regional primacy the US
allows as a matter of course to its former enemies Germany and Japan; and
without US intervention in the Middle East to hand it a bumper crop of opening
wedges, Iran could have been left to stew in its own juices until it
imploded.
That’s not what happened, though. Instead, two US
adminstrations went out of their way to convince Russia and China they had
nothing to gain and everything to lose by accepting their assigned places in a
US-centric international order. Russia and China have few interests in common
and many reasons for conflict; they’ve spent much of their modern history
glaring at each other across a long and contentious mutual border; they had no
reason to ally with each other, until the United States gave them one. Nor did
either nation have any reason to reach out to the Muslim theocracy in
Iran—quite the contrary—until they began looking for additional allies to
strengthen their hand against the United States.
One of the basic goals of effective foreign policy is to
divide your potential enemies against each other, so that they’re so busy
worrying about one another that they don’t have the time or resources to bother
you. It’s one thing, though, to violate that rule when the enemies you’re
driving together lack the power to threaten your interests, and quite another
when the resource base, population, and industrial capacity of the nations
you’re driving together exceeds your own. The US government’s harebrained
pursuit of neoconservative policies has succeeded, against the odds, in
creating a sprawling Eurasian alliance with an economic and military potential
significantly greater than that of the US.
There have probably been worse foreign policy blunders in the history of
the world, but I can’t think of one off hand.
You won’t read about that in the mainstream news media in
the United States. At most, you’ll get canned tirades about how Russian
president Vladimir Putin is a “brutal tyrant” who is blowing up children in
Aleppo or what have you. “Brutal tyrant,” by the way, is a code phrase of the
sort you normally get in managed media.
In the US news, it simply means “a head of state who’s insufficiently
submissive to the United States.” Putin certainly qualifies as the latter;
first in the Caucasus, then in the Ukraine, and now in Syria, he’s deployed
military force to advance his country’s interests against those of the United
States and its allies. I quite understand that the US political class isn’t
pleased by this, but it might be helpful for them to reflect on their own role
in making it happen.
The Russian initiative isn’t limited to Syria, though. Those
of my readers who only pay attention to US news media probably don’t know yet
that Egypt has now joined Russia’s side. Egyptian and Russian troops are
carrying out joint
military drills, and reports in
Middle Eastern news media have it that Egyptian
troops will soon join the war in Syria on the side of the Syrian
government. If so, that’s a game-changing move, and probably means game over
for the murky dealings the United States and its allies have been pursuing in
that end of the Middle East.
China and Russia have very different cultural styles when it
comes to exerting power. Russian culture celebrates the bold stroke; Chinese
culture finds subtle pressure more admirable. Thus the Chinese have been
advancing their country’s interests against those of the United States and its
allies in a less dramatic but equally effective way. While distracting
Washington’s attention with a precisely measured game of “chicken” in the South
China Sea, the Chinese have established a line of naval bases along the
northern shores of the Indian Ocean from Myanmar to Djibouti, and contracted
alliances in East Africa and South Asia. Those of my readers who’ve read Alfred
Thayer Mahan and thus know their way around classic maritime strategy will
recognize exactly what’s going on here.
Most recently, China has scored two dramatic shifts in the
balance of power in the western Pacific. My American readers may have heard of
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Phillippines; he’s the one who got his fifteen minutes of fame in the
mainstream media here when he called Barack Obama a son of a whore. The broader
context, of course, got left out. Duterte, like the heads of state of many
nominal US allies, resents US
interference in his country’s affairs, and at this point he has other
options. His outburst was followed in short order by a trip to Beijing, where
he and China’s President Xi signed multibillion-dollar aid agreements and
talked openly about the end of a US-dominated world order.
A great many Americans seem to think of the Phillippines as
a forgettable little country off somewhere unimportant in the Third World.
That’s a massive if typical misjudgment. It’s a nation of 100 million people on
a sprawling archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, commanding the entire
southern end of the South China Sea and a vast swath of the western Pacific,
including crucial maritime trade routes. As a US ally, it was a core component
of the ring of encirclement holding Chinese maritime forces inside the island
ring that walls China’s coastal waters from rest of the Pacific basin. As a
Chinese ally, it holds open that southern gate to China’s rapidly expanding
navy and air force.
Duterte wasn’t the only Asian head of state to head for
Beijing in recent months. Malaysia’s prime minister was there a few weeks
later, to sign up for another multibillion-dollar aid package, buy Chinese
vessels for the Malaysian navy, and make acid comments about the way that, ahem,
former colonial powers keep trying to interfere in Malaysian affairs.
Malaysia’s a smaller nation than the Phillippines, but even more strategically
placed. Its territory runs alongside the
northern shore of the Malacca Strait:
the most important sea lane in the world, the gateway connecting the
Indian Ocean with the Pacific, through which much of the world’s seaborne crude
oil transport passes.
All these are opening moves. Those who are familiar with the
rise and fall of global powers know what the next moves are; those who don’t
might want to consider reading my book Declineand Fall, or my novel Twilight’s
Last Gleaming, which makes the same points in narrative form. Had
Hillary Clinton won this month’s election, we might have moved into the endgame
much sooner. Her enthusiasm for overthrowing
governments during her stint as Secretary of State, and her insistence that the
US should impose a no-fly zone over Syria in the teeth of Russian fighters and
state-of-the-art antiaircraft defenses, suggests that she could have filled the
role of my fictional president Jameson Weed, and sent US military forces into a
shooting war they were not realistically prepared to win.
We seem to have dodged that bullet. Even so, the United
States remains drastically overextended, with military bases in more than a
hundred countries around the world and a military budget nearly equal to all
other countries’ put together. Meanwhile, back here at home, our country is
falling apart. Leave the bicoastal bubble where the political class and their
hangers-on spend their time, and the United States resembles nothing so much as
the Soviet Union in its last days: a bleak and dilapidated landscape of
economic and social dysfunction, where the enforced cheerfulness of the
mainstream media contrasts intolerably with the accelerating disintegration
visible all around.
That could have been prevented. If the United States had
responded to the end of the Cold War by redirecting the so-called “peace
dividend” toward the rebuilding of our national infrastructure and our domestic
economy, we wouldn’t be facing the hard choices before us right now—and in all
probability, by the way, Donald Trump wouldn’t just have been elected
president. Instead, the US political class let itself be caught up in
neoconservative fantasies of global dominion, and threw away that opportunity.
The one bright spot in that dismal picture is that we have another chance.
History shows that there are two ways that empires end.
Their most common fate involves clinging like grim death to their imperial
status until it drags them down. Spain’s great age of overseas empire ended
that way, with Spain plunging into a long era of economic disarray and civil
war. At least it maintained its national unity; the Ottoman and
Austro-Hungarian empires both finished their imperial trajectories by being
partitioned, as of course did the Soviet Union. There are worse examples; I’m
thinking here of the Assyrian Empire of the ancient Middle East, which ceased
to exist completely—its nationhood, ethnicity, and language dissolving into
those of its neighbors—once it fell.
Then there’s the other option, the one chosen by the Chinese
in the fifteenth century and Great Britain in the twentieth. Both nations had
extensive overseas empires, and both walked away from them, carrying out a
staged withdrawal from imperial overreach. Both nations not only survived the
process but came through with their political and cultural institutions
remarkably intact. This latter option, with all its benefits, is still
available to the United States.
A staged withdrawal of the sort just described would of
course be done step by step, giving our allies ample time to step up to the
plate and carry the costs of their own defense. Those regions that have little
relevance to US national interests, such as the Indian Ocean basin, would see
the first round of withdrawals, while more important regions such as Europe and
the northwest Pacific would be later on the list. The withdrawal wouldn’t go
all the way back to our borders by any means; a strong presence in the Atlantic
and eastern Pacific basins and a pivot to our own “near abroad” would be
needed, but those would also be more than adequate to maintain our national
security.
Meanwhile, the billions upon billions of dollars a year that
would be saved could be put to work rebuilding our national infrastructure and
economy, with enough left over for a Marshall Plan for Mexico—the most
effective way to reduce illegal immigration to the United States, after all, is
to help make sure that citizens of the countries near us have plenty of jobs at
good wages where they already live. Finally, since the only glue holding the
Russo-Chinese alliance together is their mutual opposition to US hegemony,
winding up our term as global policeman will let Russia, China and Iran get
back to contending with each other rather than with us.
Such projects, on the rare occasions they’re made, get
shouted down by today’s US political class as “isolationism.” There’s a huge
middle ground between isolationism and empire, though, and that middle ground
is where most of the world’s nations stand as they face their neighbors. One
way or another, the so-called “American century” is ending; it can end the hard
way, the way so many other eras of global hegemony have ended—or it can end
with the United States recognizing that it’s a nation among nations, not an
overlord among vassals, and acting accordingly.
