The governed are ready for a period of retrenchment, consolidation and diplomatic solutions to unwinnable conflicts, as imperfect as the peace might be to hawks.
Are you open to a somewhat unconventional perspective on this election? If so, read on. If you’re absolutely confident you know all there is know about this election (good vs evil, Democrat vs. Republican, etc.), well then let’s compare notes in five years and see which context provided more insight into the future.
In the context presented here, the personalities of the two candidates matter less than their perceived role in the changing of the Imperial Order. Let’s start with a quick overview of the relationships between each political party and the Deep State–the unelected power centers of the central government that continue on regardless of which person or party is in elected office.
Liberal Democrats have always been uneasy bedfellows with the Deep State.Republican President Eisenhower had the political and military gravitas to put limits on the Military-Industrial wing of the Deep State, so much so that Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy claimed the U.S. had fallen behind the U.S.S.R. militarily in the 1960 presidential election (the infamous “missile gap”).
Eisenhower was a cautious Cold War leader, wary of hot wars, wars of conquest, and the inevitable burden of conquest, nation-building. The military was best left sheathed in his view, and careful diplomacy was sufficient to pursue America’s interests.
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Kennedy entered office as a foreign policy hawk who was going to out-hawk the cautious Republicans. A brush with C.I.A. cowboys (the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba) and a taste of Imperial meddling in distant, poorly understood lands (Vietnam) increased his interest in peace and reduced his enthusiasm for foreign adventurism.
Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the most activist liberal Democrat of the era, was not about to be out-hawked by the Republicans, and so he followed an expansive Imperial agenda into the 10-year quagmire of Vietnam.
Since the immense global enterprise known as World War II had taken less than four years to win, Americans had little patience for low-intensity wars that dragged on inconclusively for years while combat deaths mounted into the tens of thousands.
Liberal Democrats could find no easy political ground between the pressure to out-hawk the Republicans and the demands of an expansive Cold War Deep State. Both liberal Democratic presidents between 1965 and 1980, Johnson and Jimmy Carter, were one-term presidents, undermined by military/foreign entanglements.
The Republicans were given a freer hand; Nixon unleashed the B-52s on Hanoi in late 1972 until the North Vietnamese ran out of Soviet-supplied SAMs (surface to air missiles). Given a choice between a brokered peace or a flattened capital, they chose peace, and Nixon was free to declare victory and pull the majority of remaining American forces out of Southeast Asia.
The disastrous defeat in Vietnam of expansive Imperial ambitions (nation-building, etc.) led to an era of retrenchment and consolidation. Other than “splendid little wars” in Grenada and Panama and supporting proxies such as the Contras, the 1980s were years not of Imperial expansion but of Cold war diplomacy.
Republican President Reagan was also given a free hand to be a peacemaker, overseeing the fatal erosion of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the long, costly Cold War. President Bush Senior was a cautious Cold War leader, careful not to alienate the post-U.S.S.R. Russians and wary of overreach and quagmires even in the newUnipolar world of unrivaled U.S. power.
The era’s one hot war, Desert Storm, restored the sovereignty of Kuwait but left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq. Bush and his inner circle (and the Deep State they represented) were mindful of the lessons of Vietnam: Imperial over-reach led to costly, drawn-out failures of nation-building in the name of exporting democracy.
Though it was poorly understood by the public, Desert Storm played to American military strengths: a high-intensity conflict with concentrated forces, maneuver warfare with heavy armor protected by absolute air superiority, aided by proximity to allied bases and aircraft carrier groups. If you designed a war optimized to American military strengths, it would look much like Desert Storm. No wonder it was one of the most lopsided victories in history, with most American casualties resulting from random Scud missile strikes and accidents.
The end of the Cold War and victory in Iraq left the Republicans without their hawkish agenda and political raison d’etre, and Ross Perot’s third-party movement in 1992 effectively delivered the presidency to Democrat Bill Clinton.
Clinton was blessed with a booming domestic economy and a peace dividend from the end of the Cold war. Though Clinton reportedly hankered for a great crisis he could exploit to burnish his place in the history books, alas none arose, and the 20th century ended with a decided absence of existential threats to the U.S. or even U.S. interests.
