We hear there are two faces of US foreign policy, and that’s why it appears hypocritical.
There is just one face, one outlook. It is the face of Avril Haines, current Director of National Intelligence – and I will pause here for the laughtrack. Not only is there something called national intelligence… it has a Director? How could we have known?
Avril is accurately quoted below, from a presentation on Ukraine and how well it’s going, by none other than a government-allied fact checker:
We perceive a disconnect between Putin’s near-term military objectives in this area and his military’s capacity, a kind of mismatch between his ambitions and what the military is able to accomplish,..
This “mythdetector” piece was written to correct a separate Pravda “misinterpretation” of the US Director of National Intelligence. Haines’ actual speech, like the warmongering former Secretary Mike Pompeo’s linked above, are excellent examples of pot and kettle, a sociopathic inability for self-awareness and self-reflection, with a bit of bull-in-china-shop exuberance, all in one.
We on the other hand, people of the world and half of Americans over the age of 10, perceive that there is a real disconnect between the US government’s near-term military objectives, and our woke, wasteful, and wan corporate military system. We also perceive a mismatch between US government ambitions and the reality of an already-emerged multipolar world.
Realism informs that there are no friends among states, only allied interests, randomly coincidental objectives, fear of destruction and loss, and at the very weak end of the “state relationship” conundrum, financial debts owed.
Perversely and consequently, US foreign policy language is littered with terms like trust, friends, allies, strength through democracy, and the dollar as permanent world reserve currency. Each of these US projections and themes is misleading; none are substantiated by objective reality.
80% of the global population knows this, and many Americans know this. Americans sense that words from government officials, whether on foreign or domestic topics, are often outright lies. NEWSPEAK-style, state utterances inform only when inverted. Americans are bathed daily in chants of human liberty, the sound of freedom making us cozy and infantile, ensconced in our pods. But like growing humans everywhere, we all see and recognize truth long before we can describe and articulate it.
The rest of the world has experienced the American state directly, without the soothing daily body-wash of liberty-sounding words. The rest of the world has an accumulated generational awareness that provides a new global mythology – one that explains reality, rather than defying it.
A myth is a just a community’s understandable, working thesis of how and why the world is as it is. We have seen a meteoric rise in the capability of states to commit mass murder, conduct mass theft, compel mass human and resource dislocations. At the same time, we all recognize a similar expansion of the ability of people around the world to see and understand this murder, theft, and movement (or lack of movement) of goods and people. More than that, we see humanity’s ability achieve great things and be humane, in spite of the heavy burden of mostly rapacious governments and their agendas.
In no previous era of humanity has the world been easier to explain, to understand, and to observe. Thanks to liberty and markets, we have access to an unlimited number of ideas and items that serve, work and perform for us in ways no government could ever plan or control.
My neighbors demonstrated this on the evening of July 4th. A quarter mile away, they put on a 20 minute fireworks show that rivaled the $100,000 shows I remember from 40 years ago, and it was visible for miles. No one here is wealthy, but everyone here benefited from the global intersection of technology and market forces. In an era of inflation, debt, and war all created by governments – this is what the market and my neighbors delivered. It is something we can – and do – believe in, and I chose to assess the show as a celebration of real independence, and real liberty – not the Avril Haines version.
The explanations the US government poses, and the mythologies it uses, are garbage. As functionaries on the wrong side of change, they can’t see it – or more accurately, cannot bear to look at it. The US global pursuit (an ever-expanding, mildly fascist, elite oligarchy, a fake republic devoid of republican virtue) can be completely explained in the person of Avril Haines.
She is capable of exceptional and honestly presented deceit, and she plays her role in the machine of state much like an idealized Ford factory worker of the early 1900s. Her historical role, a woman in a grey flannel suit for a flailing empire, is intact. But the reality is she, and most of the state machine in the US and elsewhere around the world, are just plugged into their pod, Matrix-style, naked and controlled, imagining their impact and dreaming of a world that has no basis in reality.
Her energy is laudable; yet her directions and ideas, her ‘isms” and her id really amount to very little.
Avril Haines – a grand imperial “we” – perceives a disconnect between military objectives and capacity, between ambitions and capability. But she can only look outward. This is the fundamental handicap that cannot and will never be overcome by the institutional state. This state is in fact dying, as its last energy is extracted into the myth of permanent empire, and it has already begun to digest muscle on the both European and North American continents.
Curiously, Avril Haines is also accomplished in areas of engineering, small aircraft flight, erotica and torture. Any of these could have made her a career, but she applies herself to tweaking and engineering a collapsing empire.
When you fix an engine or operate machinery, you can see symptoms of aberration or failure, and you can systematically find the problem, correct it or junk it. You cannot dream it to work, or conduct rituals.
Haines, and the empire, by encouraging Ukraine’s elite to rape and steal their young country blind for years, provoke its neighbors and abuse its own population, and now, fight “patriotically” to the last Ukrainian – illustrates the empire’s own lack of a manual, and morality. In Yemen, we have territory taken by force by a US ally, now planned to become a US-funded military outpost on the Aden Sea. Trump and his son-in-law engineered a recognition that Morocco may keep and control Western Sahara, disputed lands it took by force. Israel – a friend – has kept all lands taken by force, despite global opinion and international law, with no impact on its annual US taxpayer stipend of over $4 billion a year for nine million Israelis, a nice subsidy by any standards.
The list could go on – and as Anatol Leiven writes, the problem or challenge of living peaceably under past and persistent imperial borders is one that people as smart as Haines really don’t understand. Instead of fixing an engine, she has no other options but to light incense, search tea leaves, chant with inpenetrability and lie to our faces.
People are not parts, interchangeable and inventoried, to be used up or thrown away, based on a neoconservative chop shop handbook. How people are ruled cannot be formulated in a capitol factory, pressed into molds en masse. Agency is local, it is human, and its enemy – the enemy of liberty and virtue and human connectedness – is the state.
