Where to start? I just finished speed-reading a tedious tour d’horizon of our troubled world as seen through the cracked lens of an up-and-coming Neoliberal foreign policy mastermind by the name of Hal Brands.
Title: Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once? Answer: Maybe and why not?
It was written in the middle of October for Bloomberg. Dr. Brands is a Bloomberg opinion columnist in addition to being the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Brands must know something, of course, but his long-winded rumination is unpersuasive, if not all wet. The obvious does not occur to him: that Washington must stop making enemies before it blows up the planet.
Somehow someway at some point I must have signed up for subscriptions to Bloomberg and to Foreign Affairs, perhaps the two most proactive Neoliberal fountainheads in existence, aside from the agitprop-driven New York Times.
Yesterday in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, I came across the latest outburst from the acclaimed Neocon ideologue Robert Kagan. He and Brands have been drinking Kool-Aid from the same punchbowl.
Title: A Free World, If You Can Keep It.
Kagan, as you may remember, is the husband of Victoria “Fuck the EU!” Nuland, who teed up the Russo-Ukraine war back in 2014 and didn’t look back. Kagan’s narrative is smooth and disarming. Call it cartoon history, the received version.
[By the way, if Americans couldn’t keep Ben Franklin’s republic—it is in shambles, unrecognizable—why should anyone believe them capable of safeguarding the so-called “free world”?]
Ms. Nuland does the heavy malfeasance in tandem with U.S. Secretary of State Antony “Blind Man” Blinken. She is the second official in charge at the State Department, where she tries hard to fly below the radar.
When it comes to determining U.S. foreign policy, Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism have merged. The axis is perfected. Everyone is on the same page.
Brands and Kagan are intellectual cheerleaders for covert and, if need be, naked Washington interference in the affairs of other countries, even into the internal workings of other countries. Anything less is damned as American isolationism, which is deemed as heretical as climate change skepticism.
They regard U.S. interventionism—in practice, unbridled meddling—as a Washington entitlement, a blessing for the world, instead of blatant busybodyism and madness.
It would be redundant to point out that the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. Congress reflect the Brands-Kagan attitude. The threats are incoming everywhere and the “free world” is at stake.
How myopic, self-centered, arrogant and dangerous this mindset is. Yet, it is taken for granted.
By the “free world” they mean the oft-cited, dollar-denominated “international rules-based order” which apparently leaves nothing to be desired or improved upon.
The fact that the liberal “rules-based order” is one-sided, self-serving to Washington, hypocritical in the extreme and just plain blather cannot be denied by any unbrainwashed, objective observer in his or her right mind.
Outside the Washington beltway, and the capitals of its European tributaries, and its Far East outposts of Japan and Australia, the world is having second thoughts.
The unipolar moment and George H.W. Bush’s “new world order” is history. The track record of hot wars and non-stop punitive sanctions in the aftermath of the Cold War is not a pretty picture.
Did we deserve the blowback of 9/11? Did we need “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? Did we vote for a 20-year war in Afghanistan? Or the NATO bombing of Serbia and the decimation of Libya and Syria? Is this what a successful U.S. foreign policy looks like?
The contrived Russo-Ukraine war underway is the crowning Neocon-Neoliberal achievement and perhaps the last gasp, literally in fact if it ends in nuclear war.
One wonders how Biden, Blinken, Nuland can sleep at night, knowing what they know and what they did in 2014 to ignite a civil war in Ukraine and then in a second act to recklessly provoke Putin’s 2022 invasion.
Biden, Blinken, Nuland and their deluded cheerleaders own Ukraine. It is their war. Everything else is hogwash fed to the uninformed, like what came before it.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
