Posted on 05/12/2017 4:23:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
For the World War II generation there was clarity.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before -- in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost.
After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided.
Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia's explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea's invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own security, we had to go back to Europe and Asia.
What was called the Cold War consensus -- that only America could "contain" Stalin's empire -- led to NATO and new U.S. alliances from the Elbe to the East China Sea.
Vietnam, however, shattered that Cold War consensus.
The far left of the Democratic Party that had taken us into Vietnam had repudiated the war by 1968, and switched sides to sympathize with such Third World communists as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Sandinistas.
Center-right presidents -- JFK, Nixon, Reagan -- accepted the need to cooperate with dictators who would side with us in fighting Communism.
And we did. Park Chung-Hee in Korea. The Shah in Iran. President Diem in Saigon. Gen. Franco in Spain. Somoza in Nicaragua. Gen. Mobuto in the Congo. Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Ferdinand Marcos in Manila. The list goes on.
Under Reagan, the Soviet Empire finally fell apart and the USSR then disintegrated in one of the epochal events of history.
The American Century had ended in America's triumph.
Yet, after 1989, no new national consensus emerged over what ought to be our role in the World. What should we stand for? What should we fight for?
What Dean Acheson had said of our cousins in 1962: "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role," was true of us.
What was our role in the world, now that the Cold War was history?
George H.W. Bush took us to war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Soaring to 90 percent approval, he declared America's new role was to construct a New World Order.
Those who opposed him, Bush acidly dismissed in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1991, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor:
"We stand here today on the site of a tragedy spawned by isolationism. ... And it is here we must learn -- and this time avoid -- the dangers of today's isolationism and its ... accomplice, protectionism."
Neither Bush nor his New World Order survived the next November.
Then came payback for our sanctions that had brought death to thousands of Iraqis, and for the U.S. bases we had foolishly planted on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia -- Sept. 11, 2001.
George W. Bush reacted by launching the two longest wars in our history, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and announced that our new role was to "end tyranny in our world."
The Bush II crusade for global democracy also fizzled out.
Barack Obama tried to extricate us from Afghanistan and Iraq. But he, too, failed, and got us into wars in Yemen and Syria, and then started his own war in Libya, producing yet another failed state.
What does the balance sheet of post-Cold War interventions look like?
Since 1991, we have lost our global preeminence, quadrupled our national debt, and gotten ourselves mired in five Mideast wars, with the neocons clamoring for a sixth, with Iran.
With the New World Order and global democracy having been abandoned as America's great goals, what is the new goal of U.S. foreign policy? What is the strategy to achieve it? Does anyone know?
Globalists say we should stand for a "rules-based world order." Not exactly "Remember the Alamo!" or "Remember Pearl Harbor!"
A quarter century after the Cold War, we remain committed to 60-year-old Cold War alliances to defend scores of nations on the other side of the world. Consider some of the places where America collides today with nuclear powers: the DMZ, the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, Crimea, the Donbass.
What is vital to us in any of these venues to justify sending an American army to fight, or risking a nuclear war?
We have lost control of our destiny. We have lost the freedom our Founding Fathers implored us to maintain -- the freedom to stay out of wars of foreign counties on faraway continents.
Like the British and French empires, the American imperium is not sustainable. We have issued so many war guarantees it is almost assured that we will be dragged into every future great crisis and conflict on the planet.
If we do not review and discard some of these war guarantees, we shall never know peace. Donald Trump once seemed to understand this. Does he still?
In essence, the US today has four main strategic aims: (1) to prevent the emergence of a peer or near-peer competitor by denying all such potential rivals the resources and allies that they would need; (2) to protect and promote the alliances and international institutions that underpin the rules-based international order that we established after WW II and relied on to help win the Cold War; (3) to assure the security of the US homeland and of US access to the world's resources; and (4) to oppose and suppress terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism.
None of these goals are unreasonable or ill-chosen even if, in application, the US may sometimes go astray. The US continues to enjoy a combination of military, economic, political, and cultural power that the world envies but mostly accepts because it broadly benefits from US policies and conduct. The world's complaints about US leadership are negligible against their fears of a lack of US leadership. Moreover, US foreign policy and national strategy benefit from our robust political institutions, remarkable history, and the options offered by different schools of thought about foreign relations. Working together, these help provide a check against excess and error.
The primary opposition to the US in the world -- the so-called revisionist powers (China and Russia) and rogue states (Iran, North Korea) -- are subject to containment strategies, national weaknesses, and inherent strategic constraints. The Twentieth Century has been called "The American Century." And, with most of the world fully accepting of American leadership, the current century is likely to be even more defined by American ways and decisions.
Well said. Pat’s commitment to isolationism blinds him to anything that doesn’t support his theory that often turns in to “it’s America’s fault.” Arab soil may be sacred to him, but it’s also the soil that spawns hate regardless of the USA or Israel, points I am positive he’d rejected. He’s really the last of the great appeasers.
The same goals as any Empire. The same end, too.
Liberty
Our goal should be opening a new frontier. Space, the bottom of the ocean, somewhere, a new frontier.
Yes. Seeing how the rest of the world is dominated by either socialism or Islam I was going to say “promote freedom”, but liberty works fine too.
It starts with flushing our own toilet. Send the bad guys back to the old country. Anyone with a criminal record-even white collar types. Reopen the Russian Gulag for American convicts. Turn back 30% of immigrants for whatever reason like they did 100 years ago. THEN import European families with 3 kids who succeed in schools. Throw the Mexicans a bone. Serve in the military or demonstrate their kids are in the top half of school tests.
Not only does the world use the dollar as its trade and reserve currency, but it also invests those dollars in US Treasuries and thereby finances our federal debt. The world thus covers, among millions of other Americans, the Medicare and Social Security costs of my parents in retirement because, like cops ready to deploy, there are US army brigades, strike aircraft, and carrier task forces watching and on call to keep the peace and protect US friends and allies.
And it should not be forgotten that the US is also leading the scientific and technical revolution that drives modernity. Although it seems almost like science fiction, within a generation or two, the US and the developed world may bring to reality the start of a future of astonishing material ease and abundance, with minimal work required, and the conquest of disease and dramatically improved longevity.
What is there not to like in such a future, where the US federal debt will be a bearable trifle and most urban areas in the world look like US cities, with Americans near universally welcome?
I don’t accept this. The housekeeping tasks of empire.
There is little to like about the job — but we dare not shirk it because there is far more to fear if the job is not done at all or is not done properly and to our satisfaction. And, against common dangers, the natural order of things usually has the richest, strongest, and most powerful person leads the defense effort.
The only reason America didn’t have an anti-war movement in World War 2, was because Hitler invaded the Democrat Holy Land of Russia. The Left was not about to go marching in the streets, when their hero Stalin was in mortal danger.
True. The two major anti-war movements in the US were the America First isolationist movement, which patriotically disbanded after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declarations of war by the US, and the anti-war movement led by the American Communist Party after the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 up until Hitler attacked the USSR in June of 1941. By the time the US entered the war, American Reds were vociferously eager to fight the Nazis so as to save the USSR.
The US Government is now controlled(bought and paid for) by the globalist-corprate cabal. Their goal is to keep the one sided unsustainable international rape trade status quo going as long as possible. This way corporations maximize profits and Americas enemies grow stronger industrially. The deep state is doing its part by watering down the middle class political power by importing as many 3rd worlders as possible, all the while instigating a anti white race war-cultural shift through the leftist MSM. Win-win, for them.
False. The anti war movement in the North during the US Civil War was huge. "Copperheads" were the key group in this ant war coalition. Peace candidate McClellan was very popular and could have beaten Lincoln had Atlanta not fallen in late 1864. The anti war movement climaxed in a huge race-draft riot in NYC. It was a huge event.
The democrat party has cost millions of people their lives and freedom.
Spreading perversion, destroying all other cultures to atomize the people who live in them, and to become a global shopping mall.
My comment was directed to a post that referred only to WW II.
I get it.
Just a whiff of the dense rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking in your post had my head reeling like when when I have been put under for surgery. I dare not take in enough to attempt a reply on the merits.
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