Foreign Policy, Realist Theory

The Wages of Terrorism and Illusion

Our duty is to the United States…We should be friendly to all nations, and in any crisis we should judge each nation by its conduct in that crisis. We should condemn the misconduct of any nation, we should oppose its encroachment upon our rights with equal vigor…according to what it actually does on the given occasion with which we have to deal.

Theodore Roosevelt, America for Americans, Afternoon Speech in St. Louis, MO, May 31, 1916

On October 7, Israelis were the victims of a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas, the titular government of the Gaza Strip. Far from being any kind of justified military response, it was an orgy of deliberate civilian murders, rapes, and even beheadings that violated every moral and legal rule of war. Israel is now engaged in a bloody invasion of Gaza to attempt to eliminate Hamas for good. Whether it will succeed remains to be seen.

This latest war is yet another round of violence in a perennially violent region of the world.  As I mentioned in my previous post “Dominus Flevit”, Israel and Palestine have had the misfortune of living at the crossroads of empires for millennia. Israel was an independent nation for only about 500 years and otherwise lived under occupation by stronger powers for the rest of its life. Opponents of the Gaza invasion call for a “ceasefire now”. Israelis would undoubtedly say “And then what?”  “Negotiation – for what?”  The pat answer is “peace”, but there are many kinds of peace. Israelis know that in the Middle East, the only peace that has lasted is the peace of subjugation and the grave. They are understandably determined to do whatever is necessary to avoid suffering that fate yet again.

However, the Palestinians have learned this lesson too, often at the hands of Israel itself.  Originally, their own fellow Arabs betrayed them by taking over the state that had been granted to them in the 1948 United Nations partition that created Israel. Since Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Day war of 1967, they have lived under Israeli occupation, which became increasingly onerous after Israeli politics shifted right in the 1990s. The prospect of a peaceful transition to a Palestinian state envisioned by the Oslo Accords was steadily and brutally rejected by Israel in the form of forced Jewish settlement of the West Bank. Indeed, when Palestinian protesters chant “From the River to the Sea”, they are simply adopting a similar slogan previously chanted for Israelis by some members of the present government of Binyamin Netanyahu.

Into this cauldron of ethnic and religious hatred blindly strode Uncle Sam, first as part of the Cold War rivalry, and then because of American dependence on Arab and Iranian oil. As we reduced this dependence, we had an opportunity to distance ourselves from the region. Realist foreign policy theory (see this) would dictate that our only real national interest there was to prevent domination of the region by Iran, Russia or another power.  This goal appeared to be realized as Turkey became a player and Israel was on the verge of rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. If the JCPOA agreement with Iran limiting its nuclear program had been preserved, Iran’s ability to become a hegemon in the current mix of powers would have been stymied and a stable balance of power achieved.

Instead, the US has willingly taken on the primary responsibility for achieving the impossible dream – a lasting peace in the region that addresses all the warring parties’ grievances.  When this inevitably failed, we then became responsible in their eyes for their miseries, even more than those who are actually inflicting them.  To preserve diplomatic flexibility, we should have openly criticized and taken concrete steps to pull the Netanyahu government back from its settlement policy fueling the anger behind Hamas, Hezbollah and other radical elements. We also should have withdrawn our troops from Syria and Iraq to again avoid being further tarred with responsibility for the region.

However, the Biden Administration’s first response was to go beyond support and tie America even closer to Israel. In trying now to respond to the carnage in Gaza by calling for a humanitarian pause, it risks appearing feckless and indecisive in a culture that prizes strength. The President’s aid package for Israel seeks a total of $14.3 billion of military assistance. All of this aid should be in the form of loans and not grants, which would serve two purposes. First, Israel is a rich country and should not need free money to finance its defense. Secondly, it concentrates the minds of Israeli leadership on the limits of American support and thus the need to curb it’s settlement policy and West Bank expulsions. If they do so, we can potentially forgive the loans. It would be a small price to pay for reducing tensions in the region. Moreover, any aid plan should be voted on in a separate bill, not rolled into a grab bag of aid for Ukraine and other projects. It is far past time for our role in the Middle East to be fully considered, debated and voted on in the Congress. Finally, we should withdraw our forces from Syria and Iraq to prevent them from becoming free targets and further enflaming resentment against the US.

The Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman once tersely said “War is hell”. As a veteran himself, TR certainly knew this was true and was proud no American servicemen died during his presidency. If we are to avoid it occurring in the Middle East, we will need to reduce our involvement and withdraw our gaze over the horizon rather than court seeing our blood and reputation run in the trenches. This should have been the goal of every President and, hopefully, will become the goal of President Biden before it is too late.  

Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy, General, Nationalist Theory, Politics

The Crisis of the American Spirit – Living with Limits

Early Americans were blessed to grow up without a real sense of limits.  After all, an entire continent beckoned before them, offering challenges that occupied the country for almost three centuries.  Those frontiers, however, were less important than the values frontier eventually enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It is too easy to forget how revolutionary the concepts of democracy and basic human rights were in a world that remained hostile to those ideas well into the nineteenth century.  Pushing this frontier forward was as exciting and dangerous as expanding the land frontier.  It involved personal and national sacrifice to tame and develop these new frontiers. The failure to address the contradiction of slavery forced the nation into a bloody civil war. Nevertheless, these frontiers created an optimistic spirit that animated American life and gave the Americans the feeling they were creating something new through the first century of the nation’s life.

The closing of the American land frontier in the 1890s initiated a serious debate about American goals and meanings.  The country was then in the middle of an Industrial Revolution creating once again a new, apparently limitless economic frontier of productive innovation. It also created a new challenge for American values frontier. The new industries absorbed immigrants fleeing the same economic and political turmoil as the original settlers but offered more stifling careers and a dangerous level of socioeconomic inequality threatening those values. Enter Theodore Roosevelt, who served as the perfect bridge to this new economic frontier. His life spanned the two worlds of Western pioneering and urban industrialization. He also never forgot that he became President because of an anarchist’s bullet and so sparked an era of progressive legislation that gave new hope for fairness for the average American in the new economy.  The America he left behind had renewed its confidence and a sense of limitless vistas as it entered the twentieth century.

American leadership in productivity and innovation led to both increasing international influence and socioeconomic strain that thankfully found a new bridge leader in TR’s cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. Economists still debate how effective the New Deal was in countering the Great Depression, but FDR’s program clearly lifted the spirits of the country.  The advent of World War II not only provided the economic improvement promised by the New Deal, but also ushered in a beguiling new frontier of international influence. The US now had the ability to pursue two of its historic frontiers simultaneously  – the expansion of American values across a global land frontier.  The fight against fascism and then communism justified the sacrifices involved, but also contained a Pandora’s box of temptations to overreach and hubris.

For almost fifty years after World War II, this Goldilocks period of unlimited American power seemed unstoppable. In fact, the economic and international influence frontiers were slowly closing behind us beginning in the 1970s.  The European and Asian economies devastated by the war retooled with more efficient innovative industrial facilities and, in many cases, better educational systems that allowed businesses and workers to move up the value chain and win better wages.   Meanwhile, the American industrial system stagnated and lost capital investment to new high tech and information companies. This seemed to revitalize the economic frontier for a time, only to find out how easy technological change was to duplicate, steal or exploit for sinister use. Similarly, the limits of our international power were illustrated in the Vietnam War, but then apparently renewed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the victory in the 1990 Gulf War. This ushered in the triumphant claims of a New World Order in which the US would lead the world to the new heaven of liberal values and economic bliss.

In truth, this was all being supported by policies that mortgaged the real future to sustain the illusion of an unlimited future.  Our political leadership defied TR’s warning and deceived people into believing that these unlimited vistas could be achieved with no real sacrifice. Tax cuts and government spending covered up the decline in incomes while overseas business investment slowly increased. As a result, the US went from being one of the 5 lowest debt-to-GDP countries in 2000 to one of the top 5 highest in only 23 years. The 9/11 attacks spurred a quixotic Global War on Terror that committed the nation to further military spending and long, poorly thought and fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The desperate futility of these policies was covered up by triumphalist rhetoric and a financialization of the economy that led to increasing inequality.  Instead of TR’s call to visionary sacrifice, the American people were encouraged to act like kids in a candy store who, when asked which piece of candy they would like, respond with “I want it all!”

So now we face the end of the era of unlimited economic and international power without the tools to bridge to the next era.  The drop in economic productivity due to our failure to invest in education and infrastructure makes it more difficult to maintain our standard of living and raise the necessary internal capital to keep up with the rest of the world.  The rise in debt is corroding the dollars’ status as a reserve currency – an important source of international power.  Meanwhile, China and the BRICS of the Global South are ushering in the new G-0 world of diverse powers that can chart their own destiny without us and create new rules of order more compatible with their own interests.

A modern bridge leader would have convinced the American people to invest in themselves through education and industries at home, avoided the weakening adventures abroad, and called us to new visionary, but achievable, frontiers at home and in our foreign policy. Why didn’t this happen?  Part of the reason is found in history, and not just one  – the subject of the next post.

Next – an awareness of different histories            

Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy, Politics

Victory or Stalemate?

Due to family and medical reasons, my posts have been few and far between since the mid-term election last year.  I am deeply grateful and honored by those of you who have nevertheless continued to read, share and subscribe to this website and its versions on Substack, Facebook and Twitter (or X, as Elon Musk now calls it). Your loyalty led to New Nationalism being recently named by the Feedspot e-zine  as one of the top 80 WordPress political blogs in the world. Now that we are approaching a potentially pivotal presidential election, the need for this kind of unifying debate on the real issues American voters will face next year is urgent.  This debate begins, as TR said above, with a look back at the past year and where we are going.

It is tempting to survey the current state of America and feel both secure and, indeed, triumphant. We enjoy record low unemployment and the inflation rate has come down, though is still higher than it was over the past few decades.   Overseas, American assistance has enabled Ukraine to expose Russian military weakness and Chinese ambitions are being challenged by an Asian coalition led by the United States.  So, why are Americans so glum? What could go wrong?

In fact, quite a lot.  Americans care not just about the present, but even more about the future of their children and, as a result, of the nation they will live in. They survey the public landscape and see rising tensions leading to talk of war, lagging wages, continuing economic inequality, and a warming climate. Meanwhile, the response of the American political system is a stalemate at best on these issues and at worst, divisive and irrelevant personal vendettas. Worse, the two major parties in next year’s presidential election appear poised to offer a only a choice between the increasingly feeble and increasingly deranged.  

The mission of this site is to offer a third way that Americans can rally around based on the nationalist philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt. We believe America is exceptional not because of ethnicity, but because of its values of liberty, equality and the pursuit of the American Dream. We also recognize the reality of a world in which other nations are embracing and acting on their own nationalist traditions and ambitions, whether in the form of Russian revanchism, Ukrainian heroism or Chinese threats.  Relying solely on an ideology of globalist liberal hegemony essentially amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament and threatens the survival of our values not just abroad, but here at home as well. 

Over the next year, our goal will be to continue to challenge the conventional wisdom of both parties and develop a progressive nationalist platform that voters can use to challenge the candidates. It will highlight the new, real political debate between globalism and nationalism without condemning those who take the opposite side. All Americans will have to work together if we are to succeed and accomplish our mutual goal of remaining free and prosperous at home and the beacon of liberty abroad. I invite all of you to join in this journey over the next year on any of these platforms:

Main website: www.newnationalism.com

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