‘Illiberal American Century’

George Rebane

[This is a quick response to an essay by a noted leftwing academic that I received from a longtime correspondent and friend who sometimes tacks a bit to my port side.  I post it because the author presents a good summary of what continues to abet our Left’s ongoing expressions of TDS as their never-ending source of all ills that currently blanket this fair land.]

America is becoming a “rogue superpower” according to Michael Beckley, leftwing academic at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and a professor at Tufts.  His essay ‘Rogue Superpower – Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century’ in the Nov/Dec2020 Foreign Affairs argued that President Trump’s policies focusing on America’s interests was making our country a pariah hegemon in the community of nations.  Events since then have made many important aspects of his arguments moot or just plain wrong, but his arguments are worth reviewing since they still form the core of what Democrats and their radical left purvey daily through our lamestream media.

To begin, Beckley has a somewhat skewed if not jaundiced view of history with blithe observations that after WW2 “hundreds of millions accepted communism”, a proposition that flies in the face of the actual methods communists used to subvert national governments and turn nations into wholesale gulags under the heels of tyrants who slaughtered millions of their own citizens.

Beckley sees Trump’s policy of having NATO countries pay at their agreed levels (2% of GDP) for their and the continent’s security as a mortal sin of international diplomacy.  Beckley’s solution is for us to continue bearing the overwhelming share of NATO’s defense budget, and subsume our national interest in the process.  He does not recognize nor make mention of China’s rapid advances in technology (mostly purloined), military build-up, and territorial expansions.  This blind spot makes him a critic of America’s response to Trump’s defense budgets.

Somehow the entire decades-long successful strategy of containing communist, and now fundamentalist Islamic tyrannies, is completely overlooked.  It’s as if Beckley is ignorant of what George Kennan laid out in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ to President Truman.  There Kennan made clear the global aims of the Left headed by the USSR and supported by numerous Marxist-Leninist regimes that supplanted many formerly western colonial governments after WW2.

Kennan’s counsel was assiduously followed during the Cold War, and specifically supported by Trump in his announced policy of fielding expeditionary units as needed vs maintaining expensive and politically sensitive permanent bases as the correct solution to an affordable and effective white hat global hegemony.  Beckley missed this one completely and recommends global deterrence by setting up US missile bases on foreign soils.  He is apparently ignorant of how allies like Germany responded when we suggested basing intermediate range nuclear missiles in their lands.  At least then we had our troops in those countries to defend such installations.  Beckley is silent on the force levels required to defend the foreign-based missiles in his plan.  And curiously, he argues against Trump’s stated policy of using Taiwan and the Baltics as well-armed buffers against China’s and Russia’s demonstrated expansionist aims.

And some things Beckley just gets wrong for reasons that are out of scope for this short piece.  An example is his assertion that Trump “gutted” DepState and “handed more responsibility to the Pentagon”.  Save for increasing defense spending, Trump did exactly the opposite with his announced policies of diminishing our military’s overseas roles and bases, and in Mike Pompeo, installing one of the most knowledgeable and widely respected SecStates in recent history.  I invite comparison to Biden’s low grade ore Antony Blinken now underperforming in that slot.  (In addition to him I invite your attention to our newly politicized Pentagon with worthies like SecDef Austin and JCS Chair Gen Milley.  What they are doing to our military deserves expanded inquiries by the DOJ and a bipartisan congressional committee.  Cutting to the chase, Biden has populated his cabinet with an historical legion of losers.)

So, along with many other Americans, I am puzzled as to what is rogue about a country acting in its own best interests to maintain world order - e.g. see Kissinger’s World Order (2014)  ALL other countries have demonstrably done the same for centuries, and do so to this day.  Beckley wants the US to continue its sacrifice-and-pay policy while suborning America’s interests to that of its allies and even countries that are openly hostile to us – has he forgotten Golden Rule #2? - ‘them that’s got the gold makes the rules’, or its gentler version, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.’  America First has never meant that the rest of the world can go to hell in a handbasket.

Comments

[Don Bessee]

He thinks like these guys -

https://freebeacon.com/campus/stanford-law-students-publish-guide-for-radical-1ls/

;-)

[The Estonian Fox]

I haven't seen the word "quisling" associated with Joe Biden yet. Maybe there should be a push to start associating the two, even if there is no logical reason to do so. Put the liberals on the defensive. Mr. Quisling was executed (Oct'45) even before the first of the German general staff was (Dec 1 '45). The real Norwegians were out in front of his prosecution.

I hate to quote Wikipedia, but - "Quisling's defence rested on downplaying his unity with Germany and stressing that he had fought for total independence, something that seemed completely contrary to the recollections of many Norwegians. From that point on, wrote biographer Dahl, Quisling had to tread a "fine line between truth and falsehood," and emerged from it "an elusive and often pitiful figure"." QED.

Republicans don't seem to have a really hard pushback for the insanity going on - new mask policy (again); Afghan strategic withdrawal; voter fraud; and has anyone even heard of the Mexican border in the last week?

[Bill Tozer]

'Why the Crown Heights pogrom still matters'

"That means that not only are we still obligated to remember the events of August 1991, but we should also understand that far from being marooned in a dark past, the lies that helped kill Yankel Rosenblum have actually gained traction among intellectuals and popular culture.

We ignore the consequences of legitimizing critical race theory and its advocates at our own peril"

https://www.jewishworldreview.com/0821/tobin082721.php

Didn't AOC grow up in Crown Heights? No wonder she is a member of the racist and anti-Semitic 'Squad'.

[Bill Tozer]

Might go here. Interesting (to moi at least) discussion by five folks. Essay.

‘The Authority Blob’

“The Russia hysteria served a psychological function for those at a loss as to how the country they led had slipped from their grasp. It allowed them to offload the blame for the serial failures through which they rendered themselves beatable by a carnival barker onto the machinations of a foreign power.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/authority-blob-roundtable