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USANews版 - 为什么帝国永不眠:必不可少的国家愚蠢 (转载)
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【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: beijingren (to thine own self be true), 信区: Military
标 题: 为什么帝国永不眠:必不可少的国家愚蠢
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue May 15 23:13:23 2018, 美东)
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/why-the-empire-never-sleeps-the-indispensable-nation-folly-part-1/
Why The Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly
Profile picture for user Tyler Durden
by Tyler Durden
Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true
fiscal cost is upwards of $1.o trillion per year (counting $200 billion for
veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it.
That’s because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is in the driver’s seat of
American politics. It plainly will not permit the $3 trillion per year
retirement and health care entitlement-driven Welfare State to be curtailed.
The Trumpite/GOP has already sealed that deal by refusing to reform Social
Security and Medicare and by proving utterly incapable of laying a glove
politically on Obamacare/Medicaid. At the same time, boomers keep voting for
the GOP’s anti-tax allergy, thereby refusing to tax themselves to close
Washington’s yawning deficits.
More importantly, the generation which marched on the Pentagon in 1968
against the insanity and barbarism of LBJ’s Vietnam War have long since
abandoned the cause of peace. So doing, boomers have acquiesced in the final
ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like topsy once the US became
the world’s sole superpower after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages
of history in 1991.
Yet there is a reason why the end of the 77-year world war which incepted
with the “guns of August” in 1914 did not enable the world to resume the
status quo ante of relative peace and prosperous global capitalism.
To wit, the hoary ideology of American exceptionalism and the Indispensable
Nation was also, ironically, liberated from the shackles of cold war realism
when the iron curtain came tumbling down.
Consequently, it burst into a quest for unadulterated global hegemony. In
short order (under Bush the Elder and the Clintons) Washington morphed into
the Imperial City, and became a beehive not only of militarism, but of an
endless complex of think-tanks, NGO’s, advisories and consultancies, “law
firms”, lobbies and racketeers.
The unspeakable prosperity of Washington flows from that Imperial beehive.
And it is the Indispensable Nation meme that provides the political adhesive
that binds the Imperial City to the work of Empire and to provisioning the
massive fiscal appetites of the Warfare State.
Needless to say, Empire is a terrible thing because it is the health of the
state and the profound enemy of capitalist prosperity and constitutional
liberty.
It thrives and metastasizes by abandoning the republican verities of non-
intervention abroad and peaceful commerce with all the nations of the world
in favor of the self-appointed role of global policeman. Rather than
homeland defense, the policy of Empire is that of international busybody,
military hegemon and brutal enforcer of Washington’s writs, sanctions, red
lines and outlawed regimes.
There is nothing more emblematic of that betrayal of republican non-
interventionism than the sundry hot spots which dog the Empire today. These
include the Ukraine/Crimea confrontation with Russia, the regime change
fiasco in Syria, the US sponsored genocide in Yemen, the failed, bloody 17-
year occupation of Afghanistan, the meddling of the US Seventh Fleet in the
South China Sea, and, most especially, the swiftly intensifying contretemps
in Iran.
As to the latter, there is absolutely no reason for the Empire’s attack on
Iran. The proverbial Martian, in fact, would be sorely perplexed about why
Washington is marching toward war with its puritanical and authoritarian but
relatively powerless religious rulers.
After all, it hasn’t violated the nuke deal (JPAOC) by the lights of any
credible authority—-or by even less than credible ones like the CIA. Nor by
the same consensus of authorities has it even had a research program for
nuclear weaponization since 2003.
Likewise, its modest GDP of $43o billion is equal to just eight days of US
output, thereby hardly constituting an industrial platform from which its
theocratic rulers could plausibly menace America’s homeland.
Nor could its tiny $14 billion defense budget—which amounts to just
sevendays worth of DOD outlays—inflict any military harm on American
citizens.
In fact, Iran has no blue water navy that could effectively operate outside
of the Persian Gulf; its longest range warplanes can barely get to Rome
without refueling; and its array of mainly defensive medium and intermediate
range missiles cannot strike most of NATO, to say nothing of the North
American continent.
The answer to the Martian’s question, of course, is that Iran is no threat
whatsoever to the safety and security of the US homeland, but it has run
badly afoul of the dictates of the American Empire.
That is to say, it has presumed to have an independent foreign policy
involving Washington proscribed alliances with the sovereign state of Syria,
the leading political party of Lebanon (Hezbollah), the ruling authorities
(and US puppets) in Baghdad and the reining power in the Yemen capital of
Sana’a (the Houthis).
These are all deemed by Washington to be sources of unsanctioned “regional
instability” and Iran’s alliances with them have been capriciously labeled
as acts of state sponsored terrorism.
The same goes for Washington’s demarche against Iran’s modest array of
short, medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles. These weapons are
palpably instruments of self-defense, but Imperial Washington insists their
purpose is aggression—–unlike the case of practically every other nation
which offers its custom to American arms merchants.
For example, Iran’s arch-rival across the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, has
more advanced NATO supplied ballistic missiles with even greater range (2,
600 km range). So does Israel, Pakistan, India and a half-dozen other
nations, which are either Washington allies or have been given a hall-pass
in order to bolster US arms exports.
In short, Washington’s escalating war on Iran is an exercise in global
hegemony, not territorial self-defense. What the proverbial Martian is
really asking, therefore, is how did the Empire come about?
How did the historic notion of national defense morph into Washington’s
arrogant claim that it constitutes the “Indispensable Nation” which stands
as mankind’s bulwark against global disorder and chaos among nations?
As indicated above, Iran is just the case de jure of the Indispensable
Nation in action. Yet the other hot spots of the moment are no less
exercises in hegemonic aggression.
Thus, Washington started the Ukrainian confrontation by sponsoring, funding
and recognizing the February 2014 coup that overthrew a Russia-friendly
government with one that is militantly nationalistic and bitterly
antagonistic to Russia. It re-opened deep wounds that date back to Stalin’s
brutal rein in Ukraine and Ukrainian collusion with Hitler’s Wehrmacht on
its way to Stalingrad and back.
So doing, it triggered the fear-driven outbreak of Russian-speaking
separatism in the Donbas and the 96% referendum in Crimea to formally re-
affiliate with mother Russia (which originally purchased it from the
Ottomans in 1783).
Even a passing familiarity with Russian history and geography would remind
that Ukraine and Crimea are Moscow’s business, not Washington’s.
Even more hideous is the rhetorical provocations and Seventh Fleet maneuvers
ordered by Washington with respect to China’s comical sand castle building
in the South China Sea. Whatever they are doing on these man-made islands,
it is not threatening to the security of America—nor is there any plausible
reason to believe that it is a threat to global commerce, either.
After all, it is the mercantilist economies of China and East Asian that
would collapse almost instantly if it attempted to interrupt world trade.
That is, any theoretical red military shoe would first fall on the Red
Suzerains of Beijing themselves because it is the hard currency earnings
from its export machine that keep the Red Ponzi from collapsing and the
Chinese people enthrall to their communist overlords.
Needless to say, none of these kinds of interventions were even imaginable
in the sleepy town of Washington DC just 100-years ago. But it’s baleful
evolution from the capital of an economically focused Republic to seat of
power in a globally mobilized Empire ultimately sprung from the
Indispensable Nation heresy.
So we intend to delve into the historic roots of that conceit in a multi-
part series because it not only guarantees unending calamities abroad, but
also an eventual fiscal and financial horror show at home.
Indeed, so long as Imperial Washington is stretched about the planet in its
sundry self-appointed missions of stabilization, “peacekeeping”,
punishment, attack and occupation, there is zero chance that America’s
collapsing fiscal accounts can be salvaged.
The Indispensable Nation folly thus hangs over the rotten edifice of Bubble
Finance like, in fact, a modern day Sword of Damocles.
But Empire is a corrosive disease of governance. It eventually metastasizes
into imperial arrogance, over-reach and high-handedness. Ultimately, like at
present, it falls prey to the rule of bellicose war-mongers and thugs.
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are living proof of that.
For the moment, however, make no mistake: Trump’s withdrawing from the nuke
deal and pending re-imposition of maximum sanctions is an act of war by any
other name.
Yes, the feinschmeckers of the foreign policy establishment consider
economic sanctions to be some kind of benign instrument of enlightened
diplomacy—the carrot that preempts resort to the stick. But that is just
sanctimonious prattle.
When you hound the deep water ports of the planet attempting to block Iran’
s oil sales, which are its principal and vital source of foreign exchange,
or cut-off access by its central bank to the global money clearance system
known as SWIFT or pressure friend and foe alike to stop all investment and
trade—that’s an act of aggression every bit as menacing and damaging as a
cruise missile attack.
Or at least it was once understood that way. Even as recently as 1960 the
great Dwight Eisenhower (very) reluctantly agreed to lie about Gary Power’s
U-2 plane when the Soviets shot it down and captured its CIA pilot alive.
But Ike did so because he was old-fashioned enough to believe that even
penetrating the air space of a foe without permission was an act of war—-
and that he did not intend, the CIA’s surveillance program notwithstanding.
Today, by contrast, Washington invades the economics space of foreign
nations with alacrity. In fact, the US Treasury Department’s Office of
Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) proudly lists 30 different sanctions programs
including ones on Belarus, Burundi, Cuba, Congo, Libya, Somalia, Sudan,
Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe—along with the more visible programs against
the alleged malefactors of Iran, Russia and North Korea.
These, too, are the footprints of Empire, not measures of a homeland defense
befitting a peace-seeking Republic. That would cost around $250 billion per
year, and would rely on an already built and paid for triad nuclear
capacity for deterrence, and a modest Navy and Air Force for protection of
the nation’s shorelines and air space.
The $500 billion excess in today’s Trump-bloated national security budget
of $750 billion is the cost of Empire; it’s the crushing fiscal burden that
flows from the Indispensable Nation folly and its calamitously wrong
assumption that the planet would descend into chaos without the good offices
of the American Empire.
Needless to say, we do not believe that the planet is chaos-prone absent
Washington’s ministrations. After all, the historic record from Vietnam
through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran suggests exactly the
opposite.
More pointedly, the Indispensable Nation meme originates not in the
universal condition of mankind and the nation-states into which it has been
partioned, but in the one-time, flukish and historically aberrant
circumstances of the 20th century that gave raise to giant totalitarian
states in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and the resulting mass
murder and oppressions which resulted there from.
But as we will outline in greater detail in Part 2, Stalinist Russia and
Nazi Germany were not coded into the DNA of humanity—a horror always
waiting to happen.
To the contrary, they were effectively born and bred in April 1917 when the
US entered what was then called the Great War. And it did so for absolutely
no reason of homeland security or any principle consistent with the
legitimate foreign policy of the American Republic.
So you can put the blame for this monumental error squarely on Thomas
Woodrow Wilson——-a megalomaniacal madman who was the very worst President
in American history; and who took America into war for the worst possible
reason—a vainglorious desire to have a big seat at the post-war peace table
in order to remake the world as God had inspired him to redeem it.
The truth, however, was that the European war posed not an iota of threat to
the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or
Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of
the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to
make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.
Indeed, the shattered world after the bloodiest war in human history was a
world about which Wilson was blatantly ignorant. And remaking it was a task
for which he was temperamentally unsuited—even as his infamous 14 points
were a chimera so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental
play dough.
Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it: Intervention
positioned Wilson to play “The noblest part that has ever come to the son
of man”.
America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its
century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in
the quarrels of the Old World. From that historically erroneous turn—there
arose at length the Indispensable Nation Folly ,which we shall catalogue in
the balance of this series.
For now, suffice it to say that there was absolutely nothing noble that came
of Wilson’s intervention.
It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and
avaricious imperialists—-when the war would have otherwise ended in a
bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties
on both sides.
By so altering the course of history, Wilson’s war bankrupted Europe and
midwifed 20th century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.
These developments, in turn, eventually led to the Great Depression, the
Welfare State and Keynesian economics, World War II, the holocaust, the Cold
War, the permanent Warfare State and its military-industrial complex.
They also spawned Nixon’s 1971 destruction of sound money, Reagan’s
failure to tame Big Government and Greenspan’s destructive cult of monetary
central planning.
So, too, flowed the Bush’s wars of intervention and occupation, their fatal
blow to the failed states in the lands of Islam foolishly created by the
imperialist map-makers at Versailles and the resulting endless waves of
blowback and terrorism now afflicting the world.
And not the least of the ills begotten in Wilson’s war is the modern rogue
regime of central bank money printing, and the Bernanke-Yellen-Powell plague
of bubble economics which never stops showering the 1% with the monumental
windfalls from central bank enabled speculation.
As to how all this transpired, stay tuned!
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话题: washington话题: empire话题: war话题: iran