The Uniquely American Odyssey into Liberal Internationalism
"History is ultimately decided by ideas and ideas can change almost instantly" - Hans-Hermann Hoppe (German-American Economist)
As the prescient warrior-philosopher of 21st century discourse, Ali G, boldly declared to his audience: “HEAR ME NOW”, I now follow in his footsteps to deliver an urgent message to you that should be taken into immediate consideration: liberal internationalism should be tossed into the ash heap of history, just like Communism and Nation Socialism.
There I said it.
But before you reflexively clutch your pearls as the words “isolationist” or better yet “anti-liberal-fascist/America First TrUmPer” trickle out of your mouth, hear me out.
America as a Humanitarian Expeditionary Force
Before we embark upon this Great Crusade towards enlightenment let me start by saying that the term “liberal internationalism” is not, contrary to popular belief, a figment of the collective imagination in the alt-right ecosphere. Nor was it conjured up in a BSL-4 lab in Wuhan or even worse, the prime time slot of the single greatest purveyor of propaganda since Pravda: Tucker Carlson. Levity aside, the actual definition is ambiguous at best, depending on your sources, thus to paraphrase would be a thought crime under the current regime so please see the most accurate definition below:
Liberal internationalism is a foreign policy doctrine that argues two main points: first, that international organizations should achieve multilateral agreements between states that uphold rules-based norms and promote liberal democracy, and, second, that liberal international organizations can intervene in other states in order to pursue liberal objectives.
Ok, now kindly read the italicized sentence at least three more times and you’ll have a solid working base going forward.
To the keen observer, you may be pondering to yourself: “Huh, this concept of liberal internationalism sure does bear many of the characteristics of imperialism, albeit in a different form”. If this is the case then you sir/madam/they/them would be 100% correct. If you replace the typical justification of imperial endeavors with the new justification of to protect human rights or democracy then boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
Unsurprisingly politicians on both sides of the aisle have willingly forgotten that the United States is a revolutionary power, not an imperial power. Perhaps it’s time to remind them.
Special thanks to our partisan political hacks here in the U.S., the definition of democracy has unfortunately been diluted down to the point where the term is nearly devoid of all meaning. Cue the cookie cutter speeches from our Democrat officials or media pundits who hysterically regurgitate the line “________ is a danger to democracy” then proceed to fill in the blank with whatever irrelevant policy prescription they are trying to ram through that day. For the uninitiated, let’s dip our toes in the water with the basics of the Aristotelian idea of the three primary forms of government: Democracy (rule of the many), Oligarchy (rule of the few), and Monarchy (rule of one). Similar to the United States, Ukraine is an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. Wars have been fought to overthrow hostile regimes to Western interests, amass land, or usurp natural resources but the new fangled reason for intervention on behalf human rights or protecting democracy is an entirely fresh phenomenon of the past 100 years.
Intervention is the name of the game when it comes to foreign policy. The term has it’s roots in the 18th century but only truly morphed into a coherent political-philosophical doctrine in the early 1900’s by none other than President Woodrow Wilson. Whenever Wilson wasn’t busy screening the abhorrently racist film, The Birth of a Nation, for his political cabinet and guests in the White House home theatre (true story btw) he was hard at work fine tuning his political vision of how liberal internationalism can flourish throughout the world, with the exception of the United States, vis-à-vis intervention.
Wilson absorbed this doctrine while putting his own personal spice into the cauldron and the Frankenstein-like creature that slithered out became know as Wilsonianism. In the philosophical tree think the root (liberal internationalism) and branch (Wilsoniansim).
Did I lose you? Yes? Well, Google is your friend.
Destruction of the Westphalian System circa 1917:
Entire books can be written on this subject so I intend to dive deeper into the ethos and downstream impacts of Woodrow Wilson tenure in subsequent posts.
Perhaps no singular event in Western history was more consequential in calcifying the doctrine of liberal internationalism coupled with the destruction of the nation-state than World War I. Hot take, I know, but stay with me. America’s official foray into liberal internationalism began in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson saw Europe’s war as a philosophical battle between monarchy (cringe) and liberal democracy (based). Wilson, acting as the self appointed moral arbiter of the West, seized the opportunity to showcase to the world the wonders of liberal internationalism by allowing the U.S. to dismantle the monarchies of Europe vis-à-vis mechanized carnage the likes the world have never seen. The irony of entering a war for the sole purpose of “making the world safe for democracy” is lost on me.
Initially viewed as border war over disputed territory, Wilson intervened out a misplaced sense of protecting, or rather introducing Europe to his vision of what the political world order should look like. The post war world in Europe saw monarchies, which have governed for centuries before the war, saw their governments collapse overnight and gradually morphed into liberal democracies. Keep in mind that before WW1 only three democracies existed in Europe: Portugal, France, and Portugal. As a result of the Austro-Hungarian empires collapse after the war, Wilson got his wish and wedded the rest of Europe in unholy matrimony to the idea of liberal internationalism.
Out of the ashes of monarchy and the bloodied barbed wire trenches of the Somme rose something peculiar. Wilson took a wrecking ball to the Westphalian System by creating the international peace keeping alliance, the League of Nations (precursor to the equally useless United Nations). Considering how fractured the continent was, Wilson sought to unify the infantile democracies under the cozy American security blanket in which all of the member countries could have a big group hug.
Of course, one the key tenets of this mistaken philosophy is the reflexive reliance on foreign intervention which serves as the imperial enforcement mechanism used to bludgeon regimes, which do not toe the line with our fluid democratic values, into pure submission and subservience. Once the unfriendly country is now friendly with the American Empire, that vassal country becomes an indentured servant to its new master. State autonomy or sovereignty is obliterated and a vassal state is born. This has became standard operating procedure over the course of the next 100 years and up until today.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Iatrogenic Foreign Policy in the 21st Century
With Wilsonian foreign policy at the forefront of their minds, our intellectual betters in Congress have recently passed a bi-partisan $40 billion aid package in order to bolster the robust democracy of the single most corrupt country in the Europe, Ukraine. If that number doesn't furrow your brow in the name of protecting democracy, just imagine the opportunity cost on where that money could’ve been spent domestically.
Opening the spigots of liquidity during an already white hot inflationary period seems counterproductive to say the least. Mind you this doesn’t take into account how the US taxpayer also subsidizes the entirety of the international communities security blanket aka NATO. Suffice to say, the US needs allies not protectorates but I digress.
Whenever our vassal states across the Atlantic begin to lecture us about substituting practical foreign policy for moral absolutism, our elected leaders need to simply reply with the graph below but alas, we’ve been propping up our ear protectorates since circa 1945 so we will happily oblige as per tradition.
Fast forward a hundred years and many wars lost due to the neoliberal fever dream of armed intervention out of a misplaced sense of duty to our fellow man. For once, the American intelligence community was correct in their assumptions that Putin would invade Ukraine and he did. As soon as Russia’s Z-painted tanks crossed the Rubicon with the largest European land invasion since Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the managerial elite, pundits, woke liberals, and permanent political class reflexively unfurled Ukrainian flags across every social media website known to man to express their undying support for a country they couldn’t even find on on a map of Europe but hey, it’s the thought that counts right? So with the establishments newfound love of national sovereignty and borders (just not our own) came a whirlwind of support for military intervention to secure Ukrainian’s sovereignty from Vladimir Putin’s goose-stepping, Orc-like untermensch. The irony is palpable.
The choir for the absolute destruction of any and all things Russian began to reverberate across the globe from the halls of power to the prestigious concert halls of the coastal elites, which saw the attempted erasure of Tchaichovsky from public symphonies.
Simply put: escalation is not the correct policy prescription. We are pushing the Ukrainians into a meat grinder. But in order to “protect democracy” the only clear minded solution is to provide the Ukrainians advanced military technology since the the primary way to extinguish a flame is to obviously dumped gasoline on top of it. History has not been kind to this logic. I implore you dear reader to please let me know a singular event where the U.S. has intervened and aided an ally without serious casualties or economic carnage to every country involved. We cannot supplant practical foreign policy with moral absolutism.
Predictably, this strategy has hit an iceberg of cold reality. Realistically it would take decades for Ukraine to dislodge the Russian Federation from it’s occupied territories in the East without the assistance of NATO/American boots on the ground. Despite what galvanizing western propaganda (ie. Ghost of Kyiv) peddled by the BBC or MSNBC, Ukraine has neither the resources nor willpower to successfully fend off Russia. How quickly have we forgotten Russian’s unique capacity for unfathomable pain or utter disregard for human life. Read any book about the Eastern Front during WW2 for a fresh reminder.
Now the most viable option for Ukraine will to be concede territory to Russia, a notion that Henry Kissinger conceded at Davos this year that this the right thing to do and now even President Biden has said the quiet part out loud as well. Hopefully this concession happens this autumn yielding a lasting peace agreement otherwise this opens up the high possibility that Putin will permanently shut off Nordstream 1 in retaliation for the onslaught of western sanctions.
At this point, my ESP is warning me that you, dear reader, may be on the cusp of an apoplectic meltdown since much of what I’m writing about is diametrically opposed to your conventional beliefs but please do not hyperventilate. Instead, deeply breathe:
IN.
OUT.
IN.
Aaaaand…..
Out once more for safe measure. Feel better? No? Well in that case allow me to ease your troubled mind by going on the record to say that that Putin will need to one day answer for his crimes against humanity as he stands before his final judgement with God…. however a military tribunal at The Hague will happily suffice once this debacle is over.
The establishments foreign policy of foreplay by means of sticking our imperial tip into other countries has proved wrong time and time again. Biden is no exception. It takes a few minutes of pesky research and access to a computer to find historical examples like how the Kennedy Administration through our early commitments of cash and military advisors that only drag us further into the political quagmire to the tune $1 trillion and the deaths in the hundreds of thousands. But with death comes profit and with profit comes the Military Industrial Complex vultures circling the Washington cocktail party circuit with their private armies of lobbyists ready to wine and dine the closest Neo-con politician for a chance to have Raytheon or Northrop Grumman, who are too busy splashing champaign on each other, to notice the tactical shift from droning brown people abroad in the Middle East to bombing the Russians. The spread of our universal values abroad is easier to consciously digest when you’re not on the receiving end of a tomahawk cruise missile.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend
After 100 years of failed Wilsonian liberal imperialism, our intellectual betters in Congress and managerial elite still continue to drink this nonsensical kool aid while cheer leading Ukraine down the primrose path of destruction. Maybe in some strange parallel universe intervention would be viewed for what is actually is: destruction. However in our reality, escalation is now oddly synonymous with diplomacy.
Realistically it would take decades for Ukraine to successfully dislodge the Russian Federation from its occupied territories in the East without the assistance of NATO/American boots on the ground. Now the most viable option for Ukraine will to be concede territory to Russia, a notion that Henry Kissinger conceded at Davos that this is the right thing to do and now even President Biden has said the quiet part out loud as well. But hey, in the mean time, our allies (who in reality are our protectorates and vassal states) are frothing at the mouth for Biden to whip out his Black Amex card to bankroll yet another needless war with zero defined goals and a forgone conclusion.
As the crumbling Biden Administration tries in vain to sell the fraudulent notion to the American people that Putin’s War is the sole cause of our white-hot inflation woes, American’s need to look inward for a moment of critical thinking. If we take Biden’s lie as Gospel Truth (you shouldn’t), wouldn’t it logically be in the best interests of his Administration to help broker peace in the region by any means necessary and bring the war to a swift end rather than dumping billions of dollars of sophisitcated armaments to a Ukrainian civilian population who have never picked up a rifle in their life? And do not think for an iota of a second that these arms would ever find themselves into the wrong hands (i.e. organized crime) then smuggled and distributed throughout the EU black market since that would definitely NOT happen (spoiler alert: it happened).
Sadly the public has been repeatedly assured by the current American regime and nauseously laundered through their complicit media sycophants, is that the adults are back in the room and it’s time to reverse course on the selfish idea of what any good tax paying citizen should ask themselves, “is this in the best interests of our country?”.
While Ukraine has a right to defend itself against Russia it must do so on an equitable cost basis so that our allies across the Atlantic can share our financial burden. It's only a matter of time before the next check arrives as Zelensky laid the groundwork for a potential $750 Billion (yes, with a “B”) recovery plan that he intends to hit the United States and Western countries with as part of yet another nation building experiment.
Let me ask you: How’s your appetite for the 21st century redux of the Marshall Plan? Surely the nearly $8 trillion and nearly 1 million lives lost was worth the cost of destroying and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan? The liberal internationalist superstar/goddess of war, Madeline Albright wasn’t particularly bothered with human cost of our intervention in the Middle East so why would you be now?
Curtain Call
Carl Schmitt once said that the most dangerous philosophy was the most popular philosophy at that time. Any minor denunciation against the holy sacrament of liberal internationalism is instantly met with a barrage of slanderous nonsense leveled at the offender, typically with frivolous name-calling exercises that rhyme with Yahtzee. It has also been said that history is decided by ideas and those ideas can change almost instantly. In the marketplace of ideas, liberal internationalism has triumphed for now but I can only hope that in due time we as nation can have an honest dialogue about the shortcomings of our current philosophical doctrine.
To my friends in the GOP who were grown in a petri dish in the dank basement of the Heritage Foundation or to my Liberal friends whose political philosophies can be summarized by a Coexist bumper sticker hear this: The United States has a fiduciary duty to its citizens, not to the single most corrupt nation in Europe. Arming the ambiguously socially acceptable "good guys" in any war such as the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, Vietminh in Vietnam, or Syrian rebels predictably resulted in unfathomable human carnage followed by years of political unrest due to a perpetual cycle of regime change so what exactly has changed this time around? Well, the definition of insanity comes to mind.
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Very interesting. Alas, I am in the dying grip of my most recent migraine so need to re-read this properly (and after coffee!) before leaving a proper comment. Interesting re Wilson and Birth of a Nation (another film I shoehorned into 100 Greatest War Films to get some historical perspective rather than a mere celebrity showcase).