Daniel doesn’t like Dr. L’s linking up of anti-capitalism to isolationism. Unfortunately, he passionately exaggerates, to the point of disfigurement, Dr. L’s discussion of a certain anti-capitalism as a “variant” [my bold] of the “postpolitical fantasy” of certain, often midwestern, conservatives. So it is true that
[t]he idea that the central [my bold] complaint among non-interventionists on the right is that U.S. wars are driven by anything so rational as pursuit of new markets is just hilariously wrong,
just as it’s true that nobody’s alleging that. Everyone should agree that the outrage against the Iraq war, right and left, is incomprehensible without any reference to the real manner in which big geopolitical decisions are sometimes made with economic factors in mind. The controversial idea, of course, is that ultimately the United States can’t prevail in its ongoing quest for security unless the whole world is cumulatively integrated into the Western-led economy of capitalist institutionalism. Despite the wild passions that surround this notion, at its root it touches a real empirical question about what ensures the durability of ‘the West’ as we know it. So it might very well be the case, for instance, that maintaining open access to Kuwaiti oil was a basic American interest worthy of forcible protection, defensively speaking. But probably conservatives who don’t really like Gulf War I aren’t too excited about viewing such quasi-public economic interests as the sorts of national interests proper for a spirited defense. I myself have a lot more love for the capitalism of individuals than the capitalism of corporations. My crunchy tendencies are a subject for another post, but there’s no doubt that corporate personhood has brought with it a load of insanity and perversity on a scale and of a type by no means foreordained by the rise of mere capitalism. And US superpowerdom is an unnatural and overexpensive condition from which we need to withdraw with perhaps unparalleled cleverness.
At any rate, though this pomocon is fairly soft on foreign ‘empire’ (in no small part because I’m persuaded the US is simply bad at empire, and even faux-empire is an abberation that will be corrected), he is fairly harsh on aggressive warfare. (Since the demise of the USSR, Iraq was, and still is, the only country against which we had a half-decent case for invasion.) Even defensive warfare can be overrated: would you go to war for Taiwan? Daniel thinks it absurd that we would ever have to fight a defensive war against China. But I find it absurd that a conservative — or a liberal – of any stripe would view as acceptable a world in which China was the hegemonic or leading imperial or lone great power. It may be odd that I hold this line while also being a ‘notorious’ softie on Russia, but them’s the breaks; and what’s at stake in the China debate is a vision of the good life as a life of equality in servitude that really is competetive globally with our vision of the good life as one of equality in freedom. That’s no reason to go to war with China, and the laughs directed at some neocons who have been sounding that tocsin since 1995 are often well-aimed. But it is a reason for the United States to keep in fighting trim.
I want a US that can beat China and take people like Daniel seriously. Is that too much to ask? Or is it our last, best hope? Hopefully, it’s not both.
July 23rd, 2009 | 6:28 pm
I found your point, “And US superpowerdom is an unnatural and overexpensive condition from which we need to withdraw with perhaps unparalleled cleverness” interesting. I admit, I disagree.
I believe there is no doubt we must remain ever vigilant even on a wide, global scale.
Below is an edited version of a blog entry I made prior to the election last year.
” A World Once More Transformed
I have thought for awhile that we are careening to a “New World Disorder.” The financial crisis of recent weeks is rapidly making this come closer. If our economy shrinks, it will hamstring our ability to provide global stability…
These are troubled times, far from the giddy days after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and unipolarity.
Sadly, I think America could have maintained itself. It still can if wise leadership steps forward. However, I do not know if that is forthcoming.”
I then quote from a National Journal article:
“When McCain and Obama eventually take the debate podium, the nation will have to weigh their responses to a world of troubles. Each crisis they will be asked about is linked to others: Falling markets. Rising energy costs. Global warming. Failed states. Nuclear proliferation. Terrorism. Listen carefully as the nominees make the connections, because to one of them will fall the task of avoiding the ultimate “game-changer” — a rapidly accelerating chain reaction reaches critical mass, overwhelming the United States and creating a power vacuum and chaos where the established order once stood.”
Nothing since Obama’s elevation has changed my fundamental view- chaos is the enemy. After the inevitable bloodletting that takes place in that swirling cauldron subsides, authoritarianism rises to take its place. Order must be provided.
With the destructiveness of technology now democratized to a degree never before known, I am not sure that we can be sanguine that order will exist without someone to underwrite it. I also doubt that international institutions or any variants of “Kantian” cosmopolitanism will ever replace the hard edge of brute human nature.
I am a fervent believer that we must have faith in the transcendent in order to have a meaningful existence. However, in order to contemplate this, we must live in a reasonably safe world order. Not one without conflict at all, but one where our existential anxiety can focus on Truth rather than survival. This allows us to raise ourselves from our animality and towards our humanity.
I think we have lived under such an order for awhile, but it has been underwritten by our power. The American blessing is simulataneously somewhat of a curse in that the power that bestows much upon us also requires sacrifices that are not demanded of others. Indeed it is the concept of our universalism as a political creed that gives (or perhaps gave) us the dynamism to excel.
Rome was necessary to incubate the new faith of Christianity and herald its universal reach.
The Catholic Church was necessesary to keep warring factions of semi-barbaric people from destroying each other and, by contrast, bring them together in a new universalism that looked to the next world, but maintained a grip in the here and now as well.
They did this due to their universalist aspirations and for the Church, its revelations. However, Rome fell and, as Spengler asserts in his recent post on Schiller, the Catholic Church lost much of its claim after the Reformation and the Thiry Years’ War.
The resulting nation-state further eroded this universalism to the point where Europe fell into a civil war at the beginning of the 20th Century. Those wars appear to have irrevocably destroyed the pretensions that its effectively parochial constituent members had to universality.
America is unique in this. We still retain a universal desire. It may need to be muted temporarily depending on the exigencies of the moment in a difficult world rife with geopolitical calculation.
However, that universal impulse is still there. To step back is to allow the same processes of disintegration to take further hold here than they already have. This is the doorway through which chaos, existential anxiety, and a ceaseless preoccupation with the temporal emerge onto the world stage.
Order and universality are the twin gifts America has for the world.
My hope is we do not deconstruct ourselves to the point where we unleash a new era of chaos, “superempowered” by the promethean knowledge we now possess.
A new “Dark Ages” will now not be fought by knights in armor, archers, and battering rams, but by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.
I may have gone a bit too far with this response and am open to criticism as I anticipate there probably will be much.
July 23rd, 2009 | 6:34 pm
Hang on, do you think there’s any possibility of a world in which China is the hegemonic power? Really? I find that a pretty implausible scenario. Which is why I may be closer to Larison than you are on this issue. In my view, we ought to resist turning the serious but not existential question of how we should deal with China’s growing economic power and economic power into a contest of visions of the good life. China, as Nixon and Kissinger taught us, really is not the Soviet Union.
July 23rd, 2009 | 8:39 pm
Implausible, perhaps, impossible, no. China has a much better shot than Russia. Or Europe. Or India. Or Australia. Or Brazil! Or…any other non-hegemonic power? I’m open to suggestions. Hey, maybe that possibility isn’t so implausible after all. I have to say the China of today is a lot different — far more powerful and far more alluring — than the China of the 1970s. That said, I have no interest in starting a war with China, and no longing to fight one. But the contest-of-visions approach seems to me important to preventing China from ascending to the sort of position which really would give us a headache. I mean this specifically with an eye to the global South, where China is making rather rapid and extensive economic gains.
July 24th, 2009 | 9:30 am
Economic gains, yes. But there’s more to hegemony than money. What the Chinese lack, so far as I can tell, is an ideological basis for their international role: what a Hegelian would call a universal idea. Without that, it’s hard to turn influence into leadership.
More likely is a world of several great powers: the US, China, probably India, maybe Brazil, and the EU, provided they can hold the euro together. But does that really sound so terrible?
July 24th, 2009 | 9:38 am
Re: the beloved Dr. L, my opinion is that he was/is in the midst of reconsidering his position re: the former GOP Middle East war policy (perhaps I’m wrong). The following response to the loquacious D.W. Sabin may be telling: “I actually don’t disagree that much with some of what you say, purged of the exaggerations. Certainly the talk about ending lots of regimes about 9/11 was somewhere between imprudent and nuts. I don’t think that’s current American policy now. But I also think that we’re stuck with being somewhat imperialistic.”
James, I have to take issue with this: “(Since the demise of the USSR, Iraq was, and still is, the only country against which we had a half-decent case for invasion.)” And, feel free to chalk it up to a certain admitted foreign policy ignorance but I do think we may have had just cause to make certain demands of the House of Saud.
July 24th, 2009 | 9:47 am
As to Mr. Goldman’s point
“More likely is a world of several great powers: the US, China, probably India, maybe Brazil, and the EU, provided they can hold the euro together. But does that really sound so terrible?”
That outcome would not necessarily be bad provided stability could be maintained. But great power concerts are rather unstable. I have always admired the intellectual firepower of Kissinger and his book on the post Napoleonic era (A Word Restored) is tremendously insightful, however, we can’t walk away from the notion that the “Holy Alliance” system broke down.
Bismarck began that breakdown through his diplomacy and when he was sidelined by an impatient Kaiser, the road straight to World War I became rather unobstructed.
Obviously, “human rights” and pro-internationalist sentiment make it unlikely that there would be a repaly of those very specific circumstances, but the lesson remains, concerts are unstable and will collapse every bit as much as “imperial” systems.
Consequently, I would rather see a single hegemonic power that can underwrite the relative stability of the world, at least vis a vis the “great powers.” To this, I see no viable alternative, but the United States depite its flaws and its now growing internal malaise.
July 24th, 2009 | 10:23 am
Well, a world of plural great powers isn’t so terrible, especially if we can get the US, Europe, and India on the same page. But multipolarity does tend toward bipolarity, and even if Ken Waltz is right that bipolarity is the most stable of international systems, it’s not the most enjoyable or pleasant and as far as the US is concerned it’s the one that draws us deepest into unnatural and costly quasi-imperial or imperial relations. I tend to side with Gilpin: polarity is less the issue than hegemony, and our international system tends toward hegemony. My overarching interest, however, is in getting away from our present condition — in which the US has no state, no coalition, and no institution, ever, to trust with a passed buck.
July 25th, 2009 | 12:42 pm
What is of interest to me is that anyone who questions the current technocratic program of “Globalism as designed by a Committee” is automatically labeled an “isolationist” and soon after that, surely an “anti-capitalist”. It is as though political analysis was nothing so much as a sporting event with Team A going against Team B and all of it some kind of entertainment. To be sure, the pursuit of happiness has been subsumed by the pursuit of entertainment.
The former President asserted he don’t do “nuance” and cared not a whit about history because in the future, “we’ll all be dead”…or words to that effect. It would appear that the gun-happy debt-spenders of the current generation, whatever their political philosophy are both Nuance-phobic and Historicides.
Poulos is spot on with his observation about a party able to catch the passed buck. Britain, of course, was able to slouch off it’s lion pedestal and allow the Bald Eagle to take on the task of walking the global beat in search of an arrest. America the Exceptional is violating one of the cardinal aims of any family business….grooming an heir or better yet, an heir or two. The old girl thinks she is immortal.
February 5th, 2010 | 8:13 pm
[...] James says I have exaggerated Peter Lawler’s charge against “isolationists” when I wrote: [t]he idea that the central complaint among non-interventionists on the right is that U.S. wars are driven by anything so rational as pursuit of new markets is just hilariously wrong… [...]
October 14th, 2010 | 10:03 pm
The FACT that happened near Senkaku Islands
(The ship of the Japan Coast Guard stopped a suspicious ship of China,encroached on the Japanese territorial waters on Sept.7th,2010.)
The Japan Coast Guard ship brought alongside to a Chinese ship. The staff of the Japan Coast Guard boarded it. Afterwards, the Chinese ship suddenly left the sea route.
One left staff of the Japan Coast Guard was kicked by Chinese crew. He fell into the water from a Chinese ship.To crush the staff who had fallen into the sea, the Chinese ship changed the course.The staff swam desperately to run away. Chinese crew tried to stab him to death with the harpoon. The Japan Coast Guard ship stopped to rescue the staff and the rescue was started. Chinese ship approached from the rear side. The staff was almost crushed. The staff managed to be carried up from the back to the Japan Coast Guard ship. The Chinese ship collided with the back of the Japanese ship after a few seconds. The hull of a Japanese ship damaged seriously.
All parties concerned who had seen the video said that this was an attempted murder.
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