The End of World Powers
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
60 years ago an uprising in the Ukraine would
have been met with machine guns fired from behind
the armor of Communist ideology. With the fall of
the USSR, Russia didn’t have much of an ideology to
deploy against Ukrainian nationalism. It accused the
protesters of being fascists, an accusation with
some truth to it, but not one that anyone will take
seriously coming from another fascist regime.
Putin tried to replace Communism’s international
agents of influence by cobbling together a crude
network of leftist anti-imperialists,
paleo-libertarians and assorted conspiracy theorists
and exploited it with classic tradecraft. Assange
and Snowden showed how damaging this could be to the
United States, but Assange, Snowden, Greenwald and
all the rest of the gang couldn’t keep the Ukraine
in Putin’s hands.
The anti-government sentiments projected by RT can
bring in useful idiots, Assange and Snowden are
evidence of that, but they lack Communism’s power to
influence millions through the medium of a
comprehensive ideology whose followers were willing
to lie and die for it in unending numbers.
If Russia had set out to suppress an uprising 60
years ago, its talking points would have been on the
lips and printing presses of innumerable writers and
papers that would have immediately constructed
rationalizations and denounced the protesters.
Americans would have been told that we don’t
understand what is going on there, that the
protesters aren’t saints and that angering the USSR
would destabilize the global situation and lead to
war.
To see what that would look like today, just compare
and contrast the coverage of protests in Ukraine and
Venezuela. Putin destroyed whatever goodwill he had
left from the left by coming out against gay rights.
Maduro however is a Socialist in good standing. The
media coverage of Venezuela and the Ukraine reflect
that ideological disparity.
Russia was able to call on the remnants of its old
leftist contacts in Syria, but they made little if
any difference. The number of those people who
supported it in the Ukraine is even smaller. Russia
and China traded Communism for economic
productivity, but in the process they lost the
ability to project their power through the network
of ideological alliances that once bound the left
together.
While Russia and China have moved away from the
left, the United States has moved toward the left,
but Obama is no more able to rally the left
internationally than Putin or Xi Jinping. Obama
badly frayed traditional alliances with American
allies and replaced them with nothing except empty
speeches.
Russia and China have imperial visions built on a
jumble of nationalism, exceptionalism and internal
instability that they have a history of resolving
through brutal repression or external conflict.
Obama is operating on a jumble of leftist paradigms
and existing pragmatic approaches that he inherited
from prior administrations. The two often clash, as
they did in Syria, because they are not compatible.
Obama’s foreign policy is a Jekyll and Hyde
monster with a split personality of Clintonites
trying to steer it away from the rocks and leftist
extremists with more ideology than experience from
the Center for American Progress aiming for the
rocks. Neither side really knows what it’s doing and
instead of picking a side, the man at the top is
often willing to sit back and let them fight it out
while the Washington and New York papers decide
which side is right.
That’s not a good way to run a banana republic
consisting of two shacks and a donkey. It’s a truly
terrible way to run a world power.
Obama and the left don’t want America to be a world
power. The old liberal consensus was that American
power should be used to intervene in world
conflicts. American power might have been abused in
the past, but it would be a means to a progressive
end. The new leftist consensus trashes even that
much rejecting American power as a means to a
progressive end because of its unilateral nature.
American power contains the potential for
unilateralism. The only way to prevent the United
States from acting outside a consensus is to
dismantle its military and its influence. This is
the aim that Obama has pursued over the years. The
former community organizer did not do this in a
consistent fashion, recognizing that an immediate
implosion would be disastrous, but he worked toward
it step by step.
The Post-American country no longer has the
influence to allow Obama to do much of anything
abroad, but he considers it a worthwhile trade,
giving up power so that some nebulous anti-American
consensus will take up that power instead.
When liberals dreamed of handing over American power
to the United Nations or some international
governing body, they were at least pursuing a
logical plan for enforcing their values worldwide.
The dream of that international governing body is
long dead. Not even Samantha Power seriously
believes that the United Nations is capable of doing
what she would like it to.
The abandonment of power is instead the deliberate
creation of a power vacuum. The United Nations with
its American roots is also tainted. The neo-liberal
system that leftists denounce is too embedded in
international organizations to transfer power
upward. Instead they transfer power downward.
Obama’s post-American agenda is the mirror image of
the anti-government ideology that Russian agents of
influence project into the West. Both agree that
Western power is the problem. And both are not
enough to command international influence in any
meaningful way. Ideologies that exist in the
negative space do not inspire people. They only
usher in an age of apathy, cynicism and despair.
The only real difference between Barack Obama and
Julian Assange is that the former was given the
custody of a great power whose power he distrusts
even as he uses it and the latter wasn’t.
The left is motivated by the deconstruction and
destruction of every institution in the West, but it
has nothing to replace them with except an alliance
of likeminded activists. Its rainbow coalitions have
become wrecking crews taking the mallet a new
institution every day and it is this destructiveness
that provides them with their solidarity. The left
keeps planting bombs for the sake of planting more
bombs, conducting a long march through the
institutions in order to destroy them and then doing
the same thing again, building institutions whose
only purpose is the long term destruction of the
West. Its agenda on everything from culture to race
treats the destruction of that which is as a
liberation.
This has been the traditional cycle of the left from
cultural vandalism to a political tyranny that
purges the vandals and slowly hardens into another
China or Russia as its ideological rulers become the
feudal overlords of a formerly Socialist republic.
Instead of the caterpillars becoming butterflies,
the butterflies, flighty and flashy, become
caterpillars, stodgy unremarkable tunnelers, petty
tyrants who look the same.
The destructiveness of the left is what allows it to
make common cause with Putin or Islam, but that
common cause does not extend beyond the immediate
act of institutional destruction.
The Islamic movements are the prime beneficiaries of
the collapse of the Pax Americana just as they were
the prime beneficiaries of the collapse of the Pax
Romana. Nomads, merchants and raiders can survive
and exploit the fall of an empire better than anyone
else, assembling shadow armies, moving vast sums of
money around through invisible networks built on
trust and invading other territories on short notice
as no standing army could do.
The great powers have thought of Islamic raiders, in
their various incarnations as corsairs, terrorists,
bandits and madmen, as weapons to be used against
each other. That is still the way that they think
today, repressing domestic Muslims and arming
foreign Muslims, encouraging Islamic terrorism
against their rivals and striking back when it’s
directed at them.
Like Russia and the China, the United States is
eager to include Muslims in its consensus, without
recognizing that they have entirely different
agendas of their own. And it’s not as if our
consensus is especially compelling now that we have
jettisoned everything except the international
projection of the left’s politics of resentment.
The Russians offer Muslims a place in Eurasia and
China offers them a role in its People’s Republic;
neither offer is particularly compelling. Russia and
China will always exist for the purposes of the
majority group and its elites and neither
particularly bothers to disguise it. That is why few
of Russia’s neighbors, Christian or Muslim, are
especially enamored of the idea of recreating the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the Eurasian
Union, but without the Communism.
But paradoxically a post-American order has even
less to offer them. Russia and China stand for
something even if it is only their own power. The
Post-American order stands for nothing except its
own dismantling. That is why Obama sets red lines
that he won’t enforce and issues threats that he
doesn’t mean.
The only thing less appealing than selfishness is
the complete absence of self. The only thing less
appealing than empire is an anti-imperialism that so
thoroughly negates its own power that it has no
influence and no reason to exist.
Post-American America exists to destroy itself.
Until that changes, it has nothing to offer the
world except membership in a suicide pact.