Sultan Knish
The debate over the Iraq War that was held in the United Nations, and in
academic and foreign policy circles, could be broken down as the
question whether it was Iraq or the United States that was the rogue
nation. On the one hand, Iraq had defied multiple UN resolutions, but so
had the United States. Iraq had gone rogue, but, by talking about a
unilateral invasion, so had the United States, and, in the moral
calculus of the international community, all that mattered was being a
team player.
The Iran debate is a resumption of the same old argument. Is Israel or
Iran the rogue state? Both have defied the United Nations, which apart
from any of the moral issues, makes them rogue states. If the only value
that matters is cooperation within the international community, then
Iran and Israel are on the same level.
Every now and then we wonder why we can't win wars anymore. The answer
is that we don't fight wars, we fight endless police actions in the name
of stability. Nearly every war we fought in the last hundred years was
about stabilizing a region in an endless game of domino theory. Most of
the wars were morally right, not so much because we fought them for the
right reasons or in the right ways, but because our enemies were genuine
monsters.
Our defense plan and foreign policy for generations has depended on
maintaining an international order that would provide for common defense
and common markets, and that most of all would allow for international
stability. Stability has been the absolute good, instability the
absolute enemy. It's not right or wrong that we care about, but the
regional stability that maintains stable markets and keeps us from
having to send peacekeeping forces to another hellhole.
This is the Pax Americana. This is why we did something about Iraq and
Libya, countries out of step with the Arab League. It is why we will
almost certainly bomb Syria and why we pressure Israel. It is also why
we have done nothing about a genuine genocide in Sudan, whose regime has
the support of the Arab League. It is why we will keep on pushing
Taiwan into China's embrace, while trying to checkmate China's
expansionism. It is why we will keep putting money and troops behind the
United Nations.
United States governments have lost the ability to think of national
rights and interests, apart from the international order. The two have
become one and the same. It is presumed that what is good for the
international community is good for America, even when that clearly is
not the case because it is presumed that the infrastructure of
international law and stability is an overall good.
The United Nations was not simply inept, like the League of Nations; it
was a relic of another age even as its delegates trooped into the modern
glass and steel building on Turtle Bay. It had been built to counter
the wrong threat. The problem no longer lay with rogue industrialized
nations on a conquering spree, but with an international ideology
determined to subjugate civilization with its own worldwide alliance.
American power and wealth made the international order possible, but
aside from the Korean War, it proved to be of very little use against
Communism, which simply infiltrated it and took it over. The
international order was a dream of Western liberals, and their
sympathies inevitably lay with the barbarians at the gate, not with the
civilization within. Their dream of inclusiveness filled the UN with
legions of Third World dictatorships, giving us a choice between allying
with monsters or letting the Soviet Union ally with them.
The same story is repeating itself with Islam, except we didn't spend
the Cold War pretending that the Warsaw Pact were our allies, while our
enemies were a handful of Communist terrorists who needed more moderate
influence from the Mecca of Moscow. We bombed countries to overthrow
Communist dictatorships, we did not bomb them to install "moderate"
Communist dictatorships-- as we keep doing now.
The international order was useless against Communism, it is even more
useless against Islam, which is not a rogue state acting outside the
body of international law, but nations and non-state actors bound
together by a common religion with the aim of subjugating those it
considers inferior. The international community cannot do anything about
Islam, because Islam is a sizable part of the international community.
Nor does the international community want to do something about Islam.
International orders are based on voluntary action and after all the
champagne flutes are lifted to toast peace, no one particularly wants to
go out and enforce it. Not against a big target. The League of Nations
folded out of sheer gutlessness. The United Nations hasn't gone the same
way because it has yet to encounter a major war that would expose its
uselessness. Had the Cold War gone hot, we would be reading about the
United Nations in the history books. When the conflict with Islam truly
explodes, the United Nations will be one of the first casualties.
The international order does not exist to prevent war, but to maintain
the illusion that the current level of stability and order is due to a
new plateau of human enlightenment, rather than because the combination
of factors waiting to turn the simmering grudges and power vacuums of
yesterday's conflict into tomorrow's war have not yet come to term. Then
the tanks cross the Polish border, the planes crash into the towers and
the illusion begins to collapse. The ability is gone and there is a
sharp diving line between those members of the international order who
will fight and those who will cower in a corner.
American elites have always had a strong Transatlantic tendency.
Throughout the 19th Century, the United States was pulled to the West,
but increases in communications and transportation technology, combined
with government centralization, drew it back to the east and across the
ocean into a European alliance to protect the mother country and the
continent and patch together the ragged pieces of a post-colonial
European order. From the 1940's onward, the United States was tasked
with arbitrating the conflicts between the European Left and Right, and
between its moderate and immoderate left.
The Pax Americana realized many of the European plans, tying together
international law with free enterprise, generous international aid and a
dose of moderate policing. It was a post-colonial colonialism based on
ideas that we insisted were universal, even though the only countries
which really held them to be self-evident truths were the colonial
powers and their offspring. But mostly it all depended on American
power. It still does.
The only thing worth knowing about international affairs is that
everyone hates the United States and every other country in the world
that isn't their own. The degree of hatred varies with prominence,
proximity and exposure. Everyone hates their neighbors, even if they
don't have much prominence or exposure. Most hate prominent countries
with a great deal of exposure. Even minor countries that are far away,
but have a great deal of exposure end up being hated after a while.
Mostly this hatred isn't violent. It takes the form of resentments,
stereotypes and grudges funneled into soccer matches and angry wars of
words between politicians over some minor trading dispute or the
position of a few islands on the border. Small reminders that we aren't
an enlightened breed, we aren't noble people, we are often petty and
territorial. We are only human, and the international order that we
built is only human. It has the same petty hatreds and resentments, and
the same cowardice and criminality that we are capable of. The
international order is a mob, and mobs are ugly things. They will tear
apart the weak while fleeing the strong. A mob has less morals in a
group than its individuals do. And this is the international order that
we have staked our future on.
If the United States is going to survive the century, it will have to do
so as a rogue nation. The international order has no future, and dying
for it is madness and suicide. The international order is cooperative
and turning cooperation with a system that disdains individual nations
and rewards internal alliances into our supreme value in international
affairs is suicide.
We have fought two useless destructive wars on the terms of the
international order, with international alliances aimed at stabilizing
regions, and turning rogue states into good members of the international
community. We failed both times, and we lost far more men and women on
these stabilizing exercises than we did in fighting the wars. We
recently fought a third war with nothing to gain for it and plenty to
lose. We are likely to launch a fourth war this year for the same
reason, and continuing doing this road is madness.
The United States can survive without the international order, but it
cannot survive the international order. It cannot survive if it
continues thinking of its survival only in terms of the international
order. That will mean economic suicide, demographic suicide and
strategic suicide.
The international order values integration above all else. Its only
values are cooperative values. The internationalists have replaced, "My
Country Right or Wrong" with "The International Order Right or Wrong".
And the international order has been consistently wrong for sixty years.
The order today represents our enemies who wish to destroy us
demographically and militarily. They want to grind us down as a separate
entity and incorporate us as tools and resources into the order. That
will mean not only the death of our individualism, our economy and our
independence-- it will mean the death of everything when the
international order falls to the Jihad.
To survive, we have to stop thinking of global stability and global
markets, and start thinking of ourselves. We have to go back to discover
what our national interests are and what our moral values are, instead
of confusing our interests and morals with internationalism. To survive
as a nation, we have to become a nation once again.
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