Sultan Knish
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.
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