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Posts Tagged ‘power vacuum’

A Huge Empire Requires a Huge Government | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 29, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/huge-empire-requires-huge-government?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=38d57b7fd6-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-38d57b7fd6-228343965

The chaos arising from U.S. interventionism in Syria provides an excellent opportunity to explore the interventionist mind.

Consider the terminology being employed by interventionists: President Trump’s actions in Syria have left a “power vacuum,” one that Russia and Iran are now filling. The United States will no longer have “influence” in the region. “Allies” will no longer be able to trust the U.S. to come to their assistance. Trump’s actions have threatened “national security.” It is now possible that ISIS will reformulate and threaten to take over lands and even regimes in the Middle East.

This verbiage is classic empire-speak. It is the language of the interventionist and the imperialist.

Amidst all the interventionist chaos in the Middle East, it is important to keep in mind one critically important fact: None of it will mean a violent takeover of the U.S. government or an invasion and conquest of the United States. The federal government will go on. American life will go on. There will be no army of Muslims, terrorists, Syrians, ISISians, Russians, Chinese, drug dealers, or illegal immigrants coming to get us and take over the reins of the IRS.

Why is that an important point? Because it shows that no matter what happens in Syria or the rest of the Middle East, life will continue here in the United States. Even if Russia gets to continue controlling Syria, that’s not going to result in a conquest of the United States. The same holds true if ISIS, say, takes over Iraq. Or if Turkey ends up killing lots of Kurds. Or if Syria ends up protecting the Kurds. Or if Iran continues to be controlled by a theocratic state. Or if the Russians retake control over Ukraine.

It was no different than when North Vietnam ended up winning the Vietnamese civil war. The dominoes did not fall onto the United States and make America Red. It also makes no difference if Egypt continues to be controlled by a brutal military dictatorship. Or that Cuba, North Korea, and China are controlled by communist regimes. Or that Russia is controlled by an authoritarian regime. Or that Myanmar (Burma) is controlled by a totalitarian military regime. America and the federal government will continue standing.

America was founded as a limited government republic, one that did not send its military forces around the world to slay monsters. That’s not to say that bad things didn’t happen around the world. Bad things have always happened around the world. Dictatorships. Famines. Wars. Civil wars. Revolutions. Empires. Torture. Extra-judicial executions. Tyranny. Oppression. The policy of the United States was that it would not go abroad to fix or clear up those types of things.

All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world.

That’s when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became “allies,” “partners,” and “friends.” Others became “opponents,” “rivals,” or “enemies.” Events thousands of miles away became threats to “national security.”

That’s when U.S. forces began invading and occupying other countries, waging wars of aggression against them, intervening in foreign wars, revolutions, and civil wars, initiating coups, destroying democratic regimes, establishing an empire of domestic and foreign military bases, and bombing, shooting, killing, assassinating, spying on, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, injuring, and destroying people in countries all over the world.

The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That’s how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap.

The shift toward empire and interventionism has brought about the destruction of American liberty and privacy here at home. That’s what the assassinations, secret surveillance, torture, and indefinite detentions of American citizens are all about — to supposedly protect us from the dangers produced by U.S. imperialism and interventionism abroad. One might call it waging perpetual war for freedom and peace, both here and abroad.

There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem — the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land.

[Originally published at the Future of Freedom Foundation.]

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Peace Is Passé: Why the Pacifist Movement Died | The National Interest

Posted by M. C. on October 25, 2019

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/peace-pass%C3%A9-why-pacifist-movement-died-90321

by Pratik Chougule

In the context of the current primary cycle, the Democratic candidates’ reactions to the U.S. withdrawal from Syria have revealed their different views on foreign policy.

In a larger historical context, the candidates, collectively, shifted the Overton window on foreign policy. Among the more notable if underappreciated consequences are the further relegation of the American pacifist movement to the fringes of the country’s discourse.

Marc Lacey and Anderson Cooper, who moderated the fourth Democratic debate, posed leading questions to candidates about “power vacuums” and U.S. “betrayals.” These questions were entirely predictable in a national discourse in which a bipartisan, interventionist elite smells blood amid President Donald Trump’s bungled Syria withdrawal.

To an earlier generation of Americans, however, the moderators’ prompts would have come as a surprise. For the question of whether the United States was morally justified in using military force in the first place was open for discussion.

Extreme as pacifism may seem, the absence of a pacifist movement today stands in contrast to the status quo throughout much of the twentieth century. The pacifist movement never came close to representing plurality opinion. Driven, however, by many of the country’s most influential leaders and activists, pacifism did exert enough influence to shape national policy.

Pacifists were well-represented in the broad-based antiwar movement that tried to keep the United States out of World War I. The movement eventually failed, but as public opinion in the 1920s came to regret the intervention, thousands joined pacifist groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Its leader, Jane Addams, was rewarded in 1931 with the Nobel Peace Prize for holding “fast to the ideal of peace even during the difficult hours when other considerations and interests obscured it from her compatriots and drove them into the conflict.”

Even the decisive allied victory in World War II wasn’t enough to eliminate the pacifist movement as a national force. During the 1940s, the conscientious objectors of the war organized as “radical pacifists” and popularized Gandhian strategies of nonviolent resistance in the American pacifist scene. The American Friends Service Committee, founded during World War I on behalf of conscientious objectors seeking alternative service, used its relief work to gain enough prominence to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.

By the mid-1950s, a new peace movement—driven by issues such as nuclear testing and the Korean War—began to coalesce. While the peace movement of the era was comprised predominantly of liberal internationalists who questioned the United States’ Cold War posture, its most cohesive wing consisted of pacifists who rejected war as a matter of principle.

The pacifist movement peaked during the Vietnam War. Pacifist sentiments among the country’s intellectual elite gave the movement outsized influence. A 1969–1970 Carnegie Commission National Survey found that American academics were nearly unanimous in their opposition to the Vietnam War. Both religious and radical pacifists were represented in the ideological spectrum of academic antiwar opinion.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened public confidence not only through conflicts but also with a strategy of military primacy more generally. These sentiments were reflected in a dig Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) made at the expense of former Vice President Joe Biden regarding his support for the Iraq War, as well as South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s ambivalent view on the U.S. mission in Afghanistan even while calling for “American leadership” in the world.

Yet on the larger philosophical question of using military force, not one candidate at the debate came close to endorsing pacifism.

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