I’m beginning to dread the next administration, whoever wins the upcoming election. It’s hard to dispel the notion that we are heading into a period of increasingly bellicose foreign policy, in response to circumstances that are the direct result of our previous decades of bellicose foreign policy. Ugly as these circumstances are, they do not justify the further application of American military power in places like Afghanistan, where we’ve been blowing things (and people) up for 14 years, and Syria, where we appear to be fighting on both sides of the ongoing conflict. And yet virtually every presidential candidate sounds ready to keep the imperial ball rolling, even though the policy is an obvious failure in every sense of the word.
The trouble with approaching these issues with an imperial mindset is that we are blind to our own failures while expressing righteous indignation over the failings of others. Russia’s military action in Syria is a good example. They are perhaps the fifth or sixth power to drop bombs in that unfortunate country. Their strategy, while militaristic and morally bankrupt, is not difficult to understand – they view Islamic radicalism as an extreme threat, and they make the not unrealistic assumption that the fall of Syria’s government would result in a failed state something like Libya or Somalia or Iraq (all of which are beneficiaries of our aforementioned bellicosity). So, like the U.S.’s support of Saudi’s murderous campaign in Yemen, they are applying force in support of Assad’s crumbling regime.
Of course, when we or our allies commit crimes (as we so often do), it’s presented as understandable, even noble. When official enemies commit crimes, it’s reprehensible. That’s vintage imperial statecraft. The offense taken at Russia’s actions fits this template, but also speaks to another dynamic – that of a kind of longing for the simplicity and drama of the Cold War. I’m not entirely referring to the administration here – they encourage this to some extent – but the corporate media, the pundits, the opinion-makers are all fully vested in this enterprise. The more elderly among them, those who lived through the actual Cold War, want to get the band back together again, so to speak. The younger pundits and journalists were brought up to revere the fairy tales told by their elders and want to join in the melodrama of facing off with an “evil empire”.
We are in such a cultural moment, I believe (just look at the current crop of blockbuster movies). At a time in human history when it is absolutely imperative that the nations of the world work together, we cannot afford this poisonous brand of nostalgia.
luv u,
jp
