Good Ol' Henry.

Dillon yesterday (thank you) dropped the link to Henry Kissinger's article in Wall Street Journal where Kissinger waxes geopolitical. For some reason Kissinger has reputation in US as a geopolitical thinker of scale, but then again Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew Brzezinski also have the same reputation, which, in its turn, is an affront to the term "reputation", not to speak of the modern geopolitics as a combination of a broad spectrum of knowledge ranging from history, economics, international relations, geography, military, industry, technological development and some other funny things like theory of probability and other strictly math-physics related issues. We, of course, can all remember, among his achievements, his brilliant idea of "opening China" which resulted in the long run in stripping the US of its industrial might. In general, long term thinking is not a strong point among American geopolitical "thinkers" and Kissinger is an exhibit A of such a trait. Yet, good ol' 96 year old Henry, in his WSJ's piece on Covid-19 arrives to a funny conclusion:

The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally.

After I stopped laughing, I formulated a question: what ARE those Enlightenment values as Kissinger understands them? Last time I checked the main Enlightenment "value" which made combined West great was a rational thought. Everything else follows from it, including such a simulacra as man's freedom (whatever freedom is in each given historic age). The rest is up for never-ending philosophical debate on what those "values" truly are.  And here is the problem--modern West lost its ability to think and act rationally long time ago. In fact, Kissinger should know this very well--he was and still is in the midst of the decision making kitchen in the West which begins to increasingly look and feel like a psychiatric ward populated with people very many of who suffer from acute cases of sociopathic decease, while some are down right open psychopaths incapable of rational thought and even basic reasoning in principle. If Kissinger thinks that figures of Merkel, W, Obama, Mike Pompeo or Trump are representative of "Enlightenment values" then we certainly think about very different "values". 

But the next Kissinger's statement is altogether a wowser:    

Third, safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.  

My question is: did Kissinger actually study the history of "liberalism" and what it did both to the combined West and the world as a whole? This is what I wrote a year ago in my latest book:

Liberalism, in its different contemporary manifestations, such as globalist capitalism, also known as globalization, has a “stellar” record of using threats as a primary tool in international relations. Globalism is aggressive for a number of reasons ranging from purely economic interests to convictions of cultural superiority. These form a ballast for what goes on to become military aggression, easily resorted to because of the often complete inability to understand the practice (what really happens during warfare) and the consequences of the application of military power (what really happens as a result of that trauma and destruction) and accordingly an appreciation of how to achieve a global military balance precluding war.... There is no good life without peace and liberalism is not capable of defining that as a key component of a good life, due to liberalism and its scholarship living in a complete delusion about the predatory intentions driving its own economic and military (often grossly exaggerated) capability.

Even earlier than that, three years ago, I wrote:

Where does this leave us all on the globe in general and in the US in particular? There is no denying that the economic decline both in relative and absolute terms is a fact of life for the United States and the order it came to embody. This order is a globalist liberal vision—America’s crisis is a crisis of liberalism and of global financial capitalism. The utopian modern liberal orthodoxy (a euphemism for free trade) remains based on money and profit as a measure of everything. This doesn’t work anymore.

But forget about me, I wrote it in the times when the going was good and it seemed that everything will be fine. Well, it wasn't fine then already, in fact--it never was. And then, the man of a scale much larger than Kissinger ever was, and a geopolitical thinker orders of magnitude larger than him, stated:

The liberal ideology that has underpinned Western democracy for decades is “obsolete,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times published Friday.

So, Kissinger, using fuzzy platitudes doesn't want liberalism, or whatever passes today under this stupid term, as such to be preserved, he wants, behind this psychobabble of "geopolitical" doctrine-mongering, to preserve the world in which the United States is the only one force which sets up the rules. But this is this main issue with most American "geopolitical thinkers", Kissinger included--they still live in those halcyon days of America's self-proclaimed "exceptionalism" of early 1990s and they don't have required cognitive instruments to recognize the scale of the geopolitical balance's shift which happened since 2007. The world became much more complex and weapons evolved to the point of being unstoppable--a little fact they don't teach in political "science" courses. 

What will evolve in the aftermath of the Covid-19 and America's steady departure, due to both ideological and economic bankruptcy, from its self-anointed status of hegemon is a topic for a separate discussion, which will require non-stop application of the main Enlightenment Value of a rational thought and competent reasoning--the value long ago lost in deep dark recesses of the liberalism's mythology as an answer to humanity's real challenges in the XXI Century. The answer it is not and the emerging new world order may yet answer this challenge by creating a more just and more peaceful world, that task the combined West ultimately failed at.     

Daniel Larison And The Idea He Reviews...

Are wrong, dangerously wrong. In discussing the piece by Samuel Moyn and Stephen Wertheim, Larison arrives to an astonishingly shallow conclusion:

War becomes normalized when it is taken for granted that the U.S. is always acting morally even when it engages in aggression and tramples on international law. Instead of seeing resorting to force as the rare exception, it becomes the default response. Peace becomes almost unthinkable because we have become so accustomed to living without it. We haven’t lived in peacetime in more than 18 years, and there are now generations of Americans that cannot remember a time when the U.S. did not have troops fighting in a number of foreign countries. If Americans no longer aspire to peace, it is partly because we have chosen to define the war of the last two decades in such a way that we can no longer define what an America at peace would look like.

This is one of few minor reasons but it is not the main one no matter how much judicial or moral spin one puts on it. America fights wars because she always fights them there and relatively on cheap. Period. I will, if I may quote myself: 

While speaking to the US military at Fort Bragg after the official conclusion of US operations in Iraq in 2011, in what can only be described as an acute case of myopia and ignorance, President Obama doubled down on a his dubious “finest fighting force in history” claim, assuring all that “we know too well the heavy cost of that war.” Here was the problem: America doesn’t. With the exception of those who fought and died or were wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan and their immediate families, America, as it was with every American foreign war, never knew the real costs. Even as bodies of American GIs started to arrive in coffins into the US from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans continued, as if nothing really happened, to go to work, buy lattes at espresso stands, sell and buy cars, go on vacations, travel around the world and pay their mortgages. Normal life went on as if nothing of significance happened.

That, together with the war being highly profitable for corporations involved, are the main reasons for the United States fighting those wars--they have very low immediate (long terms is a completely different story) costs. I can declare here whatever I want while exercising in futility of calling on International Law and ethics "taking front stage" in considerations when starting a war, but until the body count is in relatively low thousands over protracted period of time, and there is no draft and body-bags arrive to a very few well-guarded locations, things will continue like that. This situation is also a part of America's cancerous affliction of exceptionalism because wars are fought THERE, on TV, not HERE, as it was on 9/11. In real war, such nine-elevens would be multiplied many times and that is how one of very few mechanisms for preventing war looks like. Well, this and a complete depletion of the resources which we observe today--in the long term it finally caught up with America. We don't want a real war in US proper, but ongoing (it will get much worse as time goes by) crisis may provide some additional options for some cleaning of the act. We will see soon, I hope, if that is the case. 

So, while intent of Larison is noble, truth is--he, and authors of the article still reside in an exceptionalist bubble--only pain, only conditioning by suffering are strong enough stimuli to completely change America's clock work wound for war. This, in the end, may require a dramatic change of the elites--present ones are utterly corrupt, incompetent and, in the end, do not know what real war is. In this sense, it is very important that some sort of soul-searching and initial political mobilization is happening. 

Under Trump, who applies “maximum pressure” to all foes foreign and domestic, American militarism is more perilous than ever. It is also more undeniable. That is one reason the current moment is surprisingly hopeful. The call to end “endless war” continues to rise on the flanks of both parties, even as it is flouted by leaders of each. More and more Americans insist that, whatever interests are served by endless war, their own are not. More than twice as many Americans prefer to lower than raise military spending, according to a 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation survey. Veterans support Trump’s pledge to bring Middle East wars to a close: A majority of vets deem the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria not to have been worth fighting. The Afghanistan Papers ought to strengthen the consensus. Americans deserve a president who will act accordingly.   

These are those long-term effects and costs which we may be witnessing now and while I reserve my opinion about Trump, let us hope that, in the end, it will be the voice of a majority of Americans who may put a stop to all this madness, not a catastrophic military adventure which will make all America's wars to date combined look like a stroll in the park. I, certainly, hope so.  

Nicholas Gvosdev Loses The Nerve.

As I wrote not for once, I stopped treating American geopolitical theorists as serious scholars a long time ago. Most of what passes in contemporary US as a "national security studies" is a pseudo-academic sophistry revolving around the United States as one and only "best thing ever" which ever happened or will ever happen to humanity. The only work, as in set of the ideas, which came out of the US and which still has some relation, however limited, to reality is Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, and even this influential work turned out to be filled with misconceptions, pop-history and all other traits of what is commonly known as Political Science. In general, contemporary American geopolitical  "thought" is still defined by Fukuyama's scandalously stupid and delusional, to put it politely,  failure of The End of History. 

Most taxonomies of the American geopolitical thought, such as realists, neo-realists, neocons, liberal interventionists, globalists, you name it, make absolutely no sense since do not realistically describe American doctrine-mongering in any sensible way. There is very little difference between, say John Mearsheimer, who passes in US as "offensive realist" or whatever is hip and cool any given day, and, say Robert Kagan, who is a certifiable war-monger and pseudo-academic. Views of both originate from the same starting point and differ only in minute details. This starting point is American exceptionalism and strong belief that US is economically and militarily omnipotent. Enter Nicholas Gvosdev, whose bio, apart from naming some of his places of employment, including him being "professor" of national security studies in Naval War College, is rather foggy. For years this guy presented himself as a geopolitical "realist" (or whatever) but lately he finally dropped this BS mask and exposed himself for what he is--a classic American exceptionalist who has very little grasp of the subject of his "study" (evidently he has his Ph.D in it)--Russia. 

The issue here is not a complete mental breakdown in Gvosdev's latest piece in, where else, The National Interest, no, the issue is, as it is an overwhelming case with US "academe", a loss of any touch with the reality. I wrote a lot on this issue and not for once I stated that people in US who write on Russia's economy should really abstain from regurgitation of therapeutic self-medicating ignorant mantras on Russia's economy since they will spare their own nerves and avoid parading themselves as amateur fools most of them are. It is not enough that most of American "economists" continue to live in a delusion, such as former Reagan's budget director David Stockman:

 

And as for Russia, pulleese!

Its entire GDP of $1.5 trillion is less than that of the New York metro area, and only 8% of the US economy as a whole. The very idea that it’s a military threat to America is just flat out ludicrous; and that is in no way changed by Putin’s recent hints that Russia has developed a new class of non-ballistic strategic weapons that are not vulnerable to US ABM defenses.

Being an ignorant hack on Russia he certainly doesn't understand how actual economy (I will omit here his total ignorance on any military-technological issue) works and measured but that is expected from the former Wall Street shyster whose understanding of any serious industry is limited by methodology of fraud. For a man with degree in....theology, among many other "useful" backgrounds he boasts, it is expected not to have understanding of basic mathematics. Enter Gvosdev, who teaches, among many other things, Economic Geography. So, unlike ignorant Stockman, in his nervous-breakdown manifesto he comes up with a new wet-dream  "measure" of Russia's economic "weakness". Get this: 

It’s time to part with illusions. For too long, the U.S. national-security community has oscillated in its assessment of the Russian Federation, swinging between viewing Moscow as the country’s number one geopolitical threat to dismissing the challenge of a nation whose per capita GDP equals that of Portugal.

 

Initially when I read this I was startled. I thought Gvosdev followed Stockman's method of comparing NYC "economy", most of it based on Wall Street speculations with snake oil and air, to Russia's, but then I read "per capita". A-ha, I thought, Gvosdev is certainly smarter than so many of his Russia's "expert" colleagues who continue to spread various economic BS about Russia. The reason for this thought was simple--indeed, current Russia's GDP per capita is somewhere in the vicinity of Portugal's which, if Gvosdev didn't know is not the richest but by far not the poorest nation in the European Union with surprisingly robust economy for such a small country. The question thus is this: how Russia's per capita GDP, which only fifteen years ago was in her death throes and had a completely destroyed economy and livelihood of tens of millions of Russians, is bad?  If anything, Russia's per capita GDP was growing steadily and this comparison with Portugal far from reinforcing Gvosdev's thesis of Russia's economy being weak, actually debunks it. 

Nor Gvosdev's statement such as this:

The second illusion is that Russia’s trend lines are negative. This is true—with predictions about Russia’s relative economic size and military power by 2050 showing radical diminishment.   

has anything to do with reality, especially projected against the background of US being now at the precipice of economic and military global irrelevance. But, Gvosdev's piece is just another one in a non-stop hysterical reaction in the US on own and accelerating departure from, largely self-proclaimed, omnipotence. Russia has become an ultimate enemy and it seems that always weak US "academe" awareness of Russia is either completely lost or is reduced to a set of irrational reactions based only on emotions. These are the signs of a mental breakdown and are the heralds of a collapse, no, not Russia's. Desperation always drives increased illusions of own omnipotence and disregard of reality. It is one of the manifestations of one of (which one is for you to decide) the stages of Kubler-Ross Grief Model.  Saker thinks that these are first two stages simultaneously--I agree. These are now denial and anger, with bargaining, depression and acceptance coming at some point of time and, hopefully, without anyone in US deciding to do the unthinkable thus taking human civilization as a factor out of the history of our rather small planet. Pseudo "academic" exercises such as Gvosdev's piece or Stockman's pretentious ignorance are not helping in containing a massive geopolitical turbulence which we all are facing now. I will omit elaborating on political points here completely: I said many times, I will repeat it--American "Russian Studies" field is a sewer.