Please take the time and re-read Claes G. Ryn’s timeless essay, “Which American?” It perfectly captures the pervasive “spoiled brat” entitlement mentality of our recent presidential regimes and of their insidious media sycophants in dealing with the wider world. “American Exceptionalism” is simply the ideological rationale for a screaming two year old’s moral code of right and wrong: “right is getting away with it; wrong is getting caught.”
Actually our imperial foreign policy Establishment has always operated this way. The idea that became the Council on Foreign Relations was first proposed in Paris in 1919 at the Hotel Majestic. The word becoming flesh, so to speak, in New York City in 1921.
This cloaked entity, from its earliest patrician days of Elihu Root, John W. Davis, the Dulles brothers and Walter Lippmann (to celeb tweet favs George Clooney and Angelina Jolie of today), became the pinnacle of the Establishment in America. The CFR has had one principal, all-consuming dogma in its institutional theology — to combat the scourge of ‘isolationism.’
The increasingly popular idea of a non-interventionist foreign policy of strategic disengagement must be scaring the bejeezus out of these guys. A non-interventionist foreign policy is based on hard realism, a prudential knowledge of the limitations of global power projection, and the pragmatic exercise of measured constitutional restraint. It is, posits Claes Ryn, the polar opposite of the delusional unilateral utopianism of these later-day Jacobins masquerading as neocons. Once again we see the specter of geriatric “humanitarians” (such as John Kerry and John McCain) lusting to yield the guillotine in the name of virtue.
1:10 pm on March 20, 2014
