The Indispensable Nation meme originates not in the universal condition of mankind and the nation-states into which it has been partitioned. Instead, it stems from an erroneous take on the one-time, flukish and historically aberrant circumstances of the 20th century that gave rise to giant totalitarian states in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and the resulting mass murder and oppressions which resulted there from.
What we mean is that Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were not coded into the DNA of humanity; they were not an incipient horror always waiting to happen the moment more righteous nations let down their guard.
To the contrary, they were effectively born and bred in April 1917 when the US entered what was then called the Great War. And though it did so for absolutely no reason of homeland security or any principle consistent with the legitimate foreign policy of the American Republic, its entry tilted the outcome to the social chaos and Carthaginian peace from which Stalin and Hitler sprung.
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So you can put the blame for the monumental evil of 20th century totalitarianism squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson. This megalomaniacal madman, who was the very worst President in American history, took America into war for the worst possible reason: Namely, a vainglorious desire to have a big seat at the post-war peace table in order to remake the world as God had inspired him to redeem it.
The truth, however, was that the European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a risible pipe dream.
Indeed, the shattered world extant after the bloodiest war in human history was a world about which Wilson was blatantly ignorant. And remaking it was a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited—even as his infamous 14 points were a chimera so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.
The monumentally ugly reason for America’s entry into the Great War, in fact, was revealed—if inadvertently—by his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House. As the latter put it: Intervention in Europe’s war positioned Wilson to play,
“The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.
America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World. From Wilson’s historically erroneous turn—there arose at length the Indispensable Nation folly, which we shall catalog in depth below.
For now, suffice it to say that there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson’s intervention.
It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists—when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.
By so altering the course of history, Wilson’s war bankrupted Europe and midwifed 20th century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.
These developments, in turn, eventually led to the Great Depression, the Welfare State and Keynesian economics, World War II, the holocaust, the Cold War, the permanent Warfare State and its military-industrial-surveillance complex.
They also spawned Nixon’s 1971 destruction of sound money, Reagan’s failure to tame Big Government and Greenspan’s destructive cult of monetary central planning.
So, too, flowed the Bush dynasty’s wars of intervention and occupation, and from them a fatal blow to the failed states in the lands of Islam foolishly created by the imperialist map-makers at Versailles. The legacy: the waves of blow-back and terrorism which has afflicted the world during the last several decades.
In this context, the rise of the murderous Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes during the 1930s and the resulting conflagration of World War II is held to be, correctly, the defining event of the 20th century. But that truism only begs the real question.
To wit, were these nightmarish scourges always latent just below the surface of global civilization—waiting to erupt whenever good people and nations fell asleep at the switch, as per the standard critique of the British pacifism and US isolationism that flourished during the late 1930s?
Or were they the equivalent of the 1000 year flood? That is, a development so unlikely, aberrant and unrepeatable as to merely define a horrid but one-off chapter of history, not the ordinary and probable unfolding of affairs among the nations.
We contend that the answer depends upon whether your start with April 2, 1917, when America discarded its historic republican policy of non-intervention and joined the bloody fray on the old continent’s Western Front, or December 7, 1941, when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor allegedly awoke America from its isolationist slumber and called it to global leadership of the so-called American Century.
Needless to say, the Deep State’s ideology of the Indispensable Nation and its projects of Empire are rooted in the Pearl Harbor narrative. That is, the claim that global affairs go to hell in a handbasket when virtuous nations let down their guard or acquiesce to even modest acts of regional aggression.
Thus, allow even a local dispute over revanchist claims on a small territory like the Sudetenland, it is claimed, and the next thing you know the whole planet will be aflame in war.
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The now faded varieties of republican non-intervention, by contrast, hold that to be self-serving nonsense. The German speaking population of the Sudetenland overwhelmingly wished to rejoin the Fatherland not owing to Hitler’s agitation, but because they had been stuck in the artificial state of Czechoslovakia at the conference of WWI victors in Versailles. In turn, it had been Woodrow Wilson’s perfidious declaration of War on Germany that changed the enabled the Allies to win the stalemated war in the trenches of northern France, thereby paving the way for the once in a 1ooo years aberration of Hitler and Stalin which ultimately ensued.
Not surprisingly, the official historical narratives of the Empire glorify America’s rising to duty in World War II and after, but merely describe the events of 1917-1919 as some sort of preliminary coming of age.
As a consequence, the rich, history-defining essence of what happened during those eventful years during the 20th century’s second decade has been lost in the fog of battles, the miserable casualty statistics of war, the tales of prolonged diplomatic wrangling at Versailles and the blame-game for the failed Senate ratification of Wilson’s League of Nations thereafter.
In this connection, the defeat of the League of Nations is treated as a colossal error in the mainstream narrative. It is held to constitute a crucial default by the Indispensable Nation that hurried the rise of the totalitarian nightmares, and only compounded America’s task of righting the world in the 1940s and after.
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
