In any contest between a candidate who stands for the active projection of U.S. military strength, i.e., the empire, and a candidate who stands for either peace or a strong defense, the latter peace candidate is at a disadvantage and tends not to get chosen by the American voters.
As an example, take 42-year old Rep. Seth Moulton from Massachusetts, a victorious pro-empire proponent. His academic accomplishments show a man of high intelligence. He was a soldier, and he got a Purple Heart. He is surely highly patriotic. His entire life, occupational and educational, has made him a supporter of the empire. We have to ask what arguments he adheres to that he thinks support his ideas, and we must contend with his position and explain why it is wrong.
We could equally well choose a pro-empire Republican like Senator Tom Cotton, also 42 years old and with a military background. Americans tend to elect people like these. Tulsi Gabbard is an exception.
We as libertarians must also offer an alternative position that persuades Americans. This is not in reference to Moulton’s Trump impeachment position, which is only of passing concern, but in reference to his pro-empire position, which is of far more long-lasting consequence. It’s that position that matters greatly and has mattered ever since the U.S. became a world leader after World War I.
The anti-Trump positions of people like Moulton and Alexander Vindman arise from the fact that they want aggressive foreign policies that push against all sorts of “enemies” and hostile threats. They want to keep pushing, muscularly, militarily, economically and in all ways, until the U.S. is triumphant in some sense worldwide, no matter how long this takes and no matter how much it costs.
In opposition is the view that we can peacefully co-exist with many kinds of foreign systems. We can gradually show by example the progress that comes through our free market system. We can avoid the waste of war. But we can also be extremely strong defensively and be willing to use that strength if we are actually threatened. The latter needs to be emphasized and brought out clearly because peacefulness without strength doesn’t guarantee peace. It will be attacked as appeasement, viewed as weakness, and labeled as encouraging a dangerous world in which others are “taking over”. A peace president or a peace party has to be able to make clear that it will meet real threats against America with overwhelming force.
Moulton recently condemned Trump strongly for pressuring Ukraine:
“The former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate questioned on CNN’s ‘New Day’ why Republicans would not condemn Trump and call for his impeachment for ‘leveraging military aid to an ally … that is under daily attack from Russia.’
“‘If this is not impeachable, I don’t know what is,’ Moulton told CNN.
“‘What the president has done is unconscionable. It’s hard to imagine something worse, frankly,’ he added. ‘This certainly rises above what Nixon did and certainly what Clinton did. So, the idea that this is not an impeachable offense I think is crazy.'”
Moulton’s entirely incorrect that Ukraine is an ally, but let us not dally to prove that point. More important is that he believes that Ukraine is a U.S. pawn in a battle of sorts with Russia. And he and others like him are making a national security argument that military aid shouldn’t be mixed in with an objective like cleaning out corruption in the domestic political and governmental processes. Again, we need not dally to argue this one way or the other. The point is that the supporters of empire have a vastly different view of foreign policy, war, alliances, power projection, and aid than do those relatively few supporters of the anti-empire view. To them Ukraine is a vital part of an actively “forward” strategy, and as they see it so is almost every part of this world.
The empire supporters tend not to respond to the anti-empire arguments. Instead they tend to label the anti-empire contingent as appeasers, weak-kneed, pacifists and isolationists. Candidates who project and promise strength are the ones who tend to get elected, and peace candidates are at a disadvantage in projecting and promising strength. Peace candidates have to express a credible position of willingness to use power if threats are real. How is that credibility to be accomplished without actually committing forces at times?
Trump is actually something of a peace president, at least in part. To establish credibility of force projection, he has ramped up military spending. He has ramped up selected kinds of warfare while trying to draw down others. He wants to make deals with Russia and China. He has not committed to power projection anywhere and everywhere. He stands for peace with strength. However, all of this has not gone unrecognized by the pro-empire people who can’t or won’t get out of the rut in their thinking. They see every move he makes that goes against previous one-way policies as betraying their philosophy. They’ve learned their ideas in schools. They’ve built careers around them. They believe in them. They seem unable to exhibit any flexibility in moderating them. Hence, almost every move that Trump makes, no matter how small, to contract the empire is greeted with intense criticism.
Media assists. Media consists of a huge corp of journalists who are pinheads. They can’t think for themselves. They can’t see anything but the party line. They simply gang up on Trump, and at the same time it makes them feel good and morally superior to criticize him for such nonsense as being racist and white supremacist.
American empire is a losing proposition for Americans, morally and economically. This was demonstrated in the Vietnam War. But neoconservatives created a comeback for empire, starting with Ronald Reagan. Carter made it easy because of his handling of the Iran hostage crisis. Bush I helped to cement the comeback of empire via the Gulf War. Perhaps the second Iraq War under Bush II and the Afghanistan War fiasco will help to dampen the influence of the pro-empire (neocon) position, but judging from the reactions to Trump’s moves in Syria and Ukraine, this is not yet the case. Neocons do not change their views readily. However, Americans should be able to grasp that Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are huge losses to them.
Impeachment can be seen as a process that pro-empire people began with Trump’s election in order to prevent him from implementing a contraction of the empire. The cards have been stacked against him because the pool of people from which to make appointments included so many who have been wedded to conventional pro-empire policies. Trump didn’t come into office with a ready-made pool of people who supported his governing philosophy or ideas. He has had to weed people out and gradually build a responsive team to assist him.
Trump faces the Herculean task of creating support for a peace through strength position, one that pulls the U.S. back and contracts the empire. The reaction of Democrats, ranging from Pelosi to Ocasio-Cortez, to a reduction in U.S. forces in Syria was far from encouraging. Like Moulton, they criticized Trump for abandoning an “ally”, Kurds. It didn’t matter to them that improvements in the situation emerged almost immediately with the U.S. absent. Hence Trump faced hostility from Left and Right. Only Lindsey Graham had the sense and flexibility to understand that Trump may understand the configuration of political and military forces better than his critics do.
Make America Great Again is a slogan that comprehends contracting the empire. This cannot be done without pointing out the downsides of the empire and the realistic alternatives to it.
9:31 pm on October 30, 2019
