Must Read: "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy"

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have just published the book which follows up their 2006 article by the same name which stirred a firestorm. This is a very carefully and thoughtfully reasoned book by two academic political scientists. It gives a wealth of information about how much money and support we have given Israel beginning in the 1960s; this aid is frequently in the form of grants they don't have to pay back and we give it to them no matter what they do with it. The authors make the argument that this unconditional support is contrary to US interests and those of Israel. If this seems difficult to believe please recall that governments have been horribly wrong in the past regarding their own best interests, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan doesn't look too smart now does it? How about Hitler's attempt to rule the world? Japan's decision to attack the US?

Read Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers".

An economically expanding power… may well prefer to become rich rather than to spend heavily on armaments. A half-century later, priorities may well have altered. The earlier economic expansion has brought with it overseas obligations (dependence upon foreign markets and raw materials, military alliances, perhaps bases and colonies)…. In these more troubled circumstances, the Great Power is likely to find itself spending much more on defense than it did two generations earlier, and yet still discover that the world is a less secure environment—simply because other powers have grown faster, and are becoming stronger…. Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on ‘security,’ and thereby divert potential resources from ‘investment’ and compound their long-term dilemma (emphasis added).

I believe, along with Chalmers Johnson (see his Nemesis), that this is the position the U.S. is now in; it is on the downslope of over-reaching militarily which will eventually hurt it economically and seriously undermine its world power.

Answer to a Question About 'Conservatism'

Steven Andresen recently asked a question about how to define 'conservatism' as a comment to my Why Pseudo-Conservatives Are Not 'Conservative' post and since my reply is longish I thought I'd add it as a new post.

I believe the term 'conservative' has been hijacked by right-wing extremists in the US and thus tends to mean what ever they want it to mean even if what they believe contradicts the dictionary definition of 'conservative' and even if the principles they say they espouse are self-contradictory. Could I direct your attention to the four part series of posts I wrote called "What Does 'Conservative' Really Mean?" that starts here?

So-called "Christian Conservatives" are usually right-wing extremists who come closer to qualifying as fascists than anything 'conservative'. I do not use the term 'fascist' lightly. Robert Paxton recently published a really excellent book called "The Anatomy of Fascism" which very carefully examines the appropriate uses of this term. Paxton is a historian at Columbia and has spent many years teaching, writing and thinking about fascism. Here's his definition (p. 218):

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in an uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of
internal cleansing and external expansion.

While we have not yet realized a state of full-fledged fascism in the US Paxton demonstrates that movements can approximate fascism and there can be precursors. I suggest that the Christian right's preoccupation with 'moral decline' in America, it's preoccupation with seeing itself as the butt of a war on Christianity (let me know if you want an example), it's culture war against liberals, it's development of a compensatory cult of 'purity', it's mass-based militant nationalism ("America: Love It or Leave It"), it's collaboration with the traditional elites of the Republican Party and many in the corporate and military elites, the gradual but constant abandonment of democratic liberties under the Bush administration, the redemptive violence against abortion doctors and clinics, the goal of internally cleansing "secular humanists" and an external expansion that apparently knows no bounds (see Chalmers Johnson's "The Sorrows of Empire" and "Nemesis"--all of these elements are precursors of American fascism.

Sinclair Lewis is reputed to have said, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." I suspect this came pretty close to being an accurate anticipation and if Lewis said it his statement was made in the 1930s.

On the Origins of the Cold War

I've been reading a number of books on the origins of the Cold War because I really believe that it was the post-WW II period that set us on the path we're on today: militarism, empire, and lessening democracy and devotion to the Constitution at home. For a truly excellent description of "the path we're on today" read Chalmers Johnson's new book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. This is a book many will find difficult to take seriously but I find it very convincing; and Johnson is no knee-jerk radical, he worked as a consultant for the CIA for a number of years and has been a respected academic for many years.

At any rate I've been reading John Lewis Gaddis' The United States and the Origins of the Cold War. Gaddis is considered the primary 'respectable' authority on the Cold War and indeed his book is very well written and researched (I'm reading the original 1971 edition.). Gaddis began with a Preface in which he explained that he was going to look at foreign policy through the eyes of those who made it. What he failed to say was that this principle applied primarily to American policymakers and not their Soviet counterparts. One of the things this means is that America's commitment to "self-determination" for all peoples, as announced by FDR and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter of pre-Pearl Harbor 1941, is taken at pretty much face value. This is important because when the Soviet Union's armies, which fought the Nazis with little manpower help from England or the US for about three years and lost 16-20 million in doing so, wanted its own sphere of influence in Eastern Europe (through which it had been attacked three times within 130 years), the U.S. found it necessary to stand for the "self-determination" of Eastern European countries.

Gaddis finds it difficult to fully acknowledge that most of our talk about "self-determination" was disingenuous propaganda because acceding to Churchill we excluded most of the British Empire from self-determination and in our own history had amply demonstrated our hypocrisy re "self-determination". For evidence of the latter think of Cuba, the Phillipines and Puerto Rico in 1898, Cuba in 1960-1, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, French Indochina (Vietnam) in the 1954-1974 period, Chile in 1973, etc. etc. etc. (Read Stephen Kinzer's book, Overthrow.) My belief is that historians ought to attempt to be as objective as possible but most of the American history I read is "patriotic" history.