Red, White, and Blue Bloods

Now that I've pronounced doom on the Republican Party (even though there is much more to say on the matter) I'll move on to a much broader topic, namely the American Empire and the U.S. as the world's policeman. A wise man once said, “anything that can't go on forever will end”, and this has proven to be true of empires (at least the earthly kind), and there is no reason it will not prove to be true of ours. Empires are notorious, in fact, for coming to an end – usually ignominious, but sometimes with a minimum of pain, as witness the ends of the British, French, and Soviet empires, still within recent memory. (A generation or two earlier saw the more painful end of the German overseas empire, the Ottoman Empire, and before that the Spanish, etc.) It's not necessary that a given empire is conquered, as the Roman Empire was; most of them rot from within, from an erosion of political will, diminishing resources, and just plain demoralization. Empires go along with aggressive nationalism, and when the cultural, social, political, and economic basis for nationalism is reduced to some critical level, the empire, which seemed so permanent and invincible, collapses – much to the dismay and mystification of its adherents. The point is, this will happen – it's inevitable. It's a matter of when, and by what means, and what will remain. England and France wound up quite intact, and arguably better off; Russia is trying to regain some of its former glory, with limited success; Germany lost its empire as a result of World War I, and lost pretty much everything else as a result of World War II, but has gained much of it back because, as an acquaintance of mind put it, “the advantage Germany has is that it's full of Germans”. And yet nations, in a post-empire period, do manage to salvage some respect; they are no longer to be feared, but they are not about to be erased from the world map either. What keeps them in business, so to speak, are what I call the “eternal verities” – race, ethnicity, language, culture, and yes, faith – and these, note, are the very things that the globalists are waging war on at this time. (And don't be fooled by “identity politics” and “diversity”; those are strategies to liquidate the nation on the cultural level, not strengthen it.) A nation that asserts and shows pride in these things is likely to survive, whereas a nation that does not is doubly doomed – no more empire, and, eventually, no more nation. (Oh, did I mention borders? That's another essential quality of a nation. And we're busy giving up ours.)

So where do we stand in all this? Well, for starters, this country was not founded – at least not explicitly – on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, faith, or culture. It had a dominant race (white), a dominant ethnicity (English), a language (English), a faith (Protestant deism), and... well, not much in the way of culture, let's admit. But it was, in essence, ideational, i.e. founded not on the sorts of things that have characterized nations throughout history, but on ideas, as expressed in the founding documents of the Republic. And those ideas served us well for a while, and continue to do so, if only in the iconic (I'm tempted to say “fetishistic”) sense. They are, in fact, a kind of crumbling bulwark against what has become a wildly “diverse” society, in which all races, all languages, all cultures, and all faiths (and non-faiths) have a right to stand up and be heard, and to join the culture wars, i.e. the battle for the so-called “soul of America”. But America's “soul” is ideas, and ideas can change, and morph, and become obsolete much more readily than the more solid, natural, organic factors that traditionally define nations. (Try to find one idea from the writings of the Founding Fathers that would not cause outrage and demonstrations on college and university campuses today, and in the media – you won't find any.)

And can a nation characterized as such remain an empire? Don't the same factors that are essential to the strength and coherence of a nation apply to its empire as well? And if our nation is rotting from within, how is that supposed to be consistent with the persistence of an empire? It can't, but – again, historically – we see that, oftentimes, an empire can persist, at least for a while, even if things are collapsing on the home front. The Roman legions were spread across the known world even as Rome itself was decaying and collapsing – and we see much the same thing today. We have a military “presence”, and “force projection”, all over the globe, even while the White House is under siege and American “ideals” are under criticism and attack. It's a strange sight, to be sure – but one that is all too familiar to anyone with a sense of history. (And the rest of the world looks on in wonder, as it did when the Roman Empire came to an end – “Lo, how the mighty have fallen!”)

And when you think about it, the American Empire is a relatively new thing, historically speaking. For that matter, America itself is a relatively new thing. When the English colonies coalesced into The United States of America, it didn't take long before age-old empire urges began to surface; I'll make the Mexican War the beginning of this (although, even there, we're at least talking about adjoining territory, the difference being that we had to fight Mexico for it, whereas in the case of the Louisiana Purchase, it was one colonial power selling a piece of property to the former colony of another colonial power – which seems just, in a kind of way). But real colonialism got a shot in the arm with the Spanish-American war, where we wound up with territories halfway around the world; that's the true beginning of empire.

But then a curious thing happened. On top of the age-old empire urge, we acquired a new meme, if you will, namely that we had to – for some reason not ever quite fully explained or justified – become the world's policeman. This began in earnest when we joined up in World War I, which was supposed to “make the world safe for democracy”, but which actually made it less safe for democracy and more safe for communism and fascism. But we had a foothold on the world map, and that's what counts. And in between world wars, we pursued the Monroe Doctrine with a vengeance, charging down on any number of rebellious and upstart movements in the Western Hemisphere – allegedly in pursuit of law and order, but it was really about commercial interests. (The American Empire has always been at least as much commercial as military in intent and outcome, and it remains so to this day with the exception of the Middle East, which is purely political.)

And throughout all of these developments up to the present day, a few isolated voices were raised along the lines of “What business it is of ours?”, and “What gives us the right...”, and “Whose real interests are being served here?”, and so on. But those voices were promptly shouted down on the basis of such well-thought-out notions as “Because we're the best”, and “We need to teach those people a lesson”, not to mention verbal tics like “spreading democracy” and “protecting the American way of life”, which were invented to cloud people's minds and keep them from seeing what's really going on.

And this is not to say that there weren't people of influence along the way who really, sincerely believed that we had something to offer the benighted masses of the Third World – or the oppressed masses of the Second World. That may have been true, but the way to spread the gospel of democracy is not to start bombing and sending in troops; spreading ideas through violence is a contradiction in terms, even if it seems to actually work on occasion. Even if you can get people (whoever survives the invasion) to embrace our ideas, it is more often than not a sham; they are just mouthing words in order to stay on our good side (assuming there even is a good side in these situations). Eventually, if and when we ever leave (a rare event), the old ways return and, sooner or later, it's as if we were never there. We can poke as many holes in the ocean as we like, but unless we stick around to reinforce, protect, and maintain those holes they are going to vanish as soon as our last soldier goes back across the border. Because, once again, we are fighting traditionally-based culture with ideas. The Russians and the Chinese tried it with communism – the idea to end all ideas – and once communism in the strict, or “pure”, sense collapsed of its own weight the old culture – the “pre-idea” culture, if you will – returned. This country at least had the advantage of starting off as a blank slate, culturally speaking, which meant that ideas could gain, and maintain, more of a foothold here, because there was nothing to compete against. And yet even in what one might call “pioneer” nations, an organic culture will arise sooner or later; it's just against human nature to live in a cultural vacuum for very long. And once that new culture asserts itself, it competes with ideas for the loyalty and dedication of the citizenry – as can be seen throughout this country at the present time. Take more than ten steps outside of the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are housed and meticulously cared for like ancient mummies, and you run into people with radically different notions of man, society, and how one is to live. And they aren't all aliens, fresh off the boat; most are citizens and voters, whose families have lived here for generations. The ideas that gave rise to “diversity” – or at least to its toleration – have turned out to be self-destructive. I'm not saying this is either good or bad; it's just the way things are.

So – the fool's errand to end all fool's errands is for us to venture overseas in order to convert the unwashed and ignorant masses to the American way of thinking, which is based entirely on ideas which must seem impossibly abstract to said masses, and for which, in order to take them seriously, one must give up loyalty to things with more solidity and permanence. Plus, the fact that this is undertaken, in most cases, as a thin veneer for empire building and commercial interests, AKA imperialism, makes it even less likely to succeed and take root. So, once again, when we leave our ideas leave, and things return to normal. The problem is that there are very few examples of this because we almost never leave; the main exception in recent times has been Vietnam, and we left because we lost a war, which is also a rare occurrence.

And even if take back the bulk of our troops, we invariably leave “peacekeepers” behind, as we did in Germany and Japan. Is our military presence only a way of insuring continuing commercial advantage, or is it also a form of insurance, i.e. making certain the country in question doesn't make the same mistake – getting into a war with us – again? I say it's both, and that the two motives are complementary. The military is there to intimidate, and the commercial presence is there to soften the blow by offering economic advantages, trade being the most obvious. So we wind up with a world filled with client states who are not quite happy slaves, but who must wonder, once in a while and in the stillness of the night, what it would be like if we would just get out of their lives. And who knows, they may find out sooner than they think, if things continue the way they are going.

All of which leads to the question implied at the beginning. If the American Empire and America as world policeman can't go on forever, it will have to stop. But even when it does, the world will still be there, with all of its pathologies and discontents. So what happens then? Does someone else step up and assume the world's policeman role, or do they decide, right off the bat, to reject that hypocrisy and assert raw power? (In which case, history not only fails to end, but it starts running in reverse.) Russia and China are already making moves in that direction, and they are certainly our most likely successors. And no, I'm not forgetting the E.U., but, lest we forget, the E.U. has no troops, and neither does NATO – not really. NATO has never been anything more than the U.S. and a bunch of other guys, and the E.U. is the other guys without the U.S. These sorts of entities do not an empire make – at least not in any traditional or lasting form. Can you imagine the E.U., or NATO, going up against a resurgent Russia without Uncle Stupid providing muscle? I can't bear to look! And I suppose the U.N. is going to go toe-to-toe with China (or even North Korea) without muscle-bound us in the mix. Forget about it!

And this, I suppose, is the reasoning of the globalist powers-that-be. They may despise us and consider us uncultured, primitive slobs and idiots suitable only for cannon fodder, but they have a hard time imagining the world without us – the way the owner of a vast estate couldn't imagine getting along without his serfs and servants. And yet, “something will happen”. The world as it is is in such flux, and there is so much instability on all fronts, that things as they are simply cannot stand, any more than a machine shedding nuts and bolts and leaking oil is going to run much longer. The conservatives who want nothing to change, ever, are dreaming. The revolutionaries at least know that things can't go on, but they imagine that they're the ones who are going direct the changes and own the future (“Well, it worked for Lenin and Mao, why not for us?”) – but they may be wrong too. And even if they win some near-term victories, revolutions are notorious for devouring their own; revolutionaries who win actually have a lower life expectancy than those who lose. So the future may not be as rosy as they think. In any case, take heart – if you don't like the American Empire, be assured that it will vanish some day. The question is, will America survive its empire, and if so in what form? Hopefully not abject slavery, but even that is not assured.