John Wilkes Booth

this is gonna be a long one...

sorry it took so long for me to respond but i've just been moving so i had a transition period without internet

ok, tbh i have approached this thread in a sort of half assed and haphazard way because things have been so hectic and i haven't had time to dedicate to really fleshing out exactly what my views are and presenting them in an organized and coherent manner.

instead i've been responding here and there with what i had the time and energy to type out at the moment. as a result i think this argument is getting a bit convoluted, so i'm going to try to clarify some stuff with this post.

i don't necessarily dismiss/ disagree with your point that people often have ideological motivations. in fact in a recent conversation with frownland i made the overt argument that islamic terror is predominately fueled by a certain brand of radical islamic ideology, rather than just being a natural response to american foreign policy and imperialism. not that american imperialism doesn't also factor in, but i think that many/most islamic radicals are reacting just as much to modern liberal values as they are to political instability or poverty/violence/etc.


so with this idea in mind, i agree with you that ideology can be a driving force for an individual's actions. yet i would point out that this application of the emphasis on ideology undermines some of the incentive of the united states not to act as a global superpower out of fear of 'blowback', a CIA term commonly invoked in anti-imperial rhetoric to describe the idea of US foreign policy motivating terror attacks against the united states and causing collateral damage. because if these militants are to be taken at their word, and their ideology is to be taken serious, then presumably there isn't much incentive to resist engaging with them because regardless of our foreign policy we will remain their natural enemies and targets just on purely ideological grounds alone.

now, is that actually the case? i'm not 100% sure. surely people who want to see the islamic caliphate do genuinely believe in their ideology... but maybe they were more inclined towards this ideology because of the reduced geopolitical status of the islamic world in modern times, and thus have a sort of inherent interest in pursuing this type of ideology because it goes hand in hand with what they see as ways to promote their own geopolitical status.


so, this is to say, the 'geopolitical narrative' doesn't necessarily require that world leaders be devoid of ideology. the geopolitical narrative is that other strategic constraints, strengths and goals manifest again and again one way or another, and that these ultimately shape the course of history. if ideology is thrown into the mix then ideology seems to tend to conform with these constraints and goals.

the nazis had an ideology that promoted a german empire that used eastern europe as a bread basket and ultimately drove them to war and eventual self-destruction in the pursuit of making this happen. there were certain ethnic, cultural and political forces at work that were shaping their thoughts and actions, to be sure, but it's not a coincidence that both the germans and the soviet empires had their eyes on the same tract of land to feed and fuel their respective empires and that each had a completely different yet corresponding ideology that drove them to war over this conflict.


so maybe leaders are sometimes machiavellian manipulators pursuing an agenda, and sometimes they are ideologues determined to put their theory to work, and it just so happens that their ideology also happens to conform with/be shaped by the external constraints and goals that are presented by geography and other logistical challenges. or maybe it's some of both. or maybe it's one or the other. or maybe neither.

but regardless, history has a trend where rational, stable states relentlessly maneuver and compete for their strategic best interest, and that trend needs to be accounted for.


as for checks and balances, basically the requirement we have in modern democratic countrries is a popular narrative that conforms with popular morality. so if the masses believe that we engaged in war in vietnam/korea/cambodia/iraq/afganistan, instigated coup detats in iran, south america, etc, support puppet dictators around the world when it is convenient for us and then impose an embargo on cuba for 'human rights', effectively contributing to the starvation and poverty of the cuban lower class, if they think we did all this cause we want to make the world a better and more free and democratic place, then all is good. as far as 'checks and balances' goes. doesn't matter if any of that is true... just as long as people believe it. if leaders themselves believe it too, even better. basically the US has to continue to pursue its own strategic interests while conveying a popular narrative with a bit more heart and soul to it.


but non of that addresses the bottom line that the nation has grown incredibly prosperous over the last 100 years pursuing exactly this model. so how exactly is it that you guys don't see how imperialism benefits us again? or do i have your stance wrong?

Xurtio

I think we both agree that both ideology and strategy guide decisions. To what extent each guides decisions in different power structures and events is immeasurable. A cynic will interpret what little evidence we have differently than an idealist. I'm a cynic, myself, but I think ideology is self-serving. The bottom line is that my ideology aligns with the US more than most of its enemies.

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H̓̇̅̉yͤ͏mͬ͂ͧn͑̽̽̌ͪ̑͐͟o̴͊̈́͑̇m͛͌̓ͦ̑aͫ̽ͤ̇n̅̎͐̒ͫ͐c̆ͯͫ̋ ̔̃́eͯ͒rͬͬ̄҉

Chula Vista

Extremely stimulating read. Seriously. Please keep it going.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

John Wilkes Booth

alright well i think the previous back and forth is pretty much done with. so i'll just rattle off my thoughts on the topic and wait for anyone to respond.

so i guess i'll start with where i'm coming from in my perspective. basically i was introduced to this debate when i was a late teen/early 20's. i was more or less politically indifferent and mostly into music and doing a lot of irresponsible **** i shouldn't have been doing, so i basically coasted through high school and had no interest in college. i made my way earning money doing **** jobs and some criminal activities. then i started dating this chick that was doing an art/art history degree at university and she introduced me to all these ideas about american imperialism and ****, and that's really where i really started to form a political ideology.

i started reading noam chomsky and that kind of **** and started seeing the united states as a sort of malevolent force in the world. i mean if you read his books and take his narrative of american foreign policy, we're basically the death star and whoever is president is darth vader. and when you read his arguments, it's really hard to argue against them without resorting to some sort of fallacy or just retreating into denial. i mean all he does is spell out the exact ways in which the US has intervened over the 20th century in foreign affairs, in some detail, with of course his own ideological slant shaping the tone and wording of the message.

and the most compelling argument i heard anyone come up with against him was that he only ever focused on what the US does wrong while ignoring what everybody else does wrong. and he would respond that he thinks it is reasonable that we focus on our own behavior, since that's what we can control.

that's a solid counter point. but here's what it misses: when you take on this narrative you get the idea that you can solve imperialism by dismantling the current imperial regime. this ignores the geopolitical perspective which assumes that geopolitical powers will generally act in their strategic best interest.

sort of like how they say that once you start to look at really accomplished chess players going against each other their moves are for the most part predictable, with only the occasional surprise. because the game is strategically oriented, for any given scenario there are good moves and bad moves, and good players generally won't make obviously bad moves.

the actions of nation states are similar to this. because the stakes are so high, basically states that are successful/stable on a long term basis will only do so by strategizing successfully and not making bad moves. bringing the whole 'ideology' debate back for a second... consider the case of modern day iran. in their political rhetoric they come off as belligerent, anti-semitic and warlike. if we were to pay attention to ideology and rhetoric alone, we'd be led to the conclusion that the iranian regime needs to be undermined in every way possible, possibly dismantled, and certainly prevented any access to nuclear technologies. but if you look past the words of leaders and watch for trends in actions... you come to the conclusion that iran is a relatively reasonable entity seeking self-preservation. you recognize that iran is the natural regional superpower for the middle east, and that when the united states failed to make iran a complacent puppet for US interests by putting the shah in power, the united states started to regard iran as an inherent threat to its own interests, and vice versa, and the conflict has continued on these grounds since then.

so bringing this back to the noam chomsky response, that it's reasonable to only focus on our actions since we can only control our actions, the reason this line of rhetoric is misleading is because other powers will continue to act in their strategic best interest even if you voluntarily decide to abstain from doing so. you might wipe your hands clean of any dirt, but beyond that you don't accomplish anything regarding getting rid of imperialism as a strategic tool. and what's worse, by abstaining in this way you open up an opportunity for others to exploit to their strategic best interest and then you end up cow towing to them instead of the other way around.

this is why political philosophies based on a moral imperative tend to fail. see: libertarianism, anarchism, communism, etc. you can come up with all the arguments for why 'force' is wrong that you want. until you render force ineffective, you can do nothing to undermine it. the same holds true for imperialism. and since imperialism is and has historically been economically and strategically beneficial to the conquerors, it will remain a strategical tool on the table until something forcefully renders it obsolete or ineffective, if that is even at all possible.

imo.

hip hop bunny hop

I'm so bored I care about politics, sigh.

Whether one is for or against a sort of forced, crass American hegemony is not an indicator of broader ideology; there are Liberals and Conservatives for it (see, for example, neoconservatives), and Liberals and Conservatives against it (Paleoconservatives, for example)...

If you want a great example of some archconservatives who are against this crass Hegemony, look up the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan, etc...

WW2 did not have a clear aggressor in the European Theater. Britain and France made a promise to defend Polish Sovereignty; when Poland was invaded by the USSR and NSDAP, they only declared war on one of those countries for a reason.

As to the notion that Roosevelt some how "egged on" Japan; that's bull****. Banning oil exports to Japan was not provocative in design or execution. It was, at worst, benign realpolitik; that Japan responded to a goddamned oil embargo with a military assault just revealed their idiotic, Fascistic agenda.

The notion that geopolitical powers act in their own self interest is not, at all, in conflict with the notion that the USA is overextended, over-involved, and over-invested in a seemingly never ending list of countries that are of little to no geopolitical significance.

Further, when considering that opinion, it is imperative you keep in mind that Democracies are not a singularity but a plurality. Whereas Dictatorships are able to, somewhat, focus their foreign policy agenda, the foreign policies of Democracies are almost inevitably piecemeal and contradictory. This is because of the reality of the mobility, organized efficiency, and plurality of various special interest groups - which includes groups who have as their focus environmental, cultural, foreign policy, and economic concerns. Consequently, we get cluster****s such as, say, the current MidEast policy (or lack thereof).

MidEast aside (as that's too easy), I'll give you an easy example of how this forced Hegemony is both counterproductive and harmful to the States' real interest - Korea. Economically, it makes no sense to both subsidize South Korea's military/government and provide a guarantee to their independence when they are directly competing with the USA in several key markets (see Automotive and the ****boxes that country is pumping out) while their main rival, North Korea, is economically and military irrelevant from an American perspective.

The real realpolitik perspective on Korea (and Japan, the RoC vs PRC debacle, etc.) isn't the ludicrous extension of post-cold war subsidies to these governments; it's recognizing that if Seoul got nuked by Pyongyang, the practical effects on the USA would be negligible at worst and actually beneficial to the States' economy if you want to be practical about it.

Unfortunately, various special interest groups have discovered that it's actually possible to get the USA to act against it's interests in this area. Why? Because Senators are cheap, and the American cultural acceptance of foreign entanglements as beneficial. Some groups sell these entanglements as beneficial to human rights to liberals; some groups sell these entanglements as better for america's naked interest.

I propose, alternatively, that these entanglements benefit a small subsection of American society, and that these entanglements represent the most visible, harmful, and accepted sort of corruption in our these united states. It takes some bizarre logic to compute how it makes sense for a GM Employee in, say, Flint Michigan is best served having taxes taken out of his paycheck to subsidize the governments of Japan, Korea, etc....

***


TLR - how on earth is it in line with realpolitik to give your citizens money to a foreign nation, to help that nation buy and build a military and economy which competes with your own?

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Have mercy on the poor.

John Wilkes Booth

cool... someone to help me keep this thread alive

i work this weekend and my shifts are very long, leaving me little free time and so i'll probably be too lazy to respond to you before monday.. but after that hopefully i will have some spare time to dedicate to looking into and responding to your counter arguments.

hip hop bunny hop

Ya same here.

__________________
Have mercy on the poor.

Xurtio

I think a lot of bunny hop's argument is similar to mine (but more detailed and informed).

__________________
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John Wilkes Booth

i realize this, and if this were a board full of ron paul supporters or some **** like that then i would've geared it towards them more. but my perception of this board is that leftist ideology tends to dominate here so i geared it towards that audience.



well, i didn't actually say ww2 had a clear aggressor, my point was more that based on modern liberal values, it's pretty easy to justify using the military to dismantle the fascist regimes of germany, italy and japan. you might say there's some moral dilemma in not targeting the soviets, but i guess that's where you have to apply a bit of realism and make due with the fact that a moral imperative with no pragmatic chance of being acted upon is on its own, pretty much meaningless.

here we'll just have to disagree. because the embargo basically left japan in an untenable position which, if you are being both intellectually honest and on-the-ball with regard to anticipating a rival's strategic response, you would expect that warfare would start to look like the most promising way forward. it's not like japan didn't make diplomatic attempts to get on better terms with the united states. those attempts were rejected. basically you gave them the choice of abandoning their basic strategic ambitions vs going to war. if that's not provocative, when dealing with imperial powers, then i really don't know what is, other than launching an outright attack.



well, tbh i think the way you're framing it, it sounds like you think i'm saying the united states govt is just dedicated to providing the best lifestyle for their citizens, which is clearly not the case. i mean just look at the way our country is run domestically.

now i won't lie, i don't know enough about the global economy to sit here and debate with you the pros and cons of subsidizing the korean economy from an ecnonomic pov, and i'm not even doubting that their are inefficiencies as a result of personal favors between certain powerful personalities etc. but all i see from what you're describing is the US basically sacrificing some domestic ambitions in trying to maintain military hegemony in a key part of the globe. which, as a military super power, is probably not a bad strategy.

basically what i'm saying is if you say we don't need to maintain this dominance and just let powers manifest as they will, then you are more likely to run into some actual rivals that can challenge your position. so from a strategic pov, it's better to maintain that hegemony. not that it will be better for every american or anything like that. to me thats just not the way the world works. people move and act on self interest. and since the military is basically the foundation on which a civilization is built, i think military strategy always a relevant consideration for any civilization.

edit - to expand a bit on the nuking of sk scenario... keep in mind what sk and nk represent... basically strategic relics of the cold war, when the US had an actual (almost) rival. so that situation manifested in that context, but now at this point there's no hope of diplomatic unity with nk so basically they have to continue to manage this little belligerent troll they helped create. but also they always want to have some decent leverage with japan and china. because those two countries, left on their own, each have some potential to become a strategic rival. so really the whole globalization of the economy, that interdependence that the united states, europe, and asia have with each other is decent platform for relative stability. and since ww2 i honestly think the nation states of the world have done a good job of providing just that, under US hegemonic/imperialistic rule. but let there come a situation where there is a serious military rival with conflicting interests that can't seem to be resolved diplomatically... and then we'll see how meaningful the UN actually is imo.

William_the_Bloody

I think most people on MB are left of center, not hard left antiglobalists who view American imperialism as doing the bidding of multinational corporations. In short smarter than that.

I am a leftie in that I think the Scandinavian welfare state is the best model for the life expectancy of the middle and working class, as global statistics show it to me, albeit not the best model for global economic growth.

I basically view United States imperialism as a necessary burden, it will be needed to stabilize Iraq and check growing autocratic powers like China who do not value or respect the rule of law and habeaus corpus.