After the response from last week's column, Feminism and the Defense of the West, it is obvious that some Americans are unable to identify with general concerns. That is to say, unless something obviously touches them (or their interests), they entirely miss the point of concepts related to national grand strategy. The idea that the nation's survival is important in the larger scheme of things somehow escapes notice. Those who champion a special interest subgroup sometimes prefer their race, theology or gender to the nation. Far too often, the subgroup's agenda effectively cancels out any thought of national security as an unreal sphere of interest where threats are imaginary and strategy itself is a pretext for self-aggrandizement. They seem to believe the United States has no real enemies, and they dismiss the dangers that we face as if such things only occur to paranoid mentalities.
If you listen to late-night radio you may have stumbled across a self-described "scientist" whose obsession is an alleged "face on Mars." To support his bizarre thesis regarding the Red Planet, he alleges that the Cold War was a fiction. The nuclear arms race between Soviet Russia and the United States was a pretense. His special agenda is Mars, and nothing that stands above his hobbyhorse is allowed any reality - even the threat of thermonuclear war.
Today's political grievance groups, conspiracy theorists and factionalists are unconcerned with the fate of a real country (their own country). They are more concerned with an idea that fixates them. To be concerned with the nation, to love one's country, doesn't come naturally to everyone. What the individual derives from the nation is no longer given in today's discourse as positive. So-called "progressives" have long derided nationalism, fancying themselves as "citizens of the planet." In reality, there are no such citizens. A "citizen of the planet" who is not the citizen of a particular country is a stateless person; that is to say, a person with no recognized right to live anywhere (let alone everywhere). As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her analysis of the Holocaust, a stateless person is outside the protection of the law and may be subjected to expulsion, robbery and liquidation. Furthermore, if a nation state turns to aggressive war and totalitarianism, it will only be defeated or restrained by another nation state.
Despite the black marks against it, nationalism has been the progressive political form of the modern era. Machiavelli's literary mission reflects this understanding, and by the time of Clausewitz the advantages of nationalism were universally understood and assumed. Anything threatening the nation, threatens the citizen of the nation. An economic threat, a military threat or a diplomatic maneuver can bring a nation to ruin. In most cases the individual's quality of life depends to some extent on the quality of his nation. A defect in the nation state will, in time, hurt the individual's position. Anarchists will not acknowledge the truth of this observation, arguing that the state is evil in itself. But there is no territory on earth, excepting the uninhabitable wastes of Antarctica, free of state control. It might be said that the state is like the atomic bomb. We cannot un-invent it.
Grand strategy in the present era is a nationalist enterprise. The practical internationalists of modernity (i.e., the Marxist Leninists who presently govern China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, etc.) have been forced to rely on nationalism to advance their revolutionary agenda. There is no escaping the logic of nationalism, not even for feminists and international socialists. The nation is the ultimate international actor. Readers often ask what I think of the United Nations. Well, how many nuclear missiles does the United Nations have? How many divisions? How many carrier battle groups? Who enforces the agenda of the United Nations? The fact is, the United Nations is nothing more than a meeting place for diplomats to work on specific problems.
The passion of America's chief Founding Father, George Washington, is best found in his Farewell Address. Washington worried about his country's future. He anticipated the threat of civil war, the threat of regional factions, and the dangers inherent in foreign entanglements. The wise statesmen of every country are worth studying. The factionalists who preach racial hatred or gender hatred or class conflict, play a divide and conquer game. The true patriot seeks national unity on the firmest possible foundation. Freedom is important. Justice is preferable to injustice. But some politicians use legitimate grievances to divide a country and thereby elevate themselves. Radicals of all types, including radical feminists, are dangerous because they are divisive and prefer to wage a kind of civil "cold war." This may be a war of woman against man, black against white or poor against rich. However the arrangement is devised, the result must be negative. There are reasonable grievances and reasonable ways to frame them.
In the political world today we find a host of "single issues" that eclipse national concern with something of a more particular nature. The Right as well as the Left is guilty of setting national concerns aside. For example, a conservative businessman wants to trade with China. He wants to start up relations with Russian or Vietnamese or Cuban companies. Economically, trade is good. But when viewed from the standpoint of national security, trade with certain countries is dangerous. One might then ask the question: what stands higher - economic liberty or national security?
If the security of a free nation is undermined, then liberty is undermined. If we order our society in such a way that national security finds itself subordinated to dozens of special concerns - to the demands of capitalists, free thinkers, liberals, feminists, homosexuals, anarchists or ethnic minorities - then national security will be subverted. Prosperity, freedom and social justice are good things (to be sure), but we must not pursue these objects by sacrificing the nation's strategic position.
My concern with America's direction is precisely this: America has moved toward prosperity, freedom and social justice in a way that sets particular interests so high upon a pedestal as to cancel (to some degree or another) the very idea of a coherent national interest. In the rhetoric of today's demagogues, we often find the national interest identified negatively with the rich white male exploiter. Here, the rhetoric of divide and conquer is clearly at work.
