In its foreign policy the United States seldom finishes what it starts. Because American foreign policy is at the mercy of domestic policy, and the business of America is business, it would be silly to take the government's stated foreign policy seriously. In my 1999 book, Origins of the Fourth World War, I wrote: "America does not like war. America does not trust the principle of unified and definitive authority that goes hand in hand with militarism. It likes comfort and well-being. It prefers that capitalist thing - that phrase in the Declaration of Independence - 'the pursuit of happiness.'" Instead of taking us down a militarist path, recent statistics now suggest that the pursuit of happiness (as conceived under a culture of narcissism) leads to national neurosis, the mass marketing of anti-depressants, widespread self-medication, and a declining birthrate. The advent of Generation Me, as defined by psychologist Jean M. Twenge, has entailed the decline of social rules as well as the rise of unrealistic expectations followed by rising anxiety and depression. Appetites whetted by slick media advertisements together with fallout from the self-esteem movement has brought us to the absurdity of an American generation that is, in the words of Twenge, "more confident, assertive, entitled - and more miserable than ever before." America cannot have an effective or consistent foreign policy under any president, because the narcissistic self-misconception of the country negates any and all long-range future considerations.
The grand mess of America's present foreign policy began with the unfinished business of World War II. In the final chapter of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, economist Joseph Schumpeter described Russia's victory over America at the end of the war. Yes, he said, the Axis powers were defeated by America and Russia. But the real victory went to Russia because the Americans - with so many military advantages - refused to win. "Surely," wrote Schumpeter, "it was not worth while for this people to undergo sacrifices to carry on a conflict in which untold horrors were inflicted upon millions of innocent women and children if the chief result is to free the most powerful of all the dictators from the two armies [German and Japanese] that hemmed him in. Surely this is a case where a job half done is worse than nothing."
If an observer from another planet, watching World War II, found this situation puzzling, wrote Schumpeter, it is because he simply "does not understand political sociology." The modern dictators of Russia view foreign policy the way the tsars viewed foreign policy. It is a great zero-sum game involving the exploitation of favorable possibilities and the neutralization of unfavorable ones. According to Schumpeter, "In the United states, foreign policy is domestic politics." In other words, "there are no organs [in the United States] for playing the complex game of any other foreign policy." This statement was true in 1946 (when it was written), and it is true in 2006 when we look at the Bush administration. "When violently excited," noted Schumpeter, "the country {USA] may enter upon or accept an activist course of interference beyond the seas. But it soon tires of it, and ... [is] very anxious to return to its habitual ways of life. Urging it on to further strenuous exertion - in the absence of any immediate danger of attack - would be bad political business for any party or pressure group that might wish to undertake it." Therefore, said Schumpeter, the pattern of pre-war appeasement is the normal state of affairs. It is the closest thing to a permanent U.S. foreign policy we can find.
The Kremlin's aims were perfectly obvious in 1945. Russia's subsequent construction of large numbers of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States necessarily followed. The long-term prospects were not good then, and they are not good now. As a Russian defector once told me, the leaders of Russia are not normal people. "They are crazy persons." Their values are not the values of bourgeois consumer society. The reasons for the long conflict with Russia were simple and well understood by students of history like Schumpeter. Only those poorly versed in history can misread Russia's intentions (then and now). In his book, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, George F. Kennan lamented the "inexcusable ignorance" of Western politicians regarding Russian diplomatic practices and strategic objectives. According to Kennan, "the mistakes made in dealing with the Russians during World War II flowed not just from exaggerated military anxieties and from liberal illusions about the nature of Soviet society. A considerable importance must also be assigned to the seeming inability of a democratic state to cultivate and to hold in mind anything like a realistic image of a wartime adversary." This statement is profoundly true, and the whole American public deserves to be pummeled with it.
Given the advantages of historical knowledge, it was no great trick that Joseph Schumpeter foresaw and lamented, decades in advance, the appeasement of Russia and China later enshrined by Nixon and Kissinger. This appeasement was carried forward by every subsequent American administration, including that of Ronald Reagan (despite his rhetoric to the contrary). According to Schumpeter, "if we go through the list of the interests that form the pattern of American politics, we find that they all agree, though for different reasons, in favoring appeasement." We see this today in America's policy toward China, and in America's unwillingness to confront Russian duplicity in the struggle against international terrorism. Big business in America does not want war, wrote Schumpeter. "The business class, too, is tired of war slogans, of taxes, of regulations." They want to trade with China and Russia. And they want to trade with the Muslim world as well.
The ambition of Russia, and now the ambition of China as well as Iran, is built into the international equation. The United States seeks international security for the sake of its consumer society and global economic growth. Americans imagine that this growth can continue indefinitely, without interruption. But the Russians and Chinese know otherwise, and are preparing themselves for a different future than that imagined by most Americans. Keeping this in mind, the recent appearance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's at the Shanghai summit should come as no surprise. The Russians and Chinese are merely preparing the Asian arm of their anti-American alliance (i.e., the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which implausibly claims that it isn't aimed at any "third parties"). While the United States seeks to curb Iranian nuclear ambitions the Russians and Chinese are courting the Iranian leadership, welcoming Iran a strategic partner.
This is consistent with past Kremlin practice. Russia has supported international terrorism for many decades. It is well known that the Russians trained the late Yassir Arafat, leader of the PLO. They also trained Carlos the Jackal. Even more alarming, the KGB infiltrated anti-Soviet Islamic groups during the 1980s. It should therefore come as no surprise whatsoever that al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri - the prime mover behind bin Laden - has been named as a KGB agent by Russian intelligence defector Alexander Litvinenko.
Russia's psychological mobilization of anti-American opinion in Russia is not a fluke. The mobilization of anti-Americanism in Europe and Latin America has used the old KGB channels described by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin in a book titled The World Was Going Our Way. As objective conditions worsen, it seems that Americans have collectively decided to live in a bubble, if only to enjoy the illusion of success and victory for a few more years, ignoring the danger that comes when bubbles burst. It is not merely an economic bubble, but a foreign policy bubble as well. It appears that the Russian and Chinese leaders are waiting for a financial crisis to hit the United States. They eagerly anticipate massive Pentagon budget cuts, and the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East.
And they probably won't have to wait much longer.
