The Deep State's Last Crusade
America’s Aging Diplomatic Corps Wants a Win, Even if it's an Illusory One
This is the second Carousel guest piece from Twitter anon @DegreeStudies. The first can be found here.
I once heard a former US diplomat speak at Princeton about his time in the Embassy in Iraq in the years after the 2003 invasion. He began with a devastating anecdote. In occupied Iraq, one of his first tasks was to map the local constellation of potential liberals to identify individuals who the Americans would encourage to run for parliament. His favorite potential candidate was a women’s rights activist campaigning in her neighborhood for issues like reproductive health and education. The woman, still in her thirties, came to the diplomat and said that if she ran, she would be killed, and that groups in her community had told her as much. The diplomat told her not to worry, that he had seen this all before. In the post-Soviet states where democracies were just getting off the ground, vestiges of the old regime used similar fear and intimidation tactics, but they never had the energy to make good on them. Just wait, he told her. We are going to win, and you’ll look back and laugh at these threats from a seat in Iraqi history. Two weeks after this conversation, the woman was assassinated.
While the diplomat’s candor was rare, the arc of his career was typical. Wunderkinds aside, most of the people who make important foreign policy decisions came up during the Cold War. Some analysts convincingly argue that the national independence movements across the eastern bloc were not in fact “liberal” revolutions, but nationalist movements that harnessed the sympathies of liberal patrons. But even if this is true, it has not been internalized by the American foreign policy apparatus, which last felt righteous and powerful in the post-Soviet era and has been unable to recapture the same high ever since.
I think this is the best frame for understanding the Arab Spring. The American diplomatic and military experience during the Cold War led American foreign policy elites to conclude that international liberalism was a sort of super-code that could be implemented in any global operating system and immediately yield results. The failure of democracy to take root in the Arab states, and the more complicated transitions in Asia and Africa, left these policy professionals feeling disappointed but not disillusioned. America’s foreign policy elites don’t believe that their ideas have failed so much as foreign peoples have failed to take up the obvious and singular solution to their many ailments. Put another way, America’s ROI in the Middle East was low, but if the Arab mind proved infertile ground for the seeds of American ideology, it’s a defect with them rather than us.
This background sets the stage for the psychological potency of America’s current imperial effort in Ukraine. Before Russia’s invasion, I would have said that America’s interest in foreign projects was spent, that even former true believers no longer had faith in our ability to find fitting partners and arm them for success. I think I was wrong about this, and the most interesting dynamic to follow during the course of the war has been its galvanizing impact on the formerly demoralized American imperial elite, who now sense there is one last race to run, and that victory here could provide immense consolation for two decades of failure.
Take this passage from a joint article by Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Gedmin last month in something called American Purpose:
We write as Americans who are strong believers in NATO, in U.S. engagement in the world, and in the importance of a close U.S.-German relationship. We write as unequivocal supporters of the cause of Ukraine in their noble resistance to Putin’s invasion and brutal war.
And another passage
So this is no time for complacency. It’s time to reassert our unequivocal support for President Zelenskyy and the elected government in Kyiv. It’s actually time for more support for Ukraine and more pressure on Russia.
Even more cautious observers of international politics have adopted the evangelical tone. For instance, Francis Fukuyama, who showed some foresight in his early withdrawal from support of our middle eastern adventures, has called Ukraine “the most promising country in the world” attempting to transition to democracy and also characterized the 2019 parliamentary elections in that country, “a miracle.”
These giddy, strident statements, which have become common from the same neocons who failed in the Middle East, have proliferated over the course of the war. Rather than injecting a healthy dose of realism, neoconservatives and liberal internationalists evince pathological desperation for a context in which some of their ideas could be rehabilitated. This is the singular value of the Ukrainian cause.
It’s interesting to consider what it is about Ukraine that has reanimated the American elite’s belief in their ability to determine outcomes abroad. Humorously, there’s a “liberals are the real racists” angle at work here, in that they implicitly place more trust in a European society to make good use of American patronage, even as the particulars of Ukraine’s corrupt politics and confessional contestations seem a little…well…Arab.
Ukraine is the last rodeo for aging bureaucrats looking for one last win, and are in a position to expend the tax revenue and political capital to go out with a bang. Once, during the throes of doubt over my budding foreign policy “career,” I confided in a mentor that I couldn’t think of a single American foreign policy initiative in my lifetime that could be called even a partial success. He was far more offended than I expected, and quipped back, red-faced, “you haven’t been alive very long.” Deep in their souls, these beleaguered missionaries of liberal globalism are in desperate need of affirmation for their faith. They observed many miracles in their youth, but God’s recent silence smarts.
But even when the ideals are sincere, they are often paired with a maximally cynical approach, e.g. that simply bleeding the Russians with Ukrainian lives counts as successful American power projection. By this measure the war will almost certainly succeed, and the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and a bizarre series of assassinations inside Russia suggest the lengths to which the relevant players are willing to go.
As in so many other areas of American life, the foreign policy Boomers may be misguided, but they have a vision and they act in the world to make that vision real. Is the younger generation capable of seizing the wheel and turning it in a different direction? I have my doubts, but if such a generational transition ever does happen in foreign policy, it won’t be in time to save Ukraine.
The Deep State's Last Crusade
Nope. It’s all about Jews (who own everything in Ukraine while less than 1% of the population) and their long standing ethnic hatred of Russia over 150 year old stories of pograms, most of which is complete mythology. It’s Jews all the way down in America and Ukraine.
You deserve more commentary.
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" . . . Ukraine that has reanimated the American elite’s belief in their ability to determine outcomes abroad".
True in the anodyne sense that this is a form of Democratism. Nothing anodyne about the US Power Elite.
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As for The Ukraine and this Proxy War over the lives of the poor Ukrainians to take down the Russian State and pillage it's resources, the two most commonly advanced reasons, but then there's a third - arresting China's massive infrastructure One Belt Road and Made in China 2025, that had The Ukraine as a major rail link for China's industrial outputs to supply Western European markets.
Washington says No.
But for Washington, One Great Game Too Many. Russia determines the outcomes.
In depth . . . https://les7eb.substack.com/p/washingtons-war-ix-one-great-game