The erudite Foreign Affairs piece dated 28 February 2023 by Andrew J. Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and Chair of the Board of his co-founded Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, describes how America's zeal to save the world for freedom and democracy was borne of its laudable successful role in ending the Second World War.
Empowered by the national imperative in NSC (National Security Council document) 68 (1950), and egged on by America's long-established "military-industrial complex", the United States has been trapped by its Second World War glory in continuing to play the role of world policeman, only to end in one monumental fiasco after another - e.g. Vietnam War, the World on Terror (Iraq) and the War in Afghanistan - at gigantic cost in blood and fortune to itself and many times over to its perceived adversaries.
The author's hope that this tragedy of self-imposed errors may be corrected is, however, a triumph of hope over reality. America's military-industrial complex remains deeply entrenched, its tenacles reaching to all levers of state power and politics, including influential privately-funded national thinktanks. The intricate power web is exposed in depth in Jane Mayer's revealing book -Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is Trying to Buy Political Control in the U.S (Scribe 2016)
What is more, the Ukraine war, which the author well defines as a truly proxy war, has in many ways a hidden agenda to break Russia first, so as to concentrate later on breaking China next. The latter is firmly held to be the greatest existential threat to the endurance of US hegemony, the bedrock of America's military-industrial complex.
Indeed, the groundwork for the "Contest of the Century" is well underway, including intensifying, no-holds-barred, bipartisan pushback against and demonization of China, hyping it into a sabre-rattling existential contest "between democracy and autocracy", oblivious to possibilities of "harmony despite differences" according to Chinese philosophy.
Comments