William Astore stated (in 2022) that the United States had recently completed a 60-year war. He begins this span from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in January 1961 warning our country about the growing power of the military-industrial complex. It ended with the end of the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan in September 2021. The wars fought in this period were against small less-developed countries.
He then points out that in recent months the rhetoric in Washington is against Russia and China, two countries with nuclear weapons at the ready and modern non-nuclear forces.
What is the mindset of these officials in Congress, the President, military leaders and others who make up what Ben Rhodes called the “foreign policy blob”?* They are risking everything for what?
Leo Tolstoy in his novel War and Peace explored this subject by asking whether Napoleon actually led millions of soldiers to attack and seize control of Russia and failed, or whether the men had a common warrior impulse and pushed Napoleon ahead of them.
When the ancestors of most of us came to the Western Hemisphere, they pushed the native peoples out of the Eastern coastal lands so as to take over the territory. An expansion continued over centuries to the Pacific, during which the natives were considered the “enemy”. When the natives had only small areas in which they were allowed to live, they stopped being the enemy.
Perhaps Americans continue having a common warrior impulse, now against Russia and China because we need to have an enemy, and the “foreign policy blob” is expressing this impulse.
*Ben Rhodes was a foreign policy advisor to President Obama.
Coyote Vision 