America is destined to pursue interventionism
Writing for Zeteo, journalist Prem Thakker points out ten influential policy-makers who were involved with the Iraq war and who are now employing the same bellicose palaver against Iran. There are important differences between now and the early 2000s, yet the plot is the same, as are some of the actors and main beneficiaries of the likely intervention.
Israel is winning the battle of impressions with its subterfuge and sabotage tactics combined with its friendly media machinery across the West, yet it needs America (and other Western allies) to prevail in a total war against Iran. The Israeli government’s gambit, if not well informed expectation, is that its fait accompli will pull the Americans into the conflict, despite President Trump’s personal branding as an anti-war president. The goal is to topple the Iranian regime and replace it with a puppet of their choosing. All in the name of liberating people, of course.
Prem’s article helps us discern some of the influences Donald Trump is subject to. The base of the Republican party may have temporarily shifted away from the neoconservatism of the George Bush Jr. era in favour of the isolationist nationalism of the Make America Great Again movement, yet the elites have neither changed their tune nor lost their influence in the centres of power. Why would they, after all, given the post-WWII path dependencies of the USA? American forces are present across the globe and their domestic military-industrial-financial-tech complex is as dominant as ever.
In a vacuum, isolationism is a reasonable idea: do not get involved with the problems of other countries, stick to your own affairs, and let trade define your relationships with the rest of the world. Yet politics does not happen in the absence of historical realities. Given what has transpired, America cannot simply withdraw, say, from Europe and the Pacific and expect that the rest of the world will remain as-is. Other forces will fill in the void, creating a new balance of power in the process and with it a new order on how things are to be done.
Isolationism with its underlying classical liberal or libertarian ethos is naive in this regard. International trade does not unfold absent the control of critical resources and trade routes. Whomever manages those has the power to set the terms of commerce and benefit accordingly. The more this is the case, the greater the potential but also the higher the need to maintain that arrangement through coercion, i.e. the capacity for military presence, for others will have a powerful incentive to challenge the status quo in the hope of turning the balance in their favour.
Put differently, America cannot have it both ways of (i) being the top economy, of many of its citizens enjoying a life of opulence and unbridled consumerism, and of issuing the world’s reserve currency, all while (ii) not being involved politically and potentially militarily anywhere. The luxuries at home are the flip-side of the ceaseless interventions abroad. To put an end to the latter is to accept a more modest lifestyle. But no politician is prepared to make such an admission, with Trump chief among them. His rhetoric was that the USA would somehow decouple from all the conflicts while simultaneously being a leader in international affairs.
The reality of America’s historical trajectory is now showing its true face. The USA is at the cusp of committing to another open-ended campaign, acting as the de facto client state of Israel in the process. The country’s opinion-makers have not been honest about the trade-offs they are facing, while the apparatchiks in Washington DC have never had a genuine desire to steward the transition to a multi-polar world order. The latter is what Russia and China want, for example, but we in the West have learnt only to demonise those countries as rapacious tyrannies that are incompatible with our so-called “free world.”
What the romantics will hopefully learn from all this is that privilege is maintained through brute force and that anyone who is indeed eager to be fair towards others has to give up what they thought was their exclusive right.