Apparently it's not just Corbyn and his fellow idiots in the Stop the War Coalition who are singing that old line about it all being the West's fault, and soberly expounding on Putin's supposed security concerns. It's happening in America too: unsurprisingly in the pages of the New York Times, but - surprisingly to me at least - from the right. The authors, Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladdin Pappin, see US foreign policy as dangerously aggressive, and argue for a new isolationism. Robert J. Lieber calls them the New Strategic Narcissists:
Events in Ukraine have heightened scrutiny of America’s foreign policy after the Cold War and sharpened opinion on what that policy should be today, not always with illuminating results. A recent New York Times op-ed provided an account of past and current U.S. foreign policy that parts company with reality. In “Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party,” Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin advocate a potentially disastrous course for America and conclude with a pernicious warning about domestic “monsters” that lurk not abroad but within our polity.
As a description of Cold War policy, their language is far more polemical than analytical, though the “restraint” they call for is a hallmark of many academic realists today. Its sub-text is neo-isolationist and redolent of the arguments of the America First advocates in the 1930s. Blaming America for antagonizing Russia and China and for not being “respectful of enduring civilizational differences,” not only omits the deliberate strategies, histories, and worldviews of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and their respective regimes and cronies, but also treats them as passive actors. In effect, it denies agency to America’s great power adversaries and implies that their hostility will miraculously disappear once we adopt an approach of “cultural nonaggression abroad.”
The authors, who are not conspicuous for foreign policy expertise or accomplishments but who are proponents of a “national conservatism,” advocate a foreign policy outlook evocative of the “blame America first” impulse so commonly attributed to the Left. But their outlook also reflects an underlying assumption that Hans Morgenthau long ago identified, and which more recently former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster has cited as “strategic narcissism.” As Morgenthau observed, this is the tendency to perceive world events as depending primarily on what the United States does or doesn’t do and the belief that others think about foreign affairs much the same as we do.Finally, any serious consideration of American foreign policy cannot avoid the threats currently posed by Russia and especially China. Putin and Xi have not only established a close military, economic, and political alignment between the two countries, but in their recent joint declaration at the Beijing Olympics, have proclaimed their own crusade against the existing international order and the indispensable role of the United States for its maintenance. Whatever the reluctance of national conservatives, restrainers, offshore balancers, and various neo-isolationists of Right and Left to acknowledge this, there can be no doubt that we have entered an era of great-power competition with China and its Russian ally. It would thus be timely to recall the admonition of the late Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” In this case it has become a cold war, but a war nonetheless.
This leaves little room for appreciating the behavioral weight of Putin’s KGB background and nostalgia for the old Soviet empire, whose collapse he described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. Nor does it allow for understanding Xi and his Communist Party Politburo colleagues who seek to restore the regional and civilizational primacy of a once great China. It certainly doesn’t appreciate the role of Iran’s antediluvian supreme leader, who views the world through the lenses of a Shiite eschatology while chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel” and advocating the extermination of the Jewish state....
Even the well-worn argument that NATO enlargement has needlessly provoked Russia and that, without it, American relations with Russia would be far more relaxed ignores cause and context. It should not be forgotten that Eastern European countries were adamant about seeking NATO membership, which is not surprising given their bitter experiences with imperial and Soviet Russia. Moreover, as a study by a leading foreign policy scholar, William C. Wohlforth, and a Russian counterpart, Andrey Sushentsov, has found, Putin’s antipathy is grounded not so much in the enlargement of NATO, but in the very existence of NATO itself. They are skeptical that the deterioration in America’s relations with Russia could have been avoided. In any case, it is not difficult to imagine that in the absence of membership, former members of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic countries would be experiencing the kind of menace now facing Ukraine.
Finally, any serious consideration of American foreign policy cannot avoid the threats currently posed by Russia and especially China. Putin and Xi have not only established a close military, economic, and political alignment between the two countries, but in their recent joint declaration at the Beijing Olympics, have proclaimed their own crusade against the existing international order and the indispensable role of the United States for its maintenance. Whatever the reluctance of national conservatives, restrainers, offshore balancers, and various neo-isolationists of Right and Left to acknowledge this, there can be no doubt that we have entered an era of great-power competition with China and its Russian ally. It would thus be timely to recall the admonition of the late Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” In this case it has become a cold war, but a war nonetheless.
Not so cold now.
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