In 1936 Dale Carnegie published his seminal self-help work, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” As a book dedicated purely to interpersonal relations I read it in my late-teens early-twenties and took a few damn good lessons away from it. But, I’m not writing today to discuss Dale Carnegie. I’m here to write the first chapter of a book entitled, “How to Lose Allies and Create Enemies.”
The American way of war and diplomacy (the two are inseparable, remember your Clausewitz) has grown too open-ended. We excel at the operational art of war and tactics, more often than not winning battle after battle. Yet, like Hannibal at the gates of Rome in the aftermath of Cannae we have forgotten how to turn tactical and operational victory into strategic peace. Part of this is we have, either consciously or unconsciously, forgotten question five of the Powell Doctrine: is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless engagement. This question represents to me the supreme invocation and obligation of every great statesman: prudence. Or restraint, if you prefer.
We also have fetishized, military, and military technology. Our armed forces call it total spectrum dominance. (If the technological advances made in the Russo-Ukrainian War are not giving our generals and intellectual colonels indigestion we are well and truly fucked.) This reliance on Big Data during wartime has made American generals dangerously indecisive while the sip coffee and wait for the accrual of more and more data. But, as U.S. Grant said, “in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide.” It has also made us forget the absolute supreme importance of strategy. Now, in warfare there are tactics, operations and strategy. But my focus here is more on the outright diplomatic arrogant dismissal of grand strategy since 1992. I ask each and every one of you who cares about the subject: have you heard any discussion anywhere in the last 30 years about what kind of grand strategy we should have?
No, you have not, which is criminal because American grand strategy has been the same, and should have remained so during the so-called Uni-polar Moment, for more than a century.
Since the days of the Great White Fleet 120 years ago the United States has had a simple grand strategy, one easily understood by a high school educated American citizen: no one power or coalition of hostile powers can dominate the Eurasian landmass. If that were to occur they would have the resources to invade the Western Hemisphere with ease. Full Stop.
Today Americans are so globally and geographically ignorant, enamored with their gadgets and so overcome with financial difficulties–all features not bug bequeathed by our ruling class–that this simple idea is now difficult to understand by the average Josephine.
How did we get here?
Two easy answers: first, thirty years of post-cold war dominance of global decision making. Decision making that made no consideration for consequences became the norm. Ignorance of future potential peer competitors become the norm. By this time the Neo-con influence of total dominance became the norm. These three norms led to serious incuriosity in our diplomatic and security apparatus, creating only careerists rising up the ladder. A true danger to national well being.
Second, and most importantly, we forgot the most important Iron Law of Westphalian international relations: great powers have no permanent friends (or enemies) only interests. After thirty years of attempting dominance and willfully or otherwise ignoring the Iron Law our power diminished and is now in visible decline. The consequences of this wearing before our very eyes is like a massive pile up on the opposite lane of interstate, yet our policy makers drive by the looming catastrophe (not even rubber-necking) laboring under the delusion that all is well and our unipolar world is robust and healthy. It most certainly is not.
With Xi Jing Ping’s announcement that it was time to bury the global rules based order, multi-polarity was born. The siege has begun. NATO is dead. Although the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is not yet the organizational security block opposing NATO it soon will be. Not in two years, but maybe five, certainly ten.
Let’s explore the SCO a bit.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was founded in June 2001 as a security organization to combat terrorism in Central and East Asia two full months before 9/11. Originally founded by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan it now includes as full members the following: India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus are now full members as well. Official observers are too many to list. See this link for details.
This week, under the auspices of the SCO, China, Mongolia and Russia, finally clinched the Siberian gas field pipeline deal. This is now the largest energy project on the entire planet. We have driven our adversaries into the arms of each other by our stupidity. Let me repeat that: our blistering arrogance first drove Russia into the arms of China by uparming the Ukraine. Now Trumps idiocy in levying secondary sanctions on the purchase of Russian oil has driven India into the arms of China and Russia. Ukraine was and is a corrupt failing state that we engineered a coup against a democratically elected pro-Russian president to install a comedian. All Russia asked for was Ukrainian neutrality but with every hi-tech NATO weapon in existence at his disposal the little comedian began his drama, thus precipitating a war that ultimately drove Russia into the arms of China. Even worse it ratcheted up an ongoing demonization campaign against China as an enemy because we just don’t know how to live in peace with anyone.
For now the SCO is still a security organization but it is branching out. Its first step is to become the Chinese engine of Eurasian economic integration. So to was NATO the European engine of integration in the beginning under the Marshall Plan. But China’s ambitions outstrip those of Truman’s era. The true driving force behind Eurasian integration is China’s Belt and Road project. This project which seeks to reintegrate all of Eurasia into a single Chinese dominated ecumene, barring Western Europe, is the single greatest threat to American sovereignty that we have ever faced. I do not overstate my case here. This is an enormous long-term threat we have no answer to as yet. I doubt we ever will which is why I have developed a mid-term peace plan that would prevent war with China. I’ll post it in the near future.
Regardless, I’m a sucker for Silk Road romanticism. I have traveled the length, width and breadth of the entire Silk Road: from China to Iran to Istanbul and finally Venice. But if the lands from Istanbul to China are integrated economically by Chinese power and infrastructure America—so long as we carry on with our now customary arrogance is mortal danger. In a word: fucked.
An example of the kind of fuckery we can soon anticipate—a danger I saw coming in 2015 when I noticed the ATMs in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan no longer offered American Dollars but Chinese Renminbi—is the singular most important and major project discussed at the SCO Summit: creation of an alternative payment system to the Swift banking architecture of the west that emerged in the later years as an offshoot to the the Brenton Woods Agreement after World War II.
You know you want even more fuckery. So here it is: Xi has secured an agreement from all the members of the SCO to create an SCO Development Bank, which will rival the IMF and World Bank in the West. He’s been trying to secure this for a decade. Trump delivered it to him in a week of tomfoolery and double-speak on social media.
Need more? No problem. Another item up for discussion between several of the SCO countries was the Arctic: investments in the Arctic; how to exploit the Arctic; how to dominate the Arctic. Note: no Americans were at the SCO as observers, not even as a member of the Arctic Council. Think about that for just a moment. Our diplomats are completely ignorant of discussions that our allies, like the South Koreans are engaging in with the SCO. Is this diplomatic insanity, malfeasance, malpractice, or just outright stupidity? I report, you decide.
Another edifying aside of mass fuckery: at the beginning of Trump‘s second term Indian Prime Minister Modi visited Trump, and there was a palpable sense of excitement about Indian and American relations going forward. There is very real potential for joint naval and space operations between the two nations. Moreover, India could be the third pole we need to contain China. Thus, it was clear from Trump‘s first term that Modi and Trump had a good relationship. Of course, this says much, much more about Modi and Indian desires than it does Trump perspicacity (he probably doesn’t even know what that word means by the way). Nonetheless Trump outright betrayed Modi when he agreed to the EU and NATO levying secondary sanctions against China and India for importing Russian oil. This should come as no surprise. After all, Trump’s raison de vivre is winning the daily 24 hour news cycle first and foremost. Why not fuck Modi in the process of domestic glory? Thus he pushed a potential ally and leader of the largest population on earth into the arms of the SCO. And made him a star at the BRICS summit where he could ham it up with Putin and Xi.
Meanwhile, what about the Second Law of Westphalian politics? You know, the law of Unintended Consequences? Well here’s a whopper for you: the agreement of the Siberian 2 pipeline between Russia, China, and Mongolia will take all of the natural gas that has been sent to Europe for the last 50 years and will now send it to China and other places for the next 30. Europe is now paying four times what it used to for liquid natural gas that is being imported from the United States. It is looking at an extremely cold winter without enough energy and that is going to drive inflation. I am due to have a conversation with a friend that lives in Denmark tomorrow and I’m going to ask him about energy prices. The chaos of rising energy prices is devastating European industry. In the last year alone Germany has lost 196,000 businesses. I repeat 196,000 businesses in Germany closed in one year. That’s devastating to any economy, but Germany long the economic engine of Europe and the EU is deindustrializing for one simple reason: the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, which has been an absolute catastrophe for Europe. The United States is responsible for it.
As Kissinger said about being America’s friend, “The word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
The reason we don’t know how to live in peace with anyone anymore is that after the end of the Cold War, we reigned triumphant for 35 years and could do damn well whatever we want it all over the world and nobody could oppose us. Well after 35 years it becomes a habit and habits are hard to break, especially mental ones and that’s why our ruling elites are so delusional in their thinking about international affairs. We are now creating the very monster that can actually threaten our hegemony of the Western Hemisphere. This is the most dangerous possible time in American history when it comes to international relations, and we are being ruled by fools. I fear for the future more than anyone can possibly imagine.
Meanwhile, Putin is probably incredibly surprised at how easy it now appears to fracture NATO and to gain new potential allies in Eastern and Central Europe. We are also looking at the proto-formation of a Chinese-Russian-Indian entente. Consider the immense rewards Putin will gain after starting a small war that threatened not a single American vital interest? One in which Russia simply demanded neutrality from its neighbor. The war’s consequences have propelled Russia into a potential global order shifting alliance. This was not Putin’s original intent nor goal. But because the US, under Biden and now Trump, have scored so many “own goals” this is where we are.
The US now behaves much like Venice before the 1508 when the first Holy Alliance, formed by Pope Julius II, also known as the League of Cambrai came together. It took everyone in the European inter state system to band together to defeat Venice. Of course, Venetian behavior prior to the war against it had been high handed. They raised prices on spices, silk and all the goods they imported from the East at will, bringing penury to the elites of Europe, who were the only ones who could afford such luxury. Europe had had enough. The League included France, the Hapsburg Monarchy, the Papal States and the Spanish Empire. Venice suffered a chastening defeat at the battle of Agnadello in 1509. Before this alliance, no one could defeat the Serene Republic. The League of Cambrai did collapse over personality disputes, but not before they took Venice down two pegs. And this is when Venice began its terminal decline that ended when Napoleon overthrew the republic. But after 1509 world change seriously accelerated: Spain pilfered the New World and Portugal built a spice empire in the East by rounding Africa, conquering parts of India, destroying the Ottoman navy in the Indian Ocean and upon entering the Golden Chersonese, conquered the greatest spice entrepôt in the world, the city of Malacca and its adjoining straits, thereby dominating the spice trade from Indonesia. The arrogant behavior of Venice incited all the developments leading to lost income, increasing debt and decline, just as the US is doing now. Unintended consequences have a way of creating fuckery.
The US, however, unlike Venice, is not just passively letting these nations find common interests, the US under Biden and Trump has actively pushed them together. Secondary sanctions on India were a slap in the face of a natural ally of the United States. We already know what happened: Modi went to Beijing and held hands with Putin and Xi.
Own goal!
But the biggest problem we have, as I see it, is that the US can no longer be considered a ‘rational actor’ in the anarchic Westphalian state system presently in existence. Why? One word: Trump. Trump has three huge crippling defects as a leader. Number one: his biggest donors are hard right conservative Jewish dual citizens (Yeah, I said it. You can only serve one master. Fuck off if you disagree). Donors like Mrs. Adelson and others own Trump’s Israel policy. They drive the policy supporting genocide which is not rational by any stretch of the imagination. Second, Trump is one of those pusillanimous leaders in history who acts on what he hears from the last person he talks to. This is truly, epically bad. Third: TACO. Trump always chickens out. At heart the man is a coward. But as my great-grandfather told me, there is nothing more dangerous than a coward in a corner. We must endure three more years of this.
As the Guatemalans used to say during the years of genocide: la puebla es jodida.
So, Democratic Socialist (ie. has politics a 70s liberal would have agreed with, but is less racist) Zohran Mamdani has won the nomination as the Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor.
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.
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