Jack of Harts

I don’t know if we did the right thing this weekend. I dont have enough info to know. I didn’t want it, but we don’t always get what we want. I don’t know if it is good or bad or the least bad we could do to keep things from getting more bad. But I’m very afraid we’re going to find out.

Many strong-minded individuals in The West saw the fall of the Soviet Union as a way to build a New World Order where no one stood against our power. They promised Russia they wouldn’t expand NATO towards them, and then instantly began absorbing former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO. What could Russia do? Protest? They were bankrupt. And the many nations that weren’t Russian and didn’t like being in the Soviet Union really wanted in on that NATO thing. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want a hungry Russia looking at me after fifty years of Soviet rule. I would want friends backing me up, thank you very much.

But if you are the sole unipolar superpower in the world, what do you do when nations don’t want to do what you want them to do? You either shrug and let it go… or you don’t. And the Neocons that infected both parties did not want to let it go. They had power, and they were going to use it to get what they wanted. And any nation that disagreed just ate some bombs. Or some uranium-tipped bullets. Or some USAID-funded street protests. Or a totally-locally-led rebellion that toppled a government in hours. Or maybe they just had a tyrant that needed taking care of. Or maybe they sent a terrorist attack against us.

Yugoslavia. Libya. Syria. Georgia. The Country, not the State. Iraq. Ukraine. Afghanistan. These are the big names. The ones that made the news in America. Care to guess how many other nations we touched with USAID and other fingers of our foreign policy? Go ahead and look. You might be surprised by the names you see. And then ask yourself, how many of those names are better off now than they were in 1990? Or go back to 1980 and look. 1970. 1960.

The Neocons didn’t appear fully formed in 1990 and start their work with no history of their previous actions. Look at the world we have today and compare it to the world of the past, and ask yourself… do you like what absolute power has built?

The United States of America was born out of a strong wish to just not be involved in the Old World’s politics and squabbles. One of our earliest international policies, the Monroe Doctrine, even enshrined this idea in cold hard text. You stay out of the Americas, and we’ll stay out of your business. We maintained that aggressively non-interventionist stance for the better part of two hundred years. I say aggressively because when Muslim pirates kidnapped our people, we built the biggest and baddest ships on the planet, put the most bloody minded Marines we could find on them, and went out to aggressively teach them why it was a really bad idea to get our attention. That’s how the Marines added “To the shores of Tripoli” to their anthem.

After World War II shattered every economy on the planet, sunk a third of the ships on the seas, killed an entire generation of Europeans, and shattered world order as we knew it, we grudgingly accepted the position of the world’s cop to keep another Hitler from rising and starting World War III. Americans were grudging about it. Politicians were a bit more fond of the idea. But we were the only surviving technological society so we helped everybody else rebuild. We’ve spent the last eighty years rebuilding, patrolling the oceans, and helping everybody in the world become functional modern societies.

We helped build a good world on the surface, but there were a lot of cracks if you knew where to look. Unfortunately, most of our people didn’t look. We are still fundamentally isolationist in our viewpoints, and most Americans simply don’t see beyond our borders. We have enough space here. What do we need with more? But there are always people who want more, and that is why we are where we are right now.