Insanity
is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result. Someone should
tell the Biden team.
Soon after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Afghanistan, David Ignatius, Washington Post
columnist and Deep State insider, remarked “The
reversals in Afghanistan are confounding for a Biden
national security team that has rarely known
personal failure (…) These are America’s best and
brightest, who came to the messy endgame of the
Afghanistan war with spotless résumés.”
Though his criticism of the national security
team is understandably guarded, anyone taking a
dispassionate look at the establishment liberals who
are deemed America’s “best and brightest” in
Washington circles would reach the conclusion that
they are stronger on slogans than substance, which
leads to a disconnect between ideas and
implementation, and lack overseas experience: there
is only one career diplomat in a senior position on
the National Security Council, the director for
Africa.
Their ability to display ideological cohesion at
the expense of a reflexive process of dialogical
thinking is remarkable but not surprising:
establishment liberals do see themselves as the
centre of political enlightenment. If they appear
vainglorious and self-righteous it is because they
are part of a power structure that produces and
perpetuates these character traits. Those who
entertain the possibility of failure are side-lined
as bearers of bad news, the centre-stage is reserved
for those who project confidence and a sense of
moral superiority. As to considering opposing
viewpoints, that is entirely optional.
In the same Washington Post article Ignatius
observed “Failure can shatter the trust and
consensus of any team, and that’s a danger now for
the Biden White House. This group has been
extraordinarily close and congenial during Biden’s
first seven months. But you can already see the
first cracks in Fortress Biden.”
Are these the kind of cracks that appear when
reality hits delusions, when ‘what is’ collides with
‘what ought to be’, when military logic makes a dent
in the fairy tale of a benign power successfully
exporting “freedom, democracy and human rights”?
Trained for hybrid warfare, Biden’s aides were
suddenly dealing with a conventional military crisis
and looked out of their depth. As we have seen,
managing a retreat and putting a spin on it require
a completely different set of skills.
There is no doubt that the optics of one of the
greatest foreign policy disaster in American history
damaged the reputation of the U.S. both at home and
overseas and that’s why we should expect new and
more aggressive initiatives to harden American soft
power and tighten control of the narrative through
underhand methods.
Carefully crafted narratives are crucial for the
U.S. because it is selling the world a failed model
of development. Trumpeting it as inclusive, gender
equal, green and sustainable is like putting
lipstick on a pig, it looks grotesque. Managing
perceptions, denigrating alternative civilizational
and economic models, and demonizing the competition
is no longer working, an increasingly large segment
of the world population is developing stronger
antibodies to the virus of American propaganda.
That’s why traditional soft-power tools — trade,
legal standards, technology — are increasingly being
used to coerce rather than convince.
After the Afghanistan disaster former French
ambassador to Israel, UN and U.S. Gérard Araud
shared his dismay on Twitter: “The absence of
self-examination in the West is seen elsewhere with
disbelief. Wars waged by the West have recently cost
the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians for
no result and we still lecture the world about
values. Do you have any idea about how we are seen
abroad?”
If even allies are growing tired of America’s
preaching, guess how it is going down in the rest of
the world.
At the end of August, when U.S. allies were
weighing what the shambolic, badly-coordinated
retreat means for Western power and influence, Biden
delivered a speech in which he explained “This
decision about Afghanistan is not just about
Afghanistan. It is about ending an era of major
military operations to remake other countries.”
His statement signalled the intention to
extricate the U.S. army from a war that had
exhausted itself, politically, militarily and
epistemically, but didn’t suggest that the U.S. will
renounce its imperialistic ambitions. In the last
twenty years there have been tectonic shifts: cyber,
biological, information, cognitive and economic
warfare are changing the way wars are being fought.
Putting boots on the ground is no longer the best
nor the only option to subjugate an adversary.
The reconfiguration of the geopolitical landscape
and rapidly changing power relations also required a
reassessment of priorities. Now that all eyes are on
the Asia-Pacific region the question is whether
Biden’s team is the best fit for the challenges U.S.
power is facing.
Biden’s closest aides never learned the
fundamentals of realpolitik, they hold the belief
that liberal values are universally valid and the
use of force (rebranded “humanitarian
interventionism”) morally motivated. They never
doubted that the Western model would conquer the
world because they grew up at the end of the Cold
War, a time that was indeed characterized by a
“unipolar moment”. This period is well and truly
over and the Western liberal order in its present
form is a fraying system.
While the U.S. allocated resources to the
destruction and destabilization of sovereign
countries, and ignored the widening income gap at
home, their main competitor, China, lifted millions
of its citizens out of poverty and kept building
state-of-the-art infrastructure at home and abroad,
that is projects that make a tangible difference in
people’s livelihoods. No wonder concealing the truth
has become a matter of national security.
Democrats openly admit their intent to co-opt
Silicon Valley to police political discourse and
silence the bearers of inconvenient truths. They
effectively sowed the seeds for a future where
everything and everyone can be(come) a
national-security threat. Glenn Greenwald revealed
that Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s
of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in
the last year to demand they censor more
political speech. They explicitly threatened the
companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if
they did not start censoring more. Pulling the plug
on dissenting opinions and de-platforming people who
challenge the dominant discourse makes a mockery of
free speech, one of the rights that the U.S. claims
to be defending when it selectively condemns alleged
violations of human rights in other countries.
Increasing censorship is also an indication that
control of the narrative both at home and overseas
has become vital for the U.S.
The conviction that “for America, our interests
are our values and our values are our interests’’,
one of the tenets of NeoCons, has been revamped by
the liberal Left to aggressively promote a different
kind of values and causes. A sort of symbolic
capital that would allow the U.S. to maintain
dominance as rights defender while its own
constitutional rights are being eroded at home.
Moral grandstanding can only compound the hypocrisy,
but that is not stopping liberal totalitarians who
are trading off freedom of speech for a child’s
right to gender self-identification or for a binding
gender or race quota on corporate boards.
History shows that declining empires tend to
produce incompetent, self-delusional and divisive
leaders who unwittingly accelerate the inevitable
fall. That’s exactly what seems to be happening now.
Not only the radical liberalism embraced by the
Biden administration and Western elite has already
antagonized millions of Americans leading to social
and political polarization, it is also antagonizing
foreign leaders, including the leaders of allied
countries such as Hungary and Turkey who are being
labelled as ‘authoritarian’. As the U.S. system of
alliances is becoming increasingly fragile, dogmatic
progressives in the current administration look more
and more like Aesop’s donkey in a pottery shop, or a
bull in a China shop, if you prefer.
The current National Security Council (NSC) is
staffed with advisers who are the product of the
kind of groupthink that has long been dominant in
Anglo-American universities, those madrassas of the
liberal Left where debate is stifled by ideological
purges. The opinions and worldviews that are shaped
and reinforced in these echo chambers are
disseminated and amplified by the media and other
industries. Countless careers depend on exporting
simulacra of freedom, democracy and human rights,
not only because these “experts” have internalized a
conviction that these immaterial goods possess an
intrinsic moral value, but also because the U.S. has
little else to offer the world and leverage on,
unless you count assured mutual destruction as
leverage.
A case in point is The Summit for Democracy that
Biden will convene in virtual mode on December 9–10,
2021, while a second meeting will take place a year
later. The plan is to bring together over 100
leaders from selected governments (some of the
choices have already stirred controversy among
democracy advocates) plus various NGOs, activists
(regime change actors) and corporations to “rally
the nations of the world in defence of democracy
globally” and “push back authoritarianism’s
advance”, “address and fight corruption”,
“advance respect for human rights”.
Though this initiative is mainly a way to
strengthen ideological cohesion among allies by
appealing to “common values” and conjuring up yet
another global threat, namely “authoritarianism”, it
effectively divides the international community into
two Cold War-style blocks, friends and foes. On one
side countries that earned a seal of approval for
toeing the line and therefore deserve to be labelled
“democratic”; on the other side a basket of
deplorables that refuse to recognize the superiority
of the U.S. model of governance and civilizing
mission. Basically, the politically correct version
of neocolonialism.
The Summit for Democracy will take place against
the backdrop of AUKUS, the new Anglo-Saxon alliance
that effectively joins NATO to the Asia-Pacific
through Britain. What is clearly intended as an
alliance against China severely damages regional
peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and
jeopardizes international efforts against the
proliferation of nuclear weapons.
On one hand the U.S. is flexing its military
muscle, on the other hand is flexing the ideological
muscle that, in the intentions of the Summit
organizers, will provide the impetus to renew and
strengthen the liberal international order that has
served U.S. interests since the end of WW2.
The Summit for Democracy may have a higher
profile convener than similar events held in the
past but its premise sounds just as tone-deaf and
over-ambitious. Take for example The Copenhagen
Summit for Democracy that was organized in May by
the “Alliance of Democracies”, a foundation set up
by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh
Rasmussen in 2017. Its objective was to create a
Copenhagen Charter, modelled on the Atlantic
Charter, having a Clause 5 similar to NATO’s Article
5, whereby “a state coming under economic attack
or facing arbitrary detentions of its citizens due
to its democratic or human rights stance could ask
for unified support including retaliatory measures
of fellow democracies.” This and other creative
proposals included in the Copenhagen Charter will
likely be rehashed at the Summit to be opened by
Biden in December.
Rasmussen too can boast a spotless resume as
cheerleader for U.S. global leadership, and that
might explain why he seems trapped in a time warp
and blind to the actual state of that leadership. If
the reader needs further confirmation of Rasmussen’s
complicated relationship with reality, here is an
excerpt from an article titled ‘The Right Lessons
From Afghanistan’ that he wrote for Foreign Affairs
a few weeks after the Afghanistan fiasco, “The
world should not draw the wrong lessons from
Afghanistan. This fiasco was far from inevitable. It
would also compound the folly if the world’s
developed democracies stopped supporting the quest
for freedom and democracy in authoritarian states
and war-torn countries. That includes Afghanistan,
where the United States and its partners should lend
their support to the ongoing resistance efforts to
oppose the Taliban.” We all know what happened
to those “resistance efforts”, but Rasmussen won’t
let reality get in the way of his illusions.
It is unlikely the Summit for Democracy will
achieve the unspoken objective of creating an
Alliance of Democracies that could bypass the UN
Security Council. But it is undeniable that
international law has long been under attack and is
incrementally replaced with the Atlanticist concept
of a “rules-based international system”, which
does not have any specific rules but allows the West
to violate international law under the pretext of
advancing liberal ideals and exporting democracy.
It’s expected that USAID will be called to play a
major role at the summit. USAID under Samantha
Powers has a seat in the NSC and has been tasked
with the mission to “modernize democracy
assistance across the board”. This includes “supporting
governments to strengthen their cybersecurity,
counter disinformation and helping democratic actors
defend themselves against digital surveillance,
censorship, and repression.” In typical
Orwellian doublespeak the U.S. is seeking help by
claiming to help. With a military budget already
stretched over the limit, enlisting foreign actors
(both state and non-state) to do its bidding in the
information and cognitive warfare becomes
imperative.
NED, USAID, USAGM, “philanthropic” organizations
like Open Society Foundations and the Omidyar
Network have long been grooming and bankrolling
journalists, activists, politicians, various types
of influencers and community leaders. Their job is
to paint a negative picture of China, Russia and any
country resisting U.S. diktats. In Africa, just to
mention one of many examples, “independent”
journalists are paid to investigate Chinese
companies that are involved in mining, construction,
energy, infrastructure, loans and environment and
portray them as causing harm to communities,
environment and workers.
At the beginning of October, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken unveiled a new partnership with the
OECD in Paris: the overt goal was to combat
corruption and promote “high-quality”
infrastructure. But the partnership is part of a
broader effort to counter China’s Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI). The U.S. has also appealed to the
G7 and QUAD to provide the financial muscle for
its Build Back Better World initiative (BW3), a
rehash of Trump’s Blue Dot Network. Since the U.S.
and its partners cannot respond to BRI symmetrically
— they are unable to match China dollar for dollar,
project for project — they are relying on
virtue-signalling both as a marketing and bullying
tactic. According to this initiative, infrastructure
building in developing countries should comply with
a certification scheme and lending rules set by the
U.S. and its partners, rules that are cloaked in the
familiar jargon of social and environmental
sustainability, gender equality, and
anti-corruption.
In case the competition with China in Asia,
Europe and Africa does turn into open confrontation,
the U.S. could use the BW3 to increase pressure on
investment funds, global financial institutions and
insurance companies to discriminate against projects
that don’t meet standards set by the U.S. in return
for concessions and sweeteners. When Western
companies cannot compete fairly with Chinese ones,
they can always rely on friendly officials in
Washington to rewrite the rules of the game in their
favour.
American policymakers seem unable to abandon a
Cold War mentality that is essentially utopian in
expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in
the demands it places on others, and self-righteous.
Some analysts believe that the source of the problem
might be the force of public opinion, deemed
emotional, moralistic and binary, the old “Us vs
Them.”
Classical international relations theorists have
long held the assumption that American public
opinion has moralistic tendencies: for liberal
idealists the moral foundation of public opinion,
mobilized by norm entrepreneurs, opens up the
possibility of positive moral action, whereas for
realists, the public’s moralism is one of the main
reasons why foreign policymaking should be insulated
from the pressures of public opinion.
However it is myopic to conceive of public
opinion and policymaking as separate entities when
in fact they are both shaped by the interests of
powerful elites. Public opinion doesn’t exist in a
vacuum, it is swayed by new and old media that are
often controlled by the same interest groups and
corporations that fund the think tanks and
foundations influencing U.S. foreign policy.
For instance, not only was the collusion and
revolving door between government and the tech
industry a feature of the Obama administration, it
characterizes the Biden administration as well. The
transnational interests of these elite groups are
usually cloaked in a progressive, inclusive,
democratic rhetoric to make their narrow agenda
appear big enough so that unsuspecting ordinary
people may want to claim ownership and subscribe to
it. Corporate interests and national interest are a
tangled web no longer subjected to public scrutiny
since national level democracy has been hollowed
out. When the trilemma of democracy, state, and
market becomes irreconcilable, global market players
call the shots without democracy or state being able
to control them, oversee unceasing technological
innovation (including artificial intelligence) or
curb the excessive financialization of the economy.
Though U.S. attempts at nation-building result in
chaos and misery for local populations, Americans
haven’t given up on trying to remake the world in
their own distorted image by aggressively promoting
their worldviews, exporting a simulacrum of
democracy and politicizing human rights issues.
They reject true multilateralism by trying to
dominate the international organizations that were
created to further cooperation and harmonize
national interests. For the corporate donors of both
the Democratic and Republican Party other countries’
national interests are a relic of the past that
should be done away with. And indeed national
interests would hardly be compatible with a world
order led by the U.S. in partnership with global
stakeholders (global corporations, NGOs,
think-tanks, governments, academic institutions,
charities, etc.)
These global stakeholders and their political
representatives effectively want to replace the
modern international system of sovereign states that
is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Under
this system, commonly referred to as Westphalian
system, states exist within recognised borders,
their sovereignty is recognised by others and
principles of non-interference are clearly spelled
out. Since this model doesn’t allow the government
of one nation to impose legislation in another, the
U.S. loudly promotes the idea of global governance,
under which a global public-private partnership is
allowed to create policy initiatives that affect
people in every country as national governments
implement the recommended policies. Typically this
occurs via an intermediary policy distributor, such
as the IMF, World Bank, WHO, but many international
organizations now play a similar role.
In the Biden administration we see a dangerous
convergence of the national security establishment
and Silicon Valley tech giants. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence
Avril Haines both worked for WestExec, the
consulting firm that Blinken cofounded with Michèle
Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defence under
President Obama. Google hired WestExec to help them
land Department of Defense contracts. Google’s
former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made personnel
recommendations for appointments to the Department
of Defense. Schmidt himself was appointed to lead a
government panel on artificial intelligence. At
least 16 foreign policy positions are occupied by
CNAS alumni. The Center for a New American Security
(CNAS) is a bipartisan think tank that receives
large contributions directly from defence
contractors, Big Tech, U.S. finance giants.
These donors spend considerable resources shaping
the intellectual environment, academic research and
symposia in order to build consensus around their
agenda. The Biden administration also features
dozens of officials hailing from the Center for
American Progress (CAP), a think tank set up by John
Podesta, a longtime Clintonworld staple, with George
Soros’ generous contribution. The ties between Open
Society Foundations (OSF) and CAP are so strong that
Patrick Gaspard, the former head of OSF, was
nominated president and CEO of CAP.
When government becomes the expression of global
corporate interests and channels the belief system
of a small, privileged elite it can be hard to tell
who is leading who, who is really making policy and
setting national security strategies and goals.
Biden’s national security team is the product of
this corrupt system. Its members may tone down the
“freedom, democracy and human rights” rhetoric if it
gets in the way of achieving a particular strategic
goal, but they won’t abandon it because it has
proven to be effective in providing a legitimating
frame and moral justification to U.S. hegemony.
If we look at the Roman empire we see how one
constant theme was “expand or die”. Expansion isn’t
only to be intended as territorial or military.
Expanding influence, alliances, the use of Latin,
the spread of Roman laws, currency, standards,
culture and religion all contributed to the cohesion
of the Empire. Given the current constraints to U.S.
ambitions — namely the strategic partnership between
China and Russia, BRI, the more assertive role
played by regional powers, nervousness and
conflicting interests among U.S. allies and a large
budget deficit — the room for expansion has been
considerably reduced. Thus the U.S. is doubling its
efforts in areas where it still has room for
maneuver.
Biden’s slogan “America is Back” sought to
reassure allies but cannot hide the fact that the
emperor is naked. Advertisers, politicians and
psyops planners are continuously manipulating people
into changing their perceptions of reality and
making choices that ultimately do not benefit them.
But no matter how hard the power-knowledge
regimes of Western intellectual production work to
conceal the decline, the West no longer dominates
the world and the values it advocates are not
unanimous, far from it. Labelling governments that
don’t embrace liberal values and U.S. standards as
“autocratic regimes” is just foolish sloganeering
and doesn’t take into account the changing balance
of power on the ground. The world is evolving toward
a multipolar system and the U.S. had better take
notice of it. Those serving in the NSC are still
imagining a world that no longer exists, one where
America has the power to force other countries into
doing its bidding. The current ideological approach
blinds pragmatic thinking, thus impeding discussions
and negotiations.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting a different result. Someone
should tell the Biden team.
Laura Ruggeri. Born in Milan, she moved to
Hong Kong in 1997. A former academic, in recent
years she has been investigating colour
revolutions and hybrid warfare. Her analyses and
opinion pieces have been published by China
Daily, DotDotNews, Qiao Collective, Guancha
(观察者网), The Centre for Counter-hegemonic
Studies, et al. Her work has been translated
into Italian, Chinese and Russian.
Registration is necessary to post comments.
We ask only that you do not use obscene or offensive
language. Please be respectful of others.