Fabian international diplomacy
Enemies or adversaries will self-destruct with intramural struggles for power if left to their own devices
Roman military commander Quintus Fabius Maximus acquired fame by defeating Hannibal through feints and maneuvers causing staggering attrition in the invading Carthaginian Army. Fabian tactics are synonymous with masterly inactivity on the international stage.
The species is hormonal, not cerebral, a disease that reaches its high water mark among politicians whose amour propre is power, simpliciter. The only thing that protects nations from constant violent, intramural, struggles for power is fear of an external enemy—real or perceived. If most nations were left alone with no external threat, they would be handcuffed by chronic internal convulsions.
Take the Soviet Union. Dictator Stalin’s internecine purges killed tens of millions. They decimated the Soviet Union militarily and economically. They made the Soviet Union vulnerable to Adolf Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa and frightening casualties in World War II. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 would never have succeeded if the United States and the West had refrained from supporting White Russian adulators of the Czar.
After Stalin, internecine warfare ensued between Khrushchev, Molotov, and Malenkov. The former emerged on top, until ousted by Brezhnev and Kosygin in 1964. Brezhnev pushed the latter from the corridors of power and died in 1982. He was followed in short order by Andropov and Chernenko to be succeeded by Gorbachev. He presided over the dissolution of the depleted Soviet Empire. It self-destructed. Russia’s Putin is following down the same self-ruinous road. He remains in power only because of the unremitting hostility and encirclement by the United States that provokes widespread Russian unity against an external threat—a tribal response predictable by any with even a passing knowledge of human nature and history.
China is another example of internal, lethal convulsions occasioned by intramural lusts for power. Probably more than 100 million Chinese perished in Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Bloom Campaign, Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. The misery and deaths Mao inflicted in craving absolute power dwarfed the centuries of predation and subjugation China suffered from the West, including the First and Second Opium Wars.
If the United States had resisted the temptation to strangle China militarily and economically in its own hormonal ambition for world domination, President Xi Jinping would never have climbed to the summit of power with little or no opposition by pointing to the necessity of dictatorship to defeat submission to the enemy—the United States and its de facto satellites in Asia, including South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and India.
The United States gave Cuba’s Fidel Castro life tenure by serial assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs, economic isolation, and hysterical polemics which magnified him into a giant in the eyes of the Cuban people.
Fabian diplomacy will not end the world’s ills. It will not cure the huge defects in human nature. But it is optimal for the American people. And it would set a standard to which the wise and honest everywhere might repair.