The American Empire gone mad
Limitless panic over China to sustain the multi-trillion-dollar warfare state
It was said of Rome that first it fought in self-defense, then it fought in defense of putative allies, then it invented allies to fight to defend, and finally Rome collapsed by fighting for the sake of fighting.
The United States was born of more enlightened stuff. As then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated in his July 4, 1821 address to Congress, we do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. We fight only in self-defense to preserve and strengthen liberty at home and the march of the mind over the march of the foot soldier. War, after all, is the legalization of first degree murder—the epitaph on the rule of law. Fighting in defense of other nations or peoples is the classic cure vastly worse than the disease.
But we abandoned the enlightenment of JQA and embraced the mentality and follies of the Roman Empire with the concoction of Manifest Destiny and the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, which JQA predictably opposed (along with then Congressman Abraham Lincoln). The American Empire has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Senator Albert Beveridge (R-Ind) perfectly captured the chosen people mentality of the Empire that remains ascendant to this very day in justifying the pointless Spanish-American War. I quote Beveridge at length to anticipate a retort of incredulity:
“Fellow citizens, It is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe, a greater England with a nobler destiny. It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing working folk of all the earth; a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes the propagandists and not the misers of liberty. It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history whose keynote was struck by [the] Liberty Bell; a history heroic with faith in our mission and our future; a history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into unexplored lands and savage wildernesses; a history of soldiers who carried the flag across the blazing deserts and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset; a history of a multiplying people who overran a continent in half a century; a history of prophets who saw the consequences of evils inherited from the past and of martyrs who died to save us from them; a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves to-day.
Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than a party question. It is an American question. It is a world question. Shall the American people continue their resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Have we no mission to perform, no duty to discharge to our fellow-man?
Has God endowed us with gifts beyond our deserts and marked us as the people of His peculiar favor, merely to rot in our own selfishness, as men and nations must, who take cowardice for their companion and self for their deity as China has, as India has, as Egypt has? . . .”
For all his learning, Beveridge and his countless disciples neglected the adage, “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first intoxicate with narcissism and hubris.”
To the American Empire, like all other empires, anything that cannot be controlled and dominated is a national security threat that must be confronted under the banner of anticipatory self-defense-a concept indistinguishable from committing suicide for fear of death.
The American Empire’s paranoia of China has entered the domain of madness in the Pacific. Last week, the United States inked a military deal with the Marshall Islands, which followed United States recognizing the miniscule Cook Islands and Niue as “sovereign and independent states.” The latter sports less than 2,000 people. The United States has opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands and Tonga, and anticipates another in Vanuatu. Peace Corps volunteers are returning to Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga. The United States aim is to contain China and deny it a sphere of influence that the United States has enjoyed for two centuries with the Monroe Doctrine and chronic military or covert interventions in Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Does anyone truly believe the Constitution’s national security policy of invincible self-defense is fortified by these mini-islands thousands of miles away in the Pacific? Who cares? We should be devoting our time and energy on teaching students and adults to read and write; to engage in critical thinking; and to master the Constitution so miscreant public officials can be held to account. The failure of the latter is vastly more threatening to the survival of our Republic than China’s occupation of a handful of tiny Pacific Island nations.
We are inflating fleas into elephants and shrinking elephants into fleas.
Great! Thank you.
Bravo!