How to Think About Memorial Day in a Dark Age of Foreign Policy Nationalism
“Henry Kissinger once observed that Iranian leaders had to choose whether they wanted to be “a nation or a cause,” but great powers and aspiring great powers often see themselves as both. Their self-perception shapes their definition of the national interest, of what constitutes genuine security and the actions and resources necessary to achieve it. Often, it is these self-perceptions that drive nations, empires, and city-states forward. And sometimes to their ruin. Much of the drama of the past century resulted from great powers whose aspirations exceeded their capacity.
Americans have the opposite problem. Their capacity for global power exceeds their perception of their proper place and role in the world. Even as they have met the challenges of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, Soviet communism, and radical Islamist terrorism, they have never regarded this global activism as normal. Even in the era of the Internet, long-range missiles, and an interdependent global economy, many Americans retain the psychology of a people living apart on a vast continent, untouched by the world’s turmoil. Americans have never been isolationists. In times of emergency, they can be persuaded to support extraordinary exertions in far-off places. But they regard these as exceptional responses to exceptional circumstances. They do not see themselves as the primary defender of a certain kind of world order; they have never embraced that “indispensable” role.
As a result, Americans have often played it poorly. Their continental view of the world has produced a century of wild oscillations—indifference followed by panic, mobilization and intervention followed by retreat and retrenchment. That Americans refer to the relatively low-cost military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq as “forever wars” is just the latest example of their intolerance for the messy and unending business of preserving a general peace and acting to forestall threats. In both cases, Americans had one foot out the door the moment they entered, which hampered their ability to gain control of difficult situations.” — Robert Kagan, “A Superpower Like it or Not, ~ Foreign Affairs
Happy Memorial Day Neoliberals and Fellow Americans,
I hope your day is relaxing and you enjoy some greasy American food like hot dogs, cheeseburgers and French fries with ketchup and mustard, lettuce, tomato, onions, bacon. Layer and lather it up. Pour creamy fattening salad dressing on your lettuce. Grill or fry something tasty that proportionally symbolizes your gratitude for your hard-won freedoms. You deserve it.
I actually had two cheeseburgers and a big plate of fries, that amounted almost to the whole frozen bag when I tossed them onto the tinfoil to put them in the oven, last night. Although the prevalence of fat people today is a loathsome feature of contemporary society by any measure, and I would rank obesity, heart disease and diabetes, weak knees, and shortness of breath—as one of our most lamentable among our numerous cultural moral defects up there with gun violence—Americans never great at the art of self-control, let’s be honest—nonetheless I would advise anyone not to permit the equally decadent obsessive health-consciousness to ruin one’s facility to have a big greasy meal occasionally or even frequently.
Burgers and fries are just as essential American cultural staples and good: as the English fish and chips; and in the face of animal rights activists, FDA researchers, and decadent vegetarianism, and the minutiae of increased health risks health experts make us more and more conscious of, with “new studies” every week, along with the evidence you can see for yourself of the fat bastards struggling through life you can see everywhere you go—we have to be diligent against these immoderate all-too-American extreme appetites, to preserve these delicious freedom-promoting emblems of our culture, underlying our rights significantly and effectually distinguishing us from every other country in the world.
In some less democratic, more repressive regions, cows are sacred, for example, and it’s immoral to eat meat—as in some countries women likewise can’t show their faces or their legs. That we Americans enjoy grilling things so much especially when you venture south and west, like women who in a free society you have the privilege to see wearing sports bras and hot pants in all sorts of public venues, especially when you travel to California and Florida —is wonderful proof of how unconstrained we certainly vulgar, open-hearted, brash and above all individualistic Americans are: unlimited by the repressive, antisocial, collectivist taboos of patriarchal closed societies— India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.
Indeed despite all the advances of democratic values under the awesome and disruptive abundance agenda of neoliberal globalization, raising billions out of poverty, as well as greatly enriching the developed world even more, the resulting tech boom, massive outbound financial flows of capital and the spillover effects of specialized knowledge… and along the way converting undemocratic states into democratic ones, the former communist countries like Poland, Hungary (until recently), the Baltic states, Germany, not to mention the Asian tigers, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore (sort of a neoliberal utopia)— in much of the world repression, unfreedom, and tyranny are rampant. And for example, though it’s hard for us westerners to imagine life in a totalitarian state, North Koreans or Russians can hardly imagine what it’s like to live in a liberal democracy.
Now to appreciate the scope of the exception of liberal hegemony in the west by comparison with the rest (not to mention when you take stock of history and you’re compelled to observe the long sad train of repression, conquest and brutality, so natural to premodern civilization owing to the fundamental baseness of uneducated men, and the corruption of humane character that follows)— you must also appreciate the unique extraordinary power of the American military, backed by the biggest economy in the world, sacrificing the lives of countless men and now women, to secure our democratic ideals against the dark forces of the closed communities and collectivist societies out there, who ever since America’s founding have never stopped desiring to take away our freedoms, and against whom we will always have to fight—who pathetically denounce our “hypocrisy” just to conceal the shame of their own incontestable barbarism.
Communists, fascists, and jihadists. Thanks to America’s decision to intervene when the interests of freedom were under threat from Germany, Japan, China, North Vietnam, Russia, Iraq, decentralized terror groups everywhere, we have invariably nobly sought to intervene to protect the liberal international order and secure the west from the pre-enlightenment forces of darkness, mostly with great albeit costly success. We saved Europe and ourselves twice from a revanchist genocidal Germany; we saved Asia from an imperial Japan; we saved South Korea and Japan and all of Asia for that matter, from North Korea and China; we spared the Middle East and possibly saved the world from a genocidal Saddam Hussein sporadically invading neighboring countries and building nuclear weapons, twice in the Gulf and Iraq Wars; and we saved the world from the global terror threat of Al Qaeda under Bin Laden, virtually annihilating them in Afghanistan.
That is not to say all our interventions were well-informed, well-advised and perfect. Woodrow Wilson’s invasion of Mexico was asinine. The Spanish American war was unnecessary. Eisenhower’s CIA’s ousting of a democratically elected Iranian president was profoundly ill-advised. Vietnam was without question a very poorly conceived strategic failure and a humanitarian outrage, if well-intentioned to contain the spread of communism. Although Iraq today is certainly better off because Bush intervened, it could have been done a lot better, and we overestimated the size and scope of Saddam’s nuclear program. Obama’s interventions in Libya were dumb. Our record of intervention is imperfect. No great power’s is perfect. Take Britain in the Suez and France in Algeria and Cambodia. But not even liberal superpowers are immune from making mistakes with tragic consequences. And our errors and blunders in Vietnam or Iraq are a small price to pay for guaranteeing democracy and free trade throughout the world since World War II.
So today especially in light of the antidemocratic threats we face now with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, and a newly empowered Taliban, and Al-Shabat terrorizing Africa, rising autocracies everywhere in Turkey and Hungary, who each individually and some of which that are joining forces against the liberal West—and in consideration of the infuriating growing populist reluctance to intervene—on this Memorial Day, I think we should contemplate the sacrifices of all our courageous American soldiers who didn’t hesitate to intervene to secure our rarified almost unhistorical liberal values.
So contemplate all the men who died on Normandy Beach, in France, and in Okinawa, and in Pearl Harbor, Korea and Vietnam. Think of our soldiers Biden failed to extract in Afghanistan before horribly, stupidly withdrawing. Think of your local veterans wearing “Vietnam,” “Korea” and “World War II” and “Marines” and “Navy” baseball caps, and be grateful not only to these aging heroes, but all the ones who didn’t make it, who died and were lost to history. Think of all our soldiers right now in the Pacific bolstering deterrence in the Phillippines and Guam, Japan and South Korea. Think of our soldiers in Somalia fighting Al Qaeda. Think of our soldiers in Syria defending against an ISIS resurgence, and in Iraq defending against the possibility of an Iranian invasion. And those arming and training Ukrainean troops in Europe.
Keep in mind that America, whatever populist opportunists like Donald Trump, cranks like Rfk Jr, and crackpots like Jordan Peterson, virtue-signalling narcissistic progressive liberals and attention-seeking firebrands and anarchists like Noam Chomsky, say— America is still a superpower, and superpowers don’t retreat from the debt they owe their citizens and the world to protect the liberal order from autocrats in whose interest it is always to undermine and destroy.
Think about the heroic fallen who died so that Nazi Germany, communism, and global terrorism would be defeated—our soldiers the majority of whom wouldn’t have questioned the necessity to arm Ukraine at 0.01% of GDP.
We owe the dead our self-confidence as a global power at least.
— Jay