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u s imperialism
To Ensure Humanity’s Future, the US Must Forego Dominance for Peace
This country doesn’t need to be made great again, it needs to be made sane again by the rejection of wars and the weaponry that goes with them.
Sep 06, 2024
During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard. Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there. So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?
Israel, after all, couldn’t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000 Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry. Often, the U.S. doesn’t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills. Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas. Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank). That’s not “defense”—it’s the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation.
As Tacitus said of the rampaging Romans two millennia ago, so it can now be said of Israel: They create a desert—a black hole of death in Gaza—and call it “peace.” And the U.S. government enables it or, in the case of Congress, cheers on its ringleader, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
The militarized American god, however, says: Suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).
Of course, anyone who knows a little American history should have some knowledge of genocide. In the 17th century, Native Americans were often “satanized” by early colonial settlers. (In 1994, a friend of mine, the historian David Lovejoy, wrote a superb and all-too-aptly titled article on exactly that topic: “Satanizing the American Indian.”) Associating Indians with the devil made it all the easier for the white man to mistreat them, push them off their lands, and subjugate or eradicate them. When you satanize an enemy, turning them into something irredeemably evil, all crimes become defensible, rational, even justifiable. For how can you even consider negotiating or compromising with the minions of Satan?
Growing up, I was a strong supporter of Israel, seeing that state as an embattled David fighting against a Goliath, most notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Forty years later, I wrote an article suggesting that Israel was now the Goliath in the region with Palestinians in Gaza playing the role of a very much outgunned and persecuted David. An American-Jewish friend told me I just didn’t get it. The Palestinians in Gaza were all terrorists, latent or incipient ones in the case of the infants and babies there. At the time, I found this attitude uncommon and extreme, but events have proven it to be far too common (though it certainly remains extreme). Obviously, on some level, the U.S. government agrees that extremism in the pursuit of Israeli hegemony is no vice and so has provided Israel with the weaponry and military cover it needs to “exterminate all the brutes.” Thus, in 2024, the U.S. “cradle of democracy” reveals its very own heart of darkness.
Looking Again at the World Wars That Made America “Great”
When considering World Wars I and II, we tend to see them as discrete events rather than intimately connected. One was fought from 1914 to 1918, the other from 1939 to 1945. Americans are far more familiar with the Second World War than the First. From both wars this country emerged remarkably unscathed compared to places like France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan. Add to that the comforting myth that America’s “greatest generation” pretty much won World War II, thereby saving democracy (and “Saving Private Ryan” as well).
Perhaps, however, we should imagine those years of conflict, 1914-1945, as a European civil war (with an Asian wing thrown in the second time around), a new Thirty Years’ War played out on a world stage that led to the demise of Europe’s imperial powers and their Asian equivalent and the rise of the American empire as their replacement. Germanic militarism and nationalism were defeated but at an enormous cost, especially to Russia in World War I and the Soviet Union in World War II. Meanwhile, the American empire, unlike Germany’s Second and Third Reichs or Japan’s imperial power, truly became for a time an untrammeled world militarist hegemon with the inevitable corruption inherent in the urge for near-absolute power.
Vast levels of destruction visited upon this planet by two world wars left an opening for Washington to attempt to dominate everywhere. Hence, the roughly 750 overseas bases its military set up to ensure its ultimate global reach, not to speak of the powerful navy it created, centered on aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for possible global Armageddon, and an air force that saw open skies as an excuse for its own exercises in naked power projection. To this you could add, for a time, U.S. global economic and financial power, enhanced by a cultural dominance achieved through Hollywood, sports, music, and the like.
What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of American militarism and nationalism, making the world’s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.
Not, of course, that the United States emerged utterly unchallenged from World War II. Communism was the specter that haunted its leaders, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or Southeast Asia (where, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it would fight a disastrous losing war, the first of many to come, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Here, there, and everywhere, even under the very beds of Americans, there was a fear of the “commie rat.” And for a while, communism, in its Soviet form, did indeed threaten capitalism’s unbridled pursuit of profits, helping American officials to create a permanent domestic war state in the name of containing and rolling back that threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 erased that fear, but not the permanent war state that went with it, as Washington sought new enemies to justify a Pentagon budget that today is still rising toward the trillion-dollar mark. Naturally (and remarkably disastrously), it found them, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or so many other places in the case of the costly and ultimately futile Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
And eternally losing (or at least not winning) its wars raised the question: What will replace it? What will happen as imperial America continues to decline, burdened by colossal debt and strategic overreach, and crippled from within by a rapacious class of oligarchs who fancy themselves as a new all-American aristocracy? Will that decline lead to collapse or can its officials orchestrate a soft landing? In World Wars I and II, Europeans fought bitterly for world dominance, powered by militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed. They suffered accordingly and yet did recover even if as far less powerful nations. Can the U.S. manage to curb its own militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed in time and so recover similarly? And by “racism,” I mean, for example, reviving the idea (however put) of China as a “yellow peril,” or the tendency to see the darker-skinned peoples of the Middle East as violent “terrorists” and the latest minions of Satan.
And then, of course, there’s always the fear that, in the future, a world war could once again break out, raising the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons from global arsenals that are always being “modernized” and the possible end of most life on Earth. It’s an issue worth highlighting, since the U.S. continues to “invest” significant sums in producing yet more nuclear weapons, even as it ratchets up tensions with nuclear powers like Russia and China. Though a winnable nuclear war among the great powers on this planet is inconceivable, that hasn’t stopped my country from pushing for a version of nuclear superiority (disguised, of course, as “deterrence”).
Making America Sane Again
The world wars of the previous century facilitated America’s global dominance in virtually all its dimensions. That, in fact, was their legacy. No other nation in history had, without irony or humility, divided the globe into military combatant commands like AFRICOM for Africa, CENTCOM for the Middle East, and NORTHCOM here at home. There are also “global” commands for strategic nuclear weapons, cyber dominance, and even the dominance of space. It seemed that the only way America could be “safe” was by dominating everything everywhere all at once. That insane ambition, that vainglory, was truly what made the U.S. the “exceptional” nation on the world stage.
Such a boundless pursuit of dominance, absurdly disguised as benefiting democracy, is now visibly fraying at the seams and may soon come apart entirely. In 2024, it’s beyond obvious that the United States no longer dominates the world, even if its military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) does indeed dominate its national (in)security state and so increasingly the country. What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of American militarism and nationalism, making the world’s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.
Think, in fact, of the U.S. emerging from World War II with what might be thought of as victory disease. The last nearly 80 years of its foreign policy witnessed the remarkable progression of that “disease,” despite a lack of actual victories (unless you count minor escapades like the invasion of Grenada). Put differently, the U.S. emerged from World War II so singularly an economic, financial, and cultural juggernaut that subsequent military defeats almost didn’t seem to matter.
When we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the American empire toward an early grave.
Even as America’s economic, financial, and cultural power has waned in this century, along with its moral position (consider President Obama’s curt “We tortured some folks” admission, along with support for Israel’s ongoing genocide), the government does continue to double-down on military spending. Pentagon budgets and related “national security” costs now significantly exceed $1 trillion annually even as arms shipments and sales continue to surge. War, in other words, has become big business in America or, as General Smedley Butler so memorably put it 90 years ago, a first-class “racket.”
Worse yet, war, however prolonged and even celebrated, may be the very definition of insanity, a deadly poison to democracy. Don’t tell that to the MICC and all its straphangers and camp followers, though.
Ironically, the two countries, Germany and Japan, that the U.S. took credit for utterly defeating in World War II, forcing their unconditional surrender, have over time emerged in far better shape. Neither of them is perfect, mind you, but they largely have been able to avoid the militarism, nationalism, and constant warmongering that so infects and weakens American-style democracy today. Whatever else you can say about Germany and Japan in 2024, neither of them is bent in any fashion on either regional or global domination, nor are their leaders bragging of having the finest military in all human history. American presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have indeed bragged about having a matchless, peerless, “finest” military. The Germans and Japanese, having known the bitter price of such boasts, have kept their mouths shut.
My brother has a saying: no brag, just facts. And when we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the American empire toward an early grave. The “finest” military lost disastrously, of course, in Vietnam in the last century, and in Afghanistan and Iraq in this one. It functionally lost its self-proclaimed Global War on Terror and it keeps losing in its febrile quest for superiority everywhere.
If we met a person dressed in a military uniform who insisted he was Napoleon, boasted that his Imperial Guard was the world’s best, and that he could rule the world, we would, of course, question his sanity. Why are we not questioning the collective sanity of America’s military and foreign-policy elites?
This country doesn’t need to be made great again, it needs to be made sane again by the rejection of wars and the weaponry that goes with them. For if we continue to follow our present pathway, MADness could truly lie in wait for us, as in the classic nuclear weapons phrase, mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Another form of madness is having a president routinely implore God—yes, no one else!—to protect our troops. This is not a knock on Joe Biden alone. He’s just professing a nationalist piety that’s designed to win applause and votes. Assuming Biden has the Christian God in mind, consider the irony, not to say heresy, of functionally begging Christ, the Prince of Peace, to protect those who are already armed to the teeth. It’s also an abdication of the commander-in-chief’s responsibility to support and defend the U.S. Constitution while protecting those troops himself. Who has the biggest impact, God or the president, when it comes to ensuring that troops aren’t sent into harm’s way without a justifiable cause supported by the American people through a Congressional declaration of war?
Consider the repeated act of looking skyward to God to support military actions as a major league cop-out. But that’s what U.S. presidents routinely do now. Such is the pernicious price of pursuing a vision that insists on global reach, global power, and global dominance. America’s leaders have, in essence, elevated themselves to a god-like position, a distinctly angry, jealous, and capricious one, far more like Zeus or Ares than Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, he is alleged to have said, “Suffer the children to come unto me.” The militarized American god, however, says: Suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).
To echo a popular ad campaign, Jesus may “get” us, but our leaders (self-avowed Christians, all) sure as hell don’t get him. I may be a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing one like Joe Biden, but even I remember my catechism and a certain commandment that Thou shalt not kill.
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Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire?
Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Sep 06, 2024
The Associated Pressreports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.
That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”
A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”
U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.
Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic sanctions.
Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.
In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”
Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.
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Who Is Kamala Harris? Aggressive Foreign and Military Policies
As she accepted the Democratic nomination, Harris promised to maintain the world’s “most lethal” military and ensure that “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21st century.”
Sep 01, 2024
It wasn’t until the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention that pandering to military power took the stage. Until then, conventioneers were insulated from possible second thoughts they might have had about the party’s role in the constructing, maintaining, and expanding of what is in truth an Empire.
The run up to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech included tough talk from former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who celebrated America’s “warriors,” and by a parade of members of Congress who have served in the military: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. With the exception of celebrating the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, there were no references to those wars, nor to the president’s role as “nuclear monarch” with the sole authority to launch an omnicidal nuclear war. References to what former President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially termed the military-industrial-congressional complex and the party’s integration with it were missing in action. So too were any references to the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe or President Joe Biden’s recent insistence that Chancellor Olaf Sholtz accept deployment of U.S. dual capable tomahawk intermediate range missiles in Germany capable of reaching western Russia.
But, as the conservative journalist David Brooks observed, Harris concluded her rousing acceptance speech with “an aggressive picture of America in the world.” She built on her commitment to maintain the world’s “most lethal” military, with the promise to lead in the space and artificial intelligence arms races, and promised that “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21st century,” a euphemistic reference to the struggle for hegemony. Echoing the Biden paradigm and the commitment to new Cold Wars, and omitting embarrassing references to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and more than a few other U.S. allies, she told her audiences that she knew where she and the country stand in the “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny.”
Seeking to prevent an election shattering of the Democratic Party’s coalition, Kamala Harris has attempted to have it both ways on the Gaza genocide.
Harris came to the Senate in 2017 with little foreign policy knowledge or experience, but contrary to former President Donald Trump’s accusations, she is anything but a foreign and military policy ingenue. The Biden White House downplayed her foreign and military policy roles, but once she emerged as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, it was reported that she participated in nearly every Biden-era National Security Council meeting, where U.S. foreign and military policies are made. Similarly, she has been involved in almost every one of the President’s Daily Briefs, the intelligence community’s daily super-secret briefings about threats, developments, and opportunities around the world. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, said that Harris came to the intelligence briefings as the “best prepared, ready with questions, having already reviewed the written intelligence and ready to help ask hard questions.” The journalist Fred Kaplan put it differently: her presence in these briefings “exposed her to more information… than any newly elected president has ever had, coming into office, in more than a century.” As vice president, she visited 21 nations on 17 foreign trips and met with more than 150 foreign leaders. In three of the past four years, she led the U.S delegation to the Munich Security Conference.
We should expect Harris to hew to the trajectory of Biden’s foreign and military policies. Along her way, she has recruited a cadre of traditional national security advisers. As vice president, her first national security adviser was Nancy McEldowney, a career U.S. diplomat and former director of the Foreign Service Institute. McEldowney was succeeded by Philip Gordon, Harris’ current and very influential foreign policy adviser, who served on former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and as an Obama European and Middle East specialist. Gordon’s deputy has been Rebecca Lissner, formerly of the Naval War College and the woman who oversaw the development of the Biden National Security Strategy. Recall that the strategy declares that the post-Cold War era is over, that the struggle with China—Washington’s only peer competitor—to shape what follows is under way. And it reiterated the United States’ commitment to its first-strike nuclear arsenal and warfighting doctrine.
According to a Wall Street Journal report that Harris blames National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to contain Israel in Gaza, Gordon will likely be appointed to succeed Sullivan. Gordon was a career diplomat who is seen as a “pragmatic internationalist” rather than a progressive. He served as former President Barack Obama’s first assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and later as his special assistant to the president and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region.
Gordon’s decisive worldview reorientation reportedly came in response to former President George W. Bush’s regime change war in Iraq, which led him to understand that the U.S. is not always a force for good or on the right side of history. Bush’s wars, he understood, left that country shattered and squandered the United States’ reputation and legitimacy. As a review of the books written by Gordon explains, he believes that “the institutions of U.S. power are not in themselves wrong; it is the people who run them who make them fall short of their promise.” Staff them with better leaders he argues, and the U.S. can play its historical role as a “catalyst for democracy.” Recognizing that regime change doesn’t work, the U.S. he argues must act judiciously with the means consistent with the ends.
Gordon is seen as a Europeanist and as the E.U.’s man in Washington. Norbert Rottgen, a Christian Democratic German parliamentarian, has commented that Gordon believes that “European security is the cornerstone of U.S. global power,” and he is probably correct. Gordon has been a hardliner opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and criticized Sholz for resisting pressure to send German long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. But Gordon can be a subtle strategist, as demonstrated in his not being threatened by calls for a more autonomous Europe and his belief that a strong Europe is in the United States’ interest.
“Europeanist” though he may be, Camille Grand, the former NATO assistant secretary general, tells us that Gordon recognizes that Europe is “no longer the alpha and omega of American’s foreign policy.” There is of course China, the new “alpha and omega” of U.S. foreign, military, and economic policies, and with the exception of his deputy Linsser’s China containment work on the Biden National Security Strategy, Gordon’s fingerprints on Harris’ approach are hard to find.
Consistent with Biden, Trump, and the etiquette of U.S. political discourse, in Harris’ acceptance speech there were no references to U.S. imperial wars, coups, or provocative shows of force with which Washington won its Indo-Pacific Empir
Seeking to prevent an election shattering of the Democratic Party’s coalition, Kamala Harris has attempted to have it both ways on the Gaza genocide. In her acceptance speech, she honored the growing Democratic majority who have been outraged by Israel’s indiscriminate and devastating destruction of Gaza and its people. Possibly speaking from her heart, Harris reiterated the call for a cease-fire and stated that “what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating…The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” She then stated her ostensible commitment to the Palestinians’ ability to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination” and to the long disregarded and fading possibility of a two-state solution.
But, like Biden, the leverage she pledged to exercise was to enhance Israel’s military power, not to achieve a cease-fire. As she said, “Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Like Biden, her campaign has been clear in refusing to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist partners by withholding shipment of bombs and other weapons to Israel. And, as the Israeli leader’s campaign of assassinations in Iran and Lebanon have taken us to the brink of regional war, Harris pledged “to defend our forces,” who for reasons she didn’t dare to state find themselves deployed across southwest Asia, “and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”
Harris has been a hawk on Ukraine in its war of resistance against Russia, providing Kyiv “full-throated support.” We should expect her to continue unwavering support for NATO and U.S. dominion over Europe. In introducing herself in Chicago, she boasted that “Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade. I helped mobilize a global response—over 50 countries—to defend against Putin’s aggression. And as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”
Largely unknown prior to the convention was that in February 2022, when the U.S. intelligence community first reported that Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine was imminent, Harris pressed for the super-secret intelligence to be shared with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was Harris who was then dispatched to meet with Zelensky in Kyiv to share the detailed intelligence and Washington’s perceptions of his options. She has since met Zelensky five times.
There has been no daylight between Harris and Biden in their support for Zelensky’s “peace diplomacy” that unrealistically demands return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. (Worth noting is the Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko’s assertion that, before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, most Ukrainians were willing to be done with turmoil in the eastern 20% of Ukraine and accept its succession to Russia.) There has been no indication that in future negotiations Harris would accept a neutral Ukraine with credible security guarantees or to putting the questions of Crimean, Donetsk, and Luhansk sovereignty to fair referenda or onto the diplomatic shelf for later resolution.
And, like Biden, at Munich Security Conferences Harris has preached that the “backbone” of preservation of Western principles and security is NATO—“the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen.”
Amid growing international demands to cut military spending by at least 10%, there has been no hint of Harris objecting to Biden’s massive military spending increases.
Consistent with Biden, Trump, and the etiquette of U.S. political discourse, in Harris’ acceptance speech there were no references to U.S. imperial wars, coups, or provocative shows of force with which Washington won its Indo-Pacific Empire, nor to the region spanning Biden-Harris lattice-like network of tripartite and bilateral U.S alliances, nor to global NATO’s new roles in the campaign to contain China.
In her acceptance speech, Harris mentioned China only once, and then only in relationship to the contest for supremacy in space and AI. These, not incidentally, are at the defining edges of 21st-century military power. Elsewhere Harris has been critical of Beijing’s repression of human rights and warned about the Chinese “threat” to U.S. interests and to Washington’s allies in the Asia-Pacific. Following China’s simulated blockade of Taiwan in response to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) counterproductive and unwanted 2022 trip to Taiwan, Harris also traveled to Asia. There, in meetings with allies and some of the 55,000 U.S. troops based in Japan, she reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to deter China. She has not been shy in condemning China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea where it seeks to challenge the Seventh Fleet’s dominance in what has been an America Lake since the end of the Pacific War. And as Beijing has encroached on what are obviously Philippine territorial waters, she has played a key role in facilitating Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s (the former dictator’s son) reaffirmation and deepening of the U.S.-Philippines alliance after his predecessor’s flirtations with China.
Assuming that her audiences either don’t know or disregard the past and present practice of U.S. imperialism, Harris asserts that she is committed to the misnamed “rules-based order” and to a “free and open Indo-Pacific” to ensure stability and commerce. She warns that Beijing is unique as it “continues to coerce, to intimidate, and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea.” Rather than pursue common security solutions to the dilemmas presented by Taiwan, she repeats Washington’s unofficial commitment to defend Taiwan, including the Pentagon’s first-strike doctrine which serves as the foundation of that commitment.
In these regards we have to hope that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be more than wallpaper as vice president and that he finds ways to influence a Harris administration with his understanding that the storied China threat is “hyperbole” and the need to build on the two powers’ shared interests.
Amid growing international demands to cut military spending by at least 10%, there has been no hint of Harris objecting to Biden’s massive military spending increases. That said, if she is elected, we should not expect her to match Trump’s call for gargantuan increases in Pentagon spending.
What else might we expect from Kamala Harris if she prevails between now and November 5? Given that Africa is projected to have a quarter of the world’s population by 2050, and the markets for goods and services that go with that, as well as its stores of commercially essential natural resources, a Harris administration will likely pay greater attention to U.S. relations with the African continent than we have seen in recent years. Similarly, given her Caribbean roots, its resources, markets, and most of all its Monroe Doctrine geopolitical relationship to the United States, greater attention will likely also be paid to Latin America.
All of which brings us back to where we began. Harris remains the uncertain bastion in the struggle to defend constitutional democracy. The outcome of the election cannot be accurately predicted, and we have been sobered by the reminder that only once has a sitting vice president prevailed in an election. Between now and then Harris will be pressed to become more forthcoming about her policy commitments and how they can be achieved. Unless the Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress, and with right-wing extremist control of the Supreme Court, only minimal progress will be made on the Harris-Walz domestic agenda. And as Harris or Trump aggressively challenge the world, each in her or his unique ways, our work to end and prevent catastrophe remains ahead of us.
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