Pursuing a master’s degree in international relations from the University of North Georgia over the past few years, no single analyst made as much consistent sense, to me at least, as the de facto king of the so-called “offensive realist” school — the premise of which is that states in the anarchic international system seek to maximize their relative power through aggression as a means of self-preservation — John Mearsheimer.
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Offensive realism has been vindicated in the past thirty years or so (since the collapse of the Soviet Union) as the fictions and false promises of liberalism/neoliberalism — the main ideological rival of realism in international relations — have collapsed, chief among them that alleged liberal democracies do not instigate wars.
The United States, the preeminent “liberal democracy” on the global stage and leader of the liberal world order, has launched multiple wars of choice in the post-9/11 world — despite the predictions of scholars that, in a post-Soviet world, global harmony with such a governing system as the only remaining superpower would usher in an age of global peace and prosperity.
The war machine that the military-industrial complex constructed since the end of the Second World War, it turns out, was far too profitable and alluring to just let go simply because there was no longer any rival power after the Soviet Union’s implosion — and so it was repurposed again and again, first in the earliest part of the 21st century, first to target Islamic terrorism and now, finally, aimed at the American people themselves.
Mearsheimer explains:
It’s very important to understand that, starting in the late 19th, early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we developed, and this was true of all Western countries, a very powerful central state that could run the country. And over time that state has grown in power, and since World War II, the United States, as you all know, has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world fighting wars here, there, and everywhere, and to do that you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But, in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level bureaucrats, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence community, you name it, and they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy… Remember, when the Cold War ends, we have no rival great power left, so what are we going to do with all this power that we have? What we decide to do is go out and remake the world in our own image.
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Around the era that that Tea Party took to the national scene, the massive, sprawling, often high secretive security state had the tools but needed something to use them on; increasingly out-of-touch permanent Washington had the motivation to suppress growing internal popular dissent; the weaponization of the war machine against the domestic population, it seems in retrospect, was perhaps inevitable.
Continuing with Mearsheimer:
Do you think that we can run around the world imposing liberal democracy on other countries and, in some cases, shoving it down their throat, doing it at the end of a rifle barrel? And my argument is that’s almost impossible to do, it almost always backfires, think Iraq, Afghanistan, so forth and so on, and secondly, you begin to erode liberalism in the United States because you fill the Deep State. And you want to understand that a lot of the complaints here about cracking down on freedom of speech and so forth and so on are related to the fact that we have this ambitious foreign policy. Those two things go together in very important ways.
And so, just as Mearsheimer describes, you get spooks like John Brennan, rebranded as a contributor for MSNBC, openly talking about war with the American people.
[The Biden intelligence services] are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas…
It brings together an unholy alliance, frequently, of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians. And unfortunately I think there’s been this momentum that’s been generated as a result of unfortunately the demagogic rhetoric of people that’s just departed government, but also those who continue in the halls of Congress and so I really do think that the law enforcement, Homeland Security, intelligence, and even the defense officials are doing everything possible to root out what seems to be a very very serious and insidious threat to our democracy and our republic.
