America’s Last Crusade
For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War.
It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.
From the fall of Berlin in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that Cold War was waged by two generations, and with its end Americans faced a fundamental question:
If the historic struggle between communism and freedom is over, if the Soviet Empire and Soviet Union no longer exist, if the Russians wish to befriend us and the Maoists have taken the capitalist road, what is our new mission in the world? What do we do now?
The debate was suspended when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. George H.W. Bush assembled a mighty coalition and won a war that required but 100 hours of ground combat.
We had found our mission.
The United States was the last superpower and a triumphant Bush declared that we would build the "New World Order." Neoconservatives rhapsodized over America's "unipolar moment" and coming "global hegemony."
But Americans were unpersuaded and uninspired. They rejected the victor of Desert Storm—for Bill Clinton. By Y2K, the Republican Party was backing another Bush who was promising a "more humble" America.
Came then 9/11 and the midlife conversion of George W. to Wilsonian interventionism. After the rout of the Taliban in December 2001, Bush decided to remake Afghanistan in the image of Iowa and to go crusading against an axis of evil. In his second inaugural, he declared that America's mission was to "end tyranny in our world."
The world declined to oblige. By the end of 2006, the Taliban were back and America seemed in an endless war in Iraq. Republicans had lost Congress and Bush's democracy crusade was producing electoral victories for Hamas and Hezbollah.
In November 2008, the crusaders were sent packing.
Came then Barack Obama. With the "Arab Spring" beginning in 2010, with dictators being toppled in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria, Obama embraced the movement as his own.
But Obama received a rude awakening. As the Arab dictators began, one by one, to fall, also unleashed and now surging and spreading through the lands they had ruled were the four horsemen of the Arab apocalypse: tribalism, ethno-nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism. So we come to an elementary question:
If the Islamic world is so suffused with rage and hatred of us—for our wars, occupations, drone attacks, support of Israel, decadent culture, and tolerance of insults to Islam and the Prophet—why should we call for free elections, when the people will use those elections to vote into power rulers hostile to the United States?
If the probable or inevitable result of dethroning dictator-allies is to raise to power Islamist enemies, why help dethrone the dictators?
During the Cold War, the United States took its friends where it found them. If they were willing to cast their lot with us, from the Shah to Gen. Pinochet, we welcomed them. Democratic dissidents like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Olof Palme in Sweden got the back of our hand.
During the Cold War and World War II, the critical question was not whether you came to power through free elections—after all, Adolf Hitler did that—but are you with us or against us?
Ideology, as Russell Kirk admonished us, is political religion, and democracy worship is a form of idolatry, the worshiping of a false god, a golden calf, an idol.
And—while this may border on a hate crime—some countries are unfit for democracy. As Edmund Burke remonstrated: "It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
With hatred of America rampant across the Arab and Islamic world, we face anew a defining moment. What now is our mission in the world? What now should be the great goal of U.S. foreign policy?
What global objective should we pursue with our trillion-dollar defense, intel and foreign aid budgets, and pervasive diplomatic and military presence on every continent and in most countries of the world? Bush I's New World Order is history, given our strategic decline and the resistance of Russia, China and the Islamic world.
Bush II's democracy crusade and Obama's embrace of the Arab Spring have unleashed and empowered forces less receptive to America's wishes and will than the despots and dictators deposed with our approval.
All three visions proved to be illusions. With America headed for bankruptcy, with new debt of $1 trillion piled up each year, perhaps John Quincy Adams' counsel may commend itself to a country weary from a century of crusades.
"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
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Entries(RSS)
I am afraid that the quote from Edmund Burke perhaps applies to us.
Don't even bother to say "perhaps."
perhaps you are right, Father
Pat,
We should begin the last crusade like the first, by speaking the truth.
Here is a note I recieved recently from a working chap who sent his son to West Point and is a Chronicles sympathiser:
"It's kind of hazardous trying to psychoanalyze at long distance. There's this matter of the electoral college. For most of us (except in a few states) the vote is fore ordained. Kansas will go Republican as it has since its beginning in 1861. So for me a vote for Obama is a vote for Romney. A vote for the constitution party is a vote for Romney. A vote for Liberace is a vote for Romney. So for me and for most people in this country witholding a vote from Romney is not a vote for Obama. Now I could get out there and sell a tea party candidate to enough Kansans to displace Romney but I've got a job and other better things to do. Thank God, so do most other people.
The question for me is what about the day after the election? If we keep electing weak tea Republicans because they're marginally better than the Democrat then we will continue to slide down the Bush-Dole-Bush-McCain-Romney decline. Yes Obama wants to crash the republic but the GOP seems to want to euthanize it.
I won't tolerate the jive about the GOP and pro-life issues. In what universe is it acceptable to defend babies moderately and with marginal improvements?
I usually avoid talking politics around the Republican enthusiasts after Mass. I have a son in Afghanistan who is there on a Bush-Obama nation building exercise which so far has claimed 51 US soldiers and some Australian, French and British soldiers this year. I keep my phone charged so I can get the call which will come when he's dead. The Republicans ought to go to hell. And that is coming from someone who believes there is a hell."
Carrying water for the wounded is a corporal work of mercy. Carrying water for the duopoly is nothing --- Nothing at all.
I suggest that U.S. political, economic and military interventions in North Africa and the Middle East have been anti-crusades; for they have undermined, marginalized and even destroyed the last vestiges of Western civilization and of our Lord's Church in the regions. Our waning strongholds are caught in a vice between Islam and the militant secularism of Modernity. Bosnia and Kosovo were merely the preludes.
Bosnia and Kosovo were merely the preludes.
Oh, I'd say Bosnia and Kosovo were the grand début. The preludes were the Spanish-American War and the First World War. (One could even go further back, depending on one's perspectives.)
Mr. Nicholas,
I agree with you. The Hobbesian state consolidated itself in American in its nationalist guise in that war which ended in 1865, as Bismark would do in Germany and Garibaldi and his allies would do in Italy. I was, however, referring in particular to the crushing vice of Islam and the secular West in its modern idiom, realizing that French and British crowns had placed themselves as allies of Islam against the Pope and the Emperor in the 16th century. The Hobbesian state is now dropping its nationalist guise and baring its globalist face.
Patrick J. Buchanan: an enduring sane voice.
One could persuasively argue that since the end of the Cold War, we have seen some factors in our political economy thrive: Government, especially Washington DC; our world-wide military-industrial complex; Wall Street; our newest quasi-governmental institution, illegal immigration; the educracy. They all thrive on some combination of taxpayer, printed, or borrowed money and there isn't a .210 hitter in the bunch. Then there is the entertainment behemoth, consisting of major media, hollywood, sports, and handheld phones and screens. The less said about it, the better.
The notion that all of this is somehow threatened by Islam in the same way that it might have been threatened by the Soviet Union is absurd. There were reasons we had missile siloes in South Dakota and boomers in the Baltic during the cold war. The War on Terror, whatever that is, is another story and anyone who feels threatened in Yankton by Islam could use therapy.
On the other hand, anyone feeling threatened by all the rest of the good homeland stuff that is allegedly what needs the safekeeping might well provide the therapy.
Now what might we expect from the upcoming election? Putting aside the talk and examining the respective candidates' walks, it doesn't look promising for anything good, noble, new or even reasonable; more dreary decline where there has been decline, more growth where there has been growth, until the unexpected happens, which it will.
Dr Peters - I get what you were referring to, and I suppose the question is merely one of nuance, as I see the Spanish-American War as the U.S.'s prelude to second-wave anti-colonialism, which culminated in the Muslims regaining the upper hand against Christians.
Is Pat Buchanan supporting Thurston Howell IV in this election by default or with enthusiasm?
L. Auster thinks that Buchanan “reveals the rottenness at the center of his being“, because he dares to say that the actions of the USA have something to do with the actions of the Muslims.
For what reasons the USA are in Muslim lands? 1. Oil. To grease the machine of growth by usury for some time more; 2. to defend the geopolitic interest of Israel and 3. to bring more than 1 billion Muslims into the world of mindless consumerism because the debt ridden vampire like economics of usury need fresh blood.
On the fringe of the Zionist propaganda machine some faux traditionalist are busy to keep people who are already disillusioned from neocon patriotism still in the tenet of modernity with its pillars of Israelphilia and Islamophobia. They do not seem to like Buchanan. Good for him.
It's hard to know what the GOP thinks because as Dr, Wilson once mentioned before, they don't like to tell the truth even when it is in their best interest. When Republicans say free market, they don't really mean a free market. They want all of the restrictions and subsidies that benefit their campaign contributors to stay in place. They want all of the laws that oppress the poor, grind their faces into the dust, to stay in place. As near as I can tell, the leaders of the Republican party are, with rare exceptions, a rare type of sadistic sociopaths. They were correct to throw Mr. Buchanan out a long time ago because if his heart was ever with them, it was in the wrong place. And if his heart was no longer with them? Well Lord Almighty, what if he broke rank? Uttered some unspeakable truth ?
He of course must continue to tote water for them as we all do, willingly or unwillingly. But when he rubs their sore spots, I sure get a kick out of it.
'Islamophobia' is propaganda lifted directly from the 3rd Reich, and is every bit the lie, whether peddled by the US government or the 3rd Reich.
The reality is that US borders are quite porous. Most Muslims *don't* hate us. If they did, it would be quite easy for them to get us.
The other reality is that the US has been propping up the PLO and hamas for years, has been replacing quasi-secular Muslim leaders with pious Islamists for years. Muslims have nothing to complain about.
The 'blame the Jews' thing has long been rendered quite absurd. It was absurd when the 3rd Reich was peddling this lie, or when modern day US intelligence personnel are peddling the same lie.