Washington will lose the ability to project its power not only directly across the world but indirectly through Third World client states, particularly those in Latin America.  With no existing power—not Russia, China, India, Japan, or the European Union—capable of adequately replacing U.S. political, military, and economic assistance to sustain the governments of such states, an opportunity may emerge for indigenous nations in Mexico and Central America to regain their political independence.

The American Empire, however, is still formidable and will resist this as long as possible.

The U.S. government has approximately 6,000 military bases and/or warehouses located within U.S. territory, and another 737 military bases in 63 countries.  Unofficially, the number of overseas bases is thought to exceed 1,000.  This gives the U.S. Defense Department control of a vast extent of territory—over 30 million acres of land worldwide conservatively valued at $658.1 billion.  Its manpower consists of 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, another 1.1 million in the National Guard and Reserves, 718,000 civil-service personnel, and approximately 200,000 local hires.  Over 450,000 military personnel, their dependents, and Defense Department civilian officials are stationed in 156 countries.  Often, they are exempt from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by immunity agreements negotiated by Washington with host governments.

As Chalmers Johnson noted in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets—almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898.  The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD [sic] required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia.  Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

Washington’s drive for empire can be seen in its partition of the world into six regional Unified Combatant Commands for more effective management: Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Pacific Command, Northern Command, and Southern Command.  It is the Southern Command that will be the principal arena of conflict as Washington seeks to maintain its empire.  The purpose of this command is to continue a foreign policy toward Mexico and Central America established in the 19th century.  The objective is to suppress indigenous nations and ensure that political and economic power in these colonial-settler republics remains in the hands of Spanish speakers.

Washington has often intervened to enlarge, not just preserve, these Spanish-speaking client states by assisting them in dispossessing indigenous nations.  In some cases, these indigenous nations constituted the majority population.  What unites American and Hispanic imperialisms are two beliefs: Indigenous cultures are incapable of economic development as defined by the West; and economic growth, therefore, requires that the nonindigenous rule the indigenous.  Four examples of this phenomenon of symbiotic imperialisms are the Miskito Kingdom (1850), Yucatán (1901), Kuna Indians (1925), and Guatemala (1953-present).

In the cases of the Miskito Kingdom and the Yucatán, U.S. foreign policy supported Hispanic states invading and annexing de jure or de facto independent indigenous states.  On the 1840 map of Central America by Heinrich Berghaus, the page titled Die Vulkanreihe von Guatemala, die Landengen von Tehuantepec, Nicaragua und Panama, und die Central Vulkane der Sud See shows the Miskito Kingdom encompassed significant territory.  It was larger than either Nicaragua or Honduras.  The de facto independent Mayan states of the Yucatán do not appear on the map because they did not achieve independence until the Caste War of 1847.  However, the map does show British Honduras, now Belize, to be larger than her current territorial size.

With the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of April 19, 1850, between Washington and London, the United States, the weaker power with no territorial possessions in the Caribbean, sought to advance her growing economic and political interests by ensuring that a proposed interoceanic canal across Nicaragua was not controlled by the British.  Since any canal had to pass through the Miskito Kingdom, a British protectorate, Washington’s objective was to abolish that political entity.  This conformed to overall U.S. foreign policy, which was anti-British and engaged in sabre-rattling as it sought to reduce, if not replace, London’s influence in the Western Hemisphere whenever possible.  In 1848, Washington, which disputed the legitimacy of London’s protectorate over the Miskito Kingdom, went to the brink of war with the British over the Miskito Kingdom’s control of the port of Greytown.  Later, the U.S. government was able to exploit the advantages obtained in its treaties with Nicaragua and Honduras to persuade London to have the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty include the “neutralization” of the Miskito Kingdom.

This was set forth in Article I:

The governments of the United States and Great Britain hereby declare, that neither the one nor the other will ever obtain or maintain for itself any exclusive control over the said ship canal; agreeing that neither will ever erect or maintain any fortifications commanding the same or in the vicinity thereof, or occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito coast [the Miskito Kingdom], or any part of Central America . . .

Depriving the Miskito Kingdom of British legal and military protection was a first step in its eventual partition and annexation by Nicaragua and Honduras.  The next step came on January 28, 1860, when the Miskito Kingdom’s independence was terminated by a British-Nicaraguan treaty whereby it became part of Nicaragua, but with broad autonomy.  The end came on November 20, 1894, when Nicaragua abolished that autonomy and officially annexed the Miskito Kingdom.  In 1960, the International Court of Justice awarded the northern part of the Miskito Kingdom to Honduras.  That land forms much of the Honduran province of Gracias a Dios.  During the Nicaraguan civil war of the 1980’s, Washington exploited Miskito, Sumo, and Rama grievances against the ruling Marxist Sandinistas for propaganda purposes but opposed any restoration of an independent Miskito Kingdom.  Yet it supported the restoration of the independence of other countries from Marxist rule: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the Soviet Union; Slovakia from Czechoslovakia; and Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia.

The Maya of the Yucatán achieved de facto independence in the Caste War of 1847.  As a result of a Maya uprising, Spanish-speaking colonists in the Yucatán, who had earlier declared independence from Mexico, abandoned most of the peninsula and fled to the safety of the cities of Mérida and Campeche along the Gulf of Mexico.  With the $15 million it received from the government of the United States as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War, the government of Mexico rearmed and, in 1848-50, attempted to reannex the Yucatán.  It succeeded in securing only the west coast of the peninsula.  The rest of the Yucatán remained in the hands of independent Mayan states, the largest being Chan Santa Cruz, whose de facto independence was recognized by London.

By 1893, tensions with Washington over Alaska’s boundary with Canada, U.S. sympathy for republican rebellions in Canada, and attempted invasions of Canada from U.S. territory by Irish nationalists led London to seek to counter U.S. interference in Canadian affairs by improving British ties with Mexico.  To do that, London abandoned the Maya, signing a treaty that recognized Mexico’s claim to the Yucatán.  Mexico invaded Chan Santa Cruz in 1901, but did not gain complete control of the Mayan Yucatán until 1915.  Throughout the 20th century, Washington supported Mexico’s claim to the Yucatán and opposed political movements in Mexico it perceived to be pro-indigenous, such as the Zapatistas in neighboring Chiapas.

In the cases of Panama and Guatemala, no de jure or de facto independent indigenous states existed to obstruct U.S. political and economic interests.  On the contrary, Washington intervened specifically to prevent the possible emergence of any such independent indigenous states.  It intervened in Panama to prevent secession by the Kuna Indians, and in Guatemala to prevent decolonization and any emergence of an indigenous Mayan state.

In 1925, the Kuna seceded from Panama, declaring their independence as the Republic of Tule.  Since Panama is a country Washington created in 1903 so it could build, own, and operate the Panama Canal, and the Republic of Tule bordered the strategically important Canal Zone, the U.S. government intervened and suppressed Kuna independence.  Washington facilitated a compromise whereby the Kuna would possess political and cultural autonomy within Panama.  Following the Roman adage “divide et impera,” the Kuna were divided into three comarcas, or indigenous regions.  Kuna Yala has provincial status, while each of the other two comarcas, Kuna de Madugandí and Kuna de Wargandí, have subprovincial status.  As a means of “legally” dispossessing an indigenous people, these comarcas bear a resemblance to the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa.  In April 2003, the government of Panama, with the apparent approval of Washington, rejected a Kuna petition requesting their three adjoining comarcas be unified into one.

In 1954, Washington accused the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán of Guatemala of being pro-communist and a “Soviet beachhead” for, among other reasons, expropriating 400,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by the United Fruit Company, a major U.S. corporation.  The Árbenz government offered compensation.  It would pay the United Fruit Company the same amount for the land that the company had publicly declared the real estate was worth on its corporate taxes.  The U.S. State Department demanded that United Fruit be paid millions of dollars more.  When the Guatemalan government refused, the CIA staged a successful military coup that overthrew President Árbenz.

The oddity is that the political left in Guatemala, as represented by Árbenz, is just as dedicated to preserving Guatemala as an Hispanic colonial-settler republic, and preventing decolonization and Mayan majority rule, as is the political right in Guatemala.  The overthrow of Árbenz unleashed a half-century of political instability, military coups, civil wars, and genocide against the majority Mayan population.  During the 1970’s and 80’s, various Guatemalan regimes pursued a race war against the indigenous population, attempting to eradicate all traces of Mayan identity from Guatemala—language, culture, religion, and symbols.  Even Spanish words for Indian were officially outlawed.  It has been estimated by the Guatemala Commission for Historical Clarification that during those decades 200,000 Maya were killed, and another 250,000 were made refugees.  These figures may be conservative.  Guatemala embodies the adage “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”  The 1996 Peace Accord replaced military regimes with civilian governments that continue to represent the interests of the same constituency, the Spanish-speaking minority.  The Maya endure, but remain, as American and Hispanic politicians desire, a dispossessed majority.  They are, in the lexicon of the former Soviet Union, an “unpeople.”

Modern empires are ephemeral, if for no other reason than they are financially unsustainable.  The American Empire is no exception.  Financially, militarily, politically, and psychologically, it is at the breaking point.  Soon it will be unable to preserve the territorial integrity of its client states.  And as the Southern Command unravels, world maps may have to be redrawn, yet again, to include the Miskito Kingdom, Chan Santa Cruz, and the Republic of Tule.

Joseph E. Fallon writes from Rye, New York.

This article first appeared in the June 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.

Congressman Lincoln addressed the subject of the Mexican-American War in three major speeches: on his “Spot Resolutions” (December 22, 1847), on war with Mexico (January 12, 1848), and on the “presidential question” (July 27, 1848).  But his most insightful analysis of why the Constitution assigned the power to declare war to Congress, and Congress alone, was given in his letter of February 15, 1848, to his friend and law partner William H. Herndon.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever, he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons.  Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.  This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

In another letter to Herndon, dated February 1, 1848, Representative Lincoln had written about his opposition to the Mexican-American War:

That vote affirms that the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President; and I will stake my life, that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did . . . Richardson’s resolutions, introduced before I made any move, or gave any vote upon the subject, make the direct question of the justice of the war; so that no man can be silent if he would.  You are compelled to speak; and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie.

These words could be mistaken for those of another antiwar congressman, Clement L. Vallandigham, whom President Lincoln would arrest and deport.  On May 1, 1863, Vallandigham delivered a speech at Mount Vernon, Ohio, denouncing President Lincoln’s war as

a wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war . . . a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union . . . a war for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism . . . the sooner the people inform the minions of usurped power that they will not submit to such restrictions upon their liberties the better . . .

Representative Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions (which the House ignored and did not adopt) urged Congress to ask that the President answer his eight questions regarding the legitimacy of the war.  The fifth asked

Whether the People of that settlement, or a majority of them, or any of them, had ever, previous to the bloodshed . . . submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, or of the United States by consent, or by compulsion . . .

The sixth inquired “Whether the People of that settlement, did, or did not, flee from the approach of the United States Army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops . . . ”  These two, in particular, expressed Lincoln’s moral outrage at the apparent violation of civilians’ democratic rights and the safety of their persons and property—an outrage Lincoln would abandon while conducting his own war.

Lincoln’s most important antiwar speech, on war with Mexico, was more partisan, attacking the motivation and emotional stability of President James K. Polk.  It alienated his constituents back home, ensuring Lincoln would not be elected to a second term.  His criticisms of President Polk, however, are directly applicable to his own behavior as president:

I carefully examined the President’s messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point.  The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true, all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him. . . .

[L]et the President answer the interrogatories, I proposed, as before mentioned, or some other similar ones.  Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly.  Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments . . . But if he can not, or will not do this—if on any pretense, or no pretense, he shall refuse or omit it, then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. . . .

[H]e plunged into it, and has swept on and on, till, disappointed in his calculations . . . he now finds himself, he knows not where.  How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his message. . . .

[T]he president is, in no wise, satisfied with his own position . . . His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.

[The President] is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.  God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscience, more painful than all his mental perplexity.

Congressman Lincoln then asks his colleagues in the House of Representatives what is to be done with the population inhabiting territory captured by the U.S. Army.  “I suppose no one will say we should kill the people, or drive them out, or make slaves of them, or even confiscate their property.”

Yet these are the very policies President Lincoln would support and laud General Sherman, among others, for implementing.  In his official report dated January 31, 1864, Sherman declared,

Next year their lands will be taken, for in war, we can take them, and rightfully too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives . . . Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence . . . to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is a mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.

On July 26, 1864, President Lincoln commended Sherman for his conduct in warfare: “My profoundest thanks to you and your whole Army for the present campaign so far.”

Approval was not restricted to private correspondence.  On September 3, 1864, President Lincoln issued two proclamations: One praised Sherman; the other mandated public celebrations in his honor.  Lincoln’s “Executive Order of Thanks to William T. Sherman and Others” declared:

The national thanks are herewith tendered by the President to Major General William T. Sherman, and the gallant officers and soldiers of his command before Atlanta, for the distinguished ability, courage, and perseverance displayed in the campaign in Georgia, which, under Divine favor, has resulted in the capture of the City of Atlanta.  The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations that have signalized this campaign must render it famous in the annals of war, and have entitled those who have participated therein to the applause and thanks of the nation.

The second presidential proclamation, “Executive Order for Celebration of Victories in Atlanta, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama,” proclaimed

That on Wednesday, the 7th day of September, commencing at the hour of twelve o’clock noon, there shall be fired a salute of one hundred guns at the Arsenal at Washington, and at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, Newport, Ky., and St. Louis, and at New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Hilton Head & Newberne, the day after the receipt of the order, for the brilliant achievements of the army under the command of Major General Sherman, in the State of Georgia, and the capture of Atlanta.  The Secretary of War shall issue directions for the execution of this order.

In criticizing Polk’s war with Mexico, Representative Lincoln displayed prescience with words that indict the proclamations of President Lincoln and all those

trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.

As an antiwar politician, Lincoln returned to the question of civilians in a speech on the “Presidential question”:

The marching [of] an army into the midst of a peaceful . . . settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops, and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us.  So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak accordingly.

The policy so eloquently condemned here is the very policy pursued by President Lincoln between 1861 and 1865.  As General Sherman described it in an official correspondence dated December 24, 1864, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”

After Sherman completed his destructive March to the Sea known as the Savannah Campaign, which culminated in the occupation of that city, he received another laudatory note from President Lincoln (December 26, 1864):

Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift, the capture of Savannah.  When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that “nothing risked, nothing gained,” I did not interfere.  Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours . . . Please make my grateful acknowledgments to your whole army, officers, and men.

In January 1865, Sherman boasted:

I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia [alone] . . . at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.

Seventeen years earlier, in his speech on the presidential question, Lincoln had declared to the war hawks in Congress that

the distinction between the cause of the President in beginning the war, and the cause of the country after it was begun, is a distinction which you can not perceive.  To you the President, and the country, seems to be all one.  You are interested to see no distinction between them; and I venture to suggest that possibly your interest blinds you a little.

As president, Lincoln implied (if not insisted) that in wartime the cause of the president and the country are one.  So to an inquiry from the House of Representatives as to the unlawful arrests of city officials in Baltimore, he wrote on July 27, 1861, that,

In answer to the resolution of the House of Representatives of the 24th instant, asking the grounds, reasons, and evidence upon which the police commissioners of Baltimore were arrested, and are now detained as prisoners at Fort McHenry, I have to state that it is judged to be incompatible with the public interest at this time to furnish the information called for by the resolution.

Continuing on the presidential question, Congressman Lincoln opposed what he perceived as threats by the president to advance executive authority by usurping powers of the legislature:

[T]hat the constitution gives the President a negative on legislation, all know: but that this negative should be so combined with platforms, and other appliances, as to enable him, and in fact, almost impel him, to take the whole of legislation into his own hands, is what we object to . . . To thus transfer legislation, is clearly to take it from those who understand, with minuteness, the interest of the people, and give it to one who does not, and cannot so well understand it.

That is exactly how President Lincoln governed—by usurping the powers of the legislature.  Pro-Lincoln scholars acknowledge this.  James G. Randall wrote that “It thus appears that the President, while greatly enlarging his executive powers, seized also legislative and judicial functions as well . . . ”  Clinton Rossiter concurred, writing that

[Lincoln] was allowed to proceed without external check to a series of unusual measures which he alone deemed necessary to lay the rebellion.  Unlike Cincinnatus, this great constitutional dictator was self-appointed.

Of Lincoln’s executive acts, he added: “This amazing disregard for the words of the Constitution . . . was considered by nobody as legal.”

This unconstitutional expansion of the powers and prerogatives of the executive office by President Lincoln was for the express purpose of prosecuting a war to advance his economic agenda.  The result was death, corruption, and war profiteering.  Over 600,000 Americans were killed as the federal government was transformed, according to Lincoln’s attorney general Edward Bates, into a bloated bureaucracy of institutionalized corruption.  Lincoln’s friends and cronies did quite well.  The war

assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . . Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Langworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others . . .

This series of tragedies brought forth by President Lincoln proved the wisdom and insight of Representative Lincoln, who, in a speech on June 20, 1848, observed: “I say there are few stronger cases in this world of ‘burthen to the many, and benefits to the few’ . . . than the presidency itself . . .”

I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle [the Revolutionary War].

This was all the more remarkable because Lincoln was a nonbeliever.  His first law partner, John T. Stuart, stated that Lincoln

was an avowed and open infidel . . . and sometimes bordered on atheism. . . . [He] went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard; he shocked me.

Ward Lamon, another law partner and friend of Lincoln, relates that,

[a]s he grew older, he grew more cautious. . . . The imputation of Infidelity had seriously injured him in several of his earlier political contests; and, sobered by age and experience, he was resolved that the same imputation should injure him no more.  Aspiring to lead religious communities, he foresaw that he must not appear as an enemy within their gates; aspiring to public honors under the auspices of a political party which persistently summoned religious people to assist in the extirpation of that which it denounced as the “nation’s sin,” he foresaw that he could not ask their suffrages whilst aspersing their faith.  He perceived no reason for changing his convictions, but he did perceive many good and cogent reasons for not making them public.

Herndon concurred:

Lincoln was very politic, and a very shrewd man in some particulars.  When he was talking to a Christian, he adapted himself to the Christian. . . . I could state facts about Mr. Lincoln’s jokes on and gibes at Christianity and committee of ministers, who waited on him while President of the United States, and before, that would shock a Christian people.

On August 12, 1861, as Ft. Sumter was being attacked, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of a National Day of Fast.  He was explicit on who started the war:

And, whereas, when our own beloved Country, once, by the blessing of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation.

Lincoln then broadened the blame to all Americans.  They were sinners who had offended God, and the war was His retribution:

[I]n sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him, and to pray for His mercy,—to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved.

For Lincoln to call upon people to pray to God to end the war was all the more extraordinary, as it contradicted his personal beliefs.  According to Herndon, Lincoln

believed that both matter and mind are governed by certain irrefragable and irresistible laws, and that no prayers of ours could arrest their operation in the least . . . what was to be would be. . . . [T]he laws of human nature are persistent and permanent and could not be reversed. . . . In proof of his strong leaning towards fatalism he once quoted the case of Brutus and Caesar, arguing that the former was forced by laws and conditions over which he had no control to kill the latter, and vice versa, that the latter was specially created to be disposed of by the former.

Throughout his presidency, Lincoln maintained that God alone was responsible for the war.  In his September 3, 1862, “Meditation on the Divine Will,” he wrote:

God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.

Lincoln continued in the same vein in an October 26, 1862, letter to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney:

We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial.  In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to his will . . . but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light which he affords me I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.  If I had had my way, this war would never have been commenced; If I had been allowed my way this war would have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.

As the war dragged on from one bloody encounter to the next from Manassas to Antietam to Shiloh with no end in sight, the President’s unbelief, both in God and his own rhetoric, was evident in private correspondence.  His letter of November 24, 1862, to Carl Shurz is petty and childish in its attempt to evade responsibility:

I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not.  And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better.  You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already.  I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.

Nonetheless, Lincoln continued to repeat his accusation against God on public occasions.  In a proclamation on March 30, 1863, designating another National Day of Fast, he wrote:

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?

With victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, some in the North thought the war would soon end.  But in an August 26, 1863, letter to James C. Conk­ling, Lincoln disagreed, reiterating that God, not he, determined when there would be peace.

Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph.  Let us be quite sober.  Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.

In his Proclamation of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863, Lincoln left any question of a timetable in the hands of “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens”:

I . . . fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.

As the number of dead and maimed mounted, and an official policy of total war was pursued against Southern civilians, Lincoln persisted in denying any responsibility for his own acts.  He was a victim of circumstance, and circumstance was determined by God.  In his April 4, 1864, letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln declared

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.  Now, at the end of three years of struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected.  God alone can claim it.

He continued bizarrely asserting that the death of over 600,000 Americans would be a testament to God’s righteousness.

If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Lincoln assiduously promoted the idea that, while he was blameless for the war, its death and destruction served some higher good.  As he wrote to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney in a letter dated September 4, 1864:

The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.  We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best and has ruled otherwise. . . . Surely, He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.

By March 1865, the war was fast coming to an end.  But in his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, Lincoln ominously insisted that God might want the bloodshed to continue indefinitely.

The Almighty has His own purposes.  “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offences cometh!”  If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Loving God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” . . . [W]ith firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

Through use of such rhetoric about a righteous and triumphant God, Lincoln exploited religious feelings in the North to carry out a four-year war against Southern civilians.  Women, children, the sick, and the elderly were targeted; homes and cities burned; crops destroyed; and domestic animals slaughtered.  Lincoln’s influence on the North validated Voltaire’s observation that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

After the first ground assault on September 3, which lasted several hours and involved two-dozen Navy Seals, the unanimous reaction of Pakistan’s democratically elected parliament was to call on its government to repel future U.S. incursions with military force.  Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, agreed, declaring that his country’s territorial integrity “will be defended at all costs.”

Seeking to justify future incursions into Pakistan, President Bush announced on September 9 that Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan were “all theaters in the same overall struggle.”  But when the U.S. military attempted another ground attack on September 15, employing armed helicopters, it was forced to retreat after coming under sustained fire from Pakistan’s army.  The next day, Pakistan’s military issued a press release announcing its policy on U.S. incursions: “The orders are clear . . . open fire.”

If war with a nonnuclear-armed Iran would be folly, war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan would be a disaster.  It would open a Pandora’s box of instability, crises, and conflicts that could engulf neighboring states.  It would undermine U.S. strategic interests abroad and further erode American liberties at home.  Yet the Bush administration has been laying the foundation for such a war for months, and Barack Obama has raised eyebrows with his tough talk about invading Pakistan in hopes of killing Osama bin Laden.

On January 25 of last year, the Washington Post reported that the Bush administration was building eight bases along the Afghan-Pakistan border from which to attack Islamic militants in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that “The Pentagon is ‘ready, willing and able’ to send U.S. troops to conduct joint combat operations with Pakistan’s military against al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

Secretary Gates’ announcement was disingenuous, coming as it did after Pakistan had publicly rejected the idea of U.S. troops operating inside her borders.  This suggests that the Bush administration was considering unilateral military intervention despite warnings from the Pakistani government that “any unilateral action by the United States would be regarded as an invasion.”

Where would the money come from for a war with Pakistan?  The proposed military budget of the Department of Defense grew from $396 billion in 2003 to $440 billion in 2007; an additional 40 percent is now off the books, and this figure does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates at $700 billion.  Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been battered by rising oil prices, a falling dollar, the subprime mortgage crisis, a credit crunch, a deteriorating housing market, layoffs, a volatile stock market, a mounting national debt and deficit, and a meltdown in its financial sector.

Where would the U.S. government get the necessary troops for such a war?  The U.S. military is already stretched to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Enlistments are down, and reinstating the draft would be politically unpopular and socially divisive.  In Iraq, approximately 156,000 troops still have not been able to defeat the insurgents, and plans to reduce troop levels have been suspended.  Washington is attempting to lower the level of violence against U.S. troops by bribing Sunni tribes to attack foreign jihadists.  While these Sunnis oppose the American occupation of their country, they eagerly accept U.S. money and weapons so they can defeat their political rivals and prepare for a future showdown with their benefactors.  In Afghanistan, the base for the proposed intervention in Pakistan, the United States lacks sufficient troops to roll back a resurgent Taliban that effectively controls the southern half of the country, the homeland of the Pushtuns.  Washington has been forced to call on NATO members for several thousand additional troops—a request not likely to be met.

Both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border are inhabited by Pushtuns whose combined population of over 38 million is larger than that of Iraq.  In contrast, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is estimated at only 25,500.  Pushtuns in Afghanistan form the backbone of the Taliban and are bound to their brethren in Pakistan by ties of blood, 60 major tribes and over 400 clans, custom and law, the Pushtunwali, and now an Islamic and nationalistic anti-Americanism.  Will the eight U.S. military bases along the Afghan-Pakistan border become eight Dien Bien Phus?

U.S. diplomatic policy toward Pakistan has been self-defeating.  Washington persuaded the Musharraf government to attack alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban militants hiding in the Northwest Frontier Province.  That destabilized the region, radicalized the tribal population, and resulted in the establishment of an Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, which Islamabad was forced to recognize to end the disastrous war.

The February 18, 2008, election resulted in a victory for the secular anti-Musharraf opposition, comprising the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League.  However, hostility to U.S. military intervention is found across Pakistan’s political spectrum, government and opposition, Islamists and secularists, pro- and anti-American politicians.  Under these circumstances, how could Washington intervene without causing further damage to the international reputation and strategic interests of the United States?

Although Washington insists it wants a stable Pakistan free from Islamic radicalism, the policy it is pursuing in neighboring Iran is ensuring the opposite.  Endeavoring to promote “regime change” in Tehran, Washington is supporting ethnic secessionist groups in Iran.  Among them are the Baluch, who inhabit adjoining territory called Baluchistan, the largest province in Pakistan, accounting for 44 percent of the country’s area.  The Bush administration has enlisted, funded, and armed the Baluch in a Sunni fundamentalist army called Jundullah (Army of God).  From bases in Pakistan, Jundullah is waging a guerrilla war attacking installations and personnel inside Iran.

The Baluch of Pakistan have been fighting for decades for their independence from Islamabad.  By arming them to fight Iran, Washington is giving them the means to resume fighting Pakistan.  Such a policy is undermining Pakistani authority and political stability in Baluchistan.  It is making it more likely that the Baluch of Pakistan, not Iran, will be the ones to achieve their independence.  If Baluchistan breaks away, Sind and the Northwest Frontier Province will eventually secede as well.  The impact of any balkanization of Pakistan on India, Islamic radicalism, and nuclear proliferation would adversely affect U.S. strategic interests in South Asia.

U.S. diplomatic policy toward Pakistan is schizophrenic.  The Bush administration has demanded that Pakistan suppress Islamic fundamentalists among the Pushtuns in the north, but support Islamic fundamentalists among the Baluch in the south.  By sponsoring Jundullah, Washington is, in many ways, recreating the Mujahideen of the 1980’s from which Al Qaeda and the Taliban sprang.  This is potentially a greater threat to U.S. national security than the disintegration of Pakistan (though the two may go hand in hand).

The United Nations estimates Iraq’s population at 29 million and Afghanistan’s at 27 million.  Pakistan’s population is more than five-and-a-half times larger.  Washington may wish to fight only Islamic militants in the Northwest Frontier Province, but for all practical purposes it would be at war with 162 million people.  U.S. military operations would also be severely hampered by rugged terrain; limited air, road, and rail transportation; and financial constraints.

An attack on Iran has been prevented, to date, by Defense Secretary Gates and Commander of CENTCOM Admiral Fallon.  The United States has neither the manpower nor the resources for the job, and any attack would endanger U.S. troops in Iraq.  But in September, Secretary Gates said that the United States could have 10,000 more troops in place to intervene in Pakistan “in the spring and summer of 2009.”  Admiral Fallon has taken early retirement and has been replaced by David Petraeus, who had been commanding general of the Multi-National Force—Iraq.  Iran has a population of 71 million.  Pakistan’s population is more than twice as large.  Iran has one of the world’s largest paramilitaries, numbering over 11 million, but its active service strength is 420,000, with a reserve of 350,000.  Pakistan’s active service strength is 619,000, with a reserve of 528,000.

The U.S. military would quickly defeat the Pakistanis in a conventional war, but there would be American casualties, and the victory would be hollow, since those Pakistani soldiers who were not killed or captured would likely join the guerrillas in attacking U.S. troops, supplies, and installations.

Then there is Pakistan’s atomic bomb.  Would an intervention to eliminate Islamic militants in the Northwest Frontier Province require the U.S. military to seize Pakistan’s nuclear warheads to prevent them from falling into the hands of Islamic militants or disaffected Pakistani military officers?  If the U.S. military did not seize those warheads, would the government of India exploit a U.S. intervention to launch a surgical strike to seize or destroy the nuclear weapons of its political rival?

In February 2003, the U.S. Navy Center for Contemporary Conflict estimated Pakistan already had between 35 and 95 nuclear bombs.  These warheads have not been placed on missiles but are kept separate in a secure facility.  Pakistan has modified F-16 fighter jets to carry warheads.  Unless all warheads and modified F-16s are secured, the threat of a suicide pilot dropping the bomb on U.S. forces would be very real.  And, should India join in the intervention, New Delhi could also be targeted.

Even if the Indian government takes no action, it will still be perceived by many Muslims in India as an accomplice in Washington’s efforts to weaken and humiliate Pakistan.  India still has not recovered from the Muslim-Hindu bloodletting that occurred in Gujarat, an Indian state bordering Pakistan, in 2002.  A U.S. military intervention in Pakistan would mean an upsurge in radicalism among Muslims in India that would increase political volatility, outbreaks of communal violence, and economic difficulties for the country as a whole.

The U.S. military might be able to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, but even if Washington could redeploy all U.S. forces to Pakistan, it would still be unable to occupy a country of 162 million hostile people.  Yet it would have to occupy the country in order to have a realistic chance of extricating Islamic militants.  Thus, any intervention would result in American casualties but would not achieve any desirable political ends.  It would only win converts for the cause of radical Islam; destabilize the subcontinent and much of the Middle East; ensure that anti-Americanism dominates popular passions in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan for the foreseeable future; cripple the U.S. military; weaken an already feeble U.S. economy; and play havoc with international markets.

The most dramatic evidence of this strategy came after September 11.  Through its declared Global War on Terror, the Bush administration used military alliances and military bases (ostensibly to fight Islamic jihadists) to surround Russia, even though Russia had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on America and was, herself, fighting an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya.

The intellectual justification for what became the Bush administration’s post-September 11 policy of containment was articulated in 1997 by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.  Dr. Brzezinski, who has served Democratic and Republican presidents, is described by the mainstream media as a political realist.  Yet the ideas expressed in his book formed the basis of the neocon agenda pursued by the Bush administration toward Russia.

Brzezinski assumed that, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Washington gained effective control over Eurasia.  Thus,

how America “manages” Eurasia is critical.  A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions.  A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent.  About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil.  Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.

The last two sentences are key.

Brzezinski is also advisor to several major corporations and believes control of Eurasia’s wealth, especially its oil and natural-gas reserves, should be a focus of U.S. policy.

The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly [sic] increase over the next two or three decades.  Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East.  The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.

Brzezinski conflates the interests of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations with those of the international community.  “It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”  Essentially, this is gunboat diplomacy.

Despite being a policy proposal for the new 21st century, The Grand Chessboard simply echoed the thoughts of Woodrow Wilson.  As president of Princeton University, Wilson wrote about U.S. foreign policy as a symbiotic relationship between the federal government and American businesses.

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down.  Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.

After taking the Oval Office, Wilson’s foreign policy toward Asia and Latin America reflected these beliefs.  A shared commitment to this feature of Wilsonianism unites Brzezinski and the Bush administration.

The primary objective of The Grand Chessboard was to promote the containment of Russia.  Implementation began in 1999 when the Clinton administration supported NATO membership for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.  This was in violation of the 1990 understanding between President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.  In exchange for Soviet backing for the “Two Plus Four Agreement” on German reunification, Washington had promised Moscow that NATO would not be expanded.

By 2004, the nature of Russian containment could be seen in the policies pursued or supported by the Bush administration.  Russia had been denied membership in the WTO and was told she could never be a member of NATO or the European Union.  Even the 1974 Cold War Jackson-Vanik trade sanctions imposed by Washington on the Soviet Union remained in force against Russia.  While fighting Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and saber-rattling before the regimes of North Korea and Iran, the Bush administration still energetically lobbied for NATO expansion—its own Drang nach Osten.  For while Washington would accept neutrality for Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland, it would not accept neutrality for former Warsaw Pact countries.  Thus, in 2004, seven former communist Eastern European countries were admitted into NATO, including, for the first time, three former Soviet republics: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

These seven represented what U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld termed a new “center of gravity” in NATO.  They were needed in NATO to achieve six policy objectives of the Bush administration.  The first was to ensure the continued existence of an organization whose justification had ended with the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact.  The second was to preserve U.S. dominance of NATO.  The third was to transform NATO from a defensive military alliance into an offensive one.  This is an ongoing process, which began 12 days after the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, when NATO launched a war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.  The fourth was to redefine the mission of NATO from one limited to Europe to one with a global mandate.  This was achieved at the 2002 Prague Summit, which declared that “NATO must be able to field forces that can move quickly to wherever they are needed.”  The fifth was to have NATO countries provide bases and troops for current and future U.S. wars.  And the sixth was to have allies in NATO willing to use NATO to “contain” Russia.  The Bush administration is pursuing this objective by proposing that a missile-defense system (allegedly to protect Europe from Iranian missile attacks) be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic—near Russia, not Iran.  As Prof. Keir Lieber noted in Foreign Affairs (“The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” March/April 2006), “the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one—as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a stand alone shield.”

George F. Kennan, U.S. ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union and father of the containment doctrine, declared that this expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”  Yet if NATO membership were limited to “Old Europe”—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—the Bush administration’s goals would be difficult to achieve.  In its final months, the administration is actively pursuing membership for two additional former-Soviet republics: Ukraine and Georgia.  As a member, Ukraine would pose national-security concerns for Russia.  A pro-American government in Kiev would likely be encouraged to expel the Russian Black Sea fleet from Sevastopol in the Crimea, in order to disrupt and diminish the effectiveness of the Russian navy.  And all of western Russia, except for its territory with Finland, Belarus, and Moldova, would border a U.S.-dominated and nuclear-armed NATO.

Since 2002, the Bush administration has unilaterally withdrawn from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and has asserted the right of the U.S. government to launch “preventive” wars, to employ tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, to militarize outer space, and to use force to prevent the rise of any rival power.  Professor Lieber remarks that “Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy.  It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.”  The new national-security strategy adopted by the Bush administration constitutes a clear and present danger for both the United States and the rest of the world.

As I write, the 2008 election remains undecided.  As president, Sen. John McCain would only intensify the Bush administration’s policy.  On some issues (such as those involving Russia), he is more of a hawk than President Bush.  He has repeatedly called for Russia’s expulsion from the G-8.  His neoconservative foreign-policy advisors include William Kristol, the founder and editor of The Weekly Standard and son of Irving Kristol, the founder of neoconservatism; Robert Kagan, identified by the New York Times as “a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace” and “a leading architect of a muscular and expansive American policy”; Max Boot, whom the New York Times called “an influential neoconservative author and policy expert as well as a military historian . . . an Olin senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and The Los Angeles Times”; John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Randy Scheunemann, founder and president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a former lobbyist for Georgia’s President Saakashvili.

Following the admission of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, McCain would likely seek the overthrow of President Lukashenko of Belarus in another color-coded “revolution,” followed by the admission of Belarus into NATO.  From Vadso, Norway, to Tbilisi, Georgia, a new “iron curtain” would then stand between Russia and the West.  (Barack Obama’s “me too!” reaction to the Russian response to Georgian aggression indicates that a similar scenario might play out in an Obama administration.)

The Bush administration has been attempting to cordon off Russia from the south as well.  In his 2002 Report to the President and Congress, Secretary Rumsfeld wrote that the Pentagon was realigning its “defense posture” to gain strategic control of what he described as “a broad arc of instability that stretches from the Middle East to Northeast Asia.”  This arc corresponds to Russia’s entire southern border, stretching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan.

In 2001, the Bush administration established military bases, or negotiated the use of airbases, in all five former Soviet Central Asian republics, in the name of the “War on Terror.”  In Kazakhstan, Washington was granted the use of airbases at Shymkent and Lugovoy.  In Kyrgyzstan, it established a military presence at Manas Air Base.  In Tajikistan, it established emergency-refueling points for the U.S. military.  Turkmenistan, under President Turkmenbashi, unofficially allowed Washington use of her bases to provide “humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.”  In Uzbekistan, the Bush administration established the most important U.S. military base in Central Asia (“Stronghold Freedom”), at Karshi-Khanabad.  It lost this base in July 2005 when the Uzbek government of President Islam Karimov, believing Washington was conspiring to overthrow it through another color revolution, terminated the October 2001 agreement.

In addition to military bases, the Bush administration has been attempting to buy a pro-American foreign policy from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and, until recently, Uzbekistan by giving these states hundreds of millions of dollars, principally through bilateral treaties and the Central Asian Border Security Initiative.  For instance, between October 2001 and 2004, Uzbekistan received approximately $300 million in economic assistance.

Russia’s southern border also includes the Caspian Sea.  Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the demarcation of this body of water has been disputed by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan.  From a geo-strategic perspective, the Caspian Sea is extremely important, as it possesses vast reserves of oil and natural gas.  Existing pipelines transecting the sea bring natural gas from Central Asia to an energy-hungry Europe.  Moscow has benefited from its control of most of these pipelines.  The income and influence they afford have strengthened Russia’s economy and invigorated her foreign policy.  In response, the Bush administration has sought to undermine Russia’s claim to the Caspian region.  Washington has provided training and funding for the navies of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in order to “improve security on the Caspian Sea,” which, in turn, has established a physical presence for them in the disputed zones, thereby improving their respective claims under international law.

The Caucasus, including the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, have been a part of Russia for longer than Texas has been part of the United States.  There, the Bush administration supported a color revolution that overthrew what it viewed as the pro-Russian government of Eduard Shevardnadze and installed pro-American, U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili.  On November 24, 2003, the Wall Street Journal credited the success of the “Rose Revolution” to “a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western foundations.”  Among the American foundations were such Cold War agencies as the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House.

Despite Georgia’s failed invasion of South Ossetia, the U.S. government continues to pursue its containment policy by reaffirming Washington’s support for Tbilisi in its dispute with Russia over the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and pressing for Georgia’s membership in NATO.  Under the guise of the Georgia Train and Equip program and the Georgia Border Security and Law Enforcement program, the Bush administration claimed it was simply helping Georgia’s military to fight Chechen rebels hiding in the Pankisi Gorge.  As recent events have shown, the real reason was to provide President Saakashvili with the military capacity to defeat the pro-Russian forces in the two breakaway regions and reintegrate them into the Georgian state.

Washington has applied its containment policy to Russia’s eastern and northern borders as well.  In Russia’s far east, the U.S. government has a string of military bases extending from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to Japan and South Korea.  Despite official statements by Washington that these bases are needed for the defense of South Korea and Japan from any attack by North Korea, they also confine Russia to the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan.  Vladivostok, Russia’s largest port on the Pacific Ocean, is effectively surrounded by U.S. bases located to its southwest, southeast, and northeast.

Meanwhile Russia’s northern border is contained by a series of U.S. bases and facilities that nearly surround the Arctic Circle.  They stretch from Alaska (which, now famously, is two miles from Russia at their closest point), through Winnipeg (headquarters of the Canadian NORAD Region) to Greenland.  These, in turn, link up with NATO.

An economic dimension has recently been added to this northern containment.  With the shrinking of the polar ice cap, arctic oil and gas fields have become exploitable.  Under international law, Moscow has laid claim to large sections of the resource-rich Arctic seabed, as they are an extension of Russia’s Lomonosov Ridge.  Given the enormous profits this region could garner, the Bush administration has dismissed Russia’s claim, while simultaneously encouraging rival claims by NATO members Canada, Denmark, and Norway.

Despite seven years of strenuous efforts, the Bush administration’s continuing Cold War with Russia is unsustainable.  The pursuit of Russian containment has led to a decline in America’s military and economic strength.  By pushing for an enlargement of NATO, the Bush administration has only succeeded in increasing strains within the organization, undermining its cohesion and effectiveness.  New member-states will likely see political fallout as their governments opt to spend money on integrating their militaries into NATO instead of social programs.  Political tensions within NATO already exist, between Greece and Turkey, Spain and the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom and Iceland.  Washington has added new conflicts to NATO involving the Czech Republic and Germany, Hungary and Slovakia, Hungary and Rumania, Rumania and Bulgaria, and Bulgaria and Greece.  Future attempts to deploy NATO troops to conflicts outside of Europe will likely destabilize Europe, as some member-states refuse to participate, viewing such missions as a threat to their national security.

Thus, it is in the interest of all parties for the U.S. government to end the Cold War by turning away from its policy of containment and establishing normal bilateral relations with Russia.

Lincoln’s words were a reflection of his unflagging desire to wage total war on the South.  It was to be a war that would last until the enemy agreed to unconditional surrender and U.S. public officials and private contractors had made a financial killing.  In 1878, Henry S. Olcott, special investigator for the U.S. War and Navy Departments, estimated “at least twenty, if not twenty-five, percent of the entire expenditures of the government during the Rebellion, were tainted with fraud.”  We could call this the Lincoln principle of diplomacy—a principle that was followed by the Clinton administration in Bosnia and the George W. Bush administration in Iraq.

Lincoln’s ideological view of politics equated progress and patriotism with support for a high protective tariff, internal improvements, and a national bank.  Capturing just 39 percent of the popular vote, Lincoln considered his election a democratic mandate to pursue his agenda.  A rejection of his economic program by the political leadership of the South, therefore, would be a rejection of democracy.  Lincoln’s program depended on the tariff, and the tariff depended on the South remaining in the Union, as did the survival of the Republican Party.  For that reason, Lincoln initially pledged his support for the Corwin Resolution, which had been adopted in the waning days of the Buchanan administration.  This was the original Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  It made the institution of slavery perpetual in the slave states.  It had been passed by the House and the Senate, and signed by President Buchanan, but it was never ratified, because, by then, many Southern states had decided to secede.  The fact that the South withdrew from the Union despite the passage of this amendment indicated other issues besides slavery motivated their secession.  Foremost was the South’s embrace of free trade, the antithesis of Lincoln’s economic agenda.

In an attempt to prevent the impending disunion, there was a flurry of activity to reach a compromise by the Senate Committee of Thirteen and House Committee of Thirty-Three.  The Crittenden resolutions and amendments were introduced to resolve the status of the territories.  A Peace Convention was convened attended by 21 states, a “body [which] . . . not only [was] respectable in the standing and talents of its members, but comprised many names highest in leadership.”

As his secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay wrote in Abraham Lincoln: A History,

It is evident that Lincoln was at this time not without serious apprehensions that the threats and movements of secession might induce some of the less sturdy Republicans to appeals for concession . . .

In letters written between December 13, 1860, and February 4, 1861, Lincoln anxiously lobbied Republicans to reject all compromise:

Prevent as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves, and our cause, by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort, on slavery extension.  There is no possible compromise upon it, but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again.

Indeed, he continued,

Whether it be a Mo. line, or Eli Thayer’s Pop. Sov. it is all the same.  Let either be done, & immediately filibustering and extending slavery recommences.  On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.

In a letter to Secretary of State William Seward, he wrote:

[A]ny trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other.  I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire is the object of all these proposed compromises.  I am against it.

In that same letter, he declared:

On the 21st. ult. Hon. W. Kellogg, a Republican M.C of this state whom you probably know, was here, in a good deal of anxiety, seeking to ascertain to what extent I would be consenting for our friends to go in the way of compromise . . . I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation.

Lincoln was successful in his efforts to rein in his fellow Republicans.  Soon, Senator Clark of New Hampshire introduced a new resolution, insisting

That the provisions of the Constitution are ample for the preservation of the Union and the protection of all the material interests of the country; that it needs to be obeyed rather than amended; and that extrication from our present dangers is to be looked for in strenuous efforts to preserve the peace, protect the public property, and enforce the laws, rather than in new guarantees for particular interests, compromises for particular difficulties or concessions to unreasonable demands.

Attempts by peace commissioners from the new Confederate government to negotiate all outstanding differences with Washington were similarly rebuffed by Lincoln.  Nicolay and Hay write that

The [Confederate] commissioners were instructed to solicit a reception in their official character, and if that were refused, to accept an unofficial interview; to insist on the de facto and de jure independence of the Confederate States; but nevertheless to accede to a proposition to refer the subject of their mission to the United States Senate, or withhold an answer until the Congress of the United States should assemble and pronounce a decision in the premises, provided the existing peaceful status were rigidly maintained.

After keeping the Confederate commissioners waiting for days under the mistaken impression that negotiations would be possible, “Seward replied confidentially, ‘that it was impossible to receive the commissioners in any diplomatic capacity, or even to see them peacefully.’”

On July 4, 1861, a victorious Lincoln could declare in his first message to Congress that “No compromise by public servants could, in this case, be a cure.”  War was to be the only option for settling a political dispute he helped to exacerbate.  For Lincoln, pursuing war became an obsession.  On June 28, 1862, he wrote to Seward,  “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.”

Lincoln promised the North a short war.  Addressing Union governors on July 3, 1862, he asserted, “If I had fifty thousand additional troops here now, I believe I could substantially close the war in two weeks.”  The next day, in a message to Congress, he made the same promise of a short war, but with a request for eight times the number of troops:

It is now recommended that you give the legal means for making this contest a short, and a decisive one; that you place at the control of the government, for the work, at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of dollars.

As the North soon wearied of a war with no victory or end in sight, Lincoln expressed his concern over the growing prospect of a negotiated settlement.  In a memorandum dated November 1, 1862, he wrote, “The army, like the nation, has become demoralized by the idea that the war is to be ended, the nation united, and peace restored, by strategy, and not by hard desperate fighting.”

Throughout 1863 and 1864, increasing calls in the North for negotiations with the South to end the war were rebuffed by Lincoln.  First, he maintained, “I do not believe any compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union is now possible.”  Then, he changed tack, asserting that there was no one in the South with whom he could successfully negotiate an end to the war.

[N]o paper compromise, to which the controllers of Lee’s army are not agreed, can, at all, affect that army.  In an effort at such compromise we should waste time, which the enemy would improve to our disadvantage; and that would be all.

When many in the North became aware of Southern attempts to negotiate an end to the war, Lincoln responded disingenuously:

Now allow me to assure you, that no word or intimation from that rebel army, or from any of the men controlling it, in relation to any peace compromise, has ever come to my knowledge or belief.  All charges and insinuations to the contrary, are deceptive and groundless.

Finally, Lincoln dismissed the merits of peace, writing, “I am yet unprepared to give up the Union for a peace which, so achieved, could not be of much duration.”  Lincoln knew a negotiated peace between Washington and Richmond meant the recognition of the South as an independent country.  On September 12, 1864, he wrote, “An armistice—a cessation of hostilities—is the end of the struggle, and the insurgents would be in peaceful possession of all that has been struggled for.”  It would spell the end of Lincoln’s economic program and the Republican Party.  To prevent this, he refused to cut and run, and opted to stay the course.

As he told an audience in Philadelphia on June 16, 1864,

It is a pertinent question often asked . . . when is the war to end? . . . I do not wish to name a day a month, or year, when it is to end . . . We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained.  Under God, I hope it will never end until that time.

In his Annual Message to Congress on December 6 of that year, Lincoln reiterated his objection to a negotiated peace:

On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that no attempt at negotiations with the insurgent leader could result in any good . . . Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible.  It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.

Then, he added a new rationale: “The Executive power itself would be greatly diminished by the cessation of actual war.”

Lincoln no longer spoke of a short war or a war nearly over; now, it was war without end:

The important fact remains demonstrated, that we have more men now than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely.

He denied the reality of the human cost his war had inflicted on the North—the dead, the maimed, the destitute.  He clung to his mandate:

The [1864] election has exhibited another fact not less valuable to be known—the fact that we do not approach exhaustion in the most important branch of the national resources—that of living men.  While it is melancholy to reflect that the war has filled so many graves, and carried mourning to so many hearts, it is some relief to know that, compared with the surviving, the fallen have been so few.  While corps, and divisions, and brigades, and regiments, have been formed and fought, and dwindled and gone out of existence, a great majority of the men who comprised them are still living.  The same is true of the naval service.  The election returns prove this.  So many voters could not else be found.

He then repeated his call that the war go on until the South unconditionally surrendered:

They can at any moment have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution . . . No cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government.

The South surrendered unconditionally.  Lincoln placed his political interests above those of the American people—and won.  His war ensured that the Republican Party controlled the federal apparatus for half a century.  It ushered in a time of unprecedented corruption—the “Gilded Age.”   It provided an ideological cover—promoting democracy—for future wars and war profiteering.  As Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler observed nearly 75 years ago,

War is a racket.  It always has been . . . It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives . . . Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about.  It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.  Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.