Libertarians and capitalists write as if there were some natural or divine force known as "the market".  There is no such thing.  There is no MARKET, only markets, and a market is a place where people exchange goods and services, sometimes but not always for money.  Think of the Athenian Agora or a local farmers' market.  Another way to look at markets is to describe them as playing fields for exchanges.  A market as place or playing field may become institutionalized, as a person or group of persons or a community or government claims ownership and the right to regulate it, just as the city or a business group may own a baseball stadium and a league of team owners agree to a set of rules.

A market is said to be free, not because no one pays entrance or user fees--they almost always do--but because access is not restricted.  However, once  a market become institutionalized, they can never be  entirely free, because the owners and regulators will always seek to maximize their own revenues and those of their friends, relations, allies, and fellow-citizens.

There is no known society without some kind of market.  Even communist countries had informal and black markets, and one may have comparatively free markets (hardly ever absolutely free) in societies where even the word capitalism is unknown.    When capitalists equate the "free market" with capitalism, they are either lying or hopelessly ignorant.

Let me quote a few paragraphs from my Perspective in the current number of Chronicles:

“Libero Ingresso” says the little sign on the doors of an Italian shop.  English-speakers who know enough Italian to translate the words, Free Entrance, sometimes wonder if there was a time when Italian shopkeepers charged customers an admission fee, to be refunded, perhaps, if a purchase was made.  It is just the sort of thing you might expect of Old Europe.  We Anglo-Saxons, after all, revealed the truths of free market economics at a time when the rest of the world was groaning in the darkness of mercantilism and protectionism, when honest farmers and merchants paid taxes on their windows and might be forced to labor on their lord’s land or the king’s highway.

Alas, these speculations, so comforting to our Anglo-Saxon vanity, are dashed on the hard rock of linguistic reality.  Libero (from Latin liber) means “free” in the sense of unrestricted or open, not “free” in the sense of no payment required (for which the Italians still use the Latin gratis).  French preserves the distinction between liber (French libre) and gratuitus (gratuity). In Spanish, de gastos (of charge) is added to libre for things that cost no money; otherwise one might try to  walk out of bar without paying for a Cuba Libre.

Romance languages have inherited something of Latin’s precision.  It is in English (and German) where the notions of liberty and costlessness are confused.  I wonder how many of us, when we hear the terms “free market” and “free trade,” think initially of cost-free access to markets?  When, as I have frequently done, I make the joke that there is no such thing as a free market, because there are always fees to be paid, I hardly ever get a response, neither a flicker of recognition nor a snicker of contempt.  In fact, a free market is a market into which anyone can enter and free trade is a trade between nations that cannot be forbidden or limited by national governments.  This latter phrase is somewhat ambiguous, since governments often limit international trade by imposing tariffs.  This ambiguity does not alter the fundamental fact, which is that free markets and free trade are not, by definition, free of cost but (supposedly) free from coercion.

“Well, what difference does it make?  This quibbling over the meaning of words is not going to help us out of the current economic crisis.”

Possibly not, but it is hard to see that any useful set of solutions can be proposed if we deceive ourselves, and, in the world we live in, there is hardly a more pernicious form of deception than the misuse—deliberate or unintentional—of language.  We have lived so long on the bad ideas that lie behind bad words that our minds have been poisoned and our very wills corrupted to the marrow of our being.  Freedom for us is no longer viewed as a positive good, a moral and spiritual way of living that has been shaped by centuries of experience; it is now only the right to be perverse—to take drugs that make us stupid, to read nasty books that make us crazy, and to molest other people’s children and kill our own.  Kris Kristofferson probably intended no harm by his oft-quoted line, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but he did succeed in encapsulating in a mere ten words the servility of modern men and women for whom freedom means dependency, whether on a drug, a guru, or a social worker.

Later  on in the same article, I summon the ghost of Cicero to comment on some of our errors, and here is what he has to say about terms like "the economy" and "the market."

I asked Cicero how he would have handled the American economy.

“Economy?  That is the art of managing a household and, as I understand, you people apply it to theories of buying and selling.  Your first mistake, it seems to me, lay in turning ideas into things.  A good Roman would not do this; his language would not permit it.  But you people are forever talking about history, as if it meant the events of the past (instead of the study of the past) or the geography of Europe as if it meant the actual places rather than a description of places.  What a muddle you seem to have got yourself into, where you cannot  speak about  things except as abstractions.  You even, I am told, worship an almighty dollar made out of mere paper. I wish we had thought of that one when we were raising money to fight against Mark Antony, but we knew even then that only a tyrant would degrade the currency.”

“Excuse me, Marcus Tullius, but could we return to the question?  I know you’d like to get back to your conversation with Scipio Africanus…”

“As I was saying, you people are always mistaking words and ideas for things and then, by treating what is unreal as if it were real, you cannot see the real.  I heard what you were saying a few paragraphs above, and you are perfectly correct, if a bit shallow, in questioning the meaning of that misleading phrase, the “free market.”  You people seem to think that there is some ultimate principle or universal law of nature you call “The Market,” when in fact there is no such thing.  There is no “Market”, only markets.  Markets are not ideas or mechanisms of exchange: They are places where people buy and sell things, and it hardly makes any difference whether the market in question is the forum holitorium in Rome, where vegetables were sold (you can find the ruins in several nearly derelict churches), or something like your New York Stock exchange, where most of the orders are now placed through these computers you seem so proud of, though to me they seem like nothing more interesting than a gigantic abacus that enslaves the very people who pretend to be masters.
Capital and Capitalism

We have to begin by distinguishing at least three separate notions: 1) capital, 2) the economic system that is typified by owners of capital and which is misleadingly known as capitalism, and 3) the ideology of Capitalism.

Capital is simply a fancy word used to describe  what a man has to sell and the necessary means for setting up and maintaining his enterprise.  Let us imagine a truck gardener, who takes his vegetables to a farmer's market.  His capital consists of such things as the vegetables he has to sell, the pickup truck he uses to take them to market, his tractor and other farm implements, the 10 acres he farms, etc.  The time comes when he wishes to expand his business by buying another ten acres, but he does not have the cash, either for the land or for the additional seed and implements.  The widow next door gives him $100,000 in return for a fourth of the business and a fourth of the profits.  She is now part-owner, though she does no work.

The new field and expanding operations, however, require two illegal Mexicans to work.  Where previously the farmer had done everything himself, he now has employees.  In other societies he might have bought the employees, who would be known as slaves.  The situation of the two is not so different.  Slaves in many societies  had a good deal of free time and independence, while the Mexicans have no more income and a good deal more insecurity.

In any event, capital is universal in all but the most primitive societies, and some form of "capitalism", that is, ownership of the means of the production and control of laborers, is almost as universal. The Romans were great capitalists in this slightly erroneous sense of the word, though Roman social life and ideology was not Capitalist, that is, Romans liked to think of themselves either as patriotic gentlemen or farmers, much as an 18th century English capitalist liked to become a country gentleman as soon as he could afford it.

Capitalism with a capital C, however, is the system and ideology that grew up with liberalism, and it emphasizes the unrestricted rights of capitalists, whose activities  more or less define the society, as, for example, fighting noblemen defined parts of Medieval Europe.  Let me quote from my students' book on socialism:

Liberals usually (though not always) support capitalism, but liberalism and capitalism must be distinguished.  Capitalism, although it is often confused with liberal theories of the free market, is actually an economic system that emphasizes capital, that is, the money invested into a company that pays wages to its employees.  In principle, capitalism is incompatible with socialism, because capitalism presupposes private property and laws protecting property, while socialists traditionally have advocated public ownership of the great economic interests.  In reality, however, capitalism and socialism have tended to merge.   In countries that have nationalized large businesses, capitalist managers were often hired to run the corporations, while in countries that are officially capitalistic, large corporations cooperate closely with government agencies and often secure important benefits to themselves and to the detriment of smaller rivals.  Adam Smith, the first theorist of capitalism, noted that rival  businessmen would rather combine to control, by fixing wages and prices, than compete in the marketplace.  In the 20th century this has usually meant a close collaboration of business and government, in capitalist as much as in socialist countries.

Liberalism

From Socialism

"In the United States political discourse has been complicated by the deliberate misuse of terms.  Historically and still, for the most part, in Europe, the words liberal, conservative, and socialist have clear and distinct meanings.  Liberals, or “classical liberals” as they are known in America, believe (as their name suggests) in liberty.  Since the purpose of this book is to define and describe socialism, it is enough to say at this point that socialists emphasize economic justice, the redistribution of wealth and opportunity, and state ownership or control of great economic interests.

Liberal movements and parties oppose all unnecessary obstacles to individual liberty, self-fulfillment, and the progress of the human race.  Historically, liberals argued against monarchy (though there were liberal monarchists) traditional class structures, established churches, tariffs on trade, and even (in the case of J.S. Mill) against restrictive moral codes and the subjugation of women.  Liberals believed that the best economic results would come about in a system of free competition within the marketplace.

If liberalism’s code words are liberty, progress, and competition, conservatives have spoken of the importance of religion, social stability, and  traditional loyalties to the family and the nation.  Although conservatism, unlike liberalism, never had a clear program or ideology, conservatives instinctively resisted change, and until the mid-20th century, most conservatives were, at best, lukewarm defenders of capitalism and competition.  They often agreed with the moral arguments put forward by socialists who favored assistance to the poor, and they disagreed sharply with the liberal faith in free trade.  Without being nationalists, conservatives are eager to defend their nations, a fact that makes international conservative cooperation extremely difficult.

In the 20th century, conservatives in the US and the UK adopted much of the liberal economic agenda, without necessarily sacrificing all of their old commitments to family, aristocracy, and religion.  Liberals, as they lost the support of the working classes, either turned conservative or adopted the parts of the socialist agenda they found compatible with their own.  For example, liberals originally spoke of liberty in terms of freedom from restraint, but in the late 19th century some of them began to speak of liberty in terms of the freedom to do something, such as to pursue a professional career.  These liberals concluded that the poor could only pursue their plans if they were given free education.

The changing meanings of these terms can be very confusing, seeing that American “conservatives” like Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley are really liberals, while liberals like Senator Edward Kennedy or Hilary Rodham Clinton are closer to being socialists than liberals.  To keep things simple, I shall use conservative and liberal in their classical senses, though when capitalized they will refer to conservative or liberal parties and their members.  Since American “liberals” do not like to be called socialists, they will usually be described as “left liberals,” though when their programs coincide with those of socialist parties, the spade will have to be called a spade and not a garden fork."

For this discussion, perhaps  it is enough to say that liberal individualism, with its opposition to community, authority and tradition and its emphasis on universal rational principles, although it includes many morally wholesome principles, is false to human nature and inconsistent with Christianity.  So-called Democratic Capitalism, which puts economic and political liberty as the highest good or, worse still, relies on the principle of subjective value, cannot be reconciled with the morality of Christ and the Apostles or of the Church's teachings.  We can speak more about this later, but there is no point in discussing anything, unless we agree on terms.

These brief and unpolished paragraphs are not intended as the final word on anything but only brief introductions to clarify the terms of discourse.If I have misstated or overstated something, I am happy to be corrected.   But I do ask you all not to distract the discussion with allusions to this or that classical liberal or libertarian, even if, like Acton, they thought they could reconcile Christianity and Capitalism.  As Acton once observed of himself, as a Catholic he was a bad liberal (or was it vice versa?).

VIEWS
Sola Scriptura: The Case for the Crusades
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
Following Christ.

How to Win the War Against Christmas
by Tom Piatak
Remembering how we got here.

Muslim Pressure and Christian Appeasement
by Christie Davies
The British retreat as the Muslims advance.

NEWS
The Cold War Never Ended
by Joseph E. Fallon
U.S.-Russian relations since September 11.

REVIEWS
The Fall of the House of Utter
by Clark Stooksbury

Andrew J. Bacevich: The Limits of Power

H.A. Scott Trask on Kevin Phillips’ Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on John G. West’s Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science

Ronald F. Maxwell on Alston Chase’s We Give Our Hearts to Dogs to Tear: Intimations of Their Immortality

CORRESPONDENCE
Letter From England: Spy Kids and Labour Snoops
by Thomas McMahon

VITAL SIGNS
The Family: Europe’s Self-Jihad
by Roberto de Mattei

Homeschooling as Mental Illness
by Beverly K. Eakman

COLUMNS
The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

The American Interest
by Srdja Trifkovic

In the Dark
Body of Lies
by George McCartney

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS
POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Saint-Séverin, I
by Catharine Savage Brosman

ON THE COVER
Cover art by Giotto di Bondone.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

As he grew older, the finest moment was looking out the window at the stars glittering hard upon the heaped-up snow, knowing, with a sigh, that it was all over for another year.

Halloween was just the reverse, an ordinary day punctuated by the stupid parties at school that seemed designed to take the magic out of the holiday.  In the early years, when he had been dressed up as a ghost—blinded by the sheet whose holes never matched his eyes—and dragged from house to house by an exasperated sister screaming, “Come on, hurry up, you little dope,” he came back more than once bruised and bleeding from running into a tree or splitting his head on the boulder that a crazy old woman kept in front of her cottage.  But by the time he was eight or so, he could go out with his friends and face the terrors of a cold autumn night.  If Christmas was a prison ruled by domineering old people who refused to let him play with his new toys—“Just keep that in the box until we have time to read the instructions”—Halloween was the Get Out of Jail Free Card so sought after when losing at Monopoly with his sister, a born plutocrat who did not hesitate to cheat.  (She was, after all, the banker.)

He and his friends never actually soaped—much less waxed—any windows, though, in the case of old Mr. Van Horne, who spent September nights protecting his garden with a shotgun loaded with rock salt (so they said), they were sorely tempted.  They did lie in wait behind bushes to jump out and scare the littler kids who came by, but that was the extent of their mischief.  It did not matter what they did because they were free, free even to eat so much candy that they would be sick all night.

But as much fun as it was to demand—and get—the treats by methods that sounded a lot like the techniques used by the hard boys in the blackmail or protection rackets, the real thrill of Halloween was the eerie sense of something inexplicable out there, something that could not be explained away by an atheist father or by the rationalist moralizings he heard from Christian friends, who cheated, lied, and stole more than he did.  Sure, Jesus must have been a swell guy, but as presented in school and at the occasional Sunday-school class he attended with neighbors, he was a little too much like the YMCA camp counselors who talked a good game about playing straight and leading a good life but were no less likely to write bad checks or abandon their wives.  Less crudely generous than Santa Claus but certainly more real than the Easter Bunny, Jesus sometimes reminded him a bit of the Pilgrim fathers they had to pretend to be on Thanksgiving, despite the fact that among the Swedes, Polacks, and Micks in his class, none of them could trace his ancestry back to Plymouth or even Massachusetts Bay.  At least Capt. John Smith had been an Indian fighter, but Jesus fought nobody, not even the Devil, who won in the end.  That is what Easter was all about—dying on the cross with no complaints and then, oh yeah, some story about pie in the sky when you die, as Rev. Ike, the “success and prosperity preacher” on the radio, dismissed the immaterial blessings of the Faith.  Perhaps his dislike of Christianity came from his father, but it was exacerbated by the preacher’s kid in his class—a nasty little piece of work who flattered the teachers and tried to get the other boys in trouble when they beat him up as he deserved.

On Halloween, there was nothing or no one you could put a name to, no cut-out figures in a pageant, no Squanto who betrayed his own people to curry favor with aliens, no gentle Jesus meek and mild, who refused to resist evil even to save himself.  There were only fearsome things with no name, dead people who walked the earth and the demons let out of Hell on a one-night pass.

He grew up and learned how wrong he had been about the Crucifixion, but he retained his distaste for the smarmy race-traitor Squanto.  Instead of turning against Halloween, he appreciated it even more now that he understood its significance as the eve of the holy days of All Saints and All Souls, when Christians everywhere are supposed to honor those who have died in faith and fear.  Yes, he understood the objections of fundamentalists who spotted borrowings from pagan cults such as the Roman Parentalia and Lemuria, but the same fundamentalists, so eager to put the Christ back in Christmas, took pagan trees into their houses and exchanged pagan rings at their weddings.  What they really objected to, he began to suspect, was the sense of dread and awe the night inspired.  All their chipper talk about dying and going straight to Heaven seemed to conceal a terrified refusal to consider the terrors of death.  If death is such a pleasant thing for people who say the right magic words, then why did Christ Himself, praying in the Garden, say “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me”?  In a stronger age of faith, William Dunbar’s refrain “Timor mortis conturbat me” made sense to the most ardent believer, but in the age of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, no right-thinking man or woman had anything to fear.  There was no Dies irae awaiting mankind, only an air-conditioned retirement complex in St. Petersburg.

Perhaps he was wrong, but each year, as he entered the Christmas season, he was appalled by the irreverence of public celebration.  It was not just the cynical exploitation of a Christian holiday by non-Christian retailers—though that was bad enough—but professing Christians joined in the desecration, putting up Christmas decorations at the beginning of Advent, replacing the solemn carols and hymns he had sung in his atheist youth with foolish jingles concocted for megachurch theatricals and degrading the solemn joys of the season with their irreverent billboards that treated the Son of God like some miraculous detergent: “Kmart isn’t the only saving place.”  Is it any wonder that people willing to trivialize the Creator and His Son with every breath they take and every horn they toot—“Honk if you love Jesus”—treat Christmas like one more excuse for a dance party, music provided by Kristal Myers and Hawk Nelson?

Walking down the street one late October day, he noted the yard displays for Halloween, especially the graveyard a family puts up every year with an expanding set of victims:  “Tom Buck, he forgot to duck.”  Silly but harmless, and not so irrelevant as the Santas and reindeer, Frosties and Season’s Greetings signs that greeted the birth of Christ.  He thought, for some reason, of a truly revolting movie, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which Jack, the “King of Halloween,” decides to displace Santa Claus and take over Christmas.  Jack inevitably learns his mistake and restores Santa to his rightful place.

For all he knew, Tim Burton meant no disrespect; he may even have intended a positive message—that love and happiness trump the power of fear—but it is the triumph of Hallmark sentimentality that he celebrates and not Christ’s birth and triumph over the grave.  The trivialization did not start with Tim Burton or even with the Grinch fable of the leftist propagandist Ted Geisel or the American version of the Santa story, concocted largely by Charles Nast and Frank Baum.  Baum’s Wizard of Oz is a more Christian story, he realized, than The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.  Going back still further to a childhood favorite, he began to understand that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a moving and, despite the sentimentalism, largely wholesome fable, but there is hardly an allusion to the real Christmas story, and, such little faith was there in the 19th century, Dickens felt the need to invent his own supernatural characters and events—Marley’s ghost and  the three ghosts of Christmas—which replace the miracles of the Incarnation, the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the choirs of angels singing, “Peace on earth to men of good will.”

The neopagan desecration of Christmas has been matched by a process that turned All Hallows Eve first into a gold mine for candy butchers and dentists and then into a glorification of all that is twisted and perverse.  What films do people watch on October 31?  It used to be wholesome moral cartoons like the Wolfman and Dracula.  Now, people are more likely to watch Michael Myers in Halloween or Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street.  In addition to these examples of tasteful filmmaking, Reader’s Digest (that bastion of Middle American family values) also recommends The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Silence of the Lambs, Night of the Living Dead, and—for 12 and above—The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Instead of confronting supernatural evil and defeating it, these films glorify and worship it.  Small wonder that decent evangelicals in their confusion have declared war on Halloween, though they might just as well declare war on Christmas, while they are at it.

The ancient pagans, from whom we have borrowed so many of the petty customs and rituals that enrich the Christian calendar, knew that life and death are serious matters.  They also understood something basic that we have been trying to forget for centuries, though it is summed up in the Anglican Prayerbook’s burial rite (with no apologies to Job):

Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.  He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

In the midst of life we are in death.

There were pagans who believed in a heaven for the virtuous, but, for the rest, their awareness of life’s brevity and the imminence of death gave a richer savor to their experience.  Una nox dormienda, the poet warned his mistress: There is a night that must be slept forever.  A Greek or Roman household was alive with the spirits of the dead, who had to be honored and propitiated.  Post-Christians today, in fleeing death, are really denying life, not just the life in the here and now, but the abundant life that has been promised to us.  We sing (with Miss Peggy Lee), “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing.  Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.”

Even otherwise solid Catholic theologians have come to overvalue the here and now to such an extent that they oppose the death penalty.  Yes, there are also reasons of prudence and humanity that should give a Christian pause before signing his fellow man’s death warrant, but in this age of fear and denial we cannot see much beyond the end of our nose that is said to grow sharp when we are at the point of death.  To the arguments of fear whined from every New York Times editorial page and preached from every electronic soapbox, we should do as the Pilgrim did when he “put his fingers in his ears and went on crying, ‘Life, Life, Eternal Life.’”

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.

Whither the Republic?
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

Paradise Lost
by Roger D. McGrath
The white minority.

The Promise and Peril of Identity Politics
by Tom Piatak
Hope in a dismal season.

The Burden of Racial Guilt
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
A new declaration of independence.

Pro-Choice Christians
by Aaron D. Wolf
Shattering nature's glass ceiling.

NEWS

Spain Embraces Change
by José  Javier Esparza
Canceling the past.

REVIEWS

La Plus Belle France
by Catharine Savage Brosman

Graham Robb: The Discovery of France

plus

James O. Tate on Chilton Williamson, Jr.'s Mexico Way

Thomas Fleming on Peter Green's The Hellenistic Age: A Short Story

Clark Stooksbury on Paul Roberts' The End of Food

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From the Upper Midwest: More (Local) Government
by Sean Scallon

VITAL SIGNS

Commonweal: The West's Guilty Feelings
by Claude Polin

COLUMNS

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Letter to the Bishop
by Joe Ecclesia

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

The American Interest
by Srdja Trifkovic

In the Dark
Elegy, Burn After Reading
by George McCartney

The Hundredth Meridian
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Ecce Canis and
Four Firsts and a Last
by Timothy Murphy

ON THE COVER

Cover by George McCartney, Jr.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

The Audacity of Hate
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

The Obama Presidency
by Doug Bandow
The triumph of (lots of) experience over (a little) hope?

Boogaloo Down Broadway
by Tony Outhwaite
The charade of liberal change.

The Revelations of the Obama Plan
by David A. Hartman
Change we can't afford.

Obama on Foreign Policy
by Ted Galen Carpenter
A mysterious work in progress.

ROUND TABLE

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
by Wayne Allensworth, Srdja Trifkovic, and John Lukacs

REVIEWS

True—or New?
by W. James Antle III

Mark Krikorian: The New Case Against Immigration

plus

Clyde Wilson on Sen. Jim Webb's A Time to Fight:
Reclaiming a Fair and Just America

Jack Trotter on Anthony Bukoski's North of the Port

Chris Chan on Chesterton on War and Peace, Michael W. Perry, ed.

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Thailand: The Greening of the Gold Rush
by Harry Nicolaides

VITAL SIGNS

Politics: Nobody's Bagboy
by Jack Trotter

Carolina Courage
by Jeff Minick

COLUMNS

Sins of Omission
by Roger D. McGrath

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

The American Interest
by Srdja Trifkovic

In the Dark
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
by George McCartney

The Hundredth Meridian
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

California Condor and
Louder Than Words by Paul Lake

ON THE COVER

Cover by George McCartney, Jr.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

The forthcoming general election is a Worst-Case Scenario Survival situation and it is happening to us. November 4 calls for the Guide approach. Let me come to the point and speak plainly.

When we look at this season’s four key names—Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin—we know what three of them signify.

Let us start with Senator Obama, that perpetually self-inventing Kenyan-Hawaiian nobody who came from who-knows-where. He may be an American citizen after all, but his disdain for the still-real and historic America is on full display even when it is wrapped in smilingly patronizing condescention for its majority population. The purpose of his presidency would be to re-educate that population in the spirit of self-loathing – his cult-like following among many white yuppies gives him great hope – and to neutralize the incorrigible segment by whatever means the postmodern theurapeutic state has on offer. Abroad, we’d have the “Concert of Democracies” led by Washington deciding whom to bomb, with Zbigniew Brzezinski pulling the strings. Under Obama, America’s overall odds, at home and abroad, would be no better than those of a Dresden firefighter on February 13, 1945.

Joe Biden is the archetypical Homo Beltveicus. He’d be Pol Pot’s running mate if that served Joe Biden’s quest for power, money, and then some more of the same. He proves that in Washington we have the best Congress and the worst hair pluggers money can buy. An interventionist to boot, Biden enthusiastically supported Clinton's bombing campaign against the Serbs in 1999, which prompted John McCain to declare three weeks into the war, "We need Joe Biden for secretary of state." When Tim Russert asked, "Is that an offer by President McCain?" McCain replied: "Absolutely!" Almost a decade later he is on the same page with McCain on supporting Kosovo’s independence and in his visceral Russophobia, as evidenced by his recent trip to Tbilisi.

In case of a Democratic victory Biden's chances of succeeding Obama would be no better than one-in-fifty, however – not that it would matter much one way or another. Barring a Dallas-like scenario that Hillary Clinton wished him in the primaries’ final days, Obama is good for another quarter-century of CV building and self-reinvention before finally making the Hajj.

John McCain is an unstable ignoramus who has never seen a war he wouldn’t gladly escalate. He is also obtuse, unendearingly eccentric, and morally challenged. (Let us not waste time dwelling on those traits; the evidence is ample and available to the curious.) If elected he would invent new missions and embark on new cakewalks, because he cannot do otherwise and because he’d be surrounded by foreign lobbyists (Scheunemann) and McCain clones (Lieberman) who reflect and support his mindset. He is an authentically dangerous man. His only saving grace, and the reason to vote for him under the Worst Scenario rules, is his age.

Mortality tables used by the life insurance industry and by the Social Security Administration indicate that average life expectancy for a 72-year-old man is at best about 11 years. That figure declines to about one half of that, however, when we factor in two significant variables: (1) four cancer scares, including melanoma (plus a long history of early and middle age smoking); and (2) a choleric personality (as per Hippocrates), which is dangerous when coupled with the pressures of a top office.

The probability of McCain dying before the end of the first term is a little over 20 percent before those variables are factored in, but they jump to somewhere between 33 and 40 percent when they are taken into consideration. Furthermore, the actuarial morbidity tables may significantly increase the odds of Veep Palin becoming President following the onset of an incapacitating condition that would force McCain to resign.

That leaves us with the probability of one-third or better that President Sarah Palin would be sworn in before the expiry of McCain’s first term. What would she do? I don’t know, but I am pretty certain that her foreign policies would not be any worse than those proposed by the three men. The Washingtonian “foreign policy community” would try to manipulate her, of course, but she is a tough nut to crack. Over the past few years she readily confronted an Old Boys' Network and defeated Frank Murkowski, the sitting Republican governor, in the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary. Before that she resigned a State sinecure, protesting the "lack of ethics" of fellow Republican members, and went on to destroy the political careers of Randy Ruedrich, GOP State Chairman, and Gregg Renkes, a former Alaska Attorney General.

Mrs. Palin’s alleged weaknesses are her strengths. Being an innocent abroad, in the dangerous world modelled on Hobbes and Darwin, is preferable to having “experience” in the obsessive attempt to tame and conquer that world. The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety: unlike any laptop bombardier, she has a son on his way to Iraq. I’d say that it is at least 50-50 President Palin would act as a foreign policy realist who’d refrain from new “missions,” “engagements” and “force projections.” That translates into cca 20 percent chance of America conducting a sane foreign policy, for the first time in decades, some time before 2012.

Most of our daily choices are morally ambiguous. The one based on The Worst Case Scenario Survival Calendar, which I am presenting herewith for our readers’ consideration, is no exception. In a fallen world the alternative is plague-on-all-their-houses quietism that suits the bad guys.