U.S. Exceptionalism and Strategies

“…(T)he thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership.”

--George F. Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947)

The political and military personality of American power as known and conceived in our epoch has been generated during more than a century of delusion and political fraud.  These dangerous psychological circumstances in world history -- a significant component of American foreign policy since its unfortunate wars ravaging Native American Indian tribes for their legitimate territorial lands -- finally realized in its hegemonic overreach since the end of World War II. Led by a white class consciousness and racial paradigm created by an Anglo-American dominant culture, it has engendered a narrow-mindedness in how the American government perceives its political enemies, and, most important, its military adversaries as well.  

Because of the United States’ troubled history of bigotry coupled with naïve exceptionalism, its political thought as well as its military forces have failed dramatically since the debacle of the Vietnam War to persuade others to follow its lead, unless bludgeoned through direct coercion. 

Such military and political coercion historically evolved from interfering in other nation-states' domestic elections such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and Chilean coup of 1973, to direct military conflicts such as the Korean War, through proxy armies in Central and South America, as well as military incursions into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.  

Most tragically in Syria, the Obama regime created and colluded with so-called ‘moderate’ rebel forces to destroy the legitimate Assad government, while other world political actors knew that in actuality those so-called democratic military forces were mercenary, military units or brigades, fighting for the dominance of a U. S. fraudulent Pax America in the whole region of the Middle East. The Trump regime would continue the war against any nation-state that opposes an American fixation on a world that is none-other than an American World Order.     

 Paradoxically, these observations I have offered on the American hegemonic vision I would deem for the most part nebulous, since there never has actually been a clear program to subdue the world to its own making except for the Marshall Plan which would stabilize Europe after its destruction in World War II.  The various United States governments also revealed to the world’s nation-states an impracticality with its modern wars of revenge and domination from Vietnam to Iraq and Syria, which began with a dogmatic political fanaticism by the Nixon regime, later followed by the Bush regimes, the Clinton and Obama regimes. This  blustering schoolyard bully style culminates in the Trump regime’s alarmingly crass foreign policy through its impulsivity to threaten acts of war bestowed upon those who do not heed its world view. 

Taking into account the historical trajectory of American political and military affairs on the contemporary world stage, I would like to conclude my somewhat circumscribed but hopefully insightful critical analysis of the American military theorist Timothy L. Thomas’s book “Russia's Military Strategy: Impacting 21st Century Reform and Geopolitics”. I  shall herein refer to him as 'the author'. The author mentions possible military scenarios which worry him in terms of a confrontation with Russian military might -- he cites a Russian strategy to surround the United States with military forces overtly within South and Central American dominions, which he believes could lead the United States into a conflict of an ultimate friction of war with Russia.       

In my view, if such a  situation occurred regarding provocation, it would find its roots either in a dramatic flare-up in the Donbass region of the Ukraine or in the territorial regions of Syria. 

While Thomas posits, after thoroughly  studying a report by independent military Russian thinkers and a Russian officer on the staff of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, “The article noted Russia should utilize deterrence and collective security strategies if it is to counter US moves in Europe. Here, strategy is tightly wound with geopolitics, which is a specialty of Ivashov. When advancing collective security the article advanced the idea of creating a joint troop grouping in Nicaragua with China and putting Russian troops in Venezuela and Brazil. More ominous was the suggestion of placing a taskforce off the coasts of the US, so that it would have American territory in its sights. That clearly implies a task force stationed in Cuba”.  

Thomas would further talk of India being part of such a strategy to surround the United States as well as mentioning UAVs (unmanned aircraft systems), while at the same time admitting, “Psychologically, there were repeated warnings from these men that Russia should not allow the US to provoke (the word was used seven or eight times) it into acting.”  

A calculated foreign policy to stave off war is not mentioned; as we must know, a flexible foreign policy and diplomacy are vital tools for war readiness.  Thomas fails to understand that military doctrine and provocations are wedded by historical and political goals or strategy. Therefore his analysis is pure conjecture, as the forces of history can be spontaneous. Political movements or a duel of war can take decades to develop, or in fact take place without warning, triggered by political miscalculation or even an assassination of a political world figure. 

In my youth, as a young undergraduate at Kansas State University, after serving in the American military, I encountered the classic treatise by notable American diplomat and historian  George F. Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005), “Russia and the West”. During the Cold War, Kennan's influential concept of "containment” was paramount regarding the USSR and its need for self-preservation.  Even in my young student days, I deeply understood how Kennan, though perhaps reactionary in his own political allegiances, clearly was aware how going to war against the Russian people could cost the American government and the American people dearly. 

And so, for years, I would often go back and study the seminal works of this brilliant American diplomat, and I learned by reading more thoroughly about how, in 1946 as the American charge d'affaires in Moscow, Kennan sent the U.S. State Department an 8,000-word telegram known as "The Sources of Soviet Conduct, by X" also referred to for short as "Long Telegram X," reminding us the strategy of “containment” can go both ways: 

“But the United States has it in its power," Kennan wrote in that "Long Telegram X," "to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. For no mystical, Messianic movement -- and particularly not that of the Kremlin -- can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.”  

Consider the current historical irony in that statement by Kennan. Russia now finds itself in a historical position: it  must either contain the bellicose Messianic vision of the United States regarding its overreach for world hegemony, or eventually go to war with the United States -- which, of course, will forever change world history, in a "clash of the Titans" not seen since the emergence of the Roman Empire. Thus, the great American people face the ultimate challenge: live in peace or face tragic implosion.