Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy could almost have been designed to undermine our national interests. Whether under Republican George W. Bush or Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we have seen “regime changes” and “color revolutions,” facilitation of global jihadism while claiming to combat it, and gratuitous confrontation with post-communist Russia which was going out of its way to become our reliable ally.
For those familiar with the operational code of the late Soviet Union, the counterproductive skew of American policy has a familiar ring. The Bolsheviks sacrificed the interests of the Russian people in pursuit of their Marxist-Leninist vision. In his famous work, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, described the roots of his ruling ideology in 19th-century German philosophy, British political economy, and French utopian socialism.
It’s time to ask why, under GOP and Democrat administrations alike, American foreign policy is so dysfunctional. Also, one could notice that this policy has three components as well.
First, consider the power of money centered in the Washington establishment, sometimes summarized as the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). This huge network of institutions, both public and private, whose bread and butter depend on global adventurism, today extends well beyond the MIC that outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower described in 1960. Reportedly, an earlier draft of the speech used the term “military-industrial-Congressional” complex. Asked about the omission from the final text, Eisenhower is said to have answered: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”
The bipartisan “oligarchy” (as Senator Jeff Sessions calls it) or the “deep state” (as author Mike Lofgren calls it) includes elements of all three branches of the U.S. government, the financial industry, government contractors, think tanks, many NGOs, the political parties and their campaign operatives, lobbyists and PR flacks for any of the foregoing as well as for foreign interests (think of Saudi contributions to the Clinton Foundation), and of course the Mainstream Media that serve as bulletin boards for official information (ask Ben Rhodes). Somebody is making a lot of money, but it sure isn’t the ordinary folk in what the elite of both parties concentrated on the coasts disdain as “Flyover Country.”
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