Amerika, zemlja velika

[Gandalf]

Did Rep. Andy Harris inadvertently legalize marijuana possession in DC? 

Shortly after noon Wednesday, the Republicans of the House Appropriations Committee (plus one Democrat) voted to block the District’s recently passed marijuana decriminalization law. Leading the charge was Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who said the measure was “bad policy” that would harm children.

 

But District lawyers are now exploring whether he might have actually moved to, in effect, legalize marijuana possession instead.

[Filipenko]

Građanin Freedom Industries kažnjen sa 11 hiljada dolara za trovanje reke u neposrednoj blizini grada u Zapadnoj Virdžiniji, slučaj poznat svima koji prate Stjuarta i Kolbera. 

[Zaz_pi]

 

Germans probe 2nd spy case reportedly involving US

(Agencies) Updated: 2014-07-10 11:46

 

BERLIN - German authorities are investigating a second spy case reportedly involving the United States, a week after the arrest of a German intelligence employee cast a new shadow over relations between the two countries.

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that police raided properties in the Berlin area on "initial suspicion of activity for an intelligence agency." They did not elaborate or specify what intelligence agency was involved, but said they had not made an arrest.

GERMANY EXPELS U.S. DIPLOMAT OVER ESPIONAGE AFFAIR

GERMAN GOVT TAKING ISSUE 'VERY SERIOUSLY,' CHANCELLERY SAYS

EXPULSION LINKED TO INVESTIGATION OF ALLEGED U.S. SPYING

 

The chief US Central Intelligence Agency officer in Germany is to be expelled in a sign of Berlin's anger at two cases of possible US espionage uncovered in the past week, a senior German legislator said Thursday.

 

Chancellor Angela Merkel declined to confirm the impending move, which would be an act of diplomatic hostility unprecedented in the seven decades the two nations have been the closest of allies.

 

"I am not going to speculate," she told reporters. "When we have a sufficient factual basis ... we will decide what can be done. I can't offer more precise information than that." The intention to ask the head of the CIA's Germany station to leave was disclosed by Clemens Binninger,

chief of the German parliament's intelligence committee, after his group received a confidential briefing from intelligence officials in Berlin.

 

edit: quote

Edited July 10, 2014 by Zaz_pi

[Filipenko]

Giant Corporations, Giant Failures

[Eraserhead]

Giant Corporations, Giant Failures

Odlicno. Sto vise malih inovativnih firmi i sto manje ogromnih tromih divova.

[Paul]

vasington is not amused da je merkel zamolila spiona da se vrati u ameriku :D

[Lord Protector]

 

It's Still 1945 in Europe --- In Washington's View

 

BY ERIC MARGOLIS • JULY 12, 2014

 

Just how independent is the European Union? Given recent events involving the United States and its European allies, one really must wonder.

First, there was the US National Security Agency brazenly tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cellphone and, very likely, many more vip’s in Germany, a key US ally and Europe’s most important nation.

Washington and the NSA shrugged off this horribly embarrassing incident with the usual “well, everyone does it.”

Not true. Imagine the stink if Germany bugged President Barack Obama’s Blackberry. Chancellor Merkel was humiliated but she downplayed the scandal, unable or unwilling to chastise the US by taking any real punitive action – like closing one of the 69-year old US military bases in Germany.

Next, Britain’s Mutual Defense Agreement with the US is up for renewal. This 1958 pact is the foundation of the much ballyhooed US-British “Special Relationship.”

This writer has reported for years that Britain cannot fire its nuclear-armed missiles without Washington turning the key via special codes. Now, we learn that Britain’s nukes also contain components that only the US can provide. France, at least, has an independent nuclear force.

In 2003, US CIA agents kidnap a Muslim cleric off the street in Milano. Italian courts indict and convict 23 US agents of this crime and orders them extradited to Italy. The US refused the legitimate extradition request.

US officials charge UBS bank with helping Americans avoid taxes – a perfectly legal act in Switzerland, the bank’s home.

The head of UBS wealth management, Raoul Weil, was arrested in Italy and sent to the US under house arrest where he waits trial. Washington shut down a second important private Swiss bank and sends others running. The Swiss banks, no angels, risked seeing their US operations shut down unless they violated the basic Swiss bank secrecy law by giving up many of their client’s names.

Now, France’s leading bank, BNP, is being forced to pay a mammoth fine of $8.79 billion for violating US and New York State sanctions against Sudan, Iran and Cuba. Such dealing was entirely legal under French and EU law, but the US was determined to expand its punitive laws to Europe -a process called “lawfare.” BNP’s business in the US was threatened. BNP’s humiliation was hailed as a victory by Israel against Iran.

Shockingly, France’s government made no more than a few peeps of protest, yet another example of abject weakness by President Francois Hollande who is often compared to a large jellyfish by French critics. Paris could have told the Americans “non!” and threatened to seize US assets in France. Instead, it groveled.

Of late, two Americans were caught red-handed spying on Germany’s government. The CIA station chief in Berlin was ordered expelled. Germany repeatedly asked the US to be included on its lilly-white list of allies supposedly not to be spied upon: Canada, Britain, Israel, Australia, New Zealand. The US refused.

No one knew whether President Barack Obama was actually aware of this espionage. He will, of course, deny being in the loop. But further serious damage was inflicted on US relations with Germany and the European Union.

Unwisely, Washington still deals with Europe and the EU as if dealing with minor vassal states: “foot soldiers for America’s nuclear knights,” in the pithy words of Germany’s late defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss. Washington’s arrogance and contempt for Europe was best illustrated by State Department neocon Victoria Nuland’s reply when asked if the EU should get more involved in US attempts to overthrow Ukraine’s pro-Russian government, “f-k the EU.”

Washington has never accepted any European state or the EU as an equal. While official US policy backs a united Europe, unofficially the US has sometimes tried to thwart or delay unification – particularly a European armed force. NATO – 76% financed and run by Washington – is still the EU’s police force and America’s big stick in Europe.

At times, it looks as if not so much has changed in Europe since 1945. The Soviets are gone, but the more amiable Americans are still around. But it often seems that Washington is almost trying to alienate its natural European allies by treating them like banana republics with old world charm.

 

 

Edited July 14, 2014 by slow

[Lord Protector]

SALON

SATURDAY, JUL 12, 2014 05:00 PM CEDT

The American Century is over: How our country went down in a blaze of shame We face a triple crisis in foreign policy, economics and democracy. Here's how it all went to hell

 

Donald Rumsfeld, Jamie Dimon, David Koch (Credit: AP/Rob Carr/Reuters/Keith Bedford/AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack/Photo montage by Salon)

 

In 1914, the American Century began. This year the American Century ended. America’s foreign policy is in a state of collapse, America’s economy doesn’t work well, and American democracy is broken. The days when other countries looked to the U.S. as a successful model of foreign policy prudence, democratic capitalism and liberal democracy may be over. The American Century, 1914-2014. RIP.

A hundred years ago, World War I marked the emergence of the U.S. as the dominant world power. Already by the late nineteenth century, the U.S. had the world’s biggest economy. But it took the First World War to catalyze the emergence of the U.S. as the most important player in geopolitics. The U.S. tipped the balance against Imperial Germany, first by loans to its enemies after 1914 and then by entering the war directly in 1917.

Twice more in the twentieth century the U.S. intervened to prevent a hostile power from dominating Europe and the world, in World War II and the Cold War. Following the end of the Cold War, America’s bipartisan elite undertook the project of creating permanent American global hegemony. The basis of America’s hegemonic project was a bargain with the two major powers of Europe, Germany and Russia, and the two major powers of Asia, Japan and China. The U.S. proposed to make Russia and China perpetual military protectorates, as it had already done during the Cold War with Germany and Japan. In return, the U.S. would keep its markets open to their exports and look after their international security interests.

This vision of a solitary American globocop policing the world on behalf of other great powers that voluntarily abandon militarism for trade has been shared by the Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama administrations. But by 2014 the post-Cold War grand strategy of the United States had collapsed.

China and Russia have rudely declined America’s offer to make them subservient military satellites, like Japan and Germany.  China has been building up its military, engaging in cyber-attacks on the U.S., and intimidating its neighbors, to promote the end of American military primacy in East Asia.

Meanwhile, Russia has responded to the expansion of the U.S.-led NATO alliance to its borders by going to war with Georgia in 2008 to deter Georgian membership in NATO and then, in 2014, seizing Crimea from Ukraine, after Washington promoted a rebellion against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president.

There are even signs of a Sino-Russian alliance against the U.S. The prospect excites some neoconservatives and neoliberal hawks, who had been quiet following the American military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a second Cold War against a Sino-Russian axis, the European Union, with its economy comparable to America’s, will not provide reliable support. Russia is a nuisance, not a threat to Europe. China doesn’t threaten Europe and Europeans want Chinese trade and investment too much. In Asia, only a fool would bet on the ability of a ramshackle alliance of the U.S., Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Australia to “contain” China.

The U.S. still has by far the world’s most powerful and sophisticated military — but what good is it? Russia knows the U.S. won’t go to war over Ukraine. China knows the U.S. won’t go to war over this or that reef or island in the South China Sea. As Chairman Mao would have said, America is a paper tiger.

The U.S. military was able to destroy the autocratic governments of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — but all the foreign policy agencies of the U.S. have been unable to help create functioning states to replace them. Since 2003, Uncle Sam has learned that it is easier to kick over anthills than to build them.

In addition to having a huge military that for the most part can neither intimidate strong adversaries nor pacify weak ones, America has an economy that for decades has failed to deliver sustained growth that is widely shared.

Apart from a revival of oil and gas production in the U.S., the economy’s main area of comparative strength has been technological innovation. The rise of self-driving vehicles and the “internet of things” are promising developments. But these mostly involve the extension of existing information technology to new sectors. The American tech economy has been living on intellectual capital accumulated before the 1980s, when the Defense Department funded the early breakthroughs in information technology. Compared to earlier breakthroughs like transistors and satellites, most of today’s innovations are trivial and contribute little or nothing either to living standards or national industrial power: “Hey, give me a billion dollars for my app that tells you when to pick up your laundry!”

The picture is even bleaker when we turn our gaze from Silicon Valley to the rest of the American economy. The manufacturing sector has been decimated by subsidized imports from China, Japan and other mercantilist countries, and by the decisions of many American multinationals to shut down American factories in order to exploit cheap labor and take government subsidies in other lands. America’s infrastructure is decrepit, but Congress cannot even agree about how to fund the aging interstate highway system, much less invest in twenty-first century transportation and communications systems. Most of the jobs being created in the U.S. are in the low-wage, non-union, no-benefit service sector where millions are trapped in the status of the “working poor.”

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the current American economic system are not entrepreneurs or innovators, but parasites who owe their wealth to rigged markets or government subsidies. The “parasite load” in the U.S. economy includes many in the financial industry who expect that the federal government will socialize their losses but let them keep their profits — profits taxed at low rates, or hidden from taxation altogether. Other parasitic special interests include the predatory monopolies of America’s health care sector — the pharma industry, which charges Americans far more for the same drugs than it is allowed to charge in Canada, Europe or Asia; physicians, who tend to be paid much more in the U.S. than in other countries with comparable health outcomes; and price-gouging hospitals. Much of America’s higher education industry, too, is riddled with parasites, including bankers who profit from lifelong debt serfdom by Americans who take out student loans and empire-building university administrators who fund personal entourages with public and private money.

Suppose a delegation from a developing country were to visit various First World nations in search of models. What on earth could the U.S. teach them? How to enrich bankers who add little or no value to the economy? How to ensure that citizens pay far more for medical goods and services that cost much less everywhere else? How to make citizens go into debt to get an education? How to import multitudes of poor foreign workers to compete with native workers, even though the country is suffering from massive and persistent underemployment? How to allow many employers to pay wages so low that workers are forced to use public welfare services to survive?

All right, let it be stipulated that the world’s greatest military hasn’t been very successful either at intimidating other great powers like China and Russia or frightening warlords in Mad Max wastelands into obedience. And let’s concede that any country that chose the post-1980s U.S. economic system as its model would be certifiably suicidal. Aren’t we still the world’s greatest liberal democracy?

The U.S. remains a paragon of liberalism and democracy compared to many foreign dictatorships and anarchies, of course. But the proper comparison is with other advanced industrial democracies. By that test, current American democracy offers little for Americans to take pride in.

Personal freedom? These days, Europeans insist on far more protections for individual privacy against government surveillance or corporate exploitation of our data than we Americans have been. While most civilized countries long ago abolished the death penalty, the U.S. has recently been among the world’s leaders in executions, surpassed only by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China. For the most part, we allegedly freedom-loving Americans can’t be bothered to protest government data mining, corporate data mining and the occasional mistaken execution of innocent Americans by bungling state governments.

Elections? The U.S. still uses the unfair British colonial era plurality voting system, long jettisoned by most modern democracies in favor of alternatives like proportional representation. Partisan state legislatures cynically gerrymander districts to favor the party in power in the state capital. Having been captured by the neo-Confederate White Right, the Republican Party in one state after another is trying to change voting laws to minimize voting by disproportionately black and Latino low-income voters. And politicians of both parties have to grovel and scrape before a small number of billionaires, in order to win in the “money primary” that weeds out politicians who can’t find some hedge fund manager or casino owner to bankroll them.

I do not mean to imply that other societies are doing much better than the U.S. at the moment. The European Union is suffering from a self-inflicted austerity policy disaster, China under its kleptocratic Communist Party is facing slowing growth and popular discontent, and so on.  The end of the American Century won’t be followed by the Chinese Century or the European Century. The emergence of a multipolar world means it won’t be anybody’s century.

With two lost wars in a decade, a stalled economy choked by parasitic lobbies and a political system dominated by billionaires, you would think there would be a sense of crisis in America. But neither party is willing to acknowledge the severity of our problems, much less contemplate the radical structural changes that are necessary to address them.

Those on the right who denounce “crony capitalism” perversely tend to focus on government aid to a productive industry like the Export-Import Bank, while averting their gaze from the most egregious examples of economic parasitism — finance-industry predators and the predatory medical-industrial complex. For their part, neoconservatives are in complete denial about the limits to American power illustrated by the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, earlier, Vietnam. (To be sure, we did defeat Grenada and Panama).

The mainstream Clinton-Obama Democrats, whose politics is a legacy of the booming 1990s, are also unable to acknowledge how bad things really are. Admitting that American foreign and domestic policies for decades have almost completely failed to achieve their stated goals would tend to cast doubt on the record of the two Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who have occupied the White House for four of the six presidential terms since the 1992 election. Instead, many mainstream Democrats would have us believe that all that is needed to fix essentially sound foreign and domestic policies is a Democratic congressional supermajority and a few tweaks — a bit more multilateralism and foreign burden-sharing in foreign policy, slightly bigger subsidies for low-income households at home.

The U.S. is facing a triple crisis — a crisis of foreign policy, a crisis of economics and a crisis of democracy. The American republic has renewed and rebuilt itself during even greater crises in the past, and can do so again. But the first step is to drop the happy talk and chest-thumping and flag-waving and be honest with ourselves about the severity of the problems confronting us.

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.

 

 

Edited July 15, 2014 by slow

[Gandalf]

Mom Jailed Because She Let Her 9-Year-Old Daughter Play in the Park Unsupervised

[Prospero]

polit-istorijski esej:
 

Why Liberalism Means Empire

Democracy isn't the end of history, it's a product of power.
By DANIEL MCCARTHY • July 16, 2014
 

Illustration by Michael Hogue

History ended on October 14, 1806. That was the day of the Battle of Jena, the turning point, as far as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel was concerned, in humanity’s struggle for freedom. Once Napoleon triumphed over the reactionary forces of Prussia, the ideals that post-revolutionary France represented—not just liberté, égalité, and fraternité, but the modern state and its legal order—would serve as the model for Europe and world.

When Francis Fukuyama revisited this idea in “The End of History?”—with a question mark—in the pages of The National Interest a quarter century ago, he had to remind readers what Hegel had meant. Events would still happen, including big events like wars. What had ended was a sequence of political and cultural forms whose internal contradictions each gave rise to the next step in freedom’s development: from the ancient world to medieval Christendom to, finally, what one 20th-century interpreter of Hegel called “the universal homogeneous state.” Or as Fukuyama called it, “liberal democracy.”

By 1989 it was obvious that Hegel had been right: the long series of rear-guard actions attempted by Europe’s reactionary powers came to an end after World War I. Fascism and Soviet Communism thereafter proposed themselves as alternative endings to history—competing modernities—but neither could prevail against liberal democracy, whether on the battlefield or in the marketplace.

This was welcome news to America’s foreign-policy elite. Fukuyama had not set out to justify a “unipolar moment” or America’s world role as the “indispensable nation”—indeed, he thought boredom lay ahead for those unlucky enough to live beyond history’s end—yet his essay could not help but add to the triumphalism of the time. The Cold War was over; henceforth, the American way of life would be everyone’s way of life: inevitably, forever, from Moscow to Beijing to Baghdad.
“The victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas of consciousness,” Fukuyama wrote, “and is as yet incomplete in the material world.” America’s mission would hence be to complete it, through international trade agreements, promotion of human rights, and of course war.

But what if Fukuyama was wrong and liberal democracy is not the end of the history after all? What if, on the contrary, the American way of life is an accident of history—one made possible only by a special kind of global security environment?

What in fact has triumphed over the last 250 years—not since the Battle of Jena in 1806 but since the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763—is not an idea but an institution: empire. Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which liberalism could flourish. Fukuyama’s “liberal democracy” turns out to be a synonym for “the attitudes and institutions of a world in which Anglo-American power is dominant.”

Britain’s Liberal Empire

Victory against France in the Seven Years’ War confirmed not only British naval superiority—and thus the ability to project power more widely than any other nation in the late 18th or 19th centuries—but also the superior resilience of British financial and political institutions. Britain paid a steep price for the conflict, with the loss of 13 North American colonies that rebelled against the taxes king and parliament levied to pay for what colonists called the “French and Indian War.” But while King George III lost America, the king of France lost his head. To get his country’s finances in order after the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, Louis XVI fatefully summoned the Estates-General in 1789, and thus was the French Revolution begun.

Seventeen years later, Hegel was not wrong to see in Napoleon’s armies an unwitting force of progress. In 1806, the possibility was wide open for the 19th century to be the French century—or the German century, after defeat at Jena spurred Prussia to modernize and ultimately become the nucleus of a unified Germany. But France and Germany had the misfortune to be neighbors, and the reciprocal invasions they launched and suffered gave rise not only to political modernization, but also to nationalism and state repression.

By contrast, Britain’s territory remained inviolate—a necessary if not sufficient precondition for the flourishing of liberalism. The Nazi-era German political theorist Carl Schmitt observed the irony that this country which had given the world Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan should itself have avoided the need for such a consolidated state:

The English Isle and its world-conquering seafaring needed no absolute monarchy, no standing land army, no state bureaucracy, no legal system … such as became characteristic of continental states. Drawing on the political instinct of a sea and commercial power, a power that possessed a strong fleet that it used to acquire a world empire, the English people withdrew from this kind of closed state and remained ‘open.’

Land empires of the sort that Napoleon tried to build proved uncongenial to liberalism—they elicited nationalistic reactions and political centralization. But a naval empire was a different matter, not only sparing the homeland the ravages of foreign reprisal and border clashes but also providing a ready framework for capitalism, the great engine of liberalization and democracy. Free trade, for example, a cornerstone of liberal economics, historically developed out of trade within the British Empire.

“England’s imperialism,” noted the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in his 1929 work Liberalism, “was primarily directed not so much toward the incorporation of new territories as toward the creation of an area of uniform commercial policy out of the various possessions subject to the King of England.”

Mises was an ardent classical liberal and no advocate of anyone’s subjugation. Yet faced with a choice between imperialism and liberalism together or national self-determination that might jeopardize international commerce, even Mises sided with empire. “The economy of Europe today is based to a great extent on the inclusion of Africa and large parts of Asia in the world economy as supplies of raw materials of all kinds,” he wrote:

Any stoppage in these trade relations would involve serious economic losses for Europe as well as for the colonies and would sharply depress the standard of living of great masses of people. … Ought the well-being of Europe and, at the same time, that of the colonies as well to be allowed to decline further in order to give the natives a chance to determine their own destinies, when this would lead, in any event, not to their freedom, but merely to a change of masters?
This is the consideration that must be decisive in judging questions of colonial policy. European officials, troops, and police must remain in these areas, as far as their presence is necessary in order to maintain the legal and political conditions required to insure the participation of the colonial territories in international trade.

As shocking as these words might seem coming from one of the free market’s greatest champions, the conditional quality of Mises’s prescription ought to be noted: if trade is possible without colonialism, then national self-determination can be permitted. Liberal imperialism is not directed toward gratuitous conquest but toward maintaining a global environment conducive to liberalism.

Liberalism and empire reinforced one another in manifold ways. Britain met military necessities of the Napoleonic wars with moves toward domestic liberalization—more civil rights for Catholics and Dissenting Protestants, who could hardly be asked to serve under arms while being required to swear religious oaths and denied the chance to participate in politics. The manpower needed to police the seas even after Napoleon’s defeat provided further incentives for reform, as did the growing wealth brought about by the trade that empire and peace made possible.

As British industrial magnates became wealthier, they demanded a greater role in politics; as their employees became more numerous, they too demanded representation and rights. The franchise expanded, religious liberty was extended, and liberal democracy as we know it steadily evolved within the context of empire.

Britain was not the only place where the domestic development of liberalism was made possible by the pax Britannica. For the newly independent United States as well, security was a precondition for liberalism. But during the first 30 years of the republic, that security was jeopardized by conflicts between Europe’s great powers—which were also the New World’s great powers. Britain and revolutionary France came to represent ideological poles for America’s domestic political factions, which dealt with one another in distinctly illiberal ways. Federalists passed laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress French agents and their American sympathizers, while mobs of Jeffersonian Republicans occasionally lynched pro-British Federalists and launched the War of 1812 against Britain’s remaining North American stronghold, Canada.

The partisan fury died down only with the “Era of Good Feelings” that followed the War of 1812—and, not coincidentally, Britain’s defeat of Napoleon in Europe. The resolution of Europe’s great-power conflict removed the source of much of America’s ideological unrest. Once there was only one superpower off America’s coasts, one that proved uninterested in reclaiming its long-lost colonies, domestic tranquility could ensue.

Britain vouchsafed the post-Napoleonic order in Europe by acting as an “offshore balancer,” checking the rise of any potential hegemon in the Old World. This inadvertently freed the United States to expand across its own continent. A young country whose development might easily have been stunted by war and insecurity was instead afforded the luxury to industrialize and solidify its institutions in peace.

Looking back from the perspective of 1951, George Kennan described this situation in American Diplomacy:

[britain was] prepared to hover vigilantly about the fringes of the Continent, tending its equilibrium as one might tend a garden, yet always with due regard for the preservation of her own maritime supremacy and the protection of her overseas empire. In this complicated structure lay concealed not only the peace of Europe but also the security of the United States.
Whatever affected it was bound to affect us. And all through the latter part of the nineteenth century things were happening which were bound to affect it: primarily the gradual shift of power from Austria-Hungary to Germany. This was particularly important because Austria-Hungary had not had much chance of becoming a naval and commercial rival to England, whereas Germany definitely did have such a chance and was foolish enough to exploit it aggressively…

American foreign policy had never been peaceful merely for the sake of being peaceful. Security was the paramount concern, but with Britain keeping any possible global predator at bay, American statesmen could pursue their ends through means other than war. The Monroe Doctrine was of a piece with Britain’s strategy of offshore balancing: its author, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, understood that only in peace—that is, in the absence of great power competition in the New World—could 19th century America develop politically and economically, and to keep that peace was worth fighting for.

The liberalizing effects of the security environment fostered by the British Empire were felt far beyond the English-speaking world. Europe, too, enjoyed a peace during which it could industrialize and slowly democratize. But Europe could never enjoy quite as much security as the island-states of Great Britain and (in effect) the United States, and the bitter experiences of the Napoleonic Wars left even the continent’s liberals infected with nationalist resentments. Thus while “free speech,” for example, in a security context like that of the Anglo-American peoples was not disloyal speech, matters were otherwise where the proverbial wolf was at the door, as it was for much of continental Europe.

In time, liberal sentiment grew so strong within imperial Britain that its exponents began to lose sight of the security context that made liberalism possible. Idealists and pacifists—the privileged children of empire—fancied that the peace was a product not of power but of good intentions; of love. Other liberals developed attitudes that foreshadowed today’s humanitarian interventionists: for them, power was more than just a means to a strategic balance in which freedom might flourish; it was an instrument by which despotic regimes could be directly overthrown and transformed into liberal or democratic governments.

Yet what sent the British Empire into eclipse in the second decade of the 20th century was neither a loss of nerve nor utopian overextension, but the brute fact that Britain did not have the wherewithal to contain a united Germany forever. Sooner or later, Germany would upset the continent’s balance and challenge the Royal Navy’s supremacy on the seas. Britain was not, therefore, acting irrationally when it entered into alliances against Germany ahead of World War I: the British way of life depended on the empire, which in turn depended on maritime hegemony.

A Britain ready to fight Germany might win and preserve its world order; or it might lose. But a Britain unwilling to fight could only lose. In the event, Britain won a Pyrrhic victory. Germany was defeated, but only with American help; the British Empire was no longer the archstone of the global system.

In the 19th century, the empire on which the sun never set could plausibly lay claim to represent “The End of History.” And if Francis Fukuyama were right—if ideas rather than institutions are the drivers of history—then the waning of British imperial power need not have meant a twilight for the ideals of liberalism and democracy as well. But in fact, the collapse of the security environment Britain had preserved for a century did indeed coincide with the downfall of liberal democracy—certainly on the European continent, where weak liberal regimes gave way to the likes of Il Duce and Der Führer, but also in Britain and America, where the intelligentsia increasingly looked to fascism, Bolshevism, and other profoundly illiberal creeds for inspiration.

A fair test of Fukuyama’s idea is whether liberal democracy endures in the absence of Anglo-American empire. In the interwar period, however, liberal democracy—divorced from British power, not yet remarried to American hegemony—looked well and truly moribund.

Why Pax Americana?

America might have been expected to fill the security gap left by the receding British Empire. But a people who had known almost nothing but international peace for a hundred years could scarcely imagine that it was anything other than the natural state of human affairs. Just how much America’s prospering liberal democracy owed to global conditions another nation’s empire had engineered was far from obvious.

The U.S. could certainly have stayed out of World War I. A fanciful scenario in which Germany won the war would not inevitably have led to trouble for the United States, which might have remained aloof from the Old World’s troubles as long as they did not wash up on American shores—and Wilhelmine Germany was hardly an exporter of revolution. If, as is most likely, the European powers had exhausted themselves, America would have been in a position to assert dominion over the oceans without firing a shot.

Alternatively, once the U.S. was in the war, the objective might have been to achieve a traditional balance of power, with the Kaiser preserved in Germany and Allied support for governments strong enough to suppress revolutionary movements. Such illiberal measures would in fact have done the most to preserve the international order that made liberalism possible.

In the event, however, U.S. involvement in Europe’s war was disastrous. The terms of the peace exacerbated the continent’s political instability, relying on a weak Weimar liberalism to withstand Bolshevism or Bolshevism’s fascist antithesis, and establishing an even feebler League of Nations to do with laws what Britain had once done with the Royal Navy.

Even as European liberalism was set up to fail without an imperial power to support it, America returned to her disengaged republican—and Republican—ways. Woodrow Wilson’s party was repudiated, and Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover kept out of Europe’s disintegrating affairs. Franklin Roosevelt only succeeded in leading the country into World War II after lying in his 1940 re-election campaign, violating the Neutrality Acts, and placing Japan in an economic stranglehold. It took Pearl Harbor to get Americans interested in the next war.

The old myths of natural peace and prosperity, which had taken root in America during a century of pax Britannica, died hard. In the decades between the wars, honorable men—not pro-Nazis but Americans who had seen their country grow to greatness without becoming entangled in European affairs—argued that events in Europe posed little danger to America and were frankly none of our business.

Their argument doesn’t hold up. Although the two great anti-liberal powers, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, eventually turned on one another, a scenario in which they completely canceled one another out is implausible, to say the least. More likely one would have overcome the other, and the alacrity with which Soviet power did in fact fill the vacuum left by the defeated Nazis in Eastern Europe after World War II suggests what would have happened to all of Europe had one totalitarian juggernaut triumphed.

Just as the world order made possible by the British Empire had a liberalizing effect on the United States, a Soviet or Nazi world order would have profoundly influenced American development in the opposite direction. In such a world, the U.S. would have faced both domestic and foreign pressures to assimilate to the Soviet or Nazi model, and resisting such pressure could itself have taken an illiberal turn. This is not so hypothetical: the Palmer Raids of the Wilson years and the McCarthyism of the 1950s show that America could indeed revert to its less-than-liberal 1790s sensibilities about free speech and disloyalty when faced with a foreign threat in a risky security environment.

But during the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, America was not facing a totalitarian power anywhere near as persuasive as it would have been had it conquered all of Europe. To think that American intellectuals would not have been as easily seduced by a victorious Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia as they were, in historical fact, by those same totalitarianisms when they had rather less territory under their sway seems rather naïve. Intellectuals worship power, and everybody worships success.

A Cold War between an embattled, increasingly illiberal and security-conscious America and a burgeoning USSR or Nazi Germany is not at all hard to conceive of—because in fact, we got just such a thing even with American involvement in World War II. Had Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought one another to a standstill in the 1940s, the results would have been much the same: a Cold War, only one whose poles were Moscow and Berlin rather than Washington and Moscow.

Had we stayed out of World War II, there is every reason to think that all of the illiberal measures taken by the U.S. in the Cold War that we actually did fight with the Soviets—in which the U.S. held the upper hand from the start—would have been taken in a much worse strategic, economic, and cultural climate. America might still have prevailed against an inhuman and unsustainable Soviet or Nazi system, but the America that emerged would hardly have been likely to be more liberal or democratic than the one we have today.

In the 19th century, the United States enjoyed the advantages of an international security environment propitious to liberalism and democracy without having to incur the costs of empire necessary to sustain those conditions. America could be liberal without having to be imperial—although the Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos might well disagree. Beginning with World War II, however, if America wished to remain liberal and democratic, it would have to become imperial in many of the ways Britain had been—including playing a leading role in Europe and on the oceans. Indeed, America would have to do much of what the British Empire had done in the previous century on an even larger scale.

The efflorescence of liberal democracy in the latter half of the 20th century—the growth of international trade and support for democracy and human rights to the point where the total package appeared to be the “End of History”—was not a spontaneous, natural development. It was driven by U.S. prestige and power. Germany is now deeply committed to political liberalism, and Japan may in some respects be more consumerist than the U.S. itself. But these states were, of course, remade by the U.S. after World War II.

This is not to say there aren’t genuinely local traditions of liberalism or democracy to be found among America’s allies, nor that American arms can simply transform any other kind of regime into a liberal and democratic one: the apparent success of nation-building in Japan and Germany owed as much to the threat that the Soviet Union posed to those states as to anything America did. The Germans and Japanese had the most urgent incentive imaginable to make their newly liberal and democratic constitutions work—because aligning with the U.S. was the only insurance they could buy against being annexed by the Soviet empire instead.

There is a crucial difference between the Napoleonic, land-empire mentality that wants to revolutionize other states—a mentality taken to extremes by the Soviets and exhibited with considerable fervor by many neoconservatives and liberal hawks today—and the example set by Britain in the 19th century, which was a liberal but not revolutionary world power and encouraged liberalization mostly though indirect means: via trade, culture, and above all, by upholding a relatively un-Hobbesian global security environment.

Liberal anti-imperialists today, whether libertarian or progressive, make the same mistakes Britain’s pacifists and America’s interwar noninterventionists once did: they imagine that the overall ideological complexion of the world, as determined by the state most capable of projecting power, need not affect their values and habits at home. They believe that liberalism is possible without empire. 

There is little historical evidence for this. When libertarians point to how economically liberal city-states like Hong Kong or Singapore are, they ignore the imperial strategic contexts in which those city-states are historically set. No city-state can resist the military force of a superpower; thus, the liberalism of a city-state tends to be entirely contingent on the liberalizing security conditions established by some great empire.

Yet liberal anti-imperialists are entirely correct about the price of the ideological wars that the other sort of liberal—the empire-loving kind—extols. These aggressive liberals, whether they call themselves humanitarians or neoconservatives, also misunderstand the world order that underwrites liberalism: they have Napoleonic ambitions to liberalize the planet through revolution, not merely to preserve conditions in which the happy accident of liberalism can survive and grow, if at all, by a slow process of assimilation.

Just as there are idealists who deny that power is the basis of the peaceful order upon which liberal democracy rests, there are other, more dangerous idealists who deny that power is a limited commodity that cannot simply be wished into existence by a feat of will. This is a view characteristic of neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan, who never evince any sense that the U.S. could overextend itself in regime-changing crusades.

Liberal democracy depends on empire, but there are strict limits to what empire can achieve. This point is best understood by the conservative critics of liberalism and empire alike. Figures such as George Kennan and Patrick Buchanan are relatively untroubled by the implications of noninterventionism for liberal values and practices because the America they wish to see is a more self-sufficient and nationally self-conscious one. They are consistent anti-imperialists and anti-liberals: opposed to open borders, free trade, consumerism, and mass democracy as well as to the global power projection that makes such things possible; they would like America to be more like Sparta than Athens.

But after 200 years, liberalism has soaked too deep into the fiber of America’s national character for a new path of national self-sufficiency to hold much popular appeal. Thus while the anti-liberal anti-imperialists are among our greatest critics, they are also among our most neglected. They preach what a liberal nation will not hear.

This leaves one final view to be examined, that of the conservative realist—who is a realist not only in understanding the role that power plays in shaping ideology and world conditions (including economics), but also in recognizing the bitter truth about liberalism and its imperial character. The conservative realist knows that America will not be anything other than broadly liberal and democratic for a long time to come, and liberal democracy requires a delicately balanced system of international security upheld by an empire or hegemon. This balance is apt to be upset not only by some rampaging foreign power—by a Napoleonic France or a Nazi Germany or Soviet Union—but also by our own revolution-loving, democracy-promoting liberals.

The conservative realist emphasizes four points in thinking about American hegemony today. First, judgment must be exercised to discern essential conflicts (like the Cold War and World War II) from absolutely inessential ones (like Iraq) and relatively ambiguous ones like World War I. The individual cases matter; no ideological framework that renders predetermined answers about the use of force can suffice.

Second, if liberalism is ineradicably imperial—or hegemonic, if we’re being polite—it is also true that the only secure liberal order is one upheld by offshore balancing rather than crusading on land.

The third point, a corollary to the second, is that liberal democracy grows by evolution and osmosis; active attempts on the part of great empires to transform other regimes are usually counterproductive. Power upholds the strategic, economic, and cultural environment in which other states can pursue their own intimations of liberalism. Power cannot save souls or build heaven upon earth—it cannot “immanentize the eschaton,” as conservatives used to say, or expedite the “End of History.”

And fourth, because in fact liberal democracy is not the end of history, it can and will disappear in the long run. Thus its limited resources—moral, military, and economic—must not be wasted on utopian delusions. If liberal democracy is to continue as long as possible, its strategic posture must be realistic and conservative.

Liberal democracy is unnatural. It is a product of power and security, not innate human sociability. It is peculiar rather than universal, accidental rather than teleologically preordained. And Americans have been shaped by its framework throughout their history; they have internalized liberalism’s habits and rationales. Not surprisingly, they have also acquired the habits and rationales of empire—and now they must understand why.

 

[Paul]

el sam rekao vec da bi onog spiona trebalo proglasit nepozeljnim?

[Indy]

[frn1782]

polit-istorijski esej:

Sve super i ima smesla u anglosaksonskom mindsetu.Sve vec vidjeno samo sa racionalizuce, malo prizemnije pozicije- americko liderstvo je neophodno za razvoj civilizacije bla bla bla.

 

Samo ovo

 

Intellectuals worship power, and everybody worships success.

 

mu dodje kao prostitucija a ne intelektualizam.

Zagovornici svega iznesenog ma kako to formulisali ne mogu da razdvoje vrednosti i $

 

[Eraserhead]

Tek sad videh da ove godine na RIMPAC pomorskoj vezbi ucestvuje i Kina. Celu stvar organizuje Americka Pacificka flota i obicno okuplja proverene saveznike. Kina je poslala 4 broda sto je malo iznenadjujuce.

Edited July 29, 2014 by Eraserhead

[Eraserhead]

Sta je tu tacno teorija zavere. Jesu li ili nisu Amerikanci direktno vojno ili politicki angazovani u Ukrajini, Gruziji, Turskoj, Avganistanu, Juznoj Koreji, u zemljama cija jedina politicka vrednost za Amere je to sto su na granici sa Rusijom i Kinom?

 

Ruska spijunska baza na Kubi

 

Pretpostavljam da ovo spada u "dvoriste". Svet tako funkcionise, nisu to samo Amerikanci, oni su samo danas najmocniji.