An Economist Reader from Dec 09, 2021 offers insights. Zanny Menton Beddoes has replaced this duo- note that she conducts her interviews, as if her male companions were mere widow dressing!
Adrian Wooldridge on the Political Apostacy of The Quincy Institute’s Andrew Bacevich and Michael Swaine. Richard Fontaine, of the Centre for a New American Security, shares the stage!
Sub-headline: The world that the West built after the attack on Pearl Harbour is cracking, not least because America is lukewarm about preserving it
What writer/propagandist, at The Economist, but the redoubtable Adrian Wooldridge, would have the brass to write these paragraphs:
A Line of white-painted moorings in Pearl Harbour—the old “Battleship Row”—traces the history of America’s participation in the second world war. At one end a memorial straddles the sunken remains of the USS Arizona, a battleship destroyed during Japan’s surprise attack on December 7th 1941; most of the 1,177 sailors who perished on board remain entombed in the wreck. At the other end, the USS Missouri looms above the tree-line with its imposing 16-inch guns. It was on her deck that General Douglas MacArthur accepted the formal surrender of imperial Japan, ending the war.
“The ships are the book-ends of the war,” notes James Neuman, the official historian of the naval base at Pearl Harbour. “Their legacy is with us every single day.” Families of deceased veterans still come to scatter their ashes in the waters. Some 30 survivors of the attack will attend a ceremony this week to mark its 80th anniversary.
The “date which will live in infamy”, as Franklin Roosevelt called it, transformed America’s place in the world. The country abandoned isolationism and, with “righteous might”, entered the war in the Pacific. Four days later Hitler declared war on America, ensuring that it would join the war in Europe. Victory in the global conflict, hastened by the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, established America as the world’s dominant power, which would go on to defeat the Soviet Union in the cold war.
…
The American Wound tended by a British Jingo! America’s revenge against the ‘infamy’ were two Atomic Bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and horrific deaths of civilian populations, and the long lasting deadly effects of radiation on those who survived the blasts! The only nation to ever use Atomic weapons is now the stewards of political sanity? Mr. Wooldridge is in the territory of the Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, Randall Wallace epic ‘Pearl Harbor’ of 2001?
And its just the first 238 words of this 4,062 word shaming polemic.
A History Made to Measure follows. With the addition of a list of the Bad Policy Actors: Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Andrew Bacevich and Centre for a New American Security’s Richard Fontaine.
The prime venue for such thinking is the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank in Washington set up in 2019 with money from both Charles Koch, a generous funder of right-wing causes, and George Soros, a supporter of liberal internationalist groups. Quincy cheered the withdrawal from Afghanistan. “We were very much heartened by Biden’s decision,” says Andrew Bacevich, its president. He urges Mr Biden to leave the Middle East next. odd military bases and depots around the globe. Such ideas have deep roots. He also thinks America should, over time, withdraw from NATO and close many of its 750-George Washington’s farewell address in 1796 enjoined the young nation to “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”. The think-tank takes its name from America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, who declared that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.
Yet the Quincy recipe is too strong for most Democrats and Republicans. Commentators chastise it for endangering global stability and America’s security, and being soft on Chinese human-rights abuses. Public opinion seems divided. A poll for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last summer found that Americans approved of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but were far from ready to abandon American primacy in the world. For the first time, a majority also favoured defending Taiwan.
…
What of Mr Biden himself? “On one side, he looks like our kind of guy,” says Mr Bacevich. “On the other, defence spending is going up for no particular reason. And the administration seems to be leaning into the idea of a cold war with China. Right now, Biden is all over the map.”
Richard Fontaine, head of the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank whose alumni occupy some prominent positions in the Biden administration, says opinion among foreign-policy experts is broadly split by generation: younger scholars, disillusioned by years of fruitless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, are often sympathetic to the idea of restraint. Any zeal to export democracy has abated. “There is a big disillusionment with the missionary role,” he notes. “They say, ‘after Trump, the Capitol riots and covid, are we really going to tout our model?’” The restrainers’ arguments have been seeping into Washington’s discourse—both among doves who want to reduce America’s commitments globally, and among China hawks who want America to do less in the Middle East and Europe the better to direct attention and resources to Asia and the Pacific.
The Reader’ stamina is being tested, as there are 2,530 words remaining ! Mr. Wooldridge has come to the readers assistance by titling the parts of his essay.
Troubles in battalions
Biden’ his time
Pounding sand
Awaiting the big wave in Hawaii
In need of friends
With the naming of the Apostates, Wooldridge begins his extemporaneous ramblings, on the politics that plague the Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservative Cadre, that now constitutes ‘Political Centrism’:
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, NATO, Ukraine , China, Taiwan etc., etc. … The Bad Actor Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute appears:
Others favour retaining a military presence in the Indo-Pacific to “balance” China. Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute says the cost of war would be enormous. America’s best hope of maintaining stability is not to embark on an arms race with China, but to reduce tensions and seek an accommodation based on an American commitment not to allow Taiwanese independence. “You cannot have deterrence without some degree of reassurance,” he says.’
Wooldridge did identify the Quincy Institute’s, Andrew Bacevich and Michael Swaine, as the central bad actors, in his Political Melodrama. Note Bacevich’s stand on NATO, as the ultimate crime against the American Imperium!
He also thinks America should, over time, withdraw from NATO and close many of its 750-George Washington’s farewell address in 1796 enjoined the young nation to “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”.
The concluding paragraph, is the point of arrival of Wooldridge’s shaming polemic, framed by A History Made to Measure. Was it worth The Readers time and patience?
Nevertheless, for all the lurches in America’s politics at home and abroad, many countries will continue to cleave to their main ally. As China, Russia and Iran become increasingly assertive, other countries may be driven closer to America for their own protection. America’s greatest strength is that its magnetic power goes beyond fear. On the day your correspondent visited Pearl Harbour, a pair of British offshore-patrol vessels were moored alongside American destroyers as part of a new, semi-permanent deployment to the Indo-Pacific. And a Japanese submarine was sailing out of port, with its crew lined up topside in white ceremonial uniform. If America succeeds in retaining its dominance in the world, it will be in no small part thanks to its ability to draw in old friends and foes alike.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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