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发帖数: 38600 | 1 Return of the living (neo-con) dead
http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-030614.html
Amid much hysteria, the notion has been widely peddled in the United States
that President Obama's "new" foreign policy doctrine, announced last week at
West Point, rejects neo-cons and neo-liberals and is, essentially, post-
imperialist and a demonstration of realpolitik.
Not so fast. Although stepping back from the excesses of the Cheney regime -
as in bombing whole nations into "democracy" - the "desire to lead" still
crystallizes might is right.
Moreover, "exceptionalism" remains the norm. Now not so blatant, but still
implemented via a nasty set of tools, from financial warfare to cyber-war,
from National Endowment for Democracy-style promotion of "democracy" to
Joint Special Operations Command-driven counter-terrorism, drone war and all
shades of shadow wars.
In the early 2000s, the model was the physical destruction and occupation of
Iraq. In the 2010s the model is the slow-mo destruction, by proxy, of Syria
.
And still, those who "conceptualized" the destruction of Iraq keep rearing
their Alien-like slimy head. Their icon is of course Robert Kagan - one of
the founders of the apocalyptically funereal Project for a New American
Century (PNAC) and husband of crypto-Ukrainian hell raiser Victoria "F**k
the EU" Nuland (thus their dream of Ukraine as the Khaganate of Nulands, or
simply Nulandistan.)
Kagan has been devastatingly misguided on everything, as in his 2003 best-
seller Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, an
eulogy of "benign" Americans standing guard against the "threats" (as in
Muslim fundamentalism) emanating from a Hobbesian world way beyond the cozy
Kantian precinct inhabited by Europe.
Then, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008), the "evil" was
not Muslim fundamentalism anymore (too shabby), but the emerging of those
vast autocracies, Russia and China, antithetical to Western democracies. But
with The World America Made (2012), the paradisiacal shining city on the
hill would once again triumph, more than capable to see those autocracies
off; after all, the only reliable guarantee of global peace is American
exceptionalism.
Kagan still commands the attention even of the otherwise aloof Commander-in-
Chief, who avidly consumed The World America Made before his 2012 State of
the Union Address, in which he proclaimed "America is back".
It's enlightening to flash back to Kagan writing in the Weekly Standard in
March 2011, sounding like an awestruck schoolboy praising Obama; "He
thoroughly rejected the so-called realist approach, extolled American
exceptionalism, spoke of universal values and insisted that American power
should be used, when appropriate, on behalf of those values."
Any similarity with Obama's "new" foreign policy doctrine is, indeed,
intentional. |
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