Friends + Interlocutors,

A good friend asked me to read “The Perils of Isolationism” which is the lead article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. The author is Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State for G.W. Bush and also his national security advisor. 

My friend was evidently impressed with the article. I am not. Someone at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University had emailed him an online copy. I was able to read the hard copy from the issue which had just arrived in my mailbox.

Dr. Rice is the director of the Hoover Institution. I am wondering if she has read Herbert Hoover's magnum opus, Freedom Betrayed, the Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath. I wonder because Hoover was a “revisionist”, which is something Rice deplores in her Perils essay. She is very much a cheerleader for the status quo, embracing the received version of events.

From the editor’s introduction to Freedom Betrayed:

From the back cover:

I raise the issue because nowhere in Dr. Rice’s essay do I find an original thought, something which might be termed revisionist, at  odds with the prevailing wisdom. She is every bit the conventional, establishment thinker. An enabler. Here’s my abbreviated critique of The Perils of Isolationism which I sent my friend…

…. 

OK, I’ve read the entire Condi Rice essay in the current edition of Foreign Affairs. It is full of many false assumptions, unconscious arrogance and non sequiturs which I won’t enumerate. For example, take the first page: “The United States again faces an adversary that has global reach and insatiable ambition.” She’s referring to China. That is so childish. 

And so is the subtitle: “The world still needs America—and America still needs the world” It’s like cartoon logic for children. She seems to be addressing the American public at large, whereas the Foreign Affairs is targeted for the foreign policy elite. 

Note throughout she refers disdainfully to “revisionist powers”. By this she means any country that is on the upswing (like China) who wants to change or recalibrate, if ever so slightly, the existing Washington-dictated international order inherited from WWII and the Cold War. She is every bit the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

She regards China as a danger due to Taiwan but she never refers to the fact that Washington officially accepted the one China policy decades ago, which policy recognizes that Taiwan is part of China. 

There is no need for a conflict in the Far East if Washington would only mind its own business and encourage the government in Taiwan to get along with China in the manner of Hong Kong.

China is the boogyman for all sorts of reasons…mainly because it is now the manufacturing powerhouse of the world and because the US depends upon it for many vital items. Is that China’s fault?

Then she talks about “the Russian Empire reborn”…another threat. But a bogus one. As I’ve noted many times, Putin is responding to US/NATO machinations on his doorstep in Ukraine…that’s all. Again, Washington feels obliged to stick its nose into everything everywhere. Should it be surprising that there are repercussions?

Do you realize how many countries and entities Washington is attempting to ruin or intimidate through economic sanctions? It is sickening and insane.

Then Condi addresses, “What it takes”. That is to say, what is required to maintain her crusading agenda which is Washington’s ongoing agenda: “This strategy will require investment. The United States needs to maintain the defense capabilities sufficient to deny China, Russia and Iran their strategic goals.” 

This is a prescription to bankrupt Uncle Sam. All based on a false assumption that Washington must police the world.

Item: "Washington will need to maintain economic pressure on the revisionist powers. It should continue isolating Russia, with an eye toward arresting Beijing’s creeping support for the Kremlin. But it should refrain from imposing blunt sanctions against China, since they would be ineffective and counterproductive, crippling the U.S. economy in the process.” 

Ha! At least she is not totally blind. Whack the guy with sanctions who can’t fight back; back away from the guy who can… In short, the masterminds in Washington have turned Uncle Sam into an international bully.

I won’t go on. Condi never mentions Palestine, the outstanding, monumental scandal of U.S foreign policy. She was intimately involved in it when Secretary of State.

She lets the cat out of the bag in her final (at last!!) paragraph: “...if the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries taught Americans anything, it is this: other great powers don’t mind their own business. Instead, they seek to shape the global order.” OMG. 

This outlook is the credo of the Washington foreign policy Blob. I have dubbed it Busybodyism. It is the root of all our problems. You could say it started in 1898 with the Spanish-American war or with Woodrow Wilson’s second term and his entry into the Great War.

The antidote is Ezra Pound channeling Confucius. “The principle of good, enunciated by Confucius, consists in establishing order within oneself. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples’ affairs.”—Ezra Pound

That’s enough time for Condi!

Patrick

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