The impact on Polish territory of an errant missile has once more flushed isolationist natcons out of the woodwork. To the accompaniment of “World War III” fearmongering, they’re reprising their call for “negotiations” with V. Putin to end the Russo-Ukrainian War. To prevent disaster, he must be provided with an “off ramp.” In plain language this means that the aggressor must be allowed to profit from his aggression, for only appeasement can bring peace.
The appeasers point to Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which stipulates that an attack on one NATO member state shall be deemed an attack on all NATO members. Thus, they argue, the missile that landed in Poland brought the world to the brink of disaster. But this is patent nonsense. As a matter of fact, Article Five calls for consultations among the allies when an act of aggression occurs, and only after such consultation takes place would a military response follow. In the present case a single missile killed two farmers in Poland—tragic to be sure, but clearly an accident. Nor did Poland invoke Article Five. Only an obvious, unambiguous act of aggression, for instance a large-scale ground invasion of a NATO member state, would cause the alliance to take prompt military action.
The subtext of this frivolous claim about Article Five is that for the United States, membership in NATO is too dangerous to be maintained: America should just pick up its marbles and retreat from Europe. Who cares, after all, if V. Putin pops a few nukes in Ukraine? That’s none of our business. Anyhow, isn’t America just as bad? Didn’t we drop the A-bomb on Japan? Didn’t we invade Afghanistan and Iraq? Tease out the thread of natcon isolationism and you’ll find that it’s founded on a dislike amounting to hatred of America as it is, as opposed to the ideal America of natcon fantasies. The whole system is rotten they say. Not only Ukraine or Europe or Taiwan but America itself is not worth the blood of a single American.
Now and again during his political career Donald Trump gave voice to this anti-patriotic patriotism. Perhaps it was just red meat for the rubes, for in its actual foreign policy the Trump Administration was more or less mainstream, if sometimes erratic. But the rhetorical style of a presidency is not to be disregarded. If America needed to be made great again, that implied that America was less than great in its current condition.
Tainted as it is with this irrational loathing of America, natcon isolationism is so disreputable that it has to be bolstered up with all kinds of half-truths, distortions and plain lies. Here’s an example, from a recent comment thread on Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter, Common Sense:
There is no question this is a war of choice and Biden’s puppet masters intentionally walked past every opportunity to deescalate this conflict and took every opportunity to escalate it. There is also little doubt in my mind, the US destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline just like Biden promised they would do. The goal, of course, is to future enrage the bear and push for WW III.
You’ll notice that V. Putin is nowhere to be found in this thumbnail analysis—if it may so be dignified—of the Russo-Ukrainian War. How the US might have deescalated the conflict is not explained either, though we can guess what’s being hinted at: The aggressor should have been given what he wanted. Oh, and for those fond of conspiracy theories there’s the claim that the nefarious Biden Administration sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline.
Think for a moment of the inversion of reality embodied in the above comment. V. Putin launches an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, his armed forces committing countless war crimes in the process—but the real warmongers are Joe Biden & Co. Hitler would have paid serious money for the services of such dedicated appeasers.
If America is the Great Satan of the natcon imagination, Ukraine is the Little Satan. The Putin apologists harp constantly on Ukrainian “corruption” and on “war crimes” in the Donbass. They revile the Ukrainian president, Zelensky as a “thug” and even a Nazi. They spin absurd historical fantasies designed to show that Ukraine is just what Putin says it is: a fake country with no right to an independent existence, which is the rightful property of Russia. The Ukrainian people’s determination to fight for the survival of their country is treated almost as an impertinence.
That the Russian armed forces have performed so poorly in battle further sours the natcons’ outlook. It will be recalled that before the war they rather admired V. Putin. He was claimed to be a muscular nationalist, defending Christian conservative values and the soul of his nation against pitiless, grasping globalism—a model leader in the natcon view, a Russian Trump. Then it turned out that all that bare-chested nationalist tub thumping was a front for corruption, incompetence, and decay—a rottenness at the core of the nation. When Putin ordered a large-scale military mobilization in the wake of early defeats, tens of thousands of Russian men chose an off ramp of their own: better a skedaddle across the border than death or mutilation on some Ukrainian battlefield.
As a Senate candidate, J.D. Vance said that he just doesn’t care about Ukraine. Perhaps not, but most of his natcon compatriots do care. They want Ukraine to play its appointed role in their defeatist ideology by allowing itself to be transformed into a servile puppet state under the thumb of mighty Russia. Two things stand in the way of that outcome: the assistance provided to Ukraine by the US-led NATO alliance and the resolve of the Ukrainian people. Thus have the natcons met their enemy—and it isn’t V. Putin.
You’ve presented your readers with utter nonsense. At best you’ve caricatured the NatCons.
Has it occurred to you that there might be numerous excellent reasons to oppose an internationalist foreign policy (whether of the neocon or liberal varieties) without pledging fealty to Putin?
First there’s the hundreds of billions wasted on our losing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We spent two decades in Afghanistan and came home two summers ago with our tails between our legs. The U.S. military demonstrated the same incompetence that the Russian military is experiencing in Ukraine. The Taliban were in charge before we got to Afghanistan and they’ve been in charge since we left.
Then there’s the failure of the bipartisan internationalist effort in Iraq. Supposedly we won two wars there; but we ended up with an Iraq as divided as ever and at least as partial to Iran as to the United States. That’s some victory, don’t you think, Thomas?
How much military equipment did the U.S. abandon in Afghanistan? How many billions of dollars were squandered in Iraq? Has it occurred to you that the recent debacles delivered by the bipartisan clowns calling the shots in our Government might just have something to do with the genesis of the NatCon ideology?
Of course, the hundreds of billions of wasted money amount to nothing compared to the ruined lives of our service members. I’ve talked to many of them while volunteering for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation. See,
https://t2t.org
Almost to a man, these brave soldiers will tell you that their efforts and their sacrifice was in vain. When you were in Viet Nam, Thomas, soldiers who lost more than two limbs practically never made it. Thanks to medical advances, many triple and even quadruple amputees from Afghanistan and Iraq made it home alive; alive yes, but their lives were ruined.
I’ve met many of these young men; their stories are heartbreaking. Those who were married or had fiancés more often than not end up divorced or alone. Most men with these injuries are unable to perform sexually. They require a lifetime of care. They can’t work and they often have horrendous emotional issues. Few women are prepared for a lifetime of dealing with this, especially when there in their early to mid 20s. The majority of these soldiers end up moving in with their moms. What man in his mid 20s faces a lifetime of being cared for by his mom with glee? What do you suppose the reality of a lifetime without sexual gratification or a family life does to young me with severe PTSD?
The accommodations required for their survival are remarkably expensive. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation builds home for these young men (and a very small number of women) with all of special equipment (home elevators, low kitchen cabinets, special bathroom equipment, etc) that they need to survive. Almost all of this equipment is special made and remarkably expensive. A soldier, who’s only source of income is a disability payment, could never afford it (thank goodness, Home Depot provides millions of dollars needed to build these homes free of charge).
This tragedy was hand delivered to the United States by neoconservatives and liberal internationalists convinced that their wars were necessary as long as it was working stiffs doing the fighting.
Talk to these soldiers and a small number will tell you that they volunteered for Afghanistan and Iraq out of patriotism. Most admit that their reason for enlisting was a bit less noble. What they say is that they signed up because most of the jobs held by their fathers and grandfathers didn’t exist any more. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Dubya and Barack Obama happily shipped their jobs to Asia, all in the name of free markets. The destruction of the economy of huge swaths of our nation was delivered by the same geniuses who never saw a foreign intervention that they couldn’t embrace.
Since our country was defeated by the Vietnamese which hot war have we actually won? We did capture Noriega and we did free a bunch of medical students in Grenada, but which of our other military engagements actually ended in success? We won every single battle in Iraq and still lost the war. Thank goodness we won the Cold War barely firing a shot because our nation’s real wars have not resulted in much success.
Maybe, Thomas, that’s why NatCons are more skeptical of American foreign policy than you are. Maybe after decades of failure, they think a new approach is called for. Maybe the Anti-American crowd isn’t the NatCons but is instead the internationalists who couldn’t care less that we’ve spent decades squandering American strength and resolve with too little to show for it.
Just maybe the NatCons have ample reason for disdaining the internationalists and just maybe Putin has little or nothing to do with it.
I will also say, well done.
Whatever we think about the "natcons" now, however, they likely represent an important strain in the future of the Republican party, a return to its pre-1940s isolationism. Large swaths of voters in the West want an end to neoliberal globalization policies, which I don't think ever really had more than shallow majority support in most Western countries. Of course, those policies are of recent vintage, from the 1990s, and can, with some pain and effort, be reversed. What cannot be reversed is the replacement of old-style "checkerboard," multipolar balance-of-power with "cooperative security" or "collective security" or whatever you want to call it.
The bitter lessons of the 1930s and (to a lesser extent) 1970s are now half forgotten, even by more mainstream figures and thinkers. The old "realist"-type foreign policy was already dying before the end of the 19th century, a fact only a few (like Norman Angell) perceived correctly before 1914. The two world wars and the Cold War should have killed it for good, for we no longer live in 1850, much less 1750. Many people vaguely and intuitively get this, but often can't articulate it. It makes for a vacuum that can be filled by pseudo-intellectual trash from Tucker Carlson, Christopher Caldwell, Zero Hedge, and certain crackpot academics.
(I'm not saying these gentlemen are stupid. Rather, I'm saying that intelligence-on-paper is no guarantee of common sense or honesty or not bathing oneself in a decade-long tub of sophisticated disinformation.)