A Disorderly Retreat

Ukraine is a borderland. That’s the meaning of its name. And the border that it sits on, between Nato and Russia, seems to run through the middle of the country. In such a way that it can be shifted quickly, as it has in recent years, from one side to the other. The shift in 2014 dislodged more in American politics than was apparent at the time. Five years later ‘western’ Ukraine is exhausted, bewildered by the loss of its American client status, and seeking terms with the east.

There are students of imperialism who maintain that Trump represents a faction of the ruling class who reject confrontation with Russia and favor confrontation with China. I have no doubt such theorists can be found and that they are well funded and have copiously documented strategies. Since the failure of the neo-conservative campaigns of the Bush era, however, I suspect all such strategies are no more than wish fulfillment and the true plans of the American empire are to hold the line and pray their credit holds out.

Moreover, everything indicates that if such a strategy is loose in this administration it is operating without any sort of executive control. In the case of Ukraine it would be possible for an American president to establish a policy seeking to mediate the conflict between Kiev and Moscow as part of a new detente with Russia, allowing American power to focus on an economically ascendant China. It would not be easy and would run counter to a great many positions that have been solidly entrenched over the last thirty years. But, just as with Nixon’s Chinese play, it becomes an option when the most strident voices of aggressive imperialism, those emanating from the Republican party, are brought to heel.

But nothing of the sort is going on here. Trump has no strategic ability and is completely without the friends required to carry out such a change in direction. Politically he is pure reptilian complex. Idiotic. What is being unveiled is just another instance where Trump, whose private interests were honed in the relatively primitive world of accumulation which is big city real estate, attempted to monetize his power out of the very complex world of global capital. But this time he has double-crossed the empire.

The allies he will need in the days to come are caught in what is likely to be a withering crossfire. Having never made a serious attempt to build a case for imperial withdrawal or for rapprochement with the Kremlin he is left without a political defense in a court where he will face a jury of imperialists instead of an audience of the devoted.

The deep state has never trusted Trump. It is indifferent to whether he is Republican or Democratic and it has no fear that he will subvert its authoritarian toolkit. But all candidates for high office need to display, by recognized pedigree or by cultivation of contacts, allegiance; not so much to the democratic traditions of the republic, but to the  position which it now occupies in international capitalism. Trump has never bothered.

Vetting candidates is a function of the parties. But, while the GOP made a half-hearted attempt to derail Trump in the last election, it failed. And its failure has now put in peril its fitness to rule the empire. If it defends its president it endorses the unsightly corruption of the worst currents of privately held capital and throws up its hands before the multitude of foreign policy crises which make landfall on our shores with the regularity of hurricanes. If it removes him it risks ending its status as a mass party.

What we know as the two party system was the outgrowth of national expansion, regional divisions, and the coexistence of slave and wage labor. Republican paranoia about a one party state may demonstrate its unconscious understanding that it has lost its utility as either a bulwark of American capital or as a contributor to any of the solutions which the entire world will require from the working mass of its citizens in the near future.

In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies.

Richard Wilbur