Use No Army Now

The wall falls back into the moat.
Use no army now.
Make your commands known within your own town.
Perseverance brings humiliation.
The I Ching, 11. T'ai / Peace

What is Trump's foreign policy? As always we need to look at the staging, policy as performance. There is little appetite in his audience for the wars at the edges of the American empire. He played to this as part of his dismissal of his primary opponents, conventional imperialists to a man. In the election and still today a part of his support comes from distrust of the hawks of both parties.

If, however, you are among the faithful at his rallies it is not because you are taking a principled stand against imperialism. Nationalism does not contradict imperialism. It stands always ready to be of service to it so long as it gets its cut.

In the crowds on both sides of the partisan divide in America there is war weariness. There is understanding that the ability to obliterate does not bring security and does not bring prosperity. But the ebb tide of the empire is viewed by Trump's audience through the same inversion which encloses them in service to the class which collects the benefits that still accrue to the masters of war.

The reversals of fortune suffered by the American empire in recent decades are not seen as occurring in an economic system that has aged beyond its utility to the world's people. One that specializes in destruction when the world requires, instead, advances in cooperation.

Trump is a poor cousin in the global ruling class and it gnaws at him. In revenge he has taken up the mantle of those who are excluded by their betters but would bargain for a bigger slice of the pie by savaging workers who have not, like themselves, given up their political program in deference to capital.

While the manifesto of the rally is above all directed at domestic enemies it leaves a window through which to view a foreign policy. The elaborate and careful plans of the empire and, in particular, its requirements for vast treasure go unchallenged. But patience for the status quo, or for an orderly withdrawal, or for strategies of slow encirclement, whatever the councils of state have made solemn agreement upon is swept aside when a crisis is unveiled to the masses and, therefore, to Trump.

Since capital cannot be faulted its previous executives must bear the blame. The country is exhausted and warped by the “unending wars”, by the efforts that are demanded by the guardians of empire in order to maintain a status quo that has long been no more than a slow failure. The working class, global and socialist, knows there is no resolution to the crisis without peace. Even Trump’s audience cheers to bring the troops home, not to feed them to the flames.

But in this dead end imperialism takes refuge in the psychotic, suicidal break that it always prefers to any future without the limitless accumulation of wealth in the hands of its patrons. From Roy Cohn Trump learned to never admit defeat. He has reached the point in his presidency where he can no longer evade the glaring limitations of American power. He would stand defeated before his adoring public by admitting that he has no more up his sleeve than did Obama, or Bush, or any president in recent memory. That he will never wade ashore like Douglas MacArthur.

Bush Jr. was similarly cornered and was persuaded that the destruction of Iraq would solve the puzzle. It didn’t. And now many of the same advisers and certainly the same delusion has found an ear with his idiot successor. The world revolted against Bush’s war but was unable to prevent it. Has enough been learned in the last 17 years for there to be a different outcome this time?

Then again, in the polysemantic universe of Trump discourse, the biggest snares to war may arise from within the palace itself. There, imperial expertise has no stability and the pronouncements from the throne refer to nothing outside the moment. But beyond performance there is reality. And it has brought us all to a point where the world caves in, or Trump collapses, or both. 

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

Fear of The Angry Red Planet

The anonymous op-ed in the Times as well as Woodward's book (which I have not read but am proceeding from his summaries on talk shows) emphasize the peril to the actual American empire of Trump's ignorance. As any thoughtful imperialist will tell you an empire is a complicated matter and not child's play. A president is not required to come into office with a comprehensive mastery of the subject but he or she must have a verifiable grasp of the state of their knowledge and their ignorance.

In this White House the imperialists whose asides from the stage have provided a relentless commentary, from the beginning, to the soliloquies of their commander-in-chief have, none of them, anything like the credentials normally required for their roles in the management of the actual empire. But they all can take an inflated measure of their own worth by comparison to the president. And it appears that they have.

The disastrous record of the previous Republican administration has left that party's reserve of certified strategists depleted. Had another candidate won its nomination they would have needed to promote most of the roster from the farm leagues.  But Trump, running against everything since MacArthur, was left to pick among the misfits and the reckless climbers.

So the emperor knows nothing and the palace is both disloyal and out of their depth. How have we arrived here?

We should start by acknowledging that the empire as it actually exists is in crisis. America's colonial strategy has never moved beyond the one it used to destroy the population and occupy the lands of North America. What success it had in the 20th century was by outspending all rivals and the economic history of the 21st century demonstrates the radically diminishing returns on that.

Politically, at home, the actual empire has required a fantasy empire to rally enough of the working class to give it broad support and to staff its legions. While the Obama administration pursued an assortment of wars and the patching of financial markets the Republicans were free to sell fantasy to their mass audience. And no one excelled at salesmanship like Trump. Through a strategy no more complex than protecting his right flank he swept the remains of the GOP from the field. He knows that the actual empire that his staff is so intent on bringing him around on is a much harder sell than the one in the imagination of his rally audiences. And he knows that the Republican party is an empty husk without it.

The impersonality of financial abstraction escapes any attempt at conscious political transformation, so that people who have lost control of their life hang on dearly to a sense of illusory belonging. The nation, religious faith, and ethnicity provide protection from insecurity and loneliness, and serve as tools to attack competitors. ... Aggressive belonging is their only form of cohesion.  Franco “Bifo” Beradi – And

This “aggressive belonging”, which Bifo diagnoses in our digital era is, in the American homeland, much older than the internet and fundamental to Trump's performance. However deranged the particular impulses which his advisers feel compelled to protect us from it is this underlying drive which is his bond with his audience and the very substance of their ideology.