Critique on Aaron Friedberg’s “Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Totalitarianism”

Critique on Aaron Friedberg’s “Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Totalitarianism”

Aaron Friedberg, a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University discussed the U.S.’s proposed strategy for and the inherent advantages that a democratic state has in its dealing with totalitarian states.  In what started in a historic context with regard to Russia and China then digressed into a context in which he began espousing current neocon ideology and propaganda.  Shortly into the discussion it began to seem that Friedberg was oblivious to the fact that Russia is a democratic state that correctly understands its need to have a credible deterrent as opposed to attempting to emulate the U.S.’s drive toward the unachievable goal of compete military global domination. 

It has been the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy to achieve such a degree of superiority that no nation has the ability to resist U.S. military might, but this is a foolish goal and its futility is clearly evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq.   Friedberg does not mention this aim specifically, but it is obvious that to dominate in the manner that Friedberg espouses suggests that the U.S. must have overwhelming superiority to execute its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance. What is not addressed is how the U.S. can execute such a doctrine by spending trillions of dollars while the Afghans can successfully resist the U.S. without any military training, without high levels of military spending and advanced weapon systems, and without dozens of military bases and a sophisticated logistical system.  Consider how little it took for the Taliban to defeat the U.S. in Afghanistan.  How can the U.S. state that Russia is trying to dominate Europe when the U.S.’s military spending is more than nine times higher than that of Russia’s?

After listening to Aaron Friedberg give his speech entitled “Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Totalitarianism”, it seemed blatantly obvious to me that he is in total denial as to U.S. Government’s state of affairs with respect to its failed internal politics that now must rely on a surveillance-police-prison state to maintain control domestically and a world-wide torture regime, billion-dollar bribes and global assassination teams that all have become the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.  Friedberg also fails to make mention of the U.S.’s utter failure towards achieving its geopolitical strategic objectives, nor does he mention the negative impact that corruption within the U.S. political establishment has had with regard to U.S. advancing its domestic and foreign policy interests.  He also fails to recognize, as a person who bills himself as foreign policy expert, the precarious position in which the U.S. finds itself with regard to one of its closest allies, Germany, being stuck in a position of having to stifle a populist grassroots movement to end the U.S. Federal Reserve specifically and central banking in general after the U.S. reneged on the repatriation of hundreds of billions of dollars in German gold stored at the U.S. central bank for which the U.S. will not even allow an audit.

Friedberg also totally brushes aside the fraud, waste and abuse of the U.S.’s corporate military-industrial complex as he makes comments about how China’s elite seek to maintain hold within a mixed economic system and argues that Russia is too weak to challenge U.S. interests.  While he criticizes China’s elite, he makes no mention of the fact that the U.S. loses hundreds of thousands of jobs yearly to Chinese manufacturing and production and has a trade deficit with China of hundreds of billions of dollars, nor does he offer any advice as to how the U.S. can stem this tide.

With regard to his asserting that Russia is unable to challenge U.S. hegemony, maybe he forgot that, South Ossetia and Abkhazia aside, Putin’s interests with regard to peace and security run parallel to U.S. interests, especially with regard to terrorism.  The U.S propaganda machine has been in full swing and yet failed to generate popular support for intervention in Ukraine.  Not to mention the fact that as with Ukraine the U.S. lied with regard to the Georgian conflict in accusing Russia of initiating hostilities when it was Georgia that started the ball rolling by opening up with artillery barrages on peaceful and unarmed villages comprised of Russian citizens.  While the entire world recognized what happened and accepted the aftermath, the U.S. maintained its denial while spewing venous propaganda as McCain demanded intervention and direct confrontation with Russia. 

Friedberg fails to address the fact that the U.S. government spent a decade of time, thousands of U.S. lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis’ lives and more than two-trillion dollars prosecuting a “Global War on Terror” during which time U.S. policy strengthened its enemies’ hands and weakened itself politically, militarily and economically.  This is power that has been wasted and cannot be unspent. This is not Putin making this assessment and assertion, but is the assessment of the CIA and U.S. military personnel who have watched their nation carry out a self-contradicting foreign policy as it purposely failed to recognize that that the same rebels it armed in Syria and Libya now attack its interests in Iraq.  The U.S. has also placed itself in a position of having identical interests to Iran after having threatened Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution which expelled U.S. power from that country.  Friedberg also might consider how the U.S. has not won a major war since it allied itself with Russia during WII.  During that war the Russian people smashed the Nazi war machine leaving the U.S., England and France to deal with what amounted to facing a small contingency force as compared to the war that was being waged on the Eastern Front.  The U.S did not win in Korea, Vietnam nor in Iraq after two invasions and occupations.

Getting back to the fraud within the U.S. military-industrial complex, after spending a decade training and arming the Iraqi military, their failure to engage and defeat a small enemy fighting force has sent shockwaves through the U.S. military establishment while exposing the complete failure of U.S. policy in Iraq.  The gross incompetence the U.S. spent billions of dollars and a decade to foster could only have been perpetrated by corporate contractors.  Now, the U.S. seeks to sack Maliki and install Chalabi, an Iraqi politician whose office the U.S. raided during its Operation Iraqi Freedom after accusing Chalabi of engaging in espionage and working in concert with Iran to undermine U.S. operations.  Yet this was just a lie to hide U.S. failures.  Iran wanted a Shiite government in control and had no interest in undermining its objectives.  Iran is not so stupid as to arm its enemies unlike U.S. foreign policy.  Chalabi was also accused of providing all the false intelligence that the U.S. used as the basis for its disastrous invasion and occupation, but now the U.S. wants to have this same man save Iraq from ISIS.

As Friedberg espouses his belief in the inability of Russia to challenge U.S. interests, maybe he needs to consider what effect a minor U.S. intervention in Afghanistan had in creating havoc within the former Soviet Union.  What Russia learned from the USSR’s Afghan war was that it did not need to intervene during the U.S.’s Afghan war for the U.S. to be defeated.  I was also stuck with the feeling that Friedman seemed to not understand that Russia is not the Soviet Union and has no more interest in dominating the planet than does Canada or Australia.  In this, Putin understands that only fools need to learn by experience and the U.S. has had plenty of experience in attempting to dominate the globe.  And while Friedberg arrogantly boasts of the unassailability of U.S. interest vis-à-vis Russia, what he fails to understand or admit is that Putin and Russia are not in the invasion and hegemony business, but merely seek to do business in the manner of an ethical, peaceful and trustworthy global trading partner.  It is the U.S that is engaging in hegemonic belligerence that Friedberg wrongly believes provides strength to U.S. foreign policy, but which instead is generating increasing foreign opposition from even its closest allies.  Friedberg also fails to ask or answer the following question: What strength, support and sustainability does a nation have that it must rely on the threat of violence in a vain attempt to maintain an international monetary system that increasingly is forcing greater levels of austerity upon its closest allies? In every instance where there has been or is conflict, it has not been Russia that fired the first shot or provided bribes to the opposition.  It is the U.S. that foments unrest, urges conflict, makes threats and engages in terror, and trying to ignore this fact is becoming more difficult and a growing embarrassment to U.S. allies.

While U.S. interests are under attack in Iraq, Friedman also fails to mention that the U.S. was completely clueless of that fact that Iraq would come so close to falling or that a Sunni caliphate would be established that would challenge the established borders and political order created through Western imperialism after WWI by the Sykes–Picot Agreement.  Putin understands that Russian foreign policy is for the purpose of defending Russia and providing for the peace and prosperity of its people.  He understands that this can best be achieved through economic cooperation with other nations.  This is apparent in his signing of the Eurasian Trade Pact and Russia’s cooperation with China in developing an energy market that helps the entire world by working to ensure the production of abundant energy so that all nations benefit from the availability cheap oil.  If Russia can be a valuable partner to China, it can also be a valuable partner to the EU and U.S.

The U.S.’s “Asian Pivot to challenge China was another delusional strategy and could be likened to Hitler’s last days as he moved imaginary and decimated divisions around on a map in the final defense of a collapsing Third Reich.  It seems that the U.S. was so tied down with the intrigues of empire in Iraq and Afghanistan that it could not even attend the East Asian Summit, and this was before the fall of one-third of the Iraqi state to ISIS and their decree of the establishment of a caliphate spanning two countries as they consolidated their hold on Iraqi oil production facilities.  The U.S.’s plans of maintaining a united Iraq were further dashed when the Kurds established their sovereignty over the oil-rich Kurdish regions of northern Iraq and town of Tikrit.

While Putin operates from a perspective of realism and pragmatism, Friedberg refuses to face the fact that it is the U.S that is being driven by neocon ideology.  He also fails to mention the fascist tendencies of the U.S. corporate model and the financialization of the economy in which U.S. banking profits are privatized and its losses are socialized.  He also failed to mention that after the U.S. banking collapse that necessitated the banking elites’ coercing of the U.S. government into giving them trillions of dollars at taxpayer expense in newly printed money, that the very structure which caused that collapse has become even more deeply ingrained as these banks, which were comprised of largest and most politically-connected failing banks, used the trillions of dollars taken from taxpayers to buy up smaller successful banks so as to centralize to an even greater degree the power and control over the economy by banks that have proven to be the biggest abusers of deregulation, illegal leveraging and risky loan-making and the greatest perpetrators of fraud and theft.  These crimes have proven so great that there is no longer any trust in the U.S. financial system.  The de facto seizure of German gold amply demonstrates the rot of the U.S. economic system and its threat to a global economic order where theft and illegal seizure is not initiated against states.  Is there anything more destabilizing then being told your wealth is no longer yours?  Theft of wealth has been the hallmark of U.S. intervention.  It happened in Libya and it happened in Iraq as Iraq stills seeks the return of $17 billion that was looted by the U.S. government. Gaddafi’s Libya had 100 tons of gold stolen by the U.S. and NATO.  Now we see that both Libya and Iraq got off easy as the US refuses to repatriate 1536 ton of German gold. 

As with the U.S.’s disastrous “Asian Pivot”, the U.S. also seems now to be becoming entangled in Africa as its Africom Headquarters becomes a Forces Command under the current U.S. force structure.  As China seeks economic cooperation and development in Africa, the U.S. now has decided to become embroiled in more tribal, sectarian, ethnic and ideologically driven civil war and conflict.  There is little doubt that the U.S. will achieve the same results in Africa that it did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As to the U.S. hypocrisy involving the criticism of China’s politically elite, there is currently no crime that elected officials and the elite cannot get away with in the U.S.  Whether it is committing fraud and theft in banking, spying on its own population, committing torture, perpetrating extra-judicial assassinations, initiating illegal invasions and murderous occupations, or the initiation of a world-wide torture network, the U.S. currently has no peer with regard to its lawlessness. 

Espionage was committed under the Bush Administration by Representative Jane Harman on behalf of Israel, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales overlooked this.  Harman was caught red-handed in judicially warranted wiretaps seeking to obstruct an espionage investigation and prosecution against Rosen and Weiss, two operatives from the AIPAC.  In exchange for her obstructing the investigation, she would be given Israeli support for being selected to chair the House Intelligence Committee.  This not only exposes how corrupt U.S politicians are, but also how systematic treason has become within the U.S. political establishment run by elites.  Harmon avoided espionage charges by ending her criticism of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping and giving her unflinching total support for the illegal surveillance of the American people that is now of such an Orwellian nature that the world’s greatest totalitarian regimes would have been envious.  And yet, this state of affairs gets even worse as U.S. politicians now seek to torture, imprison and kill those who expose U.S. crimes. 

The written history of how the U.S. empire fell will be a very interesting read, and its readers will be astounded by the arrogance, greed and mendacity of the U.S.’s ruling class and the ignorance and apathy of those who were ruled.