Does America need a new enemy? One Brit thinks so. . .

John Laughland has an essay titled What I Believe: Washington as Dangerous as Brussels posted on The Brussels Journal.

Ten years ago, I was vehemently pro-American. Like many British Conservatives (I use the capital ‘C’ deliberately, to denote supporters of The Conservative Party), I regarded the United States as almost the ideal society. More importantly, and also like many Conservatives, I regarded any questioning of the Anglo-American alliance as a taboo which was broken only by those whose views were dangerously and irredeemably left-wing. I believed that the main threat to my values came from the quasi-socialist political tradition of the European continent (a subject on which I wrote a book) and that the “Atlantic community” was the right response to, and defence from, that threat.

Now, ten years on, I have become completely the opposite. I am a consistent critic of American (and British) foreign policy and I have long since despaired of the Eurosceptic movement in Britain, especially on the Right, which excoriates France for an allegedly servile attitude towards Germany while at the same time demanding that Britain behave with the same servility towards Washington. British Tories say they defend British sovereignty against Brussels but they see nothing wrong in having Britain’s foreign and defence policy subjected entirely to America’s. Indeed, any suggestion that Britain should have an independent military policy, for instance by not belonging to NATO, is regarded as the wildest heresy.

The change, for me, began with the bombing of Iraq in December 1998 and was completed by the Kosovo war in 1999. I opposed both operations, partly out of a revulsion for militarism but mainly because the latter war was patently incompatible with the doctrine of national sovereignty. (Indeed, it was deliberately intended to be so.) I quickly came to the conclusion that Washington wanted to create a supra-national New World Order as dangerous for the freedom of nations as the equally supra-national super-structure being set up in Brussels.

Fisking the entire thing would be far too tedious an exercise for both me and the reader so let us limit ourselves to a few highlights. First of all we should remember that the bombing of Iraq in 1998 was ordered by Bill Clinton in response to Saddam Hussein's refusal to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and his obstruction of UN inspectors. Despite the years of airheads crying "Bush lied people died" we should never forget that the Clinton administration and the entire rest of the world believed that Saddam had active WMD programs.

Next the Kosovo war in 1999 was a NATO operation in which every NATO member nation participated. Furthermore it was the European powers who pressured the United States into participating. America was told by its European allies that the war was vital to European interests but it would not happen if America did not lead and do the lion's share of the work.

So far this is a pretty thin reed on which to hang the charge that the US is the greatest danger the world has seen since . . . what? Nazi Germany? The Soviet Union?

It was of course Bill Clinton who fought the Kosovo war. But the same policy of aggressive foreign policy has been continued, and massively amplified, by George W. Bush. Where Clinton invoked the (bogus) claims of universal human rights for his wars, Bush invoked U.N. Security Council Resolutions (as his father had done in 1990) to justify his drive for absolute American hegemony in the name of an international system based on a complete confusion between international relations and policing – the “war on terror”. These plans have been amply laid out by politicians on the Left and Right in America, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Paul Wolfowitz. But, just as each French president is worse than his predecessor, so the Clinton years now seen like a golden age.

It is a bit difficult to apply reason to pure hysterics, but we shall try. Bill Clinton's military actions, like everything else he did - and does, had at their core the self interest of Bill Clinton. However his principle error as to Iraq was that he didn't do enough and in regard to Kosovo that he allowed himself to be importuned by our feckless European allies into involving the US in a war in which America had no legitimate interest.

As for George W Bush's drive for "absolute hegemony" all I can ask is where all that Iraqi oil that we were supposed to be going to war in order to steal is. I'm paying $3.29 for a gallon of regular. If we are the world's ruthless hegemon shouldn't we divvying up the loot by now?

Have I changed or has the world? To be sure, I have partly changed. Many of my political friends now are on the Left. My book on the Milosevic trial was published by a very left-wing publisher (Pluto Press, the former publishing house of the Socialist Workers’ Party) and the preface was written by the notoriously left-wing former US Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, who has embraced every anti-American cause from the Sandinistas to Saddam Hussein. Ten years ago, this would not have happened.

But the change in me is not that I have become left-wing. It is that I have ceased to think (I hope) in terms of taboos. Much of what passes for thought on the Right in Britain is in fact nothing other than the searching out of intellectual tram-lines on which to base one’s views. Opinions are severely hedged around with taboos. If someone is critical of America, for instance, he must be a Marxist. Having defended a number of deeply unpopular causes (especially that of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic) I believe that I can say that my thinking is taboo-free and that I instead analyse matters not tribally but instead on the basis of the facts.

I think the change in you is that you have become left-wing. As for your newly "taboo-free" thinking - please give me a break. The most someone who has aligned himself with Ramsey Clark can claim is that he has swapped one set of blinders for another. To paraphrase Claire Berlinski when in doubt about which direction to orient your moral compass point it away from the malignant narcissist loon who thinks that Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Daniel Ortega are great men.

Oh and here's another clue. When the only publisher you can find is the one that was also used by a Soviet front group like the Socialist Workers Party you might want to think about what that says about your book's content.

The Right in America under George Bush has become statist both in the sense that it believes in ever greater defence spending, and also in the fact that it bases American national identity on the country’s military in a way reminiscent of Germany-Prussia in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Perhaps the right in America believes in greater defense spending because we happen to be at war. Another good reason for increased military spending is that the previous administration cut the military far more than was wise and it needs to be rebuilt.

America has always derived a healthy portion of its national self image from our military successes. This is why George Washington was our first president and why U.S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower had their turns in the Oval Office. This is not a bad thing. While the people who get up every day and go to work in a productive job, raise their children and pay their taxes are the people who make the nation function it is the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who, as Heinlein said, place their frail bodies between their beloved homeland and war's desolation who make it possible for the good citizens to get on with their business in peace and safety.

Even more profoundly, I am convinced that the neo-conservatism which unites both Bush and Clinton (including Hillary) is a revolutionary creed which has nothing whatever to do with conservatism.

It is going to be a great shock to Hillary Clinton that she is a neo-con. It will be an even bigger shock to the folks over at The Weekly Standard.

I have argued this view at length in The Spectator and The American Conservative. To put it briefly, neo-conservatism is a profoundly revolutionary ideology which betrays all the characteristics I, as a Catholic and a conservative, hate most. It is militaristic and millenarian; it is moralistic and Manichean; it is revolutionary and ruthless. Not only does it have its roots in Trostkyism (Irving Kristol boasted in 1983 that he was still proud of having joined the Fourth International, two years after Trotsky founded it); it remains an overtly revolutionary force with all the potential for wreaking havoc which many other revolutionary movements in history have displayed.

It is no wonder that Mr. Laughland writes for The American Conservative since Pat Buchanan has become as much an America hater as any European intellectual. But here is another clue for you. Pat Buchanan has his nose out of joint with the US because we are fighting the "war on terror" which is a war against Muslims. Pat, you see, loves Muslims because they hate Jews as much as he does. Someone will doubtless protest that Mr. Buchanan has Jewish friends and so cannot be an antisemite - well fine then I'm not a bigot because I used to play marbles with a colored boy before I was old enough to know any better. Seriously, one of the Nazi bigwigs at the Wannsee Conference pointed out that one of the problems that they were going to have to overcome in implementing the "Final Solution" was that every German knew his "good Jew".

I digress on the topic of Pat Buchanan here only because this is another one of those "what direction do you point your moral compass" moments and Mr. Laughland fails this test as well.

Until that ideology is destroyed, until the stranglehold which the military-industrial complex has over the political class in America, and until a counter-weight to American hegemony emerges which permits the re-emergence of a multi-polar world order and the balance of power, the world will never be at peace.

Laughland saves the best for last when he slips over the line which divides the mere loons from the evil loons. In order for a nation or combination of nations to be a true "counter-weight" to America they would have to be an adversary like the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Which people do you suppose that Mr. Laughland wishes to "volunteer" to live in this new worker's paradise? Perhaps he would like China to recommit itself to the ideals of the Cultural Revolution and take up the banner of world communist revolution which the USSR dropped in the late 199o's.

I remember from history class how the world was multi-polar back in the first half of the 20th century. There was Berlin and Moscow and London and Paris and Rome and Washington DC. How did the cause of world peace fare with all those poles? Then after WWII when the world was nice and polarized into East and West how peaceful does Mr. Laughland think things were? Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan. . . any of this ring a bell?

The sad truth is that all Mr. Laughland is going to have to do is wait and the European Union will become the adversary to the United States which he longs to see arise. It is already well on its way to becoming a kind of "Forth Reich" and by the middle of this century it will be numerically dominated by unassimilated militant Muslims (at that point the onus of assimilation will fall upon the dwindling numbers of native Europeans).