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FOREIGN POLICY

Is American Foreign Policy an Infinite Crisis?

 

George Bush as superhero, the rest of us as sketchy background characters

 

 | 5.5.2006 4:14 PM

 

He was the undisputed ruler of one world, convinced that the larger world outside his own immediate control was corrupt, lacking inspiring heroes and proper values. He acted boldly on the belief that through his own genius, combined with force, manipulation, and powerful weapons he had no hand in creating, he could make a difference—a positive difference, one he'd eventually be lauded for, petty carpers be damned.

To actuate his initially well-intentioned scheme, he launched an enormous, convoluted and confusing set of manipulations, tried to rid the world of magic, generated an interplanetary war, and built a giant cosmic tower capable of creating an endless array of alternate earths from scratch, powered by the energy forces of kidnapped Martians, Kryptonians, and random superbeings.

I am speaking, as the astute reader will have guessed, of President George W. Bush.

OK, only at the start there, kind of. Actually, I am speaking of Alexander Luthor of the former Earth-3 (as with many details in this article, honestly, if you have to ask, you don't really wanna know), whose master plan came to a failed end this week in the DC Comic book Infinite Crisis #7. A 20th-anniversary sequel to the 1985 Crisis On Infinite Earths, the Infinite Crisis series was one of the comic book industry's mega-crossover events designed to force fanboys to buy every single title issued all year long, in addition to multiple new one-shots and mini-series—that depth of reading being necessary just to pretend to have some slim hope of understanding what's going on. And for the most part, they succeeded with me, capturing the attention of this reader who had entirely abandoned superhero comics for the past two decades.

The political angles of Infinite Crisis have not gone unexamined in this era when even the pulpiest microcultures are thoroughly inspected for larger meaning. "On the surface, this appears to be a straightforward Superman story," says Booklist in its review, "but the underlying treatment of such issues as misplaced deification, human rights, and terrorism give the story depth." But all that herniated analysis sheds some light on how the culture war produces Bizarro bedfellows.

As storytelling, Infinite Crisis could be a confusing and headachy mess even if you knew most of the characters and their backstories, and didn't find phrases like "trapped in the Speed force" or "summon the Green Lantern Corps" or "drag him through the Red Sun" merely confusing, meaningless, or off-putting. Infinite Crisis and all its spinoffs are dense with interesting themes, but not necessarily with interesting and complete developments of those themes. Like superhero comics at their best and worst, it was all about universe-spanning gosh-wow spectacle and constant references to events in past comics (which were usually left unexplained for neophytes and added ballast to the gradual sinking ship of comic book sales).

But it is of enduring interest to anyone sniffing around for signals about politics that two of the biggest fan-geek epics of the 21st century, this and the second Star Warstrilogy, can be read, or even demand to be read, as sly, dark takedowns on George Bush and his imperial and world-saving visions. The zeitgeist of the fantastic is by no means behind our president's essentially superheroic vision of the U.S. government's role. It might be all right to lose the United Nations, international opinion, the opposition party, and more than half of the population—but when the naysayers are joined in their uneasiness by everyone from the Jedi Council to the Justice League, you are in political trouble.

 

Still, Bush stays the course. Does this make him more a Winston Churchill, as he imagines, or a Sith Lord or Darkseid?

The echoes of influence and connection between serious, grim military adventures and fershlugginer pop artifacts are everywhere. Post-9/11 American military operations in Afghanistan were originally called "Infinite Justice," then abruptly changed to "Enduring Freedom." By mixing in this DC comics' tribute/attack on Bush foreign policy, we can create the most accurate name yet for this century's American military operations: How about "Operation Enduring Crisis"?

The whole Infinite Crisis brouhaha began with another political metaphor, a moral dilemma touching on vital differences between libertarian and modern liberal viewpoints on the nature of the self and the proper way to treat anti-social actions. Batman grows to mistrust and hate his fellow superheroes when he learns they have magically mindwarped some villains into forgetting the heroes' secret identities—and then mindwiped him to make him forget they had done it, violating Batman's C.S. Lewis/Anthony Burgess sense of traditional morality. It's OK to beat the shit out of villains and punish them, because this involves respecting them as autonomous moral beings; but it is always wrong to "rehabilitate" them through force, because this does violence to their very being and identity, by removing the most important choice of all—to be good or evil.

Series author Geoff Johns ends escaping this complicated and promising beginning with a very modern comic meta-gesture, in which the complaint motivating the villains of the piece—that the world of DC Comics has become unremittingly dark, vicious, and unheroic—makes them world-destroying stand-ins for a significant cadre of DC's own shrinking fan base. It's every author's dream—telling a story in which his own critics are the hideous supervillains—and it made for a fun undercurrent for the cognoscenti, but it ended up blunting the seriousness of some of the other moral issues. Batman never has to decide if what his friends did really was unforgivable, and his own reaction to their violation of the villain's moral autonomy gets so out of control that he merely has to clean up his own mess rather than decide who was right or wrong in the first place. Similarly, the Iraqi people's own responsibility for rescuing themselves from tyranny and developing their own institutions is elided by our superheroic efforts, ongoing if failing, to take care of all that for them.

Stories of men in tights, flying through the universe, shooting undifferenatiated force beams willy-nilly and occasionally tearing each others' arms off, are perhaps crude vehicles for sophisticated political and moral analysis. Still, the mental world of politics inevitably colonizes our reactions to everything in our lives. In the end of Infinite Crisis—SPOILER WARNING, folks—Luthor's plan to create a perfect world out of the chaotic, living jumble of the existing universe (and the many more he creates) comes a-cropper, He is brutally and shockingly murdered by the Joker, representation of the DC universe's pure villainy, an unhinged id for whom political and ethical logic of any sort is meaningless.

Such will not be George W. Bush's fate. There is no way to map political meaning from worlds in which creating and destroying multiverses are the par to our world (where heroes must be content with merely creating and destroying nations). As the madness of Bush's plan becomes more apparent to more people, none of us have the power or guts or assumed authority to swing at him on a rope and kick him off his pedestal, as per Nightwing in Infinite Crisis. If we have a long post-Bush future, he'll live in it, and no matter how hated he is by how many in 2009, past experience with ex-presidents shows he'll be warmly embraced and meet an eventual demise followed by heaps of honors, some sincere, some not.

But the comic book analogy does hold up in another way. To Bush, we are all just those sort of barely delineated characters, small, in foreground or background, evading (barely) projecting force beams and falling chunks of masonry from destroyed buildings. Some of us are dead in the end, sure, even some third-banana superheroes get shredded by deadly eye-beams. But most of the victims of the superpower struggles are unnamed, or with names that will not be long remembered.

In that sense, Infinite Crisis does remind us of the ways in which the U.S. and the people in charge of its might are superhero manqués. As well-meaning as they might be—even the ones not as clearly bullgoose loony as Earth-3 Luthor and his partner Earth-Prime Superboy (again: don't ask)—their exertions of force in the name of goodness cause plenty of collatoral damage and often seem driven by a sense that their choices and actions are above the considerations of mortal men and their petty problems.

The disasters might be forgotten by the next issue—or the next election (though Bush and the GOP shouldn't count on it). But there will always be some fanboy to keep alive the memory of what things used to be like. Let's hope it's not too late for some fan of America after 2008 to retcon the Bush era and make the era of constant Middle East war a distant memory for only the geekiest old fans of foreign policy to argue over.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.reason.com/links/links050506.shtml

 

 

This article was referenced on yourdemocracy.net back in 2006 by John Richarson......

 

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a moralistic non-navel-gazing…….

The 'Rules-Based International Order' Is Dead. Washington Killed It.

 

written by ryan mcmaken

 

The lack of self-awareness among the many American officials who are striking a moralistic pose in opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is striking.

 

For example, Foreign Policy has published a column by Col. Yevgeny Vindman, asking how the world can tolerate a country like Russia on the United Nations Security Council. His specific point was that any country that invades another country must not be allowed veto power in the United Nations. Responding to Vindman, however, Stephen Wertheim pointed out what should be obvious to everyone: that’s a “fair question” and one “that applies to 2003, too.”

 

In other words, the view that the current Russian invasion is somehow unique in its aggressiveness requires a complete rewriting of history and a willingness to ignore the reality of the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. If an aggressive power’s veto in the UN was perfectly fine in 2003, why is it suddenly not acceptable now? The reality, of course, is that the United States is powerful enough to invade whatever country it wants and still get away with it. A second-rate power like Russia can’t do the same, even when it basically mimics the acts of the United States.

 

Nonetheless, Washington continues to have the audacity to portray itself as a white knight that stands for a “rules-based” international order—an order supposedly built around respect for national sovereignty and multilateral enforcement of international law. But, it has become abundantly clear that these alleged rules mean nothing at all when the United States wishes to invade countries in preemptive and elective wars. For those who don’t wear the American selective-memory goggles, it is not clear that the US should be in a leadership position in a rules-based order that it is so obviously willing to flout.

 

There are implications here well beyond simply pointing out hypocrisy, and they extend to global trade, international law, and the prospects for a new Cold War. Multilateralism means nothing to the US when the notion gets in the way of the next US regime change scheme, and as a result, it is likely no coincidence that the US's latest demand for a multilateral moral crusade has yielded little cooperation from the rest of the world. As has already become clear, few regimes outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been willing to go along with the US’s demands that the world’s regimes impoverish their citizens by cutting themselves off from Russian oil and wheat—and everything else. Much of the world, it seems—from Asia to Africa to Latin America—is no longer willing to get lessons in morality from Washington, and even less willing to make their populations go hungry in order to please Washington politicians.

 

This is likely to become an increasing issue for the global economy and for global international institutions moving forward.

 

Iraq 2003 versus Ukraine 2022

 

In 2003, the United States invaded a sovereign state in an elective and “preemptive” war. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—most of them civilians—were killed. Portrayals of Iraq as a threat to the US and its neighbors were exposed as lies.

 

In 2022, Russia invaded a sovereign state in an elective and “preemptive” war. Military and civilian casualties may someday rival those of Iraq, but given that Ukraine’s population is now twice as large as Iraq’s was in 2003, totals will need to grow considerably to be comparable to the carnage in Iraq.

 

Yet, the way the US regime, the US media, and US public treat these two invasions is truly a sight to behold. A few minutes on Twitter make it clear that Americans are still making excuses for the US’s blood-drenched Iraq invasion. Some claim that the deaths of Iraqi women and children should be ignored because the Iraqi regime wasn’t “democratic.”

 

Others portray the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq—a lowball figure being two hundred thousand out of a population of twenty-three million—as a negligible matter of a few “stray drones.”

 

 

Forgotten by these apologists are the times US troops opened fire on children and the US mercenaries who fired machine guns into crowds of unarmed Iraqis. Moreover, the US shelled and completely destroyed both Fallujah and Mosul. The bloodshed was remarkable, indeed. The US media, on the other hand, now hints the Russians are uniquely barbaric for using cluster bombs—but the US used these in Iraq. The US also purposely fomented a civil war through its needless de-Ba’athification policy, which rendered millions of Iraqis unemployed and abolished the nation’s few institutions designed to maintain local order.

 

Those caught up in the current anti-Russian frenzy denounce anyone who mentions these historical facts because they don’t fit Washington’s present narrative. But for most of the world, which isn’t as emotionally invested in the idea that the United States is the beacon of moral foreign policy, the last twenty-five years of US foreign policy make it clear that talk about a rules-based order is nothing more than talk.

 

Will the World Isolate Russia on Moral Grounds?

 

Even in the wake of the alleged massacres in and around Bucha, we’re hearing almost nothing at all from regimes outside the US’s inner circle of NATO and near-NATO allies. For example, in Fox’s piece on “world leaders” reacting to the alleged massacre, we quickly find that “the world” means a handful of countries like Japan, New Zealand, and NATO members. All the same regimes keep showing up in every piece about “the world’s” reaction.

 

Even within NATO, Turkey continues to engage in efforts to facilitate peace talks with Russia. There is still no sign that Latin America desires to throw its economies into recession by signing on to the US’s sanctions regime. No Latin American countries have yet been added to Russia’s list of “unfriendly countries.” As Mexico’s president has already made clear, Mexico’s interest is in maintaining friendly relations with all nations. India and China, of course, continue to trade with the Russians. In fact, the US-NATO axis only makes up one-third of global GDP (gross domestic product). The US is going to have to convince the rest of the world to cut themselves off from critical commodities in the name of joining the US’s rules-based order. But the US in no moral position to do so. 

 

Will the United Nations Eject Moscow?

 

One more key plank of the US strategy is now coming into focus. Within days of Vindman’s article in Foreign Policy calling for the removal of Russia from the UN Security Council, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky demanded the same, claiming that no country that invades another country can continue on the Security Council. Short of expelling Russia, Zelensky maintains, the council should dissolve itself. Needless to say, no similar demands were made when the US invaded Iraq, or when NATO devastated Libya. 

 

Zelensky, however, may have stumbled across a good idea. Now may be a good time to abolish the UN. The United States has spent the last thirty years turning the United Nations into a US-dominated institution designed to rubber stamp US military interventions, make excuses for US allies, and wag its finger at US enemies. This has long provided a patina of a rules-based international order, one that can also be ignored when it suits Washington. Thus, when the US failed to get its rubber stamp from the UN prior to the Iraq invasion, Washington denounced its opponents in the Security Council and instead embraced its eastern European partners like Poland and Ukraine, which apparently had no problem with invading and occupying countries unprovoked. (Ukraine sent at least 5,000 troops to help occupy Iraq.)

 

Prior to this, of course, the Security Council was deadlocked most of the time because the US and the Soviet Union would simply veto each other. Although both Washington and Moscow invaded other sovereign states during this time, neither was delusional enough to think other states in the Security Council could be ejected for such acts. That was then. 

 

Biden's New World Order

 

This all continues to highlight how the world is descending into a postglobalization world of at least two blocs: the anti-Russian one and the neutral one. Biden has already claimed that Washington will lead the ”free world” in this “new world order.” But this “free world” is increasingly looking like the US, Europe, and a handful of other allies versus everyone else. Enlarging this bloc would depend on expanding soft power based at least in part on moral leadership, especially as the US continues to become a smaller and smaller part of the global economy. Thanks to the US's blatant disregard for a rules-based order in recent decades, this looks increasingly unlikely. 

 

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

 

 

 

READ MORE:

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/april/09/the-rules-based-international-order-is-dead-washington-killed-it/

 

 

 

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GusNote: The left-Dems (and the GOP mad hawks) who are following the idiot demented braindead Old Joe are of course poopooing the Ron Paul's efforts for peace and pan the Mises Institute as well. These outlets are not perfect but more valuable than the Democrats' rubbish "trying to help" a little Jewish Nazi... Let me explain in a nutshell: Putin (or Russia) isn't going to loose the intervention in Ukraine. Capice? All the US is doing by sending weapons has nothing to do with PEACE nor DEMOCRACY, but in pushing a little idiot called Zelensky to getting MORE PEOPLE KILLED just to sell a few more weapons (well, they're not selling them, but the US have to print the cash to give to the weapons manufacturers, AND more PEOPLE IN UKRAINE ARE GOING TO GET KILLED for no other reason. If you don't understand this go and read "Mother Courage and her Children" by Bertolt Brecht....

 

 

 

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