The worst, most damaging and outright stupid ideas that have defined the American foreign relations are these:
- Free markets love democracy. If you give the gift of neoliberal economy to an authoritarian regime, it will democratize.
The reality is the opposite, of course. Neoliberalism loves authoritarianism (remember COVID?). Shipping the entire US manufacturing to China didn’t bring about democracy in China. All it did was make the US dependent on an authoritarian regime.
2. Russia is worried about its security and needs to be constantly reassured that it’s safe. For this purpose, its neighbors should be disarmed and what Russia says about its true goals and intentions should be ignored. It has free markets after all, so this means it is a democratic country because see above.
The dedicated lunacy of this approach remains unchanged regardless of what reality demonstrates. Yesterday I heard from a dude I know with connections in Washington who says this is still the only framework of thinking that exists regarding Russia.
3. It’s crucially important to prevent Latin Americans from fixing the mess that the Cold War plunged them into. Any time things improve in a Latin American country, every time Latin Americans finally start figuring out their own shit, do everything you can to prevent them. We need the rest of the hemisphere in which we live to be an absolute mess because…. reasons.
We can see this in the treatment of Nayib Bukele who is vilified like he’s the second coming of Hitler. All that this achieves is make Central Americans who love him even more resentful against the US. We are going to move these Central Americans into Ohio and Alabama anyway. Doesn’t it make sense not to make them angry in advance of that transportation?
4. The policy of giving money to Iran is an amalgam of the three preceding policies on the list. Throwing money at a problem in hopes that it will magically bring forth democracy, reassuring people who want to see us dead that we are friendly, and a total misunderstanding that people in faraway cultures are not necessarily like us. They might be or they might not be. You need to use your brain to figure out which is which.
The result of these policies is that we have sunk tons of money into empowering our enemies. We are literally paying to make countries that hate us stronger. And we do our absolute darndest to antagonize countries that like us.
I know that little of what I write is as futile as these two posts. People are so bent on obtaining from political partisanship the emotional nourishment their lives lack that they simply switch off when you tell them that it’s not about their imaginary Messiah / Antichrist. But it’s still a fascinating topic how a handful of people came up with a handful of bad ideas, and even when events have proven that the ideas are wrong, we are still clutching onto them for dear life.
Marx was wrong. It is not all about money. Ideas always come first, always decide everything.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think this can all be summarized with the idea that modernity has failed. That is, the idea that the markets are rational, the idea that countries act rationally to improve their society’s well being, etc.
The 2008 financial crises put a stake through the heart of the idea of markets being rational, with this momentous crisis we realized an entire generation of ideas was just plain wrong.
The second stake through the heart of modernity came with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Most people, myself included, just could not comprehend the irrationality of plunging the world into such a state, but yet here we are. Ideas of empire, pride, and historical grievances totally overcame the idea that invading and taking another country’s territory was a thing of the past because doing so would be incredibly irrational and have serious consequences.
Having said all this, I mourn the death of modernity. It was a noble idea and if it had worked we’d be living in a much better world. Now we’ve truly entered a postmodernist world with postmodernist leaders like Trump and Putin, where reality is what they want it to be, there is no rationality but what they want it to be; laws don’t apply to the powerful, lying is acceptable as long as it aligns with what their vision. It’s not a pretty picture anyway you see it.
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Thank you, Ed, this is well-said and very insightful.
One thing, though, is that Iran, Russia, North Korea, etc aren’t irrational. They have a different rationality. A different vision of what’s valuable and good. It seems to us they are in the grip of lunacy. And it seems to them that we are.
What is dying right now, and I really hope it does, is that all people are the same deep down. And it just isn’t true. This whole “deep down inside everybody wants peace and loves their family” is an illusion. Human rationality is different. Human subjectivity is different. We keep projecting ourselves onto others, and it just doesn’t work.
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“One thing, though, is that Iran, Russia, North Korea, etc aren’t irrational. They have a different rationality. A different vision of what’s valuable and good. It seems to us they are in the grip of lunacy. And it seems to them that we are.”
Agree, there definitely is a different rationality that they are working from. However, I don’t think their rationality is based on the betterment of their societies, so to me it’s irrational in the sense that they are working against their best interests. Russia could right now be a major economic and technologically advanced society had they chosen to embrace a more peaceful path; they clearly have the human and intellectual capital for that, but they threw that all away. Their economy is now all about the war and it will take them decades if not generations to undo the damage done.
China rose to where it is today thanks to globalization and modernity; they owe it all to modernity, globalization, and trade. They are now starting to see the results of a crumbling world order where countries are starting to embrace protectionism and now they are in a precipitous decline without the old world order giving them the avenue to continue enriching themselves. Xi Jinping truly screwed them by starting to make a fuzz with Chinese nationalism and aggressive behavior.
“What is dying right now, and I really hope it does, is that all people are the same deep down. And it just isn’t true. This whole “deep down inside everybody wants peace and loves their family” is an illusion. Human rationality is different. Human subjectivity is different. We keep projecting ourselves onto others, and it just doesn’t work.”
For sure. Multiculturalism as espoused by the West has truly been an abject failure. My biggest shock is how long it too them to figure it out; this was plain obvious to me 10 years ago.
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Nobody who knows anything about markets ever accused them of being rational. Keynes famously referred to markets as being driven by animal spirits. One of the main goals of socialism was to impose rationalism on the markets and end the boom bust cycle cycle such as the crash of ’29. ’08 was hardly the first market crash.
Socialism was obviously a total failure, although maybe countries like Spain would be more willing to accept capitalism if somebody told them that the symbol of Wall Street is the bull.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull
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OT (sort of): Interesting analysis of why this election seems…. not like a US election.
tldr: Regression to the mean; The last 80 years in the US were exceptional and that’s over. Elections are no longer about any pretense of national unity but about bribing members of a coalition to get 51% of the vote, like most of the rest of the world (and the US before WWII).
https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/a-very-lindy-election
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Somewhat related to what you’re saying, it’s wild to me how totally meaningless my vote is where I live. It feels like only a few people in the swing states really count, everything else is pretty much per-ordained.
This is why I keep saying we need more than two parties. This stuff should not be this close and down to so few people.
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Yes, we keep arguing over how I should vote, and it’s fun but I’m in Illinois. It’s completely unimportant how I vote in reality.
We have a proposal on the ballot to seek independence from the Cook County, and I’m voting yes, but I’m not hopeful.
Cook County and counties downstate are really very different.
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“Yes, we keep arguing over how I should vote, and it’s fun but I’m in Illinois. It’s completely unimportant how I vote in reality.”
I’m voting third party. It’s a bit of a protest vote, but also if enough people start voting third party maybe just maybe something will change.
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“Free markets love democracy”
I thought the idea was that free markets _cause_ democracy…. which is even dumber when you write it down in black and white but fervently believed by almost the entire US political establishment….
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Yes, they love it and then somehow cause it. Which is insane given that the very first neoliberal experiments were conducted in Pinochet’s Chile. And were very successful.
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Something you wrote in your previous post (“Where are the thinkers?”) struck a chord with me: A country with the best higher education on the planet, the best scholarship, the best conditions in human history to produce ideas, to think, contemplate and create. A country that has the most solid, advanced thinking than any other in every area of human endeavor.
While this is indubitable, ideas do not occur in a vacuum. It seems to me that such American ideas as policing the world, allaying the fears of the most disparate populations with regard to lifelong enemies, dealing with non-Americans as if they were all potential Americans in sore need of guidance towards the shining city on the hill, all stem – or stemmed – from that do-gooder-cum-bleeding-heart mentality that has for so long characterised America’s liberal elites, whether Democrat or Republican.
Wanting people to be like you, or thinking that people are just like you, and if they are not it is simply because they are not trying hard enough, not because they are historically, socially, radically and constitutionally different from you, is a recipe for disaster in human history. It is a very Romantic notion, and as such, extremely pernicious. America may well be the country where everything is “best” but this, paradoxically, also creates the conditions for people to be weak: “you’ve never had it so good” is not an ideal that inspires grittiness, determination or self-confidence.
I may be wrong here – it’s just a hunch based on my impressions – but it seems to me that while Americans are more religious than most people in the West, they have very little faith. Instead, they let themselves be ruled by good intentions, which, as everybody knows, lead to hell. In The Quiet American, Graham Greene reflects on the disastrous consequences that arise as a result of the protagonist’s well-intentioned but ultimately misguided actions. Perhaps Flannery O’Connor put it best: “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber”.
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A lot of merit to the ideals of neo-liberalism. Minimize Government regulations/bureaucracy – that’s a Trump talking point. Reduce Government Spending and Taxes. Another Trump talking point. Loosen Government Control Over the Economy. Another Trump talking point. Confidence in Free Markets requires the break up of Government established Corporate Monopolies like the Federal Reserve for starters. Minimal State Intervention like the annulment of Roe vs. Wade which returns the issue of abortion to a States Rights issue and not a woman suffrage 19th Amendment issue!
The dark side of Neoliberals: the Democrat embracement of global mingling and open borders! So while it has roots in classical liberalism – think Adam Smith and his book “Wealth of Nations”. Going back to the basics as opposed to FDR’s John Maynard Keynes Centralized Bank Socialism, deficit spending to the tune of 35 trillion dollars!
Neo-liberalism more akin and aligned with the Frankfurt School of economics. Led by folks like Herbert Marcuse. Marxist ideology approved of the rise of the proletariat revolution. But the Frankfurt economics model argues that liberation from the clutches of the abuses of the Industrial revolution requires more than just a workers revolt.
Keynes a British economist. Post the Wilson abandonment of Andrew Jacksons 1825 free banking model America made a strong alliance with the British economic model. Trump by contrast weighs pulling out of NATO and bringing the Boys Home seeing that the USSR collapsed in 1991.
Now must consider the Chicago School lead by Milton Friedman — not big fans of Keynes economics either! Milton hated Keynesian Social Security! Keynes influence reached to Johnson’s Great Society. Nixon replace Johnson but exploded a $11.6 billion deficit based upon the British socialist Keynes ideas. Nixon switched the commodity based US dollar to the petro-dollar monopoly which just recently collapsed under Biden. Welcome the rise of the BRINCS counter currency to the dominance of the US dollar!
The Camel Toe Ho praises Nixon’s Keyns Wage and Price Controls! It failed miserably to tame the inflation monster which plagued Nixon’s misrule of American governance.
[[[2. Russia is worried about its security and needs to be constantly reassured that it’s safe. For this purpose, its neighbors should be disarmed and what Russia says about its true goals and intentions should be ignored. It has free markets after all, so this means it is a democratic country because see above.]]] Excuse me, Russia twice invaded through the plains of the Ukraine by Napoleon and Hitler. The Great Patriotic War witness a blood bath of some 27 million Soviet citizens, about half of the total 55 million victims of WWII.
Solving problems by throwing money at it … Hmmm reminds me of Chamberlains appeasement two-State solution Peace in our Time bull shit destruction of the Czech Republic in 1938!
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