Preemption, What’s Not to Like?
Americans love preemption, ever since they learned that it meant they could nuke the Russians first. (The notion that the wily Russkies might pre-empt their preemption didn’t seem to occur to them, except for a few thinkers like the Rand Corporation’s “futurist,” Herman Kahn, who elaborated a 44-step “Escalation Ladder” in the fifties. He later formed his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, and grew immensely fat and died in 1983 at the age of 61. The New Yorker referred to him as the “heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals.” Kahn’s theories formed the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical film, Dr. Strangelove—How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bomb, as well as contributing to the development of the Pentagon’s nuclear playbook. For some inexplicable reason, they haven’t gotten round to nuking Russia yet, but in their view it’s never too late.
The possibility of preemption permits us to look into potential future developments with an eye to heading them off at the pass. But its applications need not be limited to war. We can apply this long-term forethought in other fields. This exercise requires thought and imagination. You get to think the unthinkable at a bargain price. Let’s look a half a century into the hypothetical future and examine the possible demise of the United States. Now you see it, now you don’t. What happened? Towards the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, the US was obliterated by an unexpected Russian counter attack to an ill-planned and executed American preemptive sneak attack. When Uncle Sam launched his nuclear barrage against Russia, he did not count on the Russians’ formidable response potential. Its effectiveness was due to the Americans’ laxity while they celebrated their victory after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But the Russians hadn’t spent those four decades celebrating. They spent them working. The forty-year lapse gave them time to develop the world’s most advanced anti-aircraft systems, coupled with the fastest and most maneuverable offensive missiles.
They called them “hypersonic,” as the flew at five to twenty times the speed of sound. So when Sam launched his last-ditch preemptive attack, Russian satellite surveillance detected it immediately and launched their hypersonic response. It wasn’t perfect, but it did manage to save two thirds of the Russian population and industrial capacity. In the exchange, the over-optimistic Americans lost 92% of their population, including 99% of that of Washington, DC, along with a similar chunk of their industrial and scientific potential.
Any trace of truth, decency or human values had by then been lost. In 2023, with its civil society in tatters, the US spent more than $100 billion—that’s 100,000,000,000 dollars—mounting and maintaining a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and they even managed to weave NATO into the warp. That not only made the operation more economical for them, but it gave the whole operation an air of universality. They dragged out the old familiar battle cry, “It’s us against the Russian communists…” In fact, it wasn’t them. It was the Ukrainian army, backed up—if you want to call it that—by NATO contingencies lurking safely behind their own borders and supplying tons and tons of materiel of more or less doubtful vintage and utility. This years-long operation was conceived by Uncle Sam in order to defeat and humiliate—this above all—the Russians, and to divide that fabulously-rich country into more manageable bites. The necessity of that scenario goes again back to the US legacy of mind control. Not even the oldest American politicians can remember a time when Russia and the Russians weren’t demonized by default. Not even the critical role of the Soviets in winning the Second World War would gain them any respect on the other side of the Atlantic. In America’s living memory—twisted and doctored as it is—have the Russians ever been anything but anathema in a world clamoring for American-style, Big-D, democracy and Big-F, freedom, of markets, of course. At least that’s what Sam’s script insists upon. Even to suggest that the script might be the result of more than a century of American geopolitical psychopathology is “fightin’ words.” It’s not that much actual fighting goes on, except for the foreign wars necessary to keep the American arms business churning out mega-death around the world. Arms are their most lucrative enterprise, excepting perhaps that bottomless pork barrel which is the vaccine biz.
The Americans’ terminal flaw didn’t come out of a blue sky. It was the result of a long series of debilitated institutions and failures to react to potentially-dangerous realities. Once again Uncle Sam underestimated his adversaries—much as he had done in Vietnam—this time with dramatic results. It was the industrialists, themselves, who brought on the American manufacturing hecatomb, by exporting their factories to China and other cheap-labor countries, mainly in the Far East, in order to cut their costs and augment their profit margins. That looked like success to them. But the Asian honeymoon didn’t last long. The capitalists soon found themselves bereft of stateside manufacturing facilities when they—and the country—needed them. If that didn’t make for problems enough, Sam soon found himself at China’s door, begging to purchase the rare-earth minerals that were essential for his critical industries. China agreed to study his case. The Biden administration sent along Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to negotiate, hoping the Chinese president Xi Jinping wouldn’t remember that Mr. Blinken’s previous performance in China consisted mainly of the US’s standard repertoire of insults and threats. In a gesture that admits of no explanation, President Biden, the very day after Blinken’s reasonably successful second meeting with Xi Jinping, referred to the Chinese premier as a “dictator.” Has President Xi ever experienced such barnyard diplomacy? Has anybody?
It is not only Uncle Sam’s industry and diplomacy that is failing him. It’s also his highly-vaunted military. When was the last time they won a significant war? And we can’t accept their October 25, 1983 intervention on the Caribbean island of Grenada, “Operation Urgent Fury,” allegedly to foil a Soviet-Cuban military buildup in the Caribbean. This objection was based on the 9,000-foot (2,700 m) runway which could accommodate the largest Soviet military aircraft. It could also activate a tourist industry on that poor little island with 55 beaches, but never mind. A second factor alleged by the Americans was to protect the 800 American medical students studying at the St. George’s University Medical School there.
That invasion pitted some 7,600 Americans and their carrot-and-stick Caribbean allies against 1,500 Grenadian soldiers, along with some 700 Cuban construction workers who were building the new Canadian-designed Point Salines International Airport. Together, they faced off against the cream of Uncle Sam’s response forces: the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and Delta Force, the U.S. Marines, the Navy SEALs, and ancillary forces. It took this illustrious assembly of US crack troops four days to neutralize the Grenadians and the Cuban hard hats.
In retrospect, the Grenada operation is seen as President Ronald Reagan’s game. With his approval ratings around 35% in early 1985, in the wake, just two days previously, of the bomb attacks on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, Reagan saw Grenada as an opportunity to recoup some credibility, and he exploited it ruthlessly.
The truth is that the role of the US Navy in the battle was one snafu after another, with an unhappy ending. Elements of their top-rated Seal Team 6 were dropped into the sea to reconnoiter the area of Point Salines. The balance of that operation was four SEALs lost at sea and presumed dead. The survivors continued, but their boats filled with water, causing them to abort the mission. A second attempt, on October 24 was also abandoned, due to rough water.
President Ronald Reagan managed to project, nevertheless, a stalwart facade. Reviewing the events in a speech from the White House Oval Office on October 27, 1983 he gloated:
“I can’t say enough in praise of our military — Army rangers and paratroopers, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel — those who planned a brilliant campaign and those who carried it out. Almost instantly, our military seized the two airports, secured the campus where most of our students were, and are now in the mopping-up phase.”
This crowing over a pointless preemptive strike—no American medical students felt threatened at any time—is the rough equivalent of praising the New York Yankees for fighting hard to beat a little league baseball team.
The United Nations General Assembly condemned the American invasion of Grenada as “a flagrant violation of international law” on 2 November 1983, a scarce week after the events, by a vote of 108 to nine.
All of which brings us to an interesting new approach to study of American decline, the “Autopsy” model of analysis, referred to by Vivienne Luk in her book, available from the Open Library, Language of Forensics: Forensic Pathology:
“Often a postmortem examination is conducted to determine the cause, mechanism, and manner of death. Conducted by dissecting the body in a meticulous manner whilst collecting and documenting evidence.”
This looks like an apt model for examining the cause of death of the United States, the dating of—mainly-self-inflicted, have they never heard of hubris? —injuries, the evidence of degree of decomposition via autolysis and putrefaction. That is the full breakdown of the cellular and tissue material of the body parts past the “degree of mortis,” used to determine the time of death. This analysis of the American downfall following this autopsy model must, of course, be hypothetical, but I think a case can be made, based on recent historical and current forensic evidence.
The whole list of American givens responsible for that great country’s downfall can be submitted to the same rigorous—and rigor mortis—analysis. I won’t elaborate on them much here, for fear of being guilty of ranting, but I will list them. They all vary so radically from the philosophical underpinnings of most modern democracies around the world, democracies which are still functioning correctly. Let’s name and number Uncle Sam’s flawed basic principles:
- Rugged individualism. To affirm that a great country can be lifted up by individuals acting individually denotes serious mental illness. Now multiply that by 200 years.
- American exceptionalism. This is, perhaps, the most potent—and most laughable—plank in the American socio-political-fantasy structure. I won’t dwell on it. It speaks for itself.
- Militarism/Imperialism. This is the institutionalized conviction that the United States can and should impose its will on the world by military means. That plan actually worked for them after their success in World War II, despite the fact that most of the heavy lifting in that war was left to the Soviet Russian allies. Ironically, it was humiliating military defeat inflicted on the all-powerful Yankees by a tiny southeast Asian country that debunked that high-flying, if specious, theory once and for all.
- Racism. From the cotton fields to the prisons, very little has changed in the lives of the United States’ colored minorities. The malaise shows signs of being so deeply ingrained in American society as to be incurable. Abundant evidence is there for all who have eyes to see.
- Rejection of collective solutions as “communistic.” The last gasp of collectivism in the US was the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency, based on emergency collective solutions, which was spectacularly successfully. Then came President Harry Truman and a long line of know-nothing or remote-control presidents.
Sitting here alone in this stone goat shed, I sometimes wonder if I have gone over the top. Luckily, there are occasional motives for optimism. I sometimes run across an honest person with a clear view of his or her American surroundings. The most recent was thanks to Chris Hedges, one of my most admired journalists, on his YouTube program, The Chris Hedges Report, via the Real News Network. Hedges interviewed Andrew Bacevich, who has an interesting trajectory. After graduating from the US Military Academy at West Point, he did a couple of decades in the army, retired with the rank of colonel and started a new life as a student and academic. Today, having spent the first 20 years of his working life on the inside of the beast, and the rest as a university professor and peace activist, he is today Emeritus Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University, as well as co-founder and director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of numerous books, including “The New American Militarism,” “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” “America’s War for the Greater Middle East,” and “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.”His most recent book is “On Shedding an Obsolete Past, Bidding Farewell to the American Century.”
This is the kind of clear thinking and straight talking that defines a minority of Americans. Bacevich says to Chris Berkik in a profile in the spring 2007 edition of Bostonia:
“I have come to believe,” he says, “that perhaps the greatest failing to which American political leaders are prone, and perhaps to which we as a people are prone, is an inability to see ourselves as we really are.”
You’re too kind, Bacevich, but your country needs more people just like you.
Trump and All the Rest 