Miles to Go, No Matter the Result

A U.S. diplomat based in Constantinople once wrote of a visit made to the embassy there in 1906 by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, according to the diplomat, appeared unacquainted with the region and upon learning the next leg of his journey was to the Balkans, replied, “What are the Balkans?”

We are a long way from that now. Yet from the vantage point of 2024, Bryan’s innocence seems both quaint and preferable to what we have now—especially after four years of the worst kind of activist American foreign policy under Joe Biden. Today, the U.S. is saddled with a foreign policy establishment imbued with a kind missionary zeal to spread the most current iteration of what passes for American “values” all over the world. And when it isn’t busy doing that it is killing people. Lots of people. What allows for such a state of affairs to continue?

The answer lies in the nature of the foreign policy establishment.  As the English journalist Henry Fairlie noted some 70 years ago, the establishment,

is not those people who hold and exercise power as such. It is the people who create and sustain the climate of assumption and opinion within which power is exercised by those who do hold it by election or appointment.

As we approach next Tuesday’s election, it is worth recalling the words of the great revisionist historian William Appleman Williams on the matter. Williams warned against confusing the establishment with the government or state, 

for in doing that we remove ourselves from any consequential part in shaping our way of life. In the first place, we foster an illusion that electing or appointing different people will produce or lead to a change in the outlook of the Weltanschauung. But we are in reality changing the wrong people.

The only prediction that can be made with any certainty with regard to next Tuesday is that the foreign policy establishment will escape unscathed. 

Within the establishment, a Harris victory will a be treated as a vindication of the Biden administration’s policies of genocide facilitation in the Levant, proxy war in Europe, and a new Cold War in Asia. A Harris victory means continuity, not change. Her camp is making no secret of this. 

If Trump becomes the first chief executive since Grover Cleveland to win non-consecutive terms, the policies may be similar, despite the hand-wringing coming out of the usual quarters. After all, only last week Trump told Hugh Hewitt that neocons like Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo are on his short list for secretary of defense. Those looking for new thinking and new ways of doing things should prepare to be disappointed. 

The problem, then, goes well beyond the strengths and weaknesses of one or another presidential candidate. The problem is the foreign policy establishment itself, which serves a single overarching purpose: to patrol the parameters of the acceptable and the sayable in order to prevent the country at large from understanding what is being done in its name. In other words, the US foreign policy establishment has been, and remains, at the forefront of a decades-long exercise in obfuscation. 

As such, the establishment is implacably hostile to truth. 

There are things that must not be said, things that must not be acknowledged. For example, we must not acknowledge that our interventions in the Middle East over the past quarter century have resulted in deaths of almost a million people. It must not be said that the current president and his aides, including his secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor, have facilitated the murder of tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of civilians in order to prolong an illegal and brutal military occupation by one of our “allies.” (It must also never be said that no treaty of alliance exists between us and our revered “ally.”) It must not be said that our newest and closest “allies” in Eastern Europe are the proud heirs of World War II ethno-nationalists who were among Third Reich’s most enthusiastic accomplices, and who, as recently as 2014, carried out a pogrom in which they burned alive their political opponents. Nor dare we mention that the leader of this new ally—feted and celebrated as the reincarnation of Churchill—has shut down no fewer than 11 political parties as well as numerous opposition media outlets. Such inconveniences are written out of the story in order to make it appear that we (and our sainted “allies”) are always and everywhere on the side of the angels.

One would like to think that such a situation is not tenable over the long term. I suspect the opposite is the case.  And part of the reason the foreign policy establishment is as unassailable as it is that militarism has inculcated itself within American life—in our churches, in the entertainment industry, in professional sports—to such an extent that no one blinks an eye when, for instance, an unmanned American drone blows away a wedding party. Such things are relegated to the anodyne category of  “accidents” or “mistakes in war.” Better to turn the page and move on.

Worryingly, the timid and thoroughly insular club of realists, restrainers, and anti-interventionists here in Washington seems to want nothing more than to be co-opted by the foreign policy establishment. Prioritizing conformity over principle, the same faces and names peddle the same ideas over and over again. It is becoming a world in which those who parrot the establishment's talking points get rewarded, while those who do not, like the scholar and The American Conservative’s contributing editor Ted Galen Carpenter, are marginalized. Those who hold the purse strings and dole out the jobs and fellowships in this world seem to neither realize nor care they are creating the same perverse incentive structure that obtains in the rest of Washington. 

That said, it is the current establishment that lies at the root of the rot. And the coming years will neither see its ouster nor its exile. Instead, there is every indication that it will become even more firmly entrenched, no matter the outcome on Tuesday.