Boreas Rising:
White Nationalism & the Geopolitics of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis, Part 2

3,261 words

Part 2 of 3

A Defensive Alignment

The Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis arose in reaction to the Second American War on Iraq. It needs thus to be understood in the context of that war, which the Bush administration treated as the second phase of its war on terror, the first being the invasion of Afghanistan and the assault on the Taliban regime harboring bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida (both of which, incidentally, were, via the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, made in the USA).[1] However much it resembled the Anglo-Afghan and Russo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century, the American assault on Afghanistan did not provoke the kind of opposition that Iraq would, for there was still enormous sympathy for the US after “9/11.” “Victory,” moreover, came quickly, as it had for all former conquerors. The Taliban were chased from Kabul and the warring tribes associated with the US-supported Northern Alliance, which did most of the fighting on the ground, soon gained control of the countryside. While Afghanistan has since reverted to a pre-state form of regional, tribal rule (ideal for narco-terrorists) and most al-Qa’ida fighters succeeded in dispersing, the Bush administration was nevertheless able to broadcast publicly satisfying TV images of swift, forceful action.[2]

Buoyed up by the nearly effortless rout of the medieval Taliban, Bush adopted the policies recommended by his neoconservative advisers,[3] whose neo-Jacobin assertion of American power not only has nothing to do with fighting Islamic terrorism, but cloaks a Judeo-liberal vision of global domination which threatens to turn the entire Middle East into something akin to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Key to their vision is Iraq, whose threat to Israel has been repackaged by such Jewish propaganda mills as the Project for the New American Century as a threat to US security. Besides promoting a peculiar blend of liberal statist and Zionist strategic concerns that represents a turn (not a break) in US foreign policy, the Krauthammers, Wolfowitzes, and other sickly neocon types advising the administration seek to “Sharonize” Washington’s strategic culture. To this end, military force is designated the option of choice, and a moralistic Manichaeanism which pits the US and Israel against the world’s alleged evils is used to legitimate the most dishonorable policies.[4] As the former wastrel of the Bush dynasty signed on to this Likud-inspired agenda, he began making a case for extending his antiterror crusade to Mesopotamia. Iraq’s “Hitler-like tyrant,” he claimed, had links with al-Qa’ida and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capable of reaching the United States.

While America’s TV-besotted masses had little difficulty swallowing his unsubstantiated argument, the rest of the world balked.[5] At this point in early 2002, the two shores of the Atlantic began pulling apart. German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was the first major European figure to oppose Bush’s war plans. He was soon joined by French president Jacques Chirac. In July 2002 they issued a joint declaration formally rejecting the US proposal, stating that the UN’s embargo and its inspectors were doing their job and that the proposed attack would only distract from the “real war on terror.” By September, Russia (whose economic situation required the good graces of Washington) hinted that it too would veto a UN resolution sanctioning war. Then, on February 10, 2003, Putin joined Chirac and Schröder in issuing a declaration condemning what one senior US intelligence officer later called “an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat.”[6]

The Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis thus originated as a temporary coalition organized around a single point of agreement. Convinced that Bush had failed to make his case for war, the French, Germans, and Russians thought the evidence for al-Qa’ida links and WMD was unconvincing (we know now, by the government’s own admissions, that it was a tissue of lies, distortions, and manipulations).[7] Their coalition was nevertheless more than a response to a momentary disturbance in the world system. As one high-level Russian analyst characterized it, the coalition was a “rebellion against a unilateral America unwilling to accommodate European interests.”[8] As such, it announced a possible geopolitical power shift from the Atlantic to Eurasia.

Globalism at Gunpoint

Since the Cold War’s end, international relations have undergone changes as fundamental as those following the world-historical realignment of 1945.[9] The neoconservatives influencing Bush, in their preemptive crusade for what is tendentiously labeled “global democracy,” have been anxious to take advantage of these “shifting tectonic plates in international politics . . . before they harden again.”[10] As Robert Kagan and William Kristol, two of the chief neocon publicists, argue: There is a danger today that an unassertive US will lose control of the world order it created in 1945. Beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union, when the field was cleared of possible rivals, they believe the US should have consolidated its “benevolent hegemony,” turning the unipolar moment into the unipolar era. Instead, George I and Clinton allegedly failed to exploit the moment, further ensnaring the US in multilateral relations that compromised its power and interests.[11]

Against this trend, the Bush administration has carried out what some characterize as a “revolution in foreign policy.” Without abandoning Washington’s objective of developing a global market system based on American-style liberal-democratic principles, it now employs hegemonist methods, codified in the new Bush Doctrine, that change the way the US asserts its power abroad.[12] In this vein, the administration dismisses international laws and institutions, as it asseverates America’s unilateral right to alter the world system however it wishes, including attacking and overthrowing states deemed a threat to its security. Traditional strategies of deterrence and containment have consequently been supplanted by a proactive policy of prevention and preemption, just as ad hoc coalitions are given precedence over established alliances and collective security arrangements, regime change over negotiations with “failed” states, and ideological goals over previous notions of the national interest.[13]

The entire tenor of American power has thus altered, but against those who claim Bush has abandoned the core assumptions of the liberal internationalist tradition, the conservative Andrew J. Bacevich points out that his foreign policy innovations are largely methodological in character. For the past half century, no matter which party occupied the White House, US policy has pursued a single overarching goal: “global openness”—as in Hay’s “Open Door” imperialism—which promotes the movement of goods, peoples, and fashions into and out of world markets for the sake of US capitalist concerns.[14] Moreover, in assuming responsibility for this integrated international trading system—this “empire”—the US wins the right not only “to sell Big Macs and Disney products round the world,” but to govern the system itself.

While Bacevich’s argument is an excellent foil to those seeking to portray Bush as a revolutionary—somehow different from the Democrats who have manipulated the United States into most of the 20th century wars and played a leading role in semantically transforming “democracy” and “human rights” into the totalitarian double-speak of the NWO—Bacevich nevertheless ignores the different ways in which the two parties implement their liberal internationalist principles. Republicans, especially since Reagan, are inclined to see the growth of US national power as the precondition for sustaining their imperial system, while Democrats look to the universalization and institutionalization of their liberal principles. This disposes Republicans to a unipolar model of liberal internationalism based on military supremacy, unlike Democrats, who favor a world-government model emphasizing the economic facets of globalization and the need for international regulation. (Lately, though, the Democratic world-government types, if such influential liberal internationalists as those associated with Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations and Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution are any guide, seem increasingly disposed to the unipolar model; John Kerry’s neocon cloning of Bush’s foreign policy also suggests a shift toward the Republican vision.) But whether pursued by Republicans or Democrats, this liberal internationalist agenda, with its emphasis on the antitraditional and anti-Aryan forces of free trade, free markets, and open societies, has been a bane to white people everywhere—for it wars against “the fundamental value of blood and race as creators of true civilization.”[15]

In pressing into areas which were off-limits during the Cold War, Washington’s imperial market system has become increasingly aggressive. Under Clinton, the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine of avoiding military engagements unless absolutely necessary was discarded, as the “unipolar moment” ushered in by the Soviet collapse was treated as a blank check for “intervening practically wherever and whenever it chose.” In this spirit, Clinton’s Secretary of State contemplated invading Iraq and disparaged the principle of national sovereignty. Her distinction between war and the use of military force has since reoriented US policy, as military interventions overseas cease being labeled wars and become armed forms of “humanitarianism.”[16] Finally, the Clinton Doctrine of Enlargement, in championing the worldwide spread of US-style democracy and free markets (that is, the globalist assault on national identity and national institutions), privileged unilateralism (rechristened “assertive multilateralism”) over containment and disarmament.[17]

Although he avoided Bush’s swaggering brand of leadership, Clinton was only slightly less coercive in promoting the totalitarian ideology of openness.[18] It is hardly irrelevant that Iraq was bombed nearly every day of his administration, that Bosnia was turned into a US military protectorate, and that unilateral military action, in one of the great “war crimes” of the 20th century, was taken against Serbia. Though smaller in scale than Operation Iraqi Freedom, the terrorist air assault on this proud little country (whose historical role was the defense of the white borderlands) aimed at “spreading democracy” for the sake of openness. Symptomatic of the “openness” Washington favors, the Albanian Liberation Front (UCK), an Islamic, drug-smuggling, terrorist mafia with links to al-Qa’ida, was armed and trained by Clinton’s government and a quarter million Christian Serbs, whose nationalist aspirations represented an affront to the New World Order, were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo.[19] These interventions by the Clintonistas also played a leading role in destabilizing the international state system, giving rise to new stateless groups whose megaterrorism is historically unprecedented. The horror of 9/11 and the unfathomable massacre of Russian children at Beslan, not to mention numerous lesser affronts to our humanity, have roots in Clinton’s Yugoslavian intervention. Bush has simply accelerated this process, which is nourishing new, more nihilistic forms of terrorism.[20]

Although he came into office complaining of Clinton’s immodest foreign policy, Bush II has actually gone further, introducing methods which removed the existing restraints on Washington’s use of military force and whatever reservation it might have in violating national sovereignty.[21] Like Clinton, he is a man beholden to alien and dishonorable interests, and inspired by a juvenile notion of power. His “faith-based foreign policy,” like the alley-cat policies of his predecessor, privileges the liberalization of global trade relations, imposes the cosmopolitan imperatives of his corporate supporters on virtually every issue pertinent to the nation’s biocultural welfare, rejects the American tradition of “isolationism,” and runs roughshod over whoever resists an order hostile to ethnocultural particularisms (unless they take innocuous folkloric forms). He might differ with Clinton in favoring a missile defense system, a different approach to China, and a Likudnik rather than a Laborite Zionism, but he is no less committed to a global system of market democracies “open to trade and investment, and policed by the United States.” As one Marxist puts it: “Playboy Clinton, Cowboy Bush, same policy.”[22] With his “Judeo-Protestant” rhetoric of American exceptionalism and his willingness to remove the velvet glove from America’s mailed fist, Bush’s “jackbooted Wilsonianism” differs from that of his predecessor mainly in linking economic globalization to “military modernization.”

As the neoconservatives Thomas Barnett and Henry Gaffney argue, the Bush Doctrine ought to be viewed as a necessary complement to the globalizing process. They claim that before 9/11 globalization (which much of the world identifies with Americanization) was mainly economic, thought best left to business. The collapse of the Twin Towers has since (allegedly) triggered a more serious reflection on America’s role as globalism’s “system administrator.” In their view, bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and all the “rogue states”—Bush’s “axis of evil”—act as “dangerous disconnects” from a world based on interdependence and a single framework of economic governance. (Although they refrain from taking their argument to its logical conclusion, globalization here is inadvertently revealed as the harbinger of global terror.)[23] Faced with these threats to its one-world system, the market not only needs to be policed, the US has a responsibility to maintain its harmonious functioning. Bush’s unilateralist use of force, in applying military power whenever violent “disconnects” interrupt the international flow of labor, raw materials, and energy, Barnett and Gaffney argue, aims at ensuring the security and operability of the globalizing process.[24] But what they do not mention is that once economic globalization is joined with “military globalization,” the globalizing process is not so much ensured as altered, becoming less a neutral extension of economic trends (not that it ever was simply that) and more a classic expression of imperial power. In Iraq, for instance, the American army had no sooner occupied Baghdad than its neoconservative viceroy, Paul Bremer, began to dismantle the Iraqi state, privatize the economy, open the borders to unrestricted imports (unless they came from France or Germany), and, within two weeks of his arrival, had declared that Iraq was “now open for business.”[25]

September 11, then, did not change the long-range goal of US foreign policy (global openness), only the way in which it was pursued. The restraints on military force, already compromised under Clinton, were formally thrown off and a proactive doctrine of preemption superseded the more reactive methods of containment and disarmament. At the same time, Clinton’s human rights rhetoric and “humanitarian” militarism were jettisoned for the bellicose language of “strategic vital interests” and “imperial responsibilities.” It would be misleading, however, to think the transatlantic rift was due solely to Bush’s militaristic assertion of US global interests. Long before 9/11, real policy differences had begun to emerge: over trade; agriculture; armament exports; relations with Cuba, Iran, and Korea; the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; the Echelon economic espionage system monitoring European faxes, e-mails, and phone calls; the Kyoto Protocol; globalization; the abrogation of the ABM treaty; the euro and the dollar, etc. All these differences, in one way or another, reflected Europe’s unwillingness to remain a pawn on Washington’s global chessboard.[26] In the year leading up to Iraq, as Europe sought to check Bush’s unilateralist moves, the transatlantic relationship went into crisis, forcing France and Germany to assert their autonomy sooner than they might otherwise have intended.[27]