Monday, December 12, 2016

Graham E. Fuller — The Never-Ending Extravaganza

… it is no wonder that the US, for all its massive military power and huge economy, is increasingly becoming an outlier on the international scene. Foreign statesmen both good and bad simply shake their heads in incredulous dismay at the decline of US rationality, prestige and steadiness. But who can avert one’s eyes from a train wreck?
Yet this isn’t new. It’s not as if the US has suddenly turned a corner with this election. US foreign policy has grown ever more isolated from the world and from reality since at least 9/11. Life in this world of denial may even date from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. That was when the US received what must now be seen as palpably a curse—the transient domination of the entire global scene, when we trumpeted ourselves as the “sole global superpower.” We assumed that such was the new permanent order of the world. We’ve never gotten over it. We’re still trying to maintain that fiction and it’s not working. Trump will find that out painfully soon.

Our domestic political antics exclude us ever further from the ranks of more responsible, sober and clear-sighted states. The rest of the world is simply going to have to go on working around us in damage limitation mode as it has been doing since 9/11. Are we capable of limiting the long-standing damage to ourselves at home? The necessary very heavy lifting seems now almost a bridge too far.
"Train wreck." "Dumpster fire." Or "the indispensable nation"?

Graham E. Fuller
The Never-Ending Extravaganza
Graham E. Fuller, former senior CIA official

14 comments:

Ryan Harris said...

"US foreign policy has grown ever more isolated from the world and from reality"

These guys seem to have believed the US was a hegemonic superpower.

We lost Vietnam.
We lost Korea.
We lost Afghanistan.
We gave up Iraq.
We bungled cuba.
We royally screwed up in South America.
Central america was a catastrophe.
We couldn't even beat Canada in a war. Canada!!!
Germany is one country we beat but it was run by a lunatic madman and the Russians did all the hard work.


So this narrative that these CIA and G-Men cling to about an enlightened america losing its shine, losing its hegemony and ceding a special place in the world. It's a creepy fantasy that never existed, we were never as great as they imagined. We had our moments in the sun, but they always faded quickly.


MRW said...

One correction: Russia beat Germany. We didn't.

A Serious Case of Mistaken Identity
The U.S. is not the 'indispensable nation,' as a growing WWII mythology would suggest.
June 22, 2000|BENJAMIN SCHWARZ | Benjamin Schwarz is the literary editor of the Atlantic Monthly

http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jun/22/local/me-43656

Calgacus said...

Oye Vey. The WWII Allies, the United Nations beat Germany & Japan etc. People on all sides should be as gracious and reasonable with credit to their erstwhile comrades as Joe Stalin was when he said that because of the importance of industry and technology, "Lend-Lease won the war."

Benjamin Schwarz: Second, stopping the mass murder of the Jews didn't figure in any way in either American war aims or conduct.

Revisionist fabrication. A quite successful modern Big Lie. The USA did about as much as it could, before and during the war against Hitler's crimes, that it along with the other allies denounced during the war and made an official war aim. But the main thing, really the only thing, was winning.

Paul Fussell declares, "in an ideological vacuum." The war was "about your military unit and your loyalty to it.
Not to belittle Fussell as a historian, but several zillion other pieces of evidence declare that almost everybody everywhere thought that the war was about something rather more than loyalty to your unit.

People knew how to behave rather better just after:

John Eisenhower said it best imho at an event in the USSR - to resounding applause and tears then: Something like "We've heard today from a lot of people about how they won the war. But the one who won the war was the ordinary fighting man, many who didn't come back, with his blood.

Marshall Zhukov stage-whispered to his buddy next to him, John's Dad: "We must be getting to be old men, to forget that."

MRW said...

Benjamin Schwarz: Second, stopping the mass murder of the Jews didn't figure in any way in either American war aims or conduct.

Revisionist fabrication. A quite successful modern Big Lie. The USA did about as much as it could, before and during the war against Hitler's crimes, that it along with the other allies denounced during the war and made an official war aim.


Guess you missed: "Keep From All Thoughtful Men" by military historian Jim Lacey.
https://www.amazon.com/Keep-All-Thoughtful-Men-Economists/dp/1591144914

MRW said...

Someone on Warren Mosler's blog highlighted it, or maybe Warren did.

MRW said...

Circa 2012.

lastgreek said...

Oye Vey. The WWII Allies, the United Nations beat Germany ...

Kursk Salient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk

Calgacus said...

Sure, lastgreek, but Stalin himself did not belittle the US contribution to the war effort, and publicly said it was essential. The Soviets would not have won without the US. In particular US trucks let Soviet factories focus on tanks that it used to win tank battles like Kursk. What is there to disagree about?

MRW: I don't see how that book, on the contribution of economists to the war effort disagrees or even has anything to do with what I said. I agree with its main thesis, but it wasn't unknown before. Schwarz's statement is preposterous but echoes a now widespread Revisionist revisionism. I don't have Lacey's book. Does he swallow the crap I was criticizing, which certainly doesn't originate with him?

There was one young US economist whose name escapes me, who some military string-pullers were quite happy to kick upstairs by giving him a commission as a captain, removing him from his civilian job, which was showing up the military production estimates as far too pessimistic. And even his were too low. Which again shows that the US contribution to the joint effort was substantial and essential.

MRW said...

@lastgeek

AMAZING story about the Battle of Kursk. I was riveted.

MRW said...

The US started making planes and and trucks and weapons in 1939 to put Americans back to work. (Paying for the stuff, planes, in gold nearly bankrupted the Bank of England by the end of the war.) There was no intention to enter the war itself. It was an economic decision. Of course, December 1941 changed all that with Pearl Harbor.

Russia got its stuff on a lend-lease agreement.

Lacey (published 2011) discovered misfiled docs in the National Archives in the mid-00s that described in official documents and memos how the economists were able to resist military officers who wanted to go to war with the materiel being produced stateside for other countries. (As a military historian, Lacey's point was in dispelling a military myth that it was great military strategy that won the war.) The economists insisted that US servicemen would not be amply supplied. It wasn't until the D-Day campaign was planned that they gave their approval. That was June 1944, nine months before the war ended in the spring of '45. By that time Khukov has liberated Auschwitz, taken Berlin, and Hitler was dead.

MRW said...

Our greatest war efforts before D-Day were in the Pacific.

MRW said...

We spent the majority of the war as an arms and armament supplier for European allies until the invasion of Italy in Sept 43 and the big push on D-Day.

Matt Franko said...

Don't forget strategic bombing....

Calgacus said...

Sure, MRW, but again, the relevance of this to what I said against Schwarz is not great.

The US had started a draft more than a year before Pearl Harbor & FDR, clearly opposed to them though the USA was officially neutral, took things to the edge with both Germany & Japan. The prewar armament wasn't mainly for economic purposes, it could hardly have been sold as such. I'm saying the USA & FDR overall did as much as anyone could reasonably expect - in fact more. The writers (mythologists?) who Schwarz is clearly citing and I am mocking have 2 basic complaints: (1) FDR didn't use his crystal ball, and once it was unnecessary, (2) He didn't use his magic wand.

Europe First is worth looking at, it was the declared policy, though as you say, the factual story was more complicated. It would be better if it distinguished or carefully covered both human & material resources, as the story was quite different, Europe first true about the second, not the first with respect to the USA.