Before We Go Over the Edge
A Neutralist Manifesto
The following post is long, 11 pages, but lays out the post-war history of where we were and now, where we are going. We are in a place we were before, Cuban Missile crisis, Berlin Stand-off, where the nation took seriously the threat of nuclear war.
Today, we seem to be cavalier about it all.
Anyway:
The Manifesto
Knowing when to stop is what it means to grow up. On a personal level, not learning that lesson means one is ever an adolescent. If those in charge of the nation’s foreign policy do not grow up, it can be fatal in a world of "Weapons of Mass Destruction."
Alas, I fear the people who are most involved in our nation’s involvement are forever children, whether part of the media, think takers or those at State.
the American nation must move away from its involvement in managing the world and pursue a neutral foreign policy. The alternative is to face ruin as we spend into oblivion, court nuclear disaster or worse.
In great power rivalry, we shall sooner or later go too far.
Our country has lost its way in the great world and needs to, as George McGovern said, "come home" and adopt a neutralist foreign policy with a Swiss style neutralist ethos.
Whether or not the words "everything eventually reduces to its absurd" are a law of nature is not for me to say. Nevertheless, the foreign policy of the United States has long entered that realm.
It has been a long slide, but appears inevitable. Though one could make the case that it started a long time ago, post-World War II is illustrative enough.
At the end of that war, our country appeared a colossus astride the globe with only the Soviet Bloc apart. The nation, wisely or luckily, entered that war after almost all the other militaries were much used up and thus, we began in better shape and finished that way as well. At the end we possessed the only "weapons of mass destruction," and had tied up the money system the way we wanted it at the Bretton Woods Conference.
It looked to be a great second half to the "American Century."
But in less than a half decade our nation was back at war.
The Korean Peninsula was divided after World War II with a communist north and an American occupied south. In 1950, the North invaded the South and nearly got it all. US forces landed behind them and then moved north towards the Yalu River.
Then a Chinese Communist army moved south and pushed American and other forces from the United Nations back and retook Seoul, the South Korean capital. The UN forces would fight to get it back and keep it.
The brutal war would continue until 1953 with the peninsula divided by a demilitarized zone. We have troops there still. Some see it as a success, but that we are, to be honest, stuck there hardly means that.
The 1950s would see us continue our cold war with the Communist bloc. The next decade brought more confrontation and danger.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
In the late 1950s a revolutionary movement took power in Cuba. Cuba was a playground for American organized crime under a corrupt dictator, but in no way bugged the U.S. establishment.
That changed when Fidel Castro took power.
The Castro regime nationalized American businesses stoking the ire of the Eisenhower administration. The Cubans would seek relations with the Soviet Union and they would ally commercially and militarily. This would continue into the 1960s when John F. Kennedy became president.
During his administration, the CIA would attempt a coup. In 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion would go forward and result in a debacle.
In 1962 nuclear missiles were detected and the Cuban missle crisis was on.
U.S. superiority in missiles would be altered with Soviet Missiles in Cuba. JFK decided on a naval blockade and demanded missiles be removed.
In the end a compromise would be arranged: Khrushchev offered to remove the missiles if we would remove ours from Turkey.
Kennedy looked a bit of a winner as he did not make public what we gave up.
A hotline came out of it, all to the good, though some might be surprised if Biden calls Vlad to calm the waters.
We have been annoyed by Cuba since, but we have lived with each other and Fidel would die in bed decades later.
We are still sanctioning Cubans and the government. It seems kind of small.
The Berlin Crisis of 1961
The East Germans built a wall to separate East and West Berlin, as people were decamping west, we confronted each other with loaded weapons. Fortunately, it kind of blew over.
The Vietnam War
The Korean war was horribly bloody with over 36,000 US deaths and many more other casualties, not to mention the millions of Koreans.
We were going to do it again in Southeast Asia. It was again framed as a battle of good versus evil, but then, are not most wars?
That conflict ended with over 58,000 dead and many more casualties, and, as one might expect, a larger fatality bill for the Vietnamese.
It lasted longer than Korea, one American officer called it "Our ten-year field training exercise."
Did anything "good" come out of it?
Yes.
We got to leave and forget about the place. If the North had agreed to a Korea style ceasefire, we would still have troops and planes and PXs and condom-dispensing machines all over South Vietnam. There would be brass on the border taking meetings ad infinitum with the North’s officers. We would be forever rebuilding the south. Swiss banks would be awash in skimmed cash from all the associated boondoggles.
That did not happen. We actually got to leave and forget about it.
It was almost as if we left no forwarding address and they changed their phone number.
The Vietnam War led to a change in the structure of U.S. military. In major wars from the Civil War, World Wars I and II through Korea, we had used conscription. As Vietnam went on, we stopped the draft. From then on, we would rely on enlistees to fill the ranks. Now, such soldiers are or had been for the most part patriotic, but still, they are a mercenary force. How will that play out?
Post-Vietnam things seemed quieter geopolitically. On the other side of the world, however, events would change in the late 1970s.
The Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan in support of a local communist regime. We would get involved, not with troops, but with military support.
In the land known as the graveyard of empires, the resistance being supplied with stingers and other ordnance, outlasted the Soviets who would leave in about ten years.
After that, the Soviet Union would go and the Iron Curtain would be gone. Maybe at that point it was time for us to come home?
Not a chance.
How naive such a sentiment would have been. All those bureaucrats out of work, Pentagon planners with nothing to plan, a president who couldn’t refer to himself as “Leader of the Free World” (granted it does not have the ring of a Dux et Imperator, but we still pretend to be a republic; it will take a while until even Princeps appears). So, we still had our Cold War commitment, without a cold war. No problem, we would eventually give ourselves one.
We would help the Europeans break up Yugoslavia and that might have led to a flareup with Russia except that a Brit general refused to start what could have gotten out of hand.
In 1990, we would go to war with a former ally, Iraq, because of their invasion of Kuwait. You might ask, "who cares." No matter who holds that stronghold of democracy, they would have to sell the oil. Well, Margaret Thatcher cared. She famously said, "look George, this is no time to go wobbly."
So once again, Uncle Sam got to come to someone else's rescue.
As the nation was not completely on board, a secret weapon had to be used…a lie.
An engaging young lady would testify in front of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that babies were taken out of incubators by Iraqi troops and left on the floor. It was a big war selling point and it was a fabrication. She was coached by the Public Relations firm Hill and Knowlton, who masterminded the campaign.
The war was short and American troops, having done their job, came home. Not exactly.
Some rotated back, but there was a footprint left in place.
The US kept several thousand troops in Saudi Arabia. As home to the holiest sites of Islam, this was no little red flag to many Muslims.
It was considered a provocation and a cause of the events of 911.
The attack of 911 was a shock to the American people and rage was understandable.
What would be the reaction of the nation and the leaders?
Put aside the ridiculous comments of Bush fils, such as hating us for our freedom, we did have a reason to demand Osama Bin Laden, the man considered the leader of al Qaeda.
Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, an excellent history of the events involved, details what the Taliban tried to do to accommodate our demands.
They wanted to drop Bin Laden as the hot potato he was, but we demanded him just handed over without legal niceties.
Thus, we got into the long, fruitless meander that was twice Vietnam in length and just as futile. Whatever went on, surges, nation building, etc. it was bound to fail for, as in Vietnam, the enemy was never going to give up no matter the body count.
Like Vietnam, the exit strategy worked…ironically.
The withdrawal was a disaster, and one hopes we took a lesson from it, but it does not look so.
Iraq, which we had beaten up before hadn't had enough of a beating, so we were going to do it again and get it right, or not.
The Iraqis had been developing "Weapons of Mass Destruction." There is an official definition of that weapon, but in this case, it meant an excuse to invade a certain country.
There is a well-known word in the English language to describe what was done to sell the war.
The word is, again…lie.
The war, promoted by an unofficial sect known as the Neoconservatives, or Neocons, eventuated. The saturation of Iraq with US forces led some to think the war was over and the president would land on an aircraft carrier sporting the banner, "Mission Accomplished."
It wasn't
What it would be was another meander over a couple of decades and it is not done yet. The Iraqis keep suggesting that we go now, but the US is, as the old SNL skit had it, "The Creature that Wouldn't Leave."
Noises are being heard that we also should stop stealing Syria's oil and leave there as well. Syria does not get as much coverage as other spots.
However, the neocons are hoping to stop a withdrawal because…Iran.
Our history with Iran is, as they say, complicated.
The elected Mossadegh government was overthrown by the CIA assisted coup in 1953. We painted the Shah's government as a lovely progressive polity. Unfortunately, the Persians, or at least enough of them, disagreed and ran him out of town.
The Ayatollah's government took power and we were not friends. Our embassy was seized and staff taken hostage.
Eventually, the hostages went home at the change of US administrations.
Iran and Iraq would go to war and we would ally with the Iraqis. It was payback and since, there has been no love lost.
There was a bit of a cooling off as the Obama administration negotiated a nuclear agreement around 2015, but Trump deep sixed it.
Iran in the world was supporting factions in Iraq and Syria and Hezbollah. They also ally the Houthis in Yemen. These are all allies, hardly proxies. Short of going to war with them, there is little we can do.
And that is what should give us pause. Will we just stay in West Asia trading shots with the Houthis? Will fleet and aircraft stand off and fire ordnance? How long will this go on?
So far, we don't seem to have a desire for an Iranian war. Did it dawn on someone at State or Defense that the inevitable outcome would be us leaving in…can we stretch one of these sojourns out to 30 years? Probably not.
As if there are not enough problems, another one reared its head.
In what is known as the Gaza Strip a military force known as Hamas arose. By discipline and training they were able to mount a brilliant military exercise and burst out of what is their territorial prison on October 7, 2023.
The Israeli forces were caught by surprise and claims were made by Israeli sympathetic media that vile atrocities were perpetrated. Grayzone and other outlets tell a different story.
This warfare is ongoing since early October of 2023 with mass destruction of Gazan infrastructure. The number of Palestinian deaths is such that The International Court of Justice took the case to decide if it was genocide. Whatever the legal decision, it is definitely ongoing mass murder.
How long will this war go on? Good question. Will we get sucked in, or better question, to what extent?
As the war continued, the above-mentioned Houthis pledged support to Hamas and have been attacking shipping such that some maritime companies have announced they are suspending shipping in The Red Sea.
The United States proposed a coalition to counter the Houthis actions. Operation Prosperity Guardian, made up of naval vessels from several countries was set up for that purpose. It has not worked as well as hoped. The Houthis have not been cowed.
So, this was the situation in late January, 2024 when another shock occurred.
On January 28th a drone attack killed three US reservists stationed at Tower 22 in Northeast Jordan with 47 others injured.
Immediately, calls were made by neocons to hit Iran hard. A fly in that ointment was that the Pentagon admitted it had no evidence Iran was behind the attack.
No matter, the president has said we are going to take action. As usual, government has to be seen as doing something, or getting close to doing something, but what could be done that makes sense?
During the Tonkin Gulf incident, President Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam and we know how that ended up.
So, we would have to show "resolve." According to antiwar.com: "Report: US Plans Weeks-Long Bombing Campaign Against Iranian Targets. The White House says the US response to the Jordan drone attack won't be a 'one-off'"
To further quote the article, "While the potential targets are not inside Iran, direct attacks on the Iranian military could provoke a full-blown war between the US and Iran. The US is considering taking this course of action even though the Pentagon admitted it has no evidence Iran was directly involved in the drone attack in Jordan."
If this does not give one confidence in elite sanity, let alone common sense, that would be understandable.
Needless to say, the US would carry out retaliatory strikes after making noises about not desiring a wider war.
How many wars are there?
These events continue to percolate when news came that the Russians are busy in space.
As of Valentine's Day, there was the CNN headline, US has new intelligence on Russian nuclear capabilities in space.Well, we are in a proxy war and the chosen enemy is thinking a few steps ahead. What would one have expected?
We continue to meander. Macron murmurs French troops in the Ukraine. It seems that as that was run up the flagpole, there were few salutes.
The Russians appear to be rolling up the Ukraine and defeat for the Proxy War seems inevitable.
If the Biden administration cannot accept a loss in keeping the Uke war going, and sends troops (NATO/US) on some ops, maybe Les Russes get tired of pantomime war and toss a tactical nuke at some NATO town?
What then?
Who would doubt the possibility of the above scenario?
It is thus reasonable to posit it is an insane world where governments allow themselves to be put in a position where miscalculations can lead to that which is known as MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction when a sane alternative exists?
And it appears President Putin may be tired of the game. M. K. BHADRAKUMAR reports at the Indian Punchline website there is the headline. Putin's nuclear warning is direct and explicit.
According to Mr. Bhadrakumar Putin "is giving advance notice that he is obliged to respond with nuclear capability if the Russian statehood is threatened."
MIA Defense Secretary Austin surfaced to report at a Congressional hearing in Washington that “NATO will be in a fight with Russia.” In light of President Putin's remarks, is that really sane?
As a boy around the time of the Cuban Missle Crisis and the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the fear of nuclear war seemed real. It is not getting the same headlines now, but is the possibility less, or maybe more?
The reason for the Austin saber rattle is the assertion in European and US governmental circles that once the Ukraine is defeated the Russians will be on the move west. That Putin has not asserted that is irrelevant to the belief that he will be on the move in those who cannot accept that the Ukraine adventures was folly.
Is Austin trying to suggest that the day after the Ukrainian forces surrender or are effectively neutralized that the Russian forces will just continue heading west, ergo we have to, you know, fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here?
And here is the crux of the matter. We court nuclear war with Russia over a country that we abetted a coup in and pushed them until a war happened and when the foolishness comes a cropper, we can't stop?
To anyone capable of reason, It is time to admit the 20th Century was a mistake, but the current one could be fatal if we continue the course.
It is time to reclaim our neutrality.
Those who say it is impossible have never given it any thought and called to consider it, usually answer with the epithet "isolationist."
I shall provide an example.
Stephen Bryen writes the Substack, Weapons and Strategy. He is senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute. He is published many places, but I mostly read him at Weapons and Strategy and find his information reliable.
That said, there is one major area of disagreement.
On the last day of February, 2024, Professor Bryen published the following at his Substack: NATO Needs To Pull Its Soldiers From Ukraine with the subtitle Putin Warns about Nuclear Weapons.
His point was well made and included the following:
"At the same time, NATO has energetically been promoting regime change in Moscow. Wired Magazine has now revealed that the US developed special technology to track the cell-phones of Putin's staff and colleagues in order to pinpoint Putin's location. This information would be of minimal value unless its intent was to assassinate Putin. The fact that the US and NATO, with the help of the Ukrainians, was deeply involved in liquidating Russian leaders (as well as military commanders) indicates without any doubt regime change was even more important than battlefield defeat of Russia. Victoria Nuland this week said that Putin's Russia "is not the Russia we wanted.""
If you don't doubt the insanity of my country's nomenklatura you have a problem.
Stephen's article was damning. I agree with him
On that thread, I commented:
"I've wondered about the US desire to assassinate Putin. Your post is evidence of the insane US policy.
I know you don't want to consider a neutral US foreign policy, but your column is evidence it is the only sane idea as we court nuclear war."
Stephen was kind enough to reply:
"You don't need to adopt a "neutral" foreign policy to have a decent foreign policy. We both agree that what is going on now is uber dangerous."
My reply was:
"There is no hope of a sane foreign policy. there is occasionally less stupid maybe due to population reaction or budget problems (early republic, post 1812), but we have usually and stupidly been interventionist."
As Stephen did not reply back to that, I asked for clarification:
"Please define a "decent" foreign policy?"
Stephen's reply:
"think of the opposite"
My reply:
"I assume you mean the opposite of what is being done now. That would be leave Europe and NATO. Leave the Middle East as we have no hope of solving anything there. And leaving Asia to Asia.
Is that not a neutralist foreign policy?"
His final reply:
"I did not mean any of that."
I asked without receiving a reply:
"Please let me know what you mean? Opposite of what?"
Though I could never get within a mile of a State Department press conference, the interaction with Stephen made a point emphatically.
It is the point that the policy is another meander that will stop for nothing.
The further point, unspoken, but inescapable is that if you can't or won't stop, the worst is inevitable.
The "worst" can be defined as a nuclear exchange.
We had a chance and we blew it at the end of the Cold War. Breathes there a secretary of state or foreign minister with soul so dead, that he does not consider himself a foreign policy genius with the ability to invent the next brilliant foreign policy that will save the world.
We need to bring the military home and adopt a neutralist foreign policy, but that is not enough.
A neutralist ethos must be adopted in the US. Granted such a principle doesn't just happen, but must develop among the people.
Nevertheless, it must develop or we shall keep getting into wars and as Ukraine and Israel/Hamas prove, we are no longer well prepared and are suffering for it. If we can't fight a conventional war well, the unconventional war is inevitable.
On the other side of the world, we are in the neighborhood of Mainland China, pledging to defend and island we recognize as part of the People's Republic. No matter the reasoning we advance, this is foolish.
How foolish? Back in October of 2021 at one of the Soho Forum debates in New York City, famed Neoconservative Bill Kristol and libertarian stalwart Scott Horton squared off on the proposition that “A willingness to intervene, and seek regime change, is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America”
One hopes no one has to be told that Mr. Kristol was the anti-democracy guy in this fray.
Anyway, after arguments and rebuttals, one audience member asked Bill the $64,000 question:
"Right now, we sail pretty often our Nimitz class carriers into an area that China considers their waters and there are 6,000 souls on board those Nimitz Class carriers and China has missiles that can strike them. If we were to lose one carrier that would be 6000 dead. that's two 911s in one afternoon. What would be our response in current American foreign policy, and wouldn't that response, wouldn't one of the things on the table be a nuclear exchange and at that point aren't we rolling the dice on the great sword of Damocles over us?"
The point was well made.
Bringing the military home appears to scare Stephen. Others who have been asked might not be scared, but do seem uncomfortable with the idea.
We should not fear neutralism, but we should remember the words of the long serving early 20th Century French ambassador to the US, Jean-Jules Jusserand, who observed that distant powers could not easily threaten the US because "on the north, she has a weak neighbor; on the south, another weak neighbor; on the east fish and on the west, fish."
By being neutralist, we remove any of the reasons for foreign nations oppose us as well as reasons to curry favor with us for support in their adventures.
Other good reasons, the bloated Military Industrial Complex can be shrunk, though that will be fought by defense contractors as well as the so-called Think Tank complex. The battle against that blob is more justified than any of our adventures abroad.
To end, The news aggregator, Zerohedge has a piece on March 19 with the title, Putin Warns of 'Full-Scale WW3' If West Sends Troops To Ukraine.
Is the man, fresh from an electoral triumph, just blowing smoke, or is his patience wearing thin.
Who wants to find out?
Come home America, from everywhere.
Addendum: The reports of the murder of concert hall attendees in Moscow are all over the news. I hope my country’s fingerprints are not on this.
Note: If you would like to be added to the Neutralist mailing list, sign up at neutralus@outlook.com
Thank you, Mr. Morchoe, excellent article. Indeed, a neutrality that recognizes the United States' geopolitical situation in the same light as Ambassador Jusserand saw it would be the best possible choice for the people of America. Free trade with all, entangling alliances with none. (Where did I hear that before?) Minding our own business is also a lot cheaper than policing the planet. I mean, sure, plan for the common defense of these shores, but if the nation were truly neutral there'd be little point in a nuclear arsenal, a world-spanning navy, and Marines and soldiers stationed in hundreds of bases all over the globe.