we should accept the minor consequences of containing Russia, or be done with NATO and leave Russia be. The men who fought off a bullying foreign nation to found the United States of America would have preferred the latter option.
Unfortunately, not only does your ideal world not exist, but it’s worse than that: the traditional means of summarizing the history of nations as the history of their regimes is not even close to reality. I think the classic seventies film “Network” put it best, when Ned Beatty as some omnipotent corporate titan explained didactically to the befuddled TV anchorman who had made himself a household icon by promising to commit suicide in prime time over being “mad as hell and not gonna take it any more”, that to the business world there were even then essentially no such things as countries, only companies.
It is all well and good to refer to the happenstance of a place called “The United States of America” as some “we” when idealizing about what “we” ought to be doing about this or that condition in the greater world. But sadly enough, the people who make real foreign policy are not the members of any government representing “we” the people, they are members of boards representing stockholders over arrangements having little to do with the disposition of lines on maps or line-items in treaties. Their concerns have more to do with serving the only true sovereign in all international relations, a thing known as ROI, or “return on investment.”
Vive le ROI is the only real-world mindset worth appraising when seeking to grasp why nations do the things they do with, for, or to other nations, in settings where their governments are barely even aware of what the corporations chartered to operate both within and outside their borders at will are really intending or have really set in motion, and even less capable of restraining these behaviors in the behalf of any “we” the people.
Just for the sake of context, it is useful to remember that no matter what Washington or Jefferson may have said when speechifying to some minuscule gathering while some scribe tried to write it all down with a stained turkey feather, meanwhile the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, fellow name of Hamilton, was clandestinely beseeching British banks to agree to reschedule the war debts accrued on them by this new experimental republic calling itself “The United States of America” during its recent war of independence fought against, go figure, British troops.
Yes, the revolution had been fought with no small measure of British finance underwriting both sides, rather irrespective of what either any Continental Congress or some Majesty’s Parliament may have thought of the arrangement.
We hear today these constant reminders of some “racist past” in the flailing efforts of current-day leftists to explain what sort of country this is. This may be accurate enough in its way, but again, the accusation of this “systemic racism” is leveled at the history of a system of government rather than at systems of finance and/or corporate intentions.
When deciding after the fact that the Civil War was fought to “end slavery”, it is all too easy to forget that it may well have been more motivated at the time by whether northern or southern business interests would get to play the more dominant role in building railroads across the continent to get to all that gold in California, which gold since 1849 had been only as useful to an east-coast republic as the possibility of shipping it by sea around the Horn of South America or across the Isthmus of Panama.
It was the interests of business which motivated that war and propelled its years of slaughter, and again, there were both financiers and industrialists then as now who were more than happy to invest in both sides of it. The arming of a million men to go camping for four years with orders to gun each other down or bayonet each other in far-flung trenches over a nonexistent conflict about which form of human chattelry might prevail ultimately as official policy, is a lucrative proposition, and anybody’s patriotism or humanitarian conceits had little to do with where the money came from or how it was distributed.
Speaking of railroads, even after railroad lawyer Lincoln, who had been propped up by the railroad party calling itself “republicans” to get their railroad built, had instead been forced by the business of war to forestall the real business of building that transcontinental railroad he had been placed in office to build, after the war was over and he lay cold in the grave it still needed to get built, not in service of any nation but in service of the bottom lines of the companies and banks who demanded it be built.
The war had just been a means toward that end, since all that gold wasn’t going anywhere fast enough, and because California’s hastily rubber-stamped status as a “state” was still a silly and nearly moot proposition in a world where the Pacific coast of a continent housing a tenuous Atlantic republic may as well have been on the far side of the moon. Not only those pesky Russians, but also the British and Spanish and French and Portuguese and Dutch governments (servants of companies, just like America’s, all of them, not to mention the Mexican one, currently owned and operated by French banks who had set an Austrian prince on its throne for themselves, and having recently lost its premier territory to these Americans in their prior war, which had ended only weeks before a failed grocer working for his wealthier local boss took a walk down a river to scope out a route for logs out of a sawmill and saw some shiny rocks), could read a map of the world and see plainly that California’s gold being allegedly an American asset was only as valid a one as this America’s capacity to defend the gold fields it came from, which by the end of “our” civil war was next to zero.
And to whom did all those Indian tribes spread across the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada pose an intolerable obstacle to “progress”? Not the handful of settlers and prospectors and fur-traders who had made it that far west to try and live, they had far more compelling interests in making peace and conducting trade with the native tribes than in any wars of genocide to remove them. But the Indians stood in the way of that railroad, which all along had never been any instrument of any government’s “policy” past the point that building it and setting it in motion was the policy demand of the companies that make all governments’ power possible at all.
Did the United States government create the absolute hoax of a “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” in 1964 in order to invade the republic in South Vietnam because Lyndon Johnson wanted to contain communism in southeast Asia? Or was it because there was too much rubber and tin and manganese and oil at stake there, to let the banks in the Soviet Union and the “people’s republic” of China (yes, they had banks, too, and yes, those had boards of directors; communism, if you hadn’t noticed, is merely capitalism by other means, perhaps even the purest form of it) cash in on the profits instead of the banks in the USA and Canada and Europe and Japan?
And let’s not forget that prior to that spectacular incidence of “fake news” as a thoroughly official government action, the “election” of South Vietnam’s “president” following the CIA-engineered assassination of its previous one had been not merely “interfered with” by the United States government, it had been entirely an American bit of geopolitical theater, in a part of the world where the verb “to vote” did not even exist in the languages spoken by most of its peoples. And who wanted that electoral outcome, that invasion of a sovereign nation, that decade of war to follow? Certainly not any “we the people” who only got stuck with the chore of paying for it via forms 1040 and sending sons to die in it: the war in Vietnam was corporate policy, and only a government’s policy because its owner-operators in the boardrooms had decreed that it be made so.
And while we’re on the topic of interfering in elections, how many remember that the German regime spent millions actively and openly seeking to engineer an electoral result of Franklin D Roosevelt’s defeat in the 1940 election, using true-blue American citizens in both the oil industry and the labor movement to buy the ads for them? Who recalls that the same oil executive who stood to lose tens of millions in profits from the sale of Mexican crude to the German navy if the US joined the ongoing war in Europe, also personally met, in Germany, with Reich officials as highly placed as Goebbels and Goering, to try and work out the details of a rigged 1940 election in the United States, because the Fuhrer was so convinced that America would never break its neutrality in that war but his corporate masters knew all too well what American industry was capable of in a war because German finance had been making it possible for generations, including during the previous war?
Et cetera.
Unfortunately, it is corporations, not ordinary people, who also write the official histories of nations and see them published, distributed and most crucially, made curriculum to schoolchildren and college students. It is absolutely in these corporations’ interests to propagate and perpetuate this utterly false mythology that the history of the nations is the history of governments. By creating such a total blindness to the historic behaviors of commercial business enterprises and such a vacuous indifference to their presence in every event both major and minor in the known history of the modern world, this smokescreen of ignorance leaves corporations and financiers entirely at liberty to formulate whatever policies best suit them and require any government standing in their path to implement them or be toppled from power unceremoniously, by any of the endless means business has of tweaking balances of official powers in their own permanent favor.
So a person may fantasize and wax philosophical all day about what “we” ought to do in the world or how “the Russians” (whichever Russians that means) might feel about it or react to it, but the business world isn’t paying any heed to such board-game fantasy. There are profits to reap from resources to be appropriated and billions of people to fleece by telling them what reality is, and by convincing them via entertainment and propaganda and “education” that their consumer habits bear no significant relation to the international shenanigans of the companies who engineer the whole nationless ruse of consumerism around the world, and they waste little effort over whose flag may be flying over which field of enterprise, unless and until those who salute it or pretend to be serving under it begin to be a nuisance to their own, vastly more historically relevant, interests.
