Part II: America, Super-Predator
A grand strategy of global white supremacy + oligarchy via empire
A follow-up analysis dissecting the just-released US National Security Strategy. Check out Part I here. And while I’ve got you, if you appreciate this kind of work, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep it going.
If you take away only one thing about the new National Security Strategy (NSS), let it be this:
[the new NSS] is a kind of manifesto for the global far right. At once a template that fascists in other countries can draw upon and a straightforward theory for how to use foreign policy to advance a global counter-revolutionary agenda from the standpoint of one of the world’s major military and economic powers.
Almost everything worth saying about this radical document follows from this understanding. Among its many quirks: It stresses prioritization repeatedly (mentioned 24 times in 29 pages), but it lays out the most ambitious, sprawling vision for US statecraft since the 1950s—spanning every region of the world, intervening in the domestic politics of both Europe and Latin America, and really pioneering how to talk about using state power for the purpose of primitive accumulation.
Europe as Enemy
The most important part of what the NSS has to say about Europe is that the US national security state will act against Europe’s ruling political parties in support of far-right movements and parties:
Later in the document, it also says Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”—a direct endorsement of the “great replacement” theory common among white supremacists.
If that wasn’t enough, it further stresses that the problem is in fact European liberalism:
European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
And that’s why the NSS declares:
We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.
One of the practical ways it seeks Europe’s white-nationalist transformation is by coercing Europe into dramatically boosting military spending, which the Steve Bannons of the world know will require European governments to impose austerity on their people, thereby making European societies ripe for far-right recruitment.
Some liberal European elites have revealed themselves to be in a pipeline from centrism to neofascism, laundered by the supposed necessity of aligning with the US no matter what it says or does—a rank betrayal of European pretenses to democracy. But most European elites appear rightly freaked out, realizing—finally, and perhaps too late—that America is a very real threat to them.
My enduring frustration with European elites is their stunted imagination, continuing to assume that dramatic increases in military spending are somehow the answer no matter whether Europe sides with or against the US (precisely what Bannon always wanted).
Latin American Imperialism
The NSS lays out a blueprint for an imperialist regime over Latin America. It prescribes:
Building up a military force in the region to facilitate a new generation of forever wars closer to home;
Extracting the region’s natural resources;
Excluding “foreign” powers from the region;
Treating the region as a dumping ground for immigrant populations removed from the US; and
Dictating how individual states in the region will be governed.
And again, this is all text, not sub-text.
While normie foreign policy pundits are so far failing to grasp how radical the MAGA designs on Latin America are, even the dimmest bulbs of the commentariat have acknowledged the NSS’s declaration of a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
For those who don’t know, the Monroe Doctrine was initially an 1823 attempt at using the power of the US state to establish the Americas as a US sphere of influence that could prevent European imperialism. But European exclusion from Latin America became a cover for dozens of US military interventions in the region on behalf of US multinational corporations.
So when naval imperialist Teddy Roosevelt announced his 1904 “Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, he was simply consecrating what had become true in practice: The US ought to be Latin America’s imperialist of choice. America gave itself a free hand to civilize the savages.
The Trump corollary, then, becomes a copy of a copy. The original intent of the Monroe Doctrine faded from reality in place of the lived experience of Latin America, which is that the US presides over the region as its exclusive sphere of influence. No longer is there any pretense to a civilizing mission; just barbarism on behalf of American oligarchy and white nationalism.
The US national security state is prepping itself for a new generation of forever wars. At least the troops won’t have to travel to the opposite side of the world in order to die for America’s billionaires and politicians.
Next up: The NSS’s plan for primitive accumulation, and how it places China (and erases Asia) in the new threat matrix…