At the United Nations this past week, the figurehead of the US Joe Biden talked about a “remarkable sweep of history,” which was somehow not referring to a descent into a WWIII hellscape but an optimistic vision of the future world led by the US.
It was a fitting final UN address for Biden who has put an exclamation point on the US’ decades-long run as chief planetary scourge — from NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine and the ongoing encirclement of China to the support of Israel’s genocidal rampage across the Middle East to the endless coups, assassinations, drone attacks, and the never ending global war on terror.
Is there any hope for change? Aurelien has an engrossing piece asking what lessons might be learned in the West from the impending loss in Ukraine. In the US at least, where learning lessons that don’t involve more conflict is mostly verboten, it’s hard to see it.
Think tanks, those buzzing plutocrat-funded shadow government hives, are week after week pumping out content on how to tinker with the lumbering leviathan. Most of these tweaks to existing strategy involve the recycling of old ideas, e.g., Ukraine is the new Afghanistan for Russia/USSR, revive the Kennan containment strategy, etc.
But what would some lessons be that the US could learn from Ukraine and the neverending wars from the past few decades if it were so inclined? How should the US adapt to the multipolar world in a way that doesn’t involve the crazies doing their best to hurtle us towards global catastrophe in a quest for hegemony?
With none of the think tanks paid to do any real thinking, it felt like a good time to look at some potential solutions — no matter how romantic they may seem at a moment when the US seems dead set on igniting WWIII. As literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote: “Utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent. Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.”
Utopia is a stretch, but it might seem like it if the US would do what Biden promised on Tuesday at the UN that it will not do: retreat from the world. Here are a few more (it’s a far-from-complete list, so please let me know what I’m forgetting in comments):
Look Backwards, Not Forward
Before charting a course forward, the US first needs to finally deal with at least its recent past and weed out all its war criminals and other neoconservative fanatics.
In contrast to former President Barack Obama’s admission that the US “tortured some folks,” but it’s better to “look forward, not backwards,” the US should fully investigate and prosecute enablers of Israeli war crimes and other US wars of aggression — either directly or through proxies.
It should then finally begin going after the architects of its global torture regime. A friendly reminder that the Justice Department still has the tools to do so:
Multiple federal statutes supply the Justice Department with authority it could use to hold accountable those who used or authorized torture and abuse. These include:
- The federal torture statute, which makes it a crime to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering on another person with specific intent if the conduct takes place outside the United States. The statute also criminalizes conspiracy to commit torture.
- The war-crimes statute, which criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions, including torture and cruel or inhuman treatment.
- Section 804 of the Patriot Act, which provides federal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes such as murder or assault committed by U.S. nationals in certain locations overseas, including U.S. military bases.
- The federal conspiracy statute, which supplies independent authority to prosecute those who entered into agreements to commit federal crimes, such as like murder or assault, so long as at least one member of the conspiracy acted to further the conspiracy.
Liability for federal crimes also extends to those who aided and abetted the crimes or counseled, commanded, induced, procured, or willfully caused another to commit the crimes. If officials endeavored to cover up torture in order to evade oversight, other criminal statutes — such as those relating to making false statements or obstructing justice, for example — may be implicated.
While some of the abuses took place a decade ago, the statute of limitations has not run out on many of the most serious crimes. Most importantly, there is no statute of limitations under the torture statute when the abuse risked or resulted in serious physical injury or death. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes that resulted in death. The federal conspiracy law’s five-year statute of limitations runs from the date of the last act taken in furtherance of the conspiracy; the last act can include an effort to conceal the conspiracy. There would be no time bar to a prosecution for any crime committed in connection with efforts to impede the Senate Committee’s investigation.
As a show of contrition and to reaffirm its commitment to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the US should also offer up offenders to The Hague for prosecution. And Washington should fund a new wing at The Hague that will almost certainly be needed to hold all of them.
Apologies, financial settlements, and other forms of repentance to all victims and their families should follow. In addition to the prosecutions of torturers, the US should perform transparent investigations into all its dirty wars of at least the past quarter century. This, along with the following steps, would be a good start at convincing the rest of the world that the US is no longer a threat to the world.
Abolish the CIA
After all the convictions for torture and other crimes, get rid of whatever is left of the CIA. It has no place in a supposedly democratic society.
Purge the State Department of Neocons.
Any who somehow escape a war crime conviction should be shunned and treated like the international pariahs that they are.
Reject War as a Tool of Foreign Policy and Commit to International Treaties
Add an amendment to the Constitution that forbids war as a means for the settlement of international disputes. Throw in something about support for international organizations and working with them to further such ends.
For instance, the US should immediately sign international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Basel Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, Ottawa Treaty (Mine Ban Treaty), Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Convention on Cluster Munitions.
That’s to name a few. And Washington should get to work on improving them and helping with their enforcement.
Exit NATO, Cut Israel Loose, and Close US Bases Overseas
NATO is an aggressive alliance that spreads violence and misery and exists primarily to enrich arms manufacturers. Let’s allow Paul Keating, prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996, to describe it:
NATO’s continued existence after and at the end of the Cold War has already denied peaceful unity to the broader Europe, the promise of which the end of the Cold War held open.
And besides, the Europeans have been fighting each other for the better part of three hundred years, including giving the rest of us two World Wars in the last hundred.
Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States. Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen.
Former Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte who takes over for Stoltenberg starting October 1 will no doubt perform the same role.
Washington should also end all support for Israel and instead be leading the charge to isolate the pariah state.
Find Ways to Work With Russia and China.
The US as the world’s second largest economy could still play a major role in the world, but the steps outlined above would mark the official end of the Project for the New American Century and the acceptance of multipolarity.
As part of that acceptance, Washington should seek ways to cooperate and build ties with Moscow and Beijing.
Maybe the US could solicit advice from Putin on how to get its oligarchs under control. Maybe China could help the US build some high speed train lines or retrain some of the American workforce in actually building stuff — skills and knowledge lost over the years as the US plutocrats dismantled US industry and moved it to China.
There are a lot of opportunities.
Washington and Beijing could team up on climate change to launch a new Marshall Plan + Belt and Road Initiative with the US leaning on its strength (finance) and China on its dominant position in clean technology. [1] Even Russia could be brought in with its expertise in the nuclear field. The US is instead fighting China’s successes in cleantech commercialization and wants to control the clean energy future while shifting the focus to favored technologies of fossil fuel companies like geothermal, hydrogen, and carbon capture. Nonetheless, here’s Adam Tooze explaining how such a Marshall Plan 2.0 might work:
There is huge demand for American financial assets. So, if America wants to fund a dollar credit scheme, it does not need to be “earning dollars” through exports. It can fund a substantial Marshall Plan 2.0 by selling debt and then recycling the proceeds. This would not be a net flow of funding from the US to the rest of the world, but a recycling of dollars within the dollar-system managed by the new Marshall Plan authority. Think of it as a sovereign private equity fund. On a gigantic scale, this is how America’s balance of payments operates anyway. Foreign inflows to the US invested in safe assets like US Treasuries, off-set the purchase of riskier and higher yielding foreign assets by US investors. On balance, the US does very well out these flows.
This all starts to go above my paygrade, but it does seem that such a scheme could help reestablish faith in the dollar system — although that’s not necessarily a desirable outcome for Americans — following its increased weaponization in recent years, and all the spending could serve as a potential replacement for the trillion in annual military spending as surely the US deficits could be put to better use.
***
Why is it that all the plutocrat-funded think tanks and plutocrat-owned politicians are always charting new foreign policy paths forward that are remarkably similar to the old path forward? A big part of the problem likely stems from the fact that US capitalism on steroids unsurprisingly leads to imperialism in a never ending quest to spread freedom for capital. A logical conclusion is that US foreign policy is a tool of its plutocrats who own the government and want to use all its tools to protect and grow their profits across the world. If that is accurate, then American capitalism makes it unlikely that US aggression will stop unless it is completely defeated (which gets us to mutually assured destruction) or the plutocrats are somehow made to accept limits. That could be forced upon them as the amount of the world they can plunder shrinks due to the rise of other powers and the increase of military parity among even smaller actors, the US empire continues to field expensive ineffective weapons, suffers from recruitment crises, and foreign countries become less inclined to act as cannon fodder for American goals.
Is there another way?
It All Starts at Home
I recall a piece from the “progressive, independent think tank,” the Century Foundation titled “A Bolder American Foreign Policy Means More Values and Less War.” Its central argument is that the US must “recenter values” like “multilateralism and human rights that are core to its identity.”
But it never stops to ask if those are actually American values or myths. Consequently, it might be even more disconnected from reality than the neocon scribes arguing for a multi-front war against Russia, China, and Iran. Because if the American value of money crowds out everything else, how would more of that benefit anyone other than a select few?
While the above foreign policy proposals are modest, it’s impossible to bring any of them about without changes at home, and that would require reorienting American values — or taking control away from those who force the vast majority to live by those values if they want to survive.
There exists belief that Americans view “themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” That might be true for some, but there are also communities all across the country filled with people looking out for their neighbors and willing to give the shirt off their back.
So while there are “embarrassed millionaires” there’s also plenty of evidence in America today supporting research showing that commoning is ‘natural’ for humans and that selfishness, competition, and fear are values that must be instilled.
Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
That’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring speaking in an interview at Nuremberg. What avenues exist for building US society not run by modern-day American Görings? Here are just a few (again, far from exhaustive):
A great first step would be to wrest control of the US government from the plutocrats? Naked Capitalism offers a good start there with its Skunk Party manifesto.
There could also be US experiments with the very values we identify as American.
Malcolm Harris in “Palo Alto” advocates for a return of the city to indigenous populations that would be able to establish a system that is essentially the opposite of what Palo Alto (and Stanford) is today. Overly optimistic? Maybe. But repeated efforts need to be made to “develop, practice, and deploy new modes of production, distribution, and reproduction – social metabolism” free from “capitalist gangsterism.”
On the individual level there’s evidence that a transition from blood-stained capitalism to a more egalitarian existence is plenty possible. Whip Randolph, a former defense industry (and regular NC reader), who came to terms with his role in spreading death and destruction and went looking for a different way of life, writes about his experiences in his book “One Disease, One Cure.”
He ended up spending time in an Ashaninka village in Peru that practices real direct democracy on a smaller, manageable scale and lives in reciprocity with the environment. Long ago this used to be commonplace:
In The Dawn of Everything (2021), Davids Graeber and Wengrow explain (among many other things) how after the Agricultural Revolution, at least 4000 years passed before the first hierarchical urban developments. During this period, early farming communities developed technologically (e.g. metallurgy, leavened bread, basic mathematics, sailing, the potter’s wheel), but without kings, centralised control, hierarchy or bureaucracy. Archaeological evidence from what is now Kurdistan and central Turkey shows large settlements with no centre, and in which all houses were more-or-less the same size (and of high-quality), and no special burial sites containing lots of treasure.
This pattern was repeated in places as far apart as China and Peru. There were, for example, large, non-hierarchical settlements of people in Peru, 4000 years before the Incas; and in the Indus Valley and Ukraine, the very first cities show no evidence of monarchs or rulers.
Randolph provides a reminder that history isn’t a one-way street. Among other examples, he points to the Zapatistas in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas who fought for more self-rule and have been enacting a project built on respect for one another and the earth. In practice that means The Assemblies of Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments coordinate decisions, resource sharing, and defense at the highest levels, but these groups also have no authority and depend upon collectives who depend upon the village governments. It’s certainly not easy. The Chiapas project is continually under threat from miners and drug cartels.
But it adds weight to Malcolm Harris’ call for new zones to experiment with different “social metabolism.” Let people choose which they’d prefer to live in.
Americans might prefer a different option. Currently with all of capitalism’s gifts delivered right to our doors, we remain some of the unhappiest, unhealthiest people in an “advanced” economy.
There are signs Americans are waking up to that fact, although a bit more directionless than communities imagined by Harris and Randolph. More and more Americans are leaving the workforce as part of the ongoing Great Resignation.
More Americans are living as nomads. As of 2022, 3.1 million Americans live full-time in vans, RVs, and other motorized transportation converted into homes—a number that’s risen 63 percent in just the last couple of years. Some are part of the newly christened “digital nomads” who work from the road, but many others are early retirees, young people, families in search of a healthier lifestyle, the seasonal working poor, and those seeking affordable healthcare across the border.
Head to Bureau of Land Management areas of the US southwest during the winter and you’ll find a sort of American version of the Ashaninka. Hunters with Trump flags waving alongside hippy types with portable greenhouses to grow organic vegetables and other plants. There isn’t official democratic structures but there are written and unwritten rules and most of all, community.
And many are like Randolph in search of something better than what our ruling class has prescribed. As Randolph writes:
I don’t know everything I learned. I’m still figuring it out. But I know this: people can live differently. We can treat each other well. I know it is possible, and I will never doubt it again because I saw it with my own eyes.
If Randolph can go from the defense industry to an advocate for the overhaul of American society, maybe there’s hope for us all — even a few of the plutocrats.
