DLC's Blog

The current global war on terror (GWOT) is not anything new in terms of American foreign policy.  America has been fighting global wars since World War I.  Woodrow Wilson made it a point (well he had 14 points actually) to involve American resources on the world stage.  Wilson wanted nation-states to be able to express self-determination, but his ideas fell on deaf ears until the Second World War.  FDR, the Father of the New Deal, took Wilson's ideas to another level.  Instead of mere self-determination for the nations, FDR wanted America and her allies to police the world against threats to human freedom.  Roosevelt called his new idea "spheres of influence."  He had to allow Stalin and the Soviet Union their sphere of influence (and China too), but that was because he couldn't do anything about them at the time.

Since America financed the Allied war effort against the Axis Powers, American leaders felt they had a greater say on the new world order that was to emerge in the aftermath of the war.  America eclipsed Britain as the West's greatest industrial and military power, so a changing of the guard occurred.  From that point on, America's involvement in the geopolitical world continuously expanded.  The rise of the military industrial complex can be attributed to the financiers who funded the war effort, and in order to protect their investments, new enemies had to be found.

Of course a new foe was found in the Soviet Union.  The emerging threat of communism easily galvanized American policy makers into concentrating all their efforts on stopping the spread of the hated ideology.  No one on the American side, however, was aware of the fact that the Soviet Union was reeling from their catastrophic losses incurred by the Nazi invasion.  The Soviets were in no position to threaten the West militarily in the decade after World War II, but the Truman and Eisenhower administrations decided in favor of a policy of containment buttressed by the threats of thermonuclear war if the Soviets stepped beyond their sphere of influence.  The famous Domino Theory thus dominated American foreign policy from then on. 

In time, the Domino Theory expanded from Eastern Europe (The Berlin Airlift Crisis) to Korea to Cuba (The Missile Crisis) to the Middle East (Iran and Mossadeq and Arab-Palestinian conflict) finally to Vietnam.  Korea and Vietnam were the result of America's belief in a Sino-Soviet "bloc" arrayed against the West...an alliance that never actually existed since Stalin and Mao never agreed in their respective mechanics of communism...but that never mattered to American policy makers like Keynes or Robert McNamara or especially the so-called "whiz kids" McNamara recruited.  In their eyes, nations were ready to fall to communism like dominoes in a line.  Eisenhower warned of the ever expanding tentacles of the military industrial complex, but his admonitions were soon forgotten (and he probably never even believed what he was saying either).

Despite the failure of Vietnam, America pressed on.  Containment of the Soviet Union transformed into Detente under the Kissinger/Nixon regime.  The balance of power under the status quo became the new goal.  America was just going to "wait out the Soviets."  This Fabian strategy fell on its face as well, but in 1980 America's perpetual war escalated again when a "cowboy" from California took office.  Reagan's decision to ramp up the arms race with the Soviets and bog them down in Afghanistan via the Muhajadeen (led by Osama bin Laden), pushed the Soviets and their new leader Mikhail Gorbachev past their financial and ideological limits.  The strange thing however, was that even though once the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, and the Soviet Union broke up, America's military industrial complex wasn't satisfied with the "victory" and the peace dividends America could then enjoy.

Of course the military industrial complex wasn't satisfied.  Without a great enemy out there staring down America, they were in danger of going out of business.  So, enter George Herbert Walker Bush, son of Prescott Bush, who once financed the rise of Adolph Hitler (before it was known what Hitler was going to become in all fairness).  Bush was elected benefiting from the success of the Reagan era in which he played a prominent part.  He proudly expanded old Woodrow Wilson's 14 points to 1000 and elevated them to the higher metaphysical realm of "light."  Bush's new celestial policy of a New World Order was really just more of the same.  He merely repackaged the old ideas of foisting American power and might onto the world in the name of freedom in a nice modern catch phrase. 

As you might guess, a new enemy was going to be needed.  Well one was found in the form of a petty dictator from Iraq named Saddam Hussein.  Ironically Saddam was once an ally in the old struggle against the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellite nation of Iran (under the Ayatollah Khomeni).  When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Bush wasted no time coming to that Oil emirate's defense.  In short order Saddam's army was ousted from Kuwait and pounded all the way back to Baghdad mercilessly.  However, Bush stopped short of toppling the Hussein regime, and opted instead to mimic the Cold War policy of containment by imposing geographical limits on Saddam's regime inside their own nation.  Iraq thus became a great experiment in world government via the United Nations.  When Bill Clinton took over for Bush, he continued the policy of containment in Iraq with little to no change.  America's perpetual war was now centered on the Middle East.

Clinton's administration served little more than as an intermission between Bushes.  When George Jr. took office, the perpetual war went into its next and greatest phase.  After the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Bush initiated the most aggressive foreign policy shift in American history.  He launched the Global War on Terror to combat "terrorism" anywhere in the world.  The scope and magnitude of Bush's new policy is not only unfathomable, it's downright mind boggling.  The resources of America, under this new war, would be stretched to a greater degree than ever before.  Bush turned America into the world's policeman of not only its sphere of influence, but that of the rest of the world too.  The Military Industrial Complex was most pleased because now they again have their open ended war with the accompanying blank check.  So the idea of perpetual war is not something PNAC or Neo-Cons invented, it's as American as apple pie, and coming up on its 100th anniversary.