US vanity

This blog does not pretend to be familiar with military strategy but, ever since Vietnam, I have doubted US claims to military supremacy. It always seemed to me to be the worst form of bully talk. The US is now playing a deeply dangerous game – arming Ukraine to the tune of 100 billion dollars while simply cheering from the sidelines. One of the blogs I follow always fires from the hip and posed this question yesterday - 

How long can an empire keep losing wars without losing power? “where are the tangible results in what throughout human history has served as the most important test of power: victories in wars?” This is a question America has been violently, rudely asking for decades, and the answer has long been ‘none’. Now it’s just becoming obvious.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, all draws or losses. America is capable of destroying things, but not achieving strategic objectives, or even having a strategy beyond destruction for profit. In Afghanistan, America deployed for 20 years, spent trillions of dollars, and still somehow lost to some of the poorest people on Earth. All the blood, all the treasure, it was all for nothing. It was all just human sacrifice on the altars of their war gods, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

 

In Ukraine, NATO trained a large Ukrainian force and flooded the place with billions of dollars in weapons. And it’s all getting ground up in Putin’s cauldron. America screamed propaganda about how dangerous Russia is to the world, but then did nothing about it besides profit from the suffering of Ukrainian people. Now they just look impotent.

An empire can’t take L after L like this and not one day be deemed a loser. America’s military actually sucks, and Andrei Martyanov called it in 2018, in his book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning. In that book, he talked about the current conflict with Russia before most of us perceived it happening (though it was happening). Alexis de Tocqueville’s widely renowned book, “Democracy in America”, addresses this aspect of the American character:

 

All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner.

The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes.

 

Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, whilst it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “There is not its fellow in the world.” If I applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he answers, “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has been struck by the corruption of all other nations, is astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge, and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.

 

This observation from 1837 should have been a warning to the American political and intellectual elites long ago. Sadly, it has been ignored and has cost everyone dearly. The American vaingloriousness described by Tocqueville has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes. It threatens a shaky republic and it is embedded in the very foundation of a now increasingly obvious American decline.

This is, of course, reflects a Russian discourse – if one who moved from Baku to the US in the late 1990s. Dmitry Orlov is a well-known character who recently made the move in the opposite direction and who now posts on the Ukraine war with some relish .

So it’s not surprising that some commentators have raised doubts about  Andrei Martyanov  - but have come away convinced. He is a fairly prolific writer on military matters (with a recent book on US decline) and his blog can be viewed here.