The Virus Chronicles (continued)

Quo Vadis?

Yesterday, Patrick Buchanan, the far right commentator wrote the following:

"After the Great Pandemic has passed and we emerge from Great Depression II, what will be America's mission in the world?

What will be America's cause?

We have been at such a turning point before.

After World War II, Americans wanted to come home. But we put aside our nation-building to face the challenge of a malevolent Stalinist empire dominant from the Elbe river to the Barents Sea.

And after persevering for four decades, we prevailed.

What, then, did we do with our epochal victory?

We alienated Russia by moving our NATO military alliance into the Baltic and Black Seas. We launched bloody, costly crusades for democracy in the Middle East that, invariably, failed. We exported a huge slice of our manufacturing capacity and economic independence to a coddled China.

Historically, blunders of such magnitude have undone great powers."

Sometimes Pat not only doesn't sound all that radical, he sounds a lot like the noises in my head, and some of the things I've written. After World War I British imperialists didn't want to come home, nor did they welcome the League of Nations mandates that drained the treasury rather than enriching the motherland as other overseas possessions were designed to do.

United States overseas overseas operations are different. Every one of them drains the treasury. Of course many of them have been for good. The entire NATO project, up until the fall of the Soviet Union, was an exercise in preserving Western Civilisation, something considered a worthy cause until the recent political correctness. Now, between the western hating youth, cheered on by their left wing professoriate, and the near collapse of society under the weight of the COVID-19 lock down, we should take care to not take for granted our country's priorities

Buchanan continues:

"Even before COVID-19, Americans had begun to realize the folly of decades of mindless interventionism over matters irrelevant to our vital interests. "Unsustainable" was the word commonly associated with our foreign policy.

But if our foreign policy was unsustainable during President Trump's economic boom, with unemployment at record lows and a bull market to rival the Roaring '20s, can an interventionist foreign policy be sustained after the losses of this major depression we have induced to kill the pandemic?"

No matter how many times scientists, politicians, and commentators speak of the new normal, I suspect most Americans still expect to wake up one day to the world they left before the plague of COVID-19 descended upon us. The descent was curious. One might say it descended with Donald Trump kicking and screaming that the whole thing was fake, until it became intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that it was here.

When we do emerge, the world must be different. Whatever it looks like, one question Americans might ask is "what are all those troops doing in all those places around the world?" I don't mean NATO, or even Korea or Japan, but Niger, Djibouti, Afghanistan, and dozens of other places where America has carved out enclaves to hold back an enemy (or perceived enemy), assist an ally in doing the same, or maintaining a drone facility to seek out new enemies for our now famous targeted killings.

All this money, poured into all those places, doesn't seem to have delivered any increase in safety or security. It has produced violence, but little more. As we slip into what might become our new routine, it is time to decide what our new priorities are. Each time a feather merchant from the Pentagon comes to Congress looking for funding for his talking dog, and says we can't afford not to fund it, we need to break out the slide rules and green eye shades. There might be more power in ensuring that we have a strong industrial base in the U.S. rather than in bleeding ourselves white to ensure we can kill every last jihadi within seconds of detection by buying every last fancy weapon and stationing it with our troops in every last far off place. China is in fact nipping at our heels, but we won't prevail if our country is a carcass of consumer stuff with no foundation, core, or heart.