Claire suggested someone ought to try to write an article examining the sources of American foreign policy from the perspective of one of our global rivals, modeled after George Kennan’s famous 1947 “X” article. Herewith, I humbly take up the gauntlet. [Disclaimer: This is an imaginative exercise. Any similarity to real persons or institutions is purely coincidental.]

A longer version of the following article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of the Russian language Journal of the Institute of USA and Canada Studies. Published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, it is the country’s pre-eminent scholarly publication focusing on American politics. Its contents during the Soviet era were presumed to bear the imprimatur of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. The author is reputed to be a high-ranking Russian diplomat, but the slightly absurd name is previously unknown and is almost certainly a pseudonym. The article is of uneven quality and highly eccentric in its policy recommendations. However, parts of it are strikingly perceptive and its appearance in a prominent Russian foreign affairs publication ought to give rise to serious concerns within the American foreign policy establishment, but probably won’t. I have therefore undertaken to translate it myself, edit it down to a (somewhat) manageable length and post it on Ricochet, where it is certain to catch the eye of Very Important People.

-Oblomov 

The Sources of American Conduct

By Georgii Frolovich Kizhe

The political personality of American power as we know it today is the product of circumstances and ideology: specifically, the uniquely favorable geo-strategic circumstances in which the country found itself following its birth; and the exhaustion and collapse of the radical republican ideology inherited by earlier generations of American leaders from the country’s founding generation. There can be few tasks of psychological analysis more difficult than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces and the relative role of each in the determination of official American conduct. Yet the attempt must be made if that conduct is to be understood and most effectively countered.

From the moment the Treaty of Paris was inked in 1783, formally ratifying American independence from the British Empire, the United States has been uniquely free from any significant external threat and utterly unencumbered by basic existential questions of survival, such as those faced by every other civilized nation in history. To the east lay 5,000 km of open ocean – an impenetrable barrier for any would-be invader. To the north lay Britannia’s remaining North American dominions, which presented no military threat whatsoever, but which, on the contrary, served as a tempting target of American imperialism well into the 19th century. In the interior to the immediate west lay a vast, untapped continent stocked with undreamed-of natural mineral and agricultural riches, and sparsely populated by a brave but primitive stone-age hunter-gatherer people, decimated by European diseases, perpetually at war amongst themselves, and therefore at the mercy of a ruthless, energetic and technologically advanced imperial nation. Finally, to the south and far-west was situated the hapless, corrupt, peasant shambles of Mexico, which stood no chance against American paramilitary colonization and outright armed expropriation. These were the geopolitical circumstances of the most fortunate great power in history.

These uniquely favorable circumstances were harnessed to a unique and revolutionary political ideology. From the moment of its founding, the United States was an ideologically radical – and radically ideological – power. The core of this ideology was a democratic republicanism, never before in history attempted on such a massive, continental scale. Historically, democratic republicanism has been – and continues to be – an unstable and idiosyncratic political arrangement that, like certain rare radioisotopes, appears in small quantities in certain places at certain times, decays, and disappears. It is a political format that is highly contingent on culture and outside circumstances. That the half-life of its American isotope has proven to be as long as it has may be attributed to the country’s unique geo-political circumstances and unbelievably good luck. [Note: Kizhe might have considered a third factor – the American native genius for self-government. –O.]

It is not difficult to summarize the set of ideological postulates with which the Americans arrived on the world stage at the end of the 19th century. Embodied in several foundational documents, the most important of these were: an exceptionally weak and divided central government of strictly limited powers and reach; a federal system that empowered the constituent sovereign states at the expense of a truncated center; popular sovereignty at every level of government; extremely strong private property rights, until recently extending even to chattel human property, enforced through a sophisticated independent court system that strongly encouraged capital formation and empowered a rapacious financial-industrial class against populist encroachment; and an almost religious veneration of legalism, expressed in an extreme deference to legal procedure and authority. In addition, the Americans were animated by a powerful evangelical religious faith, universally and almost fanatically held by all strata of society, which identified their country’s geographic expansion – its “Manifest Destiny” – with divine providence. [Note: it goes without saying that this is a woefully incomplete list. –O.]

It bears repeating that this highly decentralized system was possible only because of the uniquely favorable geo-strategic environment of 19th-century North America. During the first century of its existence, the United States was able to concentrate without distraction on its own internal nation-building and wars of western expansion, which were more in the nature of minor colonial skirmishes than real wars. In this period, Americans mostly heeded the advice of George Washington to stay out of entanglements with European powers.

A revolutionary shift occurred with the country’s entry into World War I. By 1917, all of the important foreign policy players, including President Woodrow Wilson, had concluded that America’s idyllic isolation of the previous century was not a condition inherent in her geographic circumstances, but rather a tradition made possible by Great Britain’s active collaboration in the Monroe Doctrine. America’s elites came to believe that henceforth her freedom of action and her security depended on her relations with the world’s great powers, and that as a recent arrival among their number, the U.S. could no longer realistically maintain a policy of neutrality. [Note: Wilson was wrong about a great many things, but not this one. –O.]

However, because the United States could always retreat behind its two giant oceanic moats, it never bothered to acquire skill and sophistication in geopolitics. The United States has been successful at playing the traditional great power game only twice: first, during the long reign of the cunning, Machiavellian genius, Franklin Roosevelt; and second, throughout the 40-year span of the Cold War. In both cases, the United States succeeded only because its foreign policy establishment was able to recast the geopolitical contest in the mold of a Manichean struggle for dominance by opposing ideologies in which the country’s core values were gravely threatened. By contrast, Wilson failed in his naïve and ultimately disastrous moral crusade to foist a utopian brand of democratic internationalism on the world because he could not convince his own countrymen that their own ideological foundations were at stake. To repeat: the United States has succeeded in foreign affairs only when its diplomacy, backstopped by its industrial power and military potential, have been deployed in the service of its core ideology.

II

What does this historical background spell in terms of the political personality of American power as we know it today?

In 1991, the Japanese-American politologist Francis Fukuyama triumphantly announced the “end of history,” by which he meant that in the contest for dominance between competing universalist ideologies, democratic free market capitalism had won and socialism had lost. Fukuyama was only half right. The disastrous collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end, not of history, but of ideology. The universalist socialism of Marx and Lenin had been swept away by the tides of history. The same could be said of the malignant nationalism of the mid-century. What Fukuyama did not foresee was that the radical free market republicanism of the United States would soon be swept away, as well. The age of ideology, heralded by the American Revolution and begun in earnest with the storming of the Bastille, had at last come to an end after two centuries, and the Western world was, in a sense, returning to its historical norm.

Of the original ideology of the American founders, in theory nothing has been officially scrapped. In practice, however, little remains. America’s post-ideological elites have almost completely unmoored public policy from the country’s founding principles, and permanently turned their backs on their own heritage. Popular sovereignty still exists as extravagantly produced and lavishly financed political theater, but it is mostly pantomime. In reality, the government is a vast command-administrative dictatorship. In other words, the United States in the early 21st century is a normal power, stripped of ideology and animated by normal political concerns, the most important of which is the pursuit and application of hard power.

This is a fatal problem for the United States. Unlike organic blood-and-soil ethnic nation states like Russia, China or, perhaps, Hungary, the United States has no core unifying principle beyond a collection of inherited political ideas about the nature of government and its relationship to the individual. This central feature makes the United States an exceptionally fragile, brittle entity, not unlike the multiethnic empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, which crumbled under the combined stresses of modern warfare and the simmering, competing internal nationalisms that they proved unable or unwilling to contain. When the United States’ ruling elites ceased to believe in these inherited ideas – which took place sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall – they stopped being American, and the United States lost the wellspring of its social solidarity. It is no surprise, therefore, that in the early 21st century, the United States finds itself defeated abroad and riven by powerful centrifugal forces along social, economic, regional, racial, and ethnic lines at home.

This ideological collapse is not unique to the United States. It is part of a larger collapse of political will across the Western world. The causes of this phenomenon are complex and well beyond the scope of this essay, but the phenomenon is endemic to the West, including Russia. It is this same phenomenon that was largely responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Only Islamic imperialism survives as a political ideology with global ambitions, but it is limited by its lack of mass appeal in advanced “winner” societies. What is left is a normal competition for hard power among states, stripped down to its elemental basics. [Note: Among other problems with this assessment, Kizhe seriously underestimates the appeal of Islam, both as a religion and as a political ideology in an increasingly secular, nihilistic West. –O.]

III

What does this analysis mean for Russia’s response to America’s crumbling, overextended imperium?

The problem from the standpoint of the men in Washington and Langley is that the United States without its radical republican ideology is like Samson shorn of his hair – a powerless, lumbering musclebound giant. The foreign policy of the United States has been hopelessly confused and incoherent since the Cold War ended. In this moment of American weakness, when the United States is busy applying a policy of Containment against itself, it is clear that American pressure against the Russian sphere can and must be reversed by the bold application of political and military pressure at a series of American geographical and political weakpoints. The main element of Russia’s policy toward the United States must be that of strategic revenge for the humiliation of 1991 and the ensuing American encroachment on Russia’s historic near-abroad. [Note: Kizhe uses the Russian term “politika strategicheskogo revansha”, which has a slightly more elevated connotation than the english “revenge”, but I have used “revenge” for simplicity, instead of the more highbrow “revanche”. –O.]

In his book Why Nations Fight, the American political scientist Richard Ned Lebow surveys the causes of war since 1648 and identifies revenge as a leading motive in only 11 wars since that year, or 10% of the total, of which only three occurred in the last 100 years (the Russo-Polish War of 1919, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Falklands War of 1983). This is certainly a gross undercount, if not a wholesale misunderstanding, of the role of revenge in history. In this regard, Lebow reflects the general tendency of American politologists to favor hyper-rationalist economic schools of thought and to discount or entirely misunderstand the elemental and eternal nature of politics. Having never experienced political violence or an existential military challenge, and having been raised in the soft, antiseptic world of consensual democracy, Americans don’t have a feel for the rude animal passions that drive all political conflict, and tend to regard both politics and war as simply different forms of bargaining. They would do well to re-acquaint themselves with European thinkers of the last century, such as Carl Schmitt, who had a more visceral understanding of politics. [Note: Kizhe forgets about the Civil War, an existential struggle that still marks American politics 150 years later. Also, his criticisms of American political theory are either unfair or poorly informed. –O.]

We need only consider the history of the 20th century to understand that revenge is not something only practiced by primitive societies. Revenge was an explicit military policy of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany after its forces were expelled from the territory of the Motherland. Nor has the United States been immune to this kind of thinking, as exemplified by its ongoing war against Al Qaeda. Moreover, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, which the Americans fully adopted as their nuclear posture during the mid-Cold War period, was predicated on the revenge principle.

Like the gravitational constant in Newton’s Law, revenge is a timeless constant in international relations. Vengeance was once discussed quite freely as an element of conflict between states. In fact, so obviously was it a key motive for war that often it was assumed. From the Hebrew Bible to Homer to Shakespeare to Dumas, vengeance has been a ubiquitous theme of literature, second only to love in popularity. Why, then, should we not expect it to be a prominent feature of politics?

It is clear that in this moment of opportunity, Russia must regard the United States as a rival with whom scores must be settled, not as a partner. The issue of Russian-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of Russia as a nation and the Russian people as a people. To avoid decline into irrelevance, Russia need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.