Allen Ruff and Steve Horn write: A proposal for a new “grand strategy,” aimed at mobilizing broad domestic support for a decades-long projection of U.S. global power, is currently receiving considerable attention among an expanding circle of foreign policy planners, think-tank academics, public-opinion makers and private-sector elites. It has come not from the State Department or the intelligence community, but from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Appearing under the pen name “Mr. Y,” “A National Strategic Narrative” first appeared in early April 2011, and it has been widely circulated since. Its promoters hope it will come to serve as a blueprint capable of forging a new “national consensus” for a re-branded American globalism capable of winning the “Long War for the 21st century.”
The document’s actual authors were Navy Capt. Wayne Porter and Marine Col. Mark
“Puck” Mykleby, two “strategic assistants” to the former head of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen. Ostensibly written in an unofficial “personal” capacity, the “Narrative” clearly would not have seen the light of day without a “sign off” from the Joint Chiefs and probably then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It was vetted by key figures in the foreign policy establishment before its release.The anonymous “Mr. Y” consciously referenced the Foreign Affairs article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” that appeared in 1947 under the pseudonym “Mr. X.” Actually written by State Department Russia hand and Moscow envoy George Kennan, it argued that an insatiable Soviet expansionism posed the primary threat to world peace and national security. It came to provide the cornerstone for the U.S. Cold War “grand strategy” of “containment” — the policy to confine the Soviet Union within its East Bloc sphere and halt the spread of communism.
As Anne Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s recent director of policy planning, pointed out in her preface to the newer document, Kennan’s “X article” provided an intellectual framework, a “narrative that fit the facts of the world … well enough to create and maintain a loose bipartisan national consensus for 40 years.”
The backers of Mr.Y’s piece clearly hope that it will do the same. [Continue reading...]
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{ 4 comments }
But wasn’t Kennan’s letter misunderstood. He (as he later claimed) was arguing for political containment rather than military containment of the Soviet Union.
And Kennan got it wrong, it was an insatiable American expansionism that posed the primary threat to world peace and still does.
At least these idiots will hasten the end of the American Century.
The Cold War was itself a branded exercise in narrative myth-making. Most Americans did not want or welcome the Cold War, which did enormous damage to civil society and conceptions of freedom in the U.S. The populace was surrounded, intimidated to silence and bombarded by compliant news media, public officials, government agencies, employers, universal military conscription, mass purges in key professions, and more or less constant wars of foreign aggression- to produce the supposed consensus in support of violent global counterrevolution.
The much-celebrated “end” of the Cold war came wrapped in fresh layers of myth- of national unity, benign free trade, imperial triumph, unprecedented opportunity and, inevitably, new dangers. The Cold War Victory is an encompassing social fantasy peddled now in anticipation of the next phase of predatory global capitalism. A simple binding narrative such as this one is to have its arc extended by a further elaboration for our time. The fact that the current propagandists are linking their efforts to George Kennan’s influential 1947 essay demonstrates the perceived need for continuity in the dirty racket they all profess. In a sense, they are as loyal to their heritage of lies as honest men and women are to the truth.
Reading this causes me to wonder who is running the ship? Perhaps I’m wrong, but it appears that this is just an updated version/plan of something that propelled the U.S. in a stumble bum fashion to where we are today. The country is deeply in debt, spread all over the world militarily, the internal infrastructure is decaying, which I might add, has nothing on the horizon in the way of planning to rebuild it, yet here we are, all these fools/idiots who are consuming vast quantities of the koolaid of their won making, planning on further world conquest? I really question the sanity, that if there is a revolution here in the U.S., where do these people think that they will get the manpower to carry out their war effort[s]? Considering the way they have treated the veterans from these past 2 fiasco wars, one still going on, while behind the scenes are selling out again, they sure as hell can’t depend on these combat vets. I wonder too, will the Admirals, Generals, blow up the world, like the Israelis will, sort of like cutting off their nose to spite their face? Too much war has driven the whole lot of them mad.
well remember it was ugly nose. breid