05/20/14 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I've got John Pfeffer on the line.
He's co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, that's fpif.org, put out by the Institute for Policy Studies.
They got a great stable of writers over there at Foreign Policy in Focus, again, fpif.org.
And man, this thing is just bumming me out.
The three war doctrine now, well, geez, I thought the empire was finally downsizing a little bit and it's now the era of the multipolar world and the era of the unipolar benevolent hegemony was finally over, thank God, and things could be a bit more peaceful.
But no, says you, John Pfeffer.
Welcome back.
How are you?
Doing good.
Thanks for having me back on the show.
Very happy to have you here.
The two front war doctrine, I don't know exactly how consistent that was held throughout the Cold War, but basically the idea was we ought to be able to fight in Europe and the Pacific at the same time, that kind of a thing.
But now you're saying that now that we have no enemies at all, that we have to be able to fight a three front war.
It does sound rather paradoxical, but here's the situation.
Basically President Obama has declared his doctrine finally, basically has said that the use of military force should be the last resort.
We should do everything else possible first, diplomatically, with economic sanctions, before we even consider military force.
Which he doesn't really mean that, but anyway, for the sake of argument.
Exactly.
I mean, he has, of course, used military force in the past and it hasn't been his last resort, but at least in theory this is what his doctrine is.
Now that is a deeply unsettling doctrine for Congress, which is in the House of Representatives, which is in control of the Republican Party, and even members of his own Democratic Party.
We should remember that Hillary Clinton, when she ran against Barack Obama, was always projecting herself as kind of the more realistic alternative, the one who was going to be much more hard lined when it came to use military force.
So there is certainly a faction within his own party that is uncomfortable with this assertion of this doctrine.
Now it comes at a time also of relative economic austerity, I mean the Pentagon is still going to be basically at the same size this year and next year, but after 2015, at least according to current projections, we're looking at some reductions.
That too drives complete fear into the hearts of the militarists, who we might call members of the War Party, which is not just one party or the other, but an amalgam of members of both parties who are committed to high military spending and the use of military force overseas.
And they are gearing up for what will undoubtedly be an attack on Obama's foreign policy doctrine and his legacy, and that will be certainly part of the midterm elections, but I think it will more prominently be part of the 2016 presidential elections.
So what do I mean by the three fronts?
Well, where we have seen the criticism of the War Party so far has been in these three fronts.
Number one, against a rising China.
China has been more assertive in South China Sea and in other disputed territory around its perimeter, and there have been numerous criticisms of the Obama administration for not going up more heavily against China, particularly in the South China Sea.
Number two, Russia, the old favorite of the Cold War.
Putin, of course, has been more assertive in Ukraine, taking Crimea, making some noises about eastern part of Ukraine, maybe even some other territories in the near abroad that have large Russian-speaking or ethnic Russian minorities.
And there too, Obama has been heavily criticized for not sticking up for Ukraine more vehemently and going toe-to-toe with Russia.
Number three, again, the favorite of the post-911 era, terrorism or non-state actors like Al-Qaeda, but not just Al-Qaeda, other forces like Boko Haram in Nigeria.
And here again, War Party has said that Obama has not been strong enough, has not sent the troops in to get those girls back, has not gone toe-to-toe with all these non-state terrorist actors around the world.
So what I anticipate for 2016 is a push by the War Party to say, hey, it's not the time to reduce military spending, it's not the time to withdraw from the world, it's not even the time to focus just on one potential threat.
We have three major fronts that we have to be fighting.
The Obama administration blew it on all three, and our party, if it takes over Congress, takes over the White House, will not only boost military spending, but ensure that we are capable as a country to fight three wars simultaneously.
Well, now, it also seems like at this time, there's probably a bigger split on these questions between the people and the establishment than ever before in history.
You know, the war in Afghanistan, which started out, you know, according to the official narrative, not like the Taliban didn't offer to give them up or anything, but started out as, you know, pure and simple revenge attack against those who had hit us on 9-11 kind of thing, you would think that that would be way high up on the list of justified wars in the minds of Americans.
But it is now the least popular war in American history, less popular than Iraq, which people finally came to understand was really not revenge for 9-11 and was not justified in any sense along those lines.
Less popular than Vietnam, which killed, you know, somewhere around three or four million people and was much worse for the Americans.
It's now the least popular war ever, and we saw Syria last summer.
We see, really, the opinion polls about Ukraine along the same lines, and then the Big Pew surveys and the Reuters surveys and whatever, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal polls.
They all say that the Americans are sick and tired of this, and it doesn't really matter to us if the Kagans have an unlimited list of people that they want to kill.
They can go kill them themselves.
We're just not playing this anymore.
I mean, you look at what happened with Syria, where it was 99 to 1 among the American people.
Just forget it.
No, you're forbidden from launching this war, Mr. President.
That was absolutely unheard of in American history, right?
Absolutely.
And as you point out, the polls are very clear on this.
American appetite for military intervention overseas has dropped precipitously.
And to a certain extent, you can say that this is the return, what I call the return of the industrial strength version of the Vietnam Syndrome.
In other words, the Vietnam War was such a palpable failure in people's minds in the mid to late 1970s that it applied across the board, that the failure in Vietnam suggested to people that the United States simply should not intervene militarily in any significant way overseas.
On the other hand, if we look at the other two parallels in terms of history, where we had a Democratic Party president who more or less put forward a policy of a more prudent approach to military intervention, certainly Jimmy Carter in the wake of the Vietnam War and the overwhelming influence of the Vietnam War Syndrome, and then Bill Clinton in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, at that time too, as you were saying at the top of the hour, people were saying, finally, we're seeing the end of this aggressive American presence in the world.
That changed.
Changed in 1979.
Geopolitical circumstances were part of it.
It was the Iranian Revolution.
It was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a number of other things too, of course.
And then the end of the Clinton years, and not the election of George W. Bush, but of course 9-11, triggered another wave of massive increase in U.S. military spending and of course another bout of amnesia with respect to the Vietnam War Syndrome.
Well, just like Obama, under Carter and Clinton there really wasn't much of a rollback, just the perception of one, the perception of wimpy Democrats not doing near enough killing, when really Carter gave the green light to Saddam, to the intervention in Afghanistan, and of course Bill Clinton murdered a million Iraqis from the air and with his blockade for eight years straight, etc., like that, bringing on the 9-11 attacks in the first place, really.
But I understand what you mean about, once the liberals are gone and the real men come back into power, right, all the soft-handed pretend tough guys from the AEI, when they come to staff the Pentagon and the State Department, we all better run like hell.
Exactly.
What we're looking at right now is the potential repeat of 1979 and 2001 in 2016.
Again, a perception that we had a weak Democratic president who didn't do enough to stand up to bullies, and a change in the geopolitical circumstances.
And you can say right now, of course, the American public has no appetite for military intervention, but unfortunately that can shift.
It can shift if there's an incident on the scale of 9-11, or in the case of 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
That can shift American public opinion.
If you have these two things combined, a shift in geopolitics and the return to the White House of the war party, then we may see this perfect storm of the three-war doctrine basically imposed upon us.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, we don't have much time for this segment, John, but it seems worth bringing up here real quick about how we actually don't have any enemy states.
China and Russia, they're not really enemies, they're sort of frenemies at worst, at least for now, we hope.
And then Africa, they're not all satellite-type loyal client states.
Not every militia there is loyal, but none of them are a threat to the U.S. in a million years.
The only real threat to the American people, the only real enemies of the American people in the actual real world, outside of these guys' schemes, are the Al Qaeda militants who would hijack our planes and kill us with them, or things along those lines.
And yet everything that our government does makes their movement stronger.
And that's where we're going to pick up this conversation on the other side, is, you know, bin Laden's son saying he was so happy when George Bush and Dick Cheney got elected these pretend tough guys in their war party, they're going to be so easy to get to do what he wanted them to do.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm online with John Pfeffer.
He's at fpif.org.
That's Foreign Policy in Focus, the Institute for Policy Studies there.
Kind of progressive take on the empire, but very principled, very good stuff.
And, yeah, so we're talking about the three war doctrine, and what's going to happen when the Republicans come back in.
None of this, I don't think, is a defense.
I haven't heard John say anything that's really a defense of the Democrats.
It's just sort of a warning that the Republicans, man, they're worse, because they don't even have the pretense.
They don't have a peace party within their ranks that they have to satisfy at all.
The more they posture like tough guys, the better they do.
And none of them are actual tough guys, which means that they're that much more dangerous, since it's all, you know, basically a bunch of Richard Pearls playing out their bully victim fantasies on the world and that kind of thing.
And we talked about, and you talked about before, you know, the three fronts that they're really concerned with, that they are using as their reasons, their excuses for why the empire must continue building up to contain Russia, China, and then the pivot to Africa, the invasion of Africa as well.
So I wanted to go back to the Middle East for a second here, John, because, and I think, and I'm on the record as thinking the only way to solve the war on terrorism problem is to just knock it off.
There's nothing you can do other than just quit and maybe let the European cops, you know, keep them away or something.
Abolish the U.S. government.
That's the best way to protect the American people from terrorism.
That's my position.
However, I am afraid that Patrick Coburn is absolutely right, that George Bush and Barack Obama, in effect, have conspired to create thousands of new Mujahideen from Iraq to Syria, all the way across North Africa, and even really down into Nigeria with Boko Haram, palling around with the Libyan jihadists in Mali and all of that kind of thing, and that these guys, thousands of them now, more than bin Laden could have ever dreamed that he would have in his ranks, probably more than he realized he had succeeded in pushing on the world by the time he was killed, that they will serve as the excuse for the American empire to intervene in the Middle East for a long, long time to come.
I mean, these are, by definition, these suicide bomber types are absolutely incorrigible.
There is no possible negotiation with them, and so as long as the empire wants to fight in the Middle East, they can.
Hell, right now, they're backing them in Syria.
They'll have a drone war against them in a year and a half.
It's absolutely true.
I mean, this is something that, of course, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has fundamentally understood, which is how U.S. policies have encouraged the rise of extremists, encouraged the rise of precisely those people that both administrations, at least formally, said they were against.
Now, what's interesting here, of course, is that there you might actually find common cause between Washington, Beijing, Washington, and Moscow, because, of course, both Russia and China...
And Iran, too.
And Iran have been both...
They've all been on the record that they find, of course, Sunni extremism in the case of Iran, but any extremism from the point of view of Beijing and Moscow to be antithetical to their own interests.
So here, we might actually see some breakdown in terms of...
And we saw that during the Bush administration.
We saw, actually, quite close cooperation between Washington and Beijing, and some cooperation even between Washington and Moscow.
But I'm afraid that, by and large, we're seeing a divergence in U.S. geopolitical strategizing.
Russia increasingly has been seen as somehow being the chief obstacle between the United States and Europe consolidating post-Cold War space in Eurasia.
And China, of course, is the chief obstacle in the way of the United States obtaining the kind of economic benefits that it has long wanted to reap in the Pacific realm.
Now, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is only the latest in the series of U.S. efforts to basically hitch a ride on the most successful kind of economic region of the world.
China, of course, is the challenger in this regard.
China wants to negotiate its own free trade agreement.
It's going to be implemented very shortly, a new investment pact between China, South Korea, and Japan.
This, I think, is what is at the core of the strategizing, not only of the Obama administration, but if we look ahead, what might replace the Obama administration.
And I want to stress, it's not just the Republican Party.
And even within the Republican Party, of course, you have a libertarian wing that is very uncomfortable with U.S. intervention overseas.
Within the Democratic Party, of course, you have a wing that is even more skeptical of military intervention than it would seem the Obama folks are.
But you also have a pretty hardline faction that we used to call Cold War liberalism, that basically was very strongly behind Cold War levels of spending and Cold War intervention within the Democratic Party.
And those folks still exist in some form or another.
And we might see even Hillary Clinton representing that particular wing of the Democratic Party basically running against, in some sense, what her predecessor, Obama, was standing for in terms of his doctrine, even if she was expressing in a more hardcore fashion some of the underlying or latent policies of the administration.
So I don't see it necessarily as just the Republican Party necessarily taking over and then asserting these particular views.
I could easily see the Democratic Party doing it as well.
Again, asserting itself as no longer being a weak party, as expressing kind of the legacy of Harry Truman, etc., etc., and taking what are, generally speaking, much smaller geopolitical threats in Al Qaeda.
I mean, we're not going to see Boko Haram, for instance, launching an attack on the United States.
But taking these particular non-state actors and raising them up in the same way that George W. Bush did when he asserted that Al Qaeda was essentially an expression of all the totalitarian movements of the 20th century.
In other words, taking Osama bin Laden and raising him up in status from essentially an obscure threat located at the periphery into the expression of all the 20th century evils and everything that was antithetical to the American way.
Yeah, and in fact, you know, I was talking with Eric Margulies earlier, and we were talking about the contemporary, you know, thousands of jihadists in Syria now, and I was asking him, but even from the point of view of the Israelis, isn't it pretty dangerous and chaotic to have a bunch of Al Qaeda guys running around in Syria?
Wouldn't they prefer to have Assad and the stability that comes with the Baathist government?
And Margulies said, you know, the Al Qaeda guys may be incorrigible, but they don't have a real tax base.
They're not a real state.
They don't have a real ability to wage any kind of war.
They can do pinprick attacks, but not that are any actual threat to the Western states.
And so, you know, really it's a no-brainer from their point of view that, yes, they would rather have lawless jihadists stand on their northern border than the docile and compliant Assad, who hasn't made a peep about the Golan Heights this whole time.
And so really, I guess at the end of the day, if you want to use, if jihadists are convenient to use for anti-Russian interests in Central Asia or in Syria or whatever, go ahead and redirect back toward Reagan's old Mujahideen.
Why not?
Even if they did knock down the towers.
I mean, if you're an American politician, you don't care about that, not really.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we're going to see the use of these non-state actors for very instrumentalist ways.
I mean, it's going to be a very serious situation.
I mean, I think the battle, though, will largely be around the budget question, first and foremost.
The question will be really, can we as an American people afford to lower our defenses at this particular time when we're looking at Russia, China, and Africa?
Again, granted that we're not interested in militarily intervening, but the issue will be, can we afford to lower our defense spending?
And I'm afraid they're going to push very hard for us to continue to keep those military budget numbers very high.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time.
Great to talk to you again, John.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
That's the great John Pfeffer, everybody.
FPIF.org, Foreign Policy in Focus, the Three War Doctrine.