The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative-controlled think tank. The views of its spokesmen and women do not reflect the views of the conservative realists. Tom Pauken
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On Jul 3, 2023, at 9:52 AM, Todd Pierce via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:
As a continuing need to rebut “Right-wing Peacenik lies," designed to get even more militaristic candidates than Biden elected exists, let me say, Goldwater, or Biden, couldn’t have said this better! But Trump (this written by a former administration official) made it policy, notwithstanding those who took this as “right-wing peacenik” policy, when it is in fact justification for US world-wide military operations/occupation of the critical “nodes” for maintaining “Full-Spectrum Military Global Domination":
BLUF: 3. Conservative military statecraft is based on a long and healthy tradition of supporting a strong military, which requires predictable defense budgets and the activities and capabilities required to maintain regional balances of power. This includes maintaining a forward presence abroad of sufficient scale and capability to deter conflict. These broad objectives do not mean that military power is a tool of first resort—rather, they represent an understanding that military power is a necessary foundation for keeping the peace and undergirding other forms of U.S. influence and statecraft.
Here is a more “Realistic” (honest) explanation of a Trumpite/DeSantisite foreign policy, and of the duplicity of the so-called “Restrainers,” when they advocate the “New Right’s” foreign policy as in accordance with Trumpism. It’s simply repackaging of the "Original New Right’s,” now hailed as “Traditional Conservatives,” of the perpetual-war fomenting National Review magazines “Cognitive Warfare operation” as conducted by disaffected CIA officers of the 1950s who demanded an even more aggressive U.S. foreign policy than even the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower were waging. With the PsyWar objective of “cognitive colonization” of the American people’s “consciousness,” our “minds,” as an earlier generation of Cognitive War operators were limited to before the possibilities of “digital colonization” became available as Trumpism has been successful at. The edited Foreign Policy article/excerpt below is a good example of the duplicity of those selling the “Trump ending the endless wars” lie,” and of “Double-speak” used by the New Right to peddle that lie, with this extract from an article I shared the other day a good summary of how that works:
"Influence or expansion efforts do not arise in a vacuum, but are deliberate and clearly directed processes, and not spontaneous and self-regulating. Operations occur through deep knowledge of the mental space of certain target groups and societies, and an understanding of how social and mental vulnerabilities.7 Each of its components necessarily has its own customer, developer, and organizer. . . . Cognitive operations are
aimed at managing the worldviews, interests, and values of people, unlike the seizure and colonization of a territory or economy of the state."
The bio of the article’s author: Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former U.S. deputy national security advisor for strategy during the Trump administration. She began her career as a civil servant at the Defense Department, where she worked on issues related to the Soviet Union and was the first country director for Ukraine.
The article exemplifies a “Cognitive Campaign” so well that I edited it as New Right cognitive campaign propaganda in case children or other gullible people should see it, and not be able to interpret the double-speak of it. But here it is, in part, with a more defining title:
Conservative U.S. Statecraft for the 21st Century Oligarchs
Republicans may disagree on policy, but their principles will help the United States navigate a fragmenting world.
An American flag frames Marines and Navy sailors from the USS Bataan.
An American flag frames U.S. Marines and Navy sailors on the USS Bataan during their arrival to New York on May 25. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
1. Conservatives, of course, are not all in agreement. There is no “model conservative,” as the historian Russell Kirk put it, but there is a distinctly conservative way of “looking at the civil social order.” This extends to the realm of foreign policy, where conservative principles provide a framework to assess challenges and opportunities and make choices that are biased toward liberty.
2. Authoritarian states such as China are actively working to undermine U.S. interests. While the United States no longer enjoys the same preponderance of power as in the past, its strengths remain considerable. Used wisely, this strength can influence geopolitical developments in ways that favor U.S. interests.
Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., after a news conference on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Rep. Victoria Spartz and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy leave a news conference where Spartz, a Ukrainian-born American, spoke out against the Russian invasion, in Washington on March 1. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
A conservative national security strategy would embody the principles outlined to build a policy architecture along four lines of statecraft: diplomatic, economic, military, and technological.
1. Conservative diplomatic statecraft should work to catalyze positive political alignments around the world. This does not mean leading with military power or imposing U.S. values. It means working with local actors who, in turn, create the foundations for these alignments. The more friends and allies the United States has, the better. This contributes to growing a sphere of stability, diminishes the resources and choices available to rivals, and sustains an international order that helps preserve U.S. power.
Some conservative isolationists reflexively equate U.S. engagement abroad with forever wars that promote democracy. This view presumes that the United States’ default position is to impose its values on others and ignores the fact that millions around the world aspire to live better lives.
There is no reason the United States should not offer support to those who aspire to freedom and prosperity—so long as it does not harm U.S. strategic interests. Support for grassroots movements seeking liberty is neither cultural aggression nor militarism. At the same time, there will be many instances when U.S. strategic interests require temporary cooperation with regimes that are less supportive of freedom than Americans might like.
Sovereignty is worth protecting, particularly against infringement by global multilateral institutions. Conservatives rightly approach international organizations with a healthy dose of skepticism: Many international institutions have had a decidedly mixed record of dealing with critical global problems, from migration to climate change to COVID-19. Although the United States should still act with like-minded countries to address shared challenges, it should not bestow on unaccountable organizations what is within the proper authority of elected governments.
Regional balances of power that favor the United States and its allies and partners are the building blocks of maintaining a global balance that is favorable to U.S. interests and values. In this new era of deglobalization, region-specific policies will be critical to U.S. success, rather than global, one-size-fits-all policies.
Sustaining regional balances in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East will require cooperation with allies and partners—and their active participation. Every president since Ronald Reagan has consistently called upon our allies to do more. Conservatives must make clear that allies and partners need to devote resources to their own defense and should advocate the deployment of military power only if local actors are invested as well. Allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and Germany need to increase their commitments to their own defense. It is the resolve of local actors that matter.
Not being beholden to multinational organizations for the sake of it, conservatives can focus on building coalitions that solve problems more quickly—not least because the solutions to many problems, such as carbon emissions, must begin at the local and regional levels.
2. Conservative economic statecraft should grow the United States’ advantages, avoid empowering its adversaries, and create a sphere of prosperity for like-minded countries. Keeping its place at the frontier of innovation requires the United States not only to preserve the free-market system at home, but also to structure international economic policy to cultivate U.S. advantages.
Abroad, the United States should pursue policies that expand the freedom of Americans to participate in the international marketplace. To this end, conservatives should catalyze the growth of a sphere of prosperity encompassing the United States and its allies and partners.
After the Cold War, U.S. policymakers pressed for global economic openness, exemplified by the World Trade Organization. With the rise of revisionist powers such as China and Russia, this approach must now give way to developing an exclusive sphere for economic engagement among the countries of the free world, centered on the industrial democracies. Others would be encouraged to adopt the values and institutions that would qualify them for membership.
3. Conservative military statecraft is based on a long and healthy tradition of supporting a strong military, which requires predictable defense budgets and the activities and capabilities required to maintain regional balances of power. This includes maintaining a forward presence abroad of sufficient scale and capability to deter conflict. These broad objectives do not mean that military power is a tool of first resort—rather, they represent an understanding that military power is a necessary foundation for keeping the peace and undergirding other forms of U.S. influence and statecraft.
Predictable defense budgets are especially important as inflation soars. The 2023 increase of roughly 4 percent is below inflation, which translates into a significant budget cut in real terms. This, in turn, means reduced readiness and less room to procure equipment—something the administration has neglected for two consecutive budget cycles.
Some conservatives (and liberals) allege that there is a trade-off between spending on Americans at home and on defense. This is a strawman. There is no correlation between a reduced U.S. role in the world and, for example, better schools, health care, or infrastructure. The weakness of domestic institutions is typically not about money. Conservatives know that these problems are due to flawed policy choices, stultifying regulations, and bureaucracies that stifle innovation and penalize risk-taking. The United States can both deter external threats and improve its citizens’ quality of life.
Conservative policymakers should be critics when needed and pressure the Defense Department to focus on actual defense needs—not the many unrelated items that creep into the National Defense Authorization Act each year. White House priorities on climate change—including forcing the military services to develop utopian schemes to operate with renewable energy—distract from military priorities and force trade-offs in mission-critical programs like equipment procurement and training. The role of the military is not to fight climate change but to deter and defeat enemies.
Conservatives must also stand behind a military that is apolitical and operates apart from partisan culture wars, focusing on recruiting the men and women who want to serve the country and the U.S. Constitution.
Conservatives, with their focus on free enterprise, must also demand results when it comes to the Defense Department’s perpetually sclerotic relationship with defense companies tasked with providing our military with the innovations it needs.
A central component of a U.S. strategy that seeks to maintain regional balance is the forward deployment of the U.S. military. Capable forward-deployed forces provide the United States with the ability to act quickly if necessary and maintain credible deterrence. It is much harder—and perhaps impossible in some cases—to reenter a theater once the U.S. military has departed. The logistics of shifting significant combat power takes months, and the anti-access/area denial challenges facing U.S. forces around the world mean that reentering a theater once a crisis is underway has become ever harder.
Some of the most vociferous debates among conservatives relate to the U.S. presence abroad. One camp—sometimes called isolationists, or, in more fashionable language, restrainers—calls for retrenchment. Representatives of this group have argued that the U.S. military’s forward presence represents a vision of the United States “contriving” to impose progressive values “to the ends of the earth.” Their rationale is that the United States is overextended in the world and that a U.S. presence abroad is a form of “cultural arrogance.” (TP-an argument some make, while doing all they can to promote the “Conservative foreign policy" described here, spelled “Republican.")
This view of international relations is deeply flawed. Events around the world are not merely a reaction to the United States. China’s determination to expand globally and displace the United States is not a response to Washington but a function of Beijing’s own strategic goals. Iran’s regional aspirations flow directly from the messianic objectives of its ayatollahs. Russia is engaged in a neo-imperial project that denies the existence of sovereign nations such as Ukraine. This is not a response to an imaginary U.S. overextension but stems from a particular self-conception of Russia and its imperial elite. (TP-now this is the real Bannon/Trump/DeSantis/New Right foreign policy starting point, explaining why they demand such enormous military funding increases, so “necessary” to "deter the world,” and incidentally, causing the Democrats to replicate much of this, as Biden has done so well, though never quite meeting Republican “standards,” being inherently “weak” as a Democrat in right-wing eyes, and not fully onboard with the US Right’s alliance with the Israeli “Right.” (Euphemism for fascism.)
Moreover, opposition to a forward presence discounts the fundamental military purpose of such deployments: to deter conflict. Deterrence is the primary means of preventing war, and it cannot be done with a “just in time” military.
. . . .
More than 30 years ago, Samuel Huntington wrote that “[d]eclinism is a theory that has to be believed to be invalidated.” In other words: The United States needs to be serious about facing its problems. Conservatives are in a good position to do so because they understand how the world works and have a fundamental confidence in the United States’ founding principles. That’s a good position from which to navigate the turbulence we face.
STOP
Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former U.S. deputy national security advisor for strategy during the Trump administration. She began her career as a civil servant at the Defense Department, where she worked on issues related to the Soviet Union and was the first country director for Ukraine.
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