From Kennan to Trotsky How the United States became a superpower of the left
By
Russia and China today both enjoy the same grand-strategic advantage
against the United States that the United States enjoyed through the 44
years of the Cold War.
The Soviet Union was then the superpower of the left, as the left had
been globally understood since the French Revolution. It was the state
committed to the promotion of revolutionary change across the world.
The United States, by contrast, was the superpower of the right. It
was committed to the maintenance of stability and continuity in
government systems around the world.
The United States won the Cold War. The craving for stability, peace,
and continuity among governments and populations alike proved
infinitely stronger than the fleeting flashes of revolutionary fervor.
The Soviet Union eventually became physically exhausted and globally
isolated by its ideological commitment to revolutionary change.
Today, however, the roles of the two great powers have been reversed.
Since the advent of Madeleine Albright as secretary of state in 1997,
the United States has become increasingly ideologically committed to the
spreading of “instant powdered democracy” in every nation of the world,
as defined and approved by the United States. Russia and China have
become the main “conservative” or “right-wing” powers committed to
preserving the status quo.
Ironically, the U.S. commitment to continual revolution around the
world is a revival of the discredited concepts of Leon Trotsky. Josef
Stalin abandoned Trotsky’s ideas in the 1920s when he took power in the
Soviet Union. This gave him the ideological flexibility to create the
Grand Alliance with the United States and the British Empire that won
World War II—the Great Patriotic War.
But Nikita Khrushchev revived Trotsky’s disastrous concept: he and
his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, drained their superpower dry by pouring
resources into promoting revolution throughout the developing world,
from 1954 in Egypt to Afghanistan in 1979-87. This led to the collapse
of the Soviet system. It also prompted governments around the world to
seek protection from efforts to fan the flames of revolution within them
by turning to the United States for security on U.S. terms.
Today, it is the United States under presidents of both parties that
has embraced the Trotskyite delusion. The bipartisan policy of the
United States has become Permanent Revolution until Total and Perfect
Democracy is finally achieved. This can only end the way it ended for
Maximilien Robespierre in the French Revolution and for Trotsky in the
Bolshevik one.
It is fitting that so many of the older generation of American
neoconservatives started life as communist enthusiasts in the 1930s and
’40s. For today’s neocons are really neo-Trotskyites promoting the old,
doomed enthusiasms under a new label.
By contrast, Russia and China are led by pragmatic governments guided
by the concepts of profit and self-interest. They support and want to
do business with existing governments and governing systems around the
world. This has made them the 21st century’s major global powers of the
right.
This is the strategic and psychological force behind China’s immense
success in displacing the United States and the European Union in
Africa. Chinese investment and aid comes free from the destabilizing,
potentially revolutionary ideological strings that undermine existing
systems of government throughout the region.
The governments of China and Russia hate and fear revolution and see
the endless ideological promotion of democracy American-style in small
countries around them and in their own homelands as planting the seeds
of chaos and disintegration.
Democracy
works admirably in societies where it is allowed to develop
organically. But when other governments try to accelerate its growth
artificially or hasten its triumph from outside, especially when they
resort to military force to do so, the result is almost always a fierce
reaction against the forces of democracy. This reaction often generates
extreme fascist, repressive, and intolerant forces. And these forces
usually win and take power. Then they impose themselves on the societies
in question, delaying any real democratic development for decades or
generations.
The efforts of the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon to export
liberty, equality, and brotherhood across Europe by fire and sword
instead ensured the survival of the old traditional empires for another
120 years. The efforts of Lenin and Trotsky to export socialism and
communism by similar means were even more catastrophic. The backlash
against them in Germany propelled Adolf Hitler to power.
It is not in America’s interests to follow in those footsteps—to put it mildly.
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