Foreign Policy And Chaos Theory

By: Andrew_McKillop

Western Primacy in a Multipolar World
This is a nice theory but neither of its two parts exists. John Kerry, for example heavily uses “multipolar world” as his best excuse for the USA's powerlessness because, he says, the multipolar world is so complex and the different parties all disagree. Two absentees from this theoretical world are Russia and China, and India is drifting away, also. The outright debacle of US (and western) foreign policy now playing out in Iraq underlines there is no such thing as western primacy.

ISIS has delivered US foreign policy the largest poke in its stomach for a long time – that is since earlier this year and the debacle over Syrian regime change motivated or excused by the claimed use of chemical weapons by Bashr el-Assad. In any case, ISIS did not need western help to extend its control over a large part of Syria and use it as a springboard to attack Iraq.The unreal standoff with Russia over the Ukraine lurches onward, threatening nuclear war with the second-biggest nuclear weapons power of the planet, and dealing the fragile European economy another body blow, through Russian counter-sanctions. This is how the USA of Obama helps its “allies and friends”?

According to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes ('The Three Trillion Dollar War') the enduring costs to the USA of the Bush-and-Obama war in Iraq will be massive, in fact so large that if all Iraqi oil production was exclusively given, not sold, to the USA perhaps 20 years or more would be needed to get anywhere near break-even for the US. This is American primacy in the now shrunken “international community” segment or drifted-off appendage to the supposed “multipolar world”?.

Nice Theories
One clear danger arising from the fog of what passes for “western foreign policy” today is that this non-policy constantly twists and turns, or writhes like a beheaded snake between a range of outdated and invalidated theories. We can give an example. One of Vladimir Putin's senior strategic advisors, Sergei Glazyev says that he believes American encirclement of Russia is only a prelude to American economic, political and then military attack on China. With Russia out of the way, so to speak, China will be easier to weaken and destroy.

To be sure Glazyev cites America's war against Islam, called “war on terror” as a supporting strand to his main argument. The already 13-year-long American war against Islam enables and justifies the US military presence in wide swaths of west Asia and Eurasia. Russia gets in the way, so Russia has got to go. Many commentators in Europe but not many in the USA have remarked Hillary Clinton's almost joyous use of her electoral one-liner “Putin is another Adolf Hitler”, which nicely underlines the extreme aggressivity of the USA's political elite today.

The simplest reason is paranoia and this begets more paranoia. Glazyev says that Russia won't be able to go it alone and will urgently have to find partners in an anti-war coalition facing the USA. He gave other planks of this international paranoia theory – including the USA's evident paranoia - but he avoided saying that US leadership or statesmanship is now a hollowed-out term.

Call it post-chaos leadership. Chaos theory as we all know says that if a parrot or butterfly falls off a tree in Amazonia this can start World War III or cause a surprise recovery of the economy. Unexpected causes can start a ramifying process of ever-growing change.

American aggression is by paranoia and default. The abandonment of leadership and the dereliction of government are two major strands of deconstructing western society today. Nobody has to say this deconstruction was willed or planned – that is the meat of the booming conspiracy theory industry. 

However the net result is an imaginary Grand Conspiracy. With no surprise, international relations and foreign affairs now surf in the void, using Plot Theory as the default choice for “explaining everything”. For example and at present we have Putin's Plot to steal Ukraine away from the west, the naughty boy, but immediately after him it will be the Chinese Plot which terrorises Middle America. China might withold Donald Duck flashlight supplies to Wal-Mart, or something dastardly like that.

This is the “high intellectual content” of  foreign affairs today – but down on the ground, in the real world, ragtag armies of killers like ISIS can lay waste to entire countries. Hiding all this in fogs of conspiracy suits the new and flat muppet world like burgers suit muppet eating habits.

Does Obama Believe?
If we were childish enough to believe what Obama says, we would believe the American war in Iraq is all over now and only “extended peacekeeping operations” are needed. This is a total travesty of the real situation. Obama flatly refuses to put “US boots on the ground” so the peacekeeping will have to be aerial. Obama, quickly joined by France's president Hollande says that the Humpty Dumpty of Iraq can be put back together again. They do not explain how.

We can ask questions but will not answers. Chaos theory says Obama and his “allies and partners” stumble from crisis to crisis with no road map at all except a virtual New Imperial American road map, of which Hillary Clinton has the details, if they exist. This is the flipside of reality, a sort of reverse-video image of the world where up is down, black is white and defeat is victory. The ISIS takeover of a half of Iraq is a perfect example!

To be sure Obama, even if he's suicidal with his domestic opinion poll ratings will not be admitting this. Whatever we could or might say about the putative “New Imperial American dream” is its crisis-prone nature – but we are obliged to add that perhaps it doesn't exist.

This dream only stumbles from crisis to crisis and its supposed “high level strategic goal” of wiping out the Chinese after the Russians is pure madness.

Somebody has to explain all this to the consumer/voter middle classes, and Hillary Clinton has failed. What we find is that the conspiracy theorists, now in charge of what passes for “foreign policy”, all believe in the New Imperial dream, simply because its so fantastically unreal. Their support theory is that showing “the masses” enough gore-war images will lead them to slaver for more, just like Pavlov's dogs. They have a sadistic streak, we are told, because they are white supremacist racists when they are not straight nihilists or simply Jehova's End-Times believers.

Pursuing Policy at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party
So first we have to take out Putin and then the Chinese. The big problem, here, is that China is on a fast track away from the supposed “multipolar world” that we supposedly have. China has rapidly become distant and less-known to the west, due to a host of different factors. India has also started growling about what its Bank of India chief openly calls western sabotage of the global economy.

For the Chinese elite, national identity and unity are critical life supports for their own continued existence, and they will quickly snap that China suffered 70 years of Western imperialism and wealth-sucking from about 1870 to 1940. They know exactly who is to blame. They don't respect White Muppets or their so-called “public opinion”.They will not waste time on games and ruses like the game of economic sanctions, before kicking back hard at what the Chinese press and media increasingly says, not hints, is a Western consumer world with leaderships who have gone lobo.

The Chinese really don't have time for the new game of “western foreign policy”.

For sure the heroic special forces of the west can foment and probably arm the Uyghur Muslim revolt in western China, with their so-respectable friends in Saudi Arabia, and gloat over civil strife and mass killings in Chinese cities. This however is a long way from crippling China before invading it! Divide China perhaps – but certainly not rule it.

As for Iraq in particular and the Middle East in general it is not hard to find conspiracy theorists chirping that even the ISIS or 'Deach' movement is under western control. If ISIS has not yet expanded into Lebanon (which it's doing), this is because it was told to wait by The Minders. Although the dearly departed Osama Bin Laden has disappeared from his Abbottabad niche – and there is no longer any reason for the American war in Afghanistan - the all-knowing “military-industrial complex” keeps it ticking over a little longer until the Islamic insurrection across the border in China is fully mature. Its all planned! For us the muppets!

So everything is under control, and do you want sugar in your tea?

Reality Denial is Schizophrenia
After flirting with chaos so long you end up marrying it, you inevitably get mass schizophrenia. This disease was fully-defined about 100 years ago and is mostly self-willed, although it can be due to biomedical causes like certain kinds of medication. It is not yet formally linked with a diet of Twinkies and McDonalds washed down with Coca Lite and 24/7 news-and-views shows, but that could come.

Reality can be taken or left, and mass schizophrenia rejects it. There is no past, and as Mrs Thatcher told us an awful long time ago, there is No Future. In her case and for good measure she added that Society Doesn't Exist. There will henceforth only be muppets running round like witless lemmings listening to soundbytes from Hillary Clinton. Paradise on Earth!

This is not going to get us anywhere – or as Obama is finding out every day, it gets us nowhere, fast.  Our friends in the conspiracy theory industry will chime that “the minders did it” to the so-called masses, but the net result is these “masses” are walled-up in a wonderland of imagination. Bounded only by their madness. 

There are no road maps. Charting a road map hat does not exist is as impossible as navigating the flaky and shaky Israel-Palestine road map “to peace”.Obama and his “friends and partners” will have to fumble along, flirting with chaos, until chaos is so real it is easy to prove. Neither Hitler nor Stalin ate Twinkies, used Internet or were Americans, we can note, but they did really bad things. In their madness they bought any conspiracy theory which was going, and thrived on them. They paid creative persons to invent conspiracies for them on an industrial basis.

There is no problem charting this road map to No Future which unfortunately is exactly where so-called “western foreign policy” resides today. RIP.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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