US Exceptionalism And White Supremacy

By: Andrew_McKillop

Obama Fumbles and the World Burns
An excellent summary and analysis of why the Obama White House has been overwhelmed by what we can call “legacy policy”, and has become the most paranoid US administration in decades – far surpassing rven Georfe W Bush – is given by professor Joel Migdal in his latest book (' Shifting Sands: The United States in the Middle East ). Migdal traces the basic problem to US exceptionalism – the cornerstone of foreign policy since Roosevelt and Truman – being totally unsuited to a “multipolar world” in which the US has to engage with and against a shifting set of allies and enemies on constantly changing issues, where today's friend is tomorrow's rival and vice versa. Like others (including Kissinger and Brzezinski!) he divides the post-1945 world into the period ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90, and what happened after a 10-year “reflexion and incubation period” ending in 2001.

George W. Bush launched the war on terror. To be sure, during the Clinton years there had been post-Soviet “containment; or “pushing back” of an already defeated Russia through actively recruiting new east European Nato members, but this fitted the European ally's own expansion agenda or Drang nach Osten. Leading Eurocrats and planners even imagined that Mongolia, as well as Morocco and Mauretania could become “associated nations” of the Union. Why not add Afghanistan, Ukraine, Belarus and the odd breakaway republic from the Russian Federation?  As is known to at least some, the EU flag has 12 stars (not 28) because each star represents one of the 12 Apostles.                 

On repeated occasions Putin's Russia has requested to join the EU. It even made overtures aiming at Nato membership. Although denied a place in the EU, Turkey was allowed to join Nato, but as Migdal does not say, denial of Russian membership in the EU and Nato was due to legacy-politics, whilst Turkey's exclusion from the EU was mainly due to legacy racism. The “core EU”, if it exists, is theoretically a club reserved for white majority Christian-heritage nations with economies based on crony capitalism, exactly like the USA.

During the cold war, European and US geopolitical interests could be said to have been “on the same page” but in the post-1989 multipolar world even US-European relations can be strained. This was shown by difficulties raising European support for the 2003 Iraq war, and subsequent colonial-flavored military adventures including the 2011 Libyan campaign to unseat and kill Muammar Gaddafi – opening the door for Islamic terror in a ruined and destroyed nation, much closer to Europe than the USA. Raising EU support for “regime change war” in Syrian has also proven difficult, and at the level of the UN Security Council will be rigorously opposed by Russia - and by China. US-led sanctions against Iran have encountered similar problems, in this case being entirely rejected by India and China, for reasons which include very deep-seated suspicion of what the USA's “real agenda” might be.

Global Exceptionalism and the Middle East
Migdal points out that long gone are the days when the US could put its “boots on the ground” wherever and whenever it wanted. He identifies the key period in which this doctrine or belief became sacrosanct in Washington. In the few years between the Feb 14, 1945 USS Quincy meeting of Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia's King Al-Saud, the founding of Israel with Soviet agreement, and the start of the Cold War, the cult of US exceptionalism emerged – with a “special interest” in the Middle East.

There was supposedly no alternative, somewhat like the Bourbon “learn nothing-forget nothing” policy. The cold war “froze the dynamic” of mostly imaginary Soviet expansionism in Europe, but triggered a long and bloody series of so-called brushfire and local wars almost worldwide. The Korean war was the first which opposed the US against China, as much as “global communism”, and was a war in which the US lost more troops killed in action than in all European theatres through 1941-45. This war ended in stalemate, with no total victory for the US and its local proxy. The Vietnam war, which through its French phase started in 1948, and for the USA in 1955 lasted another 20 years before the total defeat and retreat of the US in its attempt to impose a white-dominated political agenda in a yellow-colored nation. The USA's defeat was another clear wake up call for US expansionists whenever they probe too closely to China, as is shown in the negative by their very low level, if repeated attempts to use the “Tibet card” to threaten China. This can be compared with Obama's newly revived expansionists and their attitude to Russia using the Ukraine card.

Today, the Obama administration could scenarize the results of another war with China using a thinly-veiled proxy or proxies, but prefers to recycle cold war-era nostalgic dreams of a standoff with white and Christian-heritage Russia. This is a fatal error of the US, and its not-numerous like-minded European allies which since 2001, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Syria have not only underestimated the changing types and meanings of war, but have also completely ignored the reality of globalization and a multipolar world. Obama fumbles and the world burns.

Racist Overreach
The Middle East has been the burning focus of this double defect. In this region, where Arab Islam and Iranian Islam have no need for massive additional quantities of political ill-will and interference to combat one another – proven by Persian-Arab rivalry dating from well before the start of the Islamic religion more than 1400 years ago – the Obama administration has made every imaginable error. Joel Migdal provides several examples, including the strange somnambulistic reaction and response to ISIS or ISIL, passing from extreme complacency and disinterest, to outright panic when the patient – Barack Obama – woke from his nostalgic slumbers to find it was not just a bad dream. And overreacted.

White supremacist racism, which Obama could call the “Ferguson complex” is in no way new and can be devastating. Interviewed on Aljazeera UK television in November, some real Aryans were asked their opinion about the German Nazi theory or doctrine of “Aryan superiority”.  Real or genuine Aryans are still to be found in isolated hilly mountainous regions of Iran, towards the Caspian Sea. Highly independent and self-sufficient pastoralists aand small farmers they explain that among their small communities they have Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims and polytheists and certainly do not cut each others throats at the slightest excuse. A surprising number of them have heard about Germany and its Nazism, but a villager headman interviewed by Aljazeera's reporter said that Adolf Hitler's ravings were above all “trivial and ridiculous”. He added: “What did faraway Germany ever have to do with Aryans? We are the Aryans!”

In Germany however, Hitler's white supremacist racism was, for a while, a vote-winner among the middle classes as well as the working classes. It provided a nicely-simplified, idiot-friendly and ridiculous worldview as well suited to the Age of Twitter as the 1930s – possibly even more so. The cult of American exceptionalism was likewise highly suited to the mass idiocy of a supposedly educated, mostly white audience of mostly-European immigrants to the “empty continent” - or emptied subcontinent of the USA wherever it was necessary to get rid of its indigenous peoples. Hitler's attempted genocide of the Jews and Slavs was a failure, but the genocidal extermination of complete “tribes” or nations of American indigenous peoples is a known and documented historical fact.

Likewise, the white US elites, freshly processed and graduated from Harvard or Yale, can imagine they have a cleaned-up version of Ku Klux Klan “ideology” to exercize total American dominance or “moral authority” in the 21st century – but they are woefully wrong! The multipolar world notably includes China and India, both of them non-white and non-western, and both of them with a history of very recent European colonialist dominance and US exploitation, when they were in a position of weakness. US strategists must learn that racism stokes and provokes counter-racism, no less so than in the Middle East.

Historically speaking the European Crusades, which “classically” started in 1095 but had several outrunners dating to the start of the 11th century, could be called in part white racist rampages, provoking Arab racist backlash including the use of Islam as an anti-white ideology. European colonization of the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia most certainly included and utilised white supremacist notions and the racist interpretation of Christianity. Backlash and blowback in the form of anti-white racism should be no surprise at all.

As Newtonian physics states, action and reaction are equal and opposite, therefore the Obama administration, and its European allies, cannot feign surprise that - for example in the Middle East - foreign policy influenced by white racism has not provoked Arab nationalism, but Arab racism which will be much harder to deal with than – for example – Russia's ruffled nationalism. The so-called “phenomenon” of ISIS or ISIL is riddled with Arab racism thinly disguised as the “defence of Islam”. On the wider global scale also, the legacy of white western supremacist thinking and action will make any gloves-off tussles with ICBM and nuclear-owning China or India very, very dangerous because these will be short-fuze crises, nothing like the useless standoff with Putin's Russia over Ukraine. Anti-white racism was pre-installed by the “culture contact” past, both pre-1945 and post-1945, and hard-wired into the near future. Racism, very simply, cuts both ways and the Obama administration would need to be especially stupid to not take account of that.

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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