Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Conditions
They are compatible if Containment Doctrine is breached or Military Doctrine is degraded. Failing either of those, Containment Doctrine will eviscerate Military Doctrine or Military Doctrine will eliminate Containment Doctrine.
Pressed together on equal footing, Containment Doctrine and Military Doctrine are incompatible. They repel one another.
Because Containment Doctrine is a civilian invention and Military Doctrine is a military [and fundamentally necessary human] invention, and because in the USA civilian authority supersedes military authority, by virtue of the Constitution, when Containment Doctrine and Military Doctrine are pressed together, Containment Doctrine eviscerates Military Doctrine. Containment Doctrine subverts USA strength and happiness.
Comparisons
Containment Doctrine drives toward perpetual conflict. Its practice is continuous. Military Doctrine drives toward unconditional surrender. Its practice is episodic.
Containment Doctrine can be applied aggressively (ever compressing the area inside the fence, raising its temperature) or quiescently (holding the fence in place no matter events inside and across it, which also raises temperature, inside and outside the fence). Military Doctrine can be applied only aggressively, to a single strategic purpose, through specific mission executions, and only when summoned. The ordinary military posture is vigilant quiescence and continuous training.
Containment Doctrine is complex. Its application is continuously burdensome. Military Doctrine is simple. Its application is episodically burdensome.
Containment Doctrine is optional. Military Doctrine is imperative.
Description: Containment Doctrine
Containment Doctrine is a modern invention having no basis in fundamental necessity, i.e., self-support. It does base in a common negative emotion, fear, and a common response to it, appease and stand off/stand down, as well as a common impulse, laziness.
Containment Doctrine has no fundamentals beyond the superficials of fear and laziness. When these disappear, so does Containment Doctrine. Containment Doctrine lacks aseity. It lacks unconditional, independent ontological status, because it lacks fundamentals. Fear depends on strength and laziness on happiness. Strength and happiness belong to essential being, the really real, esse ipsum. They are natural and original. Fear and laziness belong to existential being, the seemingly real, esse existo. They are unnatural and unoriginal. They depend on what is natural and original.
Containment Doctrine has only a negative goal: self-defense. Effort has been made to conceive and practice Containment Doctrine with a positive goal (e.g., COIN Doctrine), but that only works where Military Doctrine has already defined the battlespace in its own terms (Occupied Japan, Occupied Western Europe, OIF pre-2009). Where Containment Doctrine trumps Military Doctrine, the results are negative: a stand-off (Iron Curtain, Korea, Balkans) or a rout (English, Russian and American Afghanistan, French and American Vietnam, Middle East and North Africa post-2008).
Description: Military Doctrine
Military Doctrine is an ancient wisdom that varies not in its fundamentals. Its origin is in the origin of life and creature-hood. In applications of the fundamentals of Military Doctrine, military practice varies by time and clime. Its fundamentals never change.
Military Doctrine bases in the inner necessity of self-support. For the self to live, the self must be supported, its strength and happiness unrestrained. Military Doctrine helps create conditions in which the self can fulfill its inner necessity. Military Doctrine does not guarantee that fulfillment. Military Doctrine is essential to existence. It has aseity. It is natural and original.
Military Doctrine has only a positive goal: self-support. The self has to support itself, or not. Military Doctrine makes and keeps conditions in which the self can do that. It clears away obstacles to self-support. It defeats forces arrayed against self-support. It takes the self’s unrestrained strength and happiness as its purpose in being and ultimate mission objective.
What Military Doctrine aims for respecting the self it aims for respecting the group, to include a nation and a group of nations.
With respect to the inner necessity of self-support, no scale of human aggregation exceeds that of human selfhood. A self, a group, a nation and a group of nations embody equal requirements for self-support. An individual is not “more important” than an aggregate. An aggregate is not “more important” than an individual. The claim of individual and aggregate to potentiality and actuality of self-support is equal.
The Contrast
Expansion Doctrine is the contrast to Containment Doctrine. It is compatible with Military Doctrine and does not mutually repel with it. Expansion Doctrine is natural and original. It expresses human nature and the goal of history. Expansion Doctrine is the policy component of the fundamental necessity and therefore positive goal of self-support.
Nature expands, it does not contain or contract, at least not sustainably or endurably. This fact is the basis of Expansion Doctrine and the reason it is prefered to Containment Doctrine.
Inorganic matter transcends itself to create organic matter. Organic matter transcends itself to create psyche, the first trans-material dimension of life. Psyche transcends itself to create spirit, the first trans-material and trans-psychic dimension of life. Spirit transcends itself to create history, the first trans-material, trans-psychic and trans-spiritual dimension of life.
Persons, groups, nations and groups of nations are the actors in the spiritual and historical dimensions of life. Presumably history too expands towards that which is above and beyond it. “Eternal Life” is the religious answer to the question, “What is that?”. Eternal life is not perpetual existence in time. It is emergence in God beyond time, space, substance and causation.
To be realistic, a nation’s foreign and domestic policy aligns with nature’s predisposition to expand. Nature is an abundance-creating system. Even death (entropy) is a door to life (matter).
There is pretense afoot to the effect that “we now know” how to control large-scale systems, up to and including nations, groups of nations and weather. Those words, “we now know,” elicit a cringe, no doubt even in those uttering them. “We” do not “know” how to control large-scale systems. Man-made small-scale systems slip out of control. Nature-made ones are never in man’s control. Use and affect, yes, but never control.
Containment Doctrine is a control doctrine. “We” did not “know” how to do it and “we” do not control the objects of the doctrine’s implementations. Furthermore, Containment Doctrine is counter-productive and self-defeating and may be, after all, not even for the purpose assumed of it. Penning an enemy compresses him, making him stronger. And it protects him from enemies external and internal. No strategic fence has kept an enemy at bay, behind the fence, and every one has strengthened its objects and protected them(1).
Expansion Doctrine is a dispersal doctrine. It contemplates crowd-sourcing operations and management – but not control, which is beyond human ken – of large-scale man-made systems. Remove obstacles to out expansion of multi-modal self-directed activity. From that dialectical interaction will emerge self-created harmony sufficient to guarantee freedom. “War is the father of all things.”(2) (And do not “save” losers from the consequences of their actions.)
Again, nature-made systems are not susceptible to human control. Use and affect, yes, but never control.
Peace?
Expansion Doctrine does not seek peace. Peace can be a result, temporarily, of dialectics, but even when it is, it lodges in the minds of only a few people, not in the dialectics themselves. In the mind, not in the world.
Peace is an internal mental condition, the mind being at rest, not leaping about like a monkey. When the mind is at rest, the world is at peace. With respect to itself, the world is constant conflict.
Peace is not a set of conditions in the interactions of life. Those are never at rest. They are always in conflict. Defeat is a prelude to victory. Victory is a prelude to defeat. Anyone who “works for world peace” is insane. They may be able to quieten their own mind, temporarily. They cannot quieten another’s. Dialectics never stop, not even in death. A “peace treaty” is one remark in a dialogue.
Life is continuous dialectics, continuous conflict. Even asleep you fight with your bed and covers – and the alarm clock.
The goal of war is not peace, it is defeat and destruction of an attacker’s will and ability to attack.
A nation cannot stay out of conflict or avoid it. It only can prevail in a conflict or succumb to it. It never ends.
Expansion Doctrine seeks unimpeded, multi-modal, self-directed interactions between persons, groups, nations and groups of nations. Today, this means a whole lot of un-poking one’s nose from inside other people’s affairs. You cannot control it anyway, why make yourself hated into the bargain?
If someone is harming you, remove their ability to do that. Do it as quickly as possible with the least destruction to all concerned. Do not try to control them. You cannot, and penning them in concentrates them, strengthening them. Destroy their war-making ability, especially their will to fight. Never seek peace. A forlorn hope. Seek termination of malicious intent as well as action, starting with yourself, so that self-organized expansion by all can flourish.
Law of Expansion
Life is a message, expansion is its life. The message of life is expansion. Avoid contraction, it is deadly. The Law of Expansion is the depth of every law of every kind. The ground of expansion is freedom.
Freedom is the core question of existence, the central issue in every thought, every discussion, every action. Life runs over and beyond any effort to deny it freedom to expand. Life’s nature is to expand. Life is expansion. It does not allow obstruction of its nature.
The summit of Everest is marine limestone.
How Expansion Works
Persons, groups and nations demand, from their inherent nature, freedom to expand, and in three ways:
Self-creation.
Self-integration.
Self-transcendence.
Expansion Doctrine supports the freedom of these three functions of self-support for all persons, groups and nations everywhere in all times and climes. It does so by removing obstacles to their practice. While its goal is positive – cultivate self-support – the method of Expansion Doctrine is negative: remove obstacles to the three functions of self-support – self-creation, self-integration and self-transcendence – by persons, groups and nations.
Expansion Doctrine is the opposite of anarchism, which promotes flight from facts, and also of totalitarianism, which promotes central planning by a cabal of something-or-others.
Expansion Doctrine accepts the polarity of autonomy and hegemony (individual and group, subject and object, self and world) and relies upon natural dialectical interaction between its poles to maintain the unity and purposeful activity of the polarity towards general expansion. (A polarity is one comprising two poles.) Occasionally, that interaction produces an ecstatic unity in which a self-created, self-integrated, self-transcended sublimity zips along a happy highway with the top down on a sunny day, so to speak.(3)
Self-creation is both being and making a person, a group or a nation unique. Successful self-creation yields the experience of confidence.
Self-integration is both cultivating and binding together the facets of a person, a group or a nation for useful labor to achieve a single goal. Successful self-integration yields the experience of peace.
Self-transcendence is both rising above known but now-obsolete, purposeless pathways of self-creation and self-integration by a person, a group or a nation and exploring for unknown but useful pathways that re-form uniqueness and purpose on a wider, deeper field than previously existed. Successful self-transcendence yields the experience of ecstasy.
Expansion Doctrine In Practice
Aquila non capit Muscas. An eagle does not catch flies. A strong person, group or nation does not hit down and hits up only in the presence of an acceptable probability of success. This wisdom is the core of Expansion Doctrine in practice.
Remembering that Expansion Doctrine cultivates unimpeded self-creation, self-integration and self-transcendence, we assert that in the case where a nation is attacked, by whatever means – meaning, harm/obstruction of its freedom is sought – rapid, overwhelming counter-attack at the supports of the attack is entrusted to military decision seconded, comprehensively and resolutely, by financial and diplomatic action. The nation who does not go “all in” on a counter-attack – that is, who foregoes total war, using some but not all of her resources – experiences failure of her counter-attack and sovereignty.
Remembering, again, that Expansion Doctrine cultivates unimpeded self-creation, self-integration and self-transcendence, we assert that a nation is not responsible for regional disorders unless they harm/obstruct her freedom or that of her formal allies. No war is a “police action,” and no nation is responsible for “world order,” for “keeping the peace.” Every nation is responsible for herself and her formal allies. “Peace keeping” is an internal responsibility of every nation, for herself. “Peace keepers” from outside a nation inside a nation are an invading force aimed at harming/obstructing the freedom of the invaded nation and should be dealt with accordingly.
Remembering, again, that Expansion Doctrine cultivates unimpeded self-creation, self-integration and self-transcendence, we assert that in the case where a nation wishes to preempt an impending attack or respond to ongoing provocations, after weighing potentialities and actualities, that entity should direct military decision to attack the attacker preemptively and decisively across their most vulnerable frontiers (physical, financial, diplomatic) and remove the attacker’s intent and ability to harm or obstruct freedom. Defeat of an enemy’s resolve to fight is the only positive support of a nation’s freedom.
Remembering, finally, that Expansion Doctrine cultivates unimpeded self-creation, self-integration and self-transcendence, we assert that “nation building” is primarily a diplomatic and financial activity and secondarily a military one. Special Forces Branch belongs in the State and Treasury Departments. It is what the Peace Corps should have been. COIN Doctrine should be civilian purview backed by manifestly sufficient military threat-in-being. It faces, after all, a defeated enemy or a nation needing build or rebuild.(4)
Expansion Doctrine points a large, strong nation at large, strong nations, or at least ones who suppose they are. Instead of chasing after every regional conflict, to manage or stop it, make an example of belligerent large and strong nations, or ones who suppose they are. The little guys will get the message.
For example, instead of trying to manage or stop conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Central/South America, Southeast/Central Asia, remove and replace the Saudi monarchy and their clerics and scholars with the Hashemite one and theirs. Again, remove and replace the Iranian clerics with Baha’is. Induce Russia to partner in those initiatives – she will do that, as will India – and now China (and here) is isolated. When China remains belligerent, which she will, attack her through Tibet, Mongolia or her north-eastern border and her sea-borne oil lines. She will get the point. Then exterminate every Salafist/Wahhabi cleric on the face of the planet. Now humanity has a chance – until the next arrays of bad people rise up – at unobstructed expansion in culture, finance, industry, distribution, communications … and laughing, dancing and singing, which life really is about.
After Word
Expansion Doctrine is an attitude, a posture, a “mentality,” a facing that way instead of this, an orientation, if you will. The specifics of its application depend on time and clime and cannot, by their nature and purpose, remain fixed.
A bitter irony is that whereas “Baby Boomers” protested their elders’ “control freak” mentality – “You’re not listening!” “You fascist pigs!” “Manipulators!” – they marshaled every technique and fad they “encountered” to construct a top-to-bottom, top-down academic/media/governmental structure to control every facet of human existence they could find or imagine. And are content with their accomplishment.
Not even Ronald Reagan discarded Containment Doctrine. He tried to work around it, secretly, but he did not face and replace it. Since the 1940s Containment Doctrine dictates USA policy at all levels of government and in all areas of endeavor. Its first tell was at Yalta. It kills service personnel and breaks the hearts of everyone else. It is anti-human, a dagger plunged in USA interest and security. The international anti-American left could not have devised a surer means of sending the USA into disability and decrepitude.
Expansion Doctrine is the medicament and replacement for Containment Doctrine. It faces intellect and attention pro-actively – Sua Sponte – toward self-confidence, self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice of all persons, groups and nations. These experiences build life and the nation by expanding them. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country – you – can do to expand the sanctity of life and protect the meek and loving.
Expansion Doctrine drives courage and initiative rather than fear and laziness. Its genius is: Be.
Footnotes
1 The Cold War (the direct, intended result of Containment Doctrine) strengthened the Soviet and ChiComs and shielded them from the consequences of their internal contradictions and from their external enemies. Containment Doctrine was a God-send to those enemies. It gave them protection, a quiet yard in which to plot and play, exactly what they needed to multiply their nefarious activities. The Cold War held the enemy together, gave them power to persist and held back their enemies. Still, they jumped every fence put in their way. One could have been defeated in the 1940s, the other in the 1950s (had they even existed).
Vietnam could have been an offer to assist the Vietnamese generally to defeat their traditional enemy, China (and here), who was pushing into Vietnam then and did again later. A war for national identity and self-support, as the “North” kept saying it was. That would have disposed US power through Expansion Doctrine to assist an effort for national self-support against a real and mutual enemy, the ChiComs. Even the Soviet would have helped on that one.
The culprit for hiding that geo-political opportunity: Containment Doctrine. Its destructive, contracting consequences took effect immediately upon its implementation and radiated outwards everywhere, causing a world-wide cock-up of everything from thought to finance to method of eating asparagus. And a lot of blown out time, money and energy. The Cold War was not won by the NATO allies. It was won by the Communists, who today control the “NATO nations” and much else besides. The Soviet died but not the ChiComs and not the Communists. They have flourished, thanks to the strengthening and protecting effect of Containment Doctrine. And there was some question about Communists in the State Department, CIA and White House? Whoever did Containment Doctrine helped the Communists. Today they’re helping the Salafists, through Containment Doctrine.
2 Heraclitus. By “war” he meant “conflict” generally as a socio-historical phenomenon.
3 Paul Tillich has called an ecstatic unity of autonomy and hegemony “theonomy.” An historical example of this phenomenon is the European 12th and 13th Centuries, the High Middle Ages, still a cynosure of colorful, expansive, united times – and their real possibility. Although not as much so, Enlightenment Europe and America, especially Scotland, were in a “theonomous” condition.
4 Nation-building, to include COIN operations, is a tactical choice within a national strategic goal and its implementing mission set. A heady mead fermented from ripe assumptions. For example, that its objects want it. Some will, some will not. In a context of national identity, COIN can work. In a context bereft of national identity, COIN cannot work. “Doing good” is not justification for COIN operations. No nation is obliged to or can police the world, much less build it. COIN operations make sense only as an implementation of a national strategic goal arising from Expansion Doctrine.
Update 1: Socialists’ attraction to anti-American strongmen
Update 2: Scott Johnson at Power Line and Elliott Abrams at The Weekly Standard
Update 3: Here they go again.
Update 4: And Al Saud intends to keep it up. See also here.
Update 5: Daniel Pipes decodes [The Fraud]’s Doctrine.
Update 6: Regarding developments in North Korea.
Update 7: Richard Fernandez: The End Of Containment
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
