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

Question:

What does a system do to protect itself from an entity that continuously and unpredictably emits destructive energy, and is there in nature such a system and such an entity whose situation vis-a-vis one another can serve as a conceptual framework and then monitory metaphor for comparing Containment Doctrine and Expansion Doctrine?

There is such a situation and metaphor, namely, the vis-a-vis between the earth and the sun.  The sun continuously emits charged particles, ions, that are deadly to us and all life.  These are denied that effect on earth by the earth’s magnetic field, which does one of three things with those deadly (to life on this planet) charged particles:

1- Deflect
2- Absorb
3- Receive and Convert

The metaphorical value for the intended comparison is not totalistic in that it includes the current vis-a-vis of sun and earth but not the original vis-as-vis of those bodies, i.e., that the earth comes from the sun.  With that proviso, the metaphorical value of this vis-a-vis (I am trying to avoid using the trite-to-the-point-of-meaningless word “relationship”) is very high.

Containment Doctrine seeks to fence off the destructive energy at its source.  Thus, Truman Doctrine (Containment Doctrine put into policy) laid the US western defensive line at the coast (littoral) of Asia and the US eastern defensive line at the Iron Curtain then running south through the Balkans to and along the Levantine littoral then jogging over to the littoral of the east coast of Arabia, thence running south.  Iran, an ally in those days, actually stood outside the defensive line, an outlier finally taken over not by Soviet but by anti-religious forces (Shiites).  Africa was not defined by a defensive line and South America was assumed inside one because of the Monroe Doctrine — an assumption Khrushchev evacuated at Cuba and Russia, Iran and China today at Venezuela.

The point of the Truman/Containment Doctrine, though not carried through in a thoroughgoing manner, was, to use the metaphor above, to prevent destructive energy from traveling the distance between the sun and the earth.  Containment seeks to wall off the juice at its source.  Not shut it off, but make it impossible for it to travel outside itself.  Thus Kennan and Truman Doctrine sought aggressively to draw the defensive perimeter at as great a distance from the USA homeland as possible.  Fortress America, protected by two oceans and a lot of going-boom things.

But that is not the way natural systems work.  They don’t try to block a system from being itself.  The natural way is as the earth does it vis-a-vis the sun’s destructive energy.  Develop survival strategies so that a destructive system can’t actually destroy you even when it reaches you.  You can’t make a destructive system not destructive, not unless you destroy it, which is difficult in the case of nations and usually but not always impossible.

The earth’s core is iron, sloshing around at a happy clip, and that makes a magnetic shield around the earth’s surface.  And that shield acts in the three ways mentioned above.  With that shield in place, life develops and deploys around the earth’s surface, expanding from its own internal nature and resting, ultimately, on the iron core of its abundance-producing host.

Fundamental policy expressing Expansion Doctrine, in place of Containment Doctrine, would be A Great Relaxation.  The idea is let countries pursue their wishes, get out of their way, get out of them, stop being busybodies trying to control the course of events everywhere or thinking one needs to and should.  All that is vain and impossible, therefore irresponsible and stupid.

But if a country crosses one, sending destructive energy at one, then apply the Napier Principle:

A story for which Napier is often noted involved Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities. This was the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. As first recounted by his brother William, he replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

That can be done in one or more of three natural, realistic, experience-guaranteed (that is, ideal) ways (I am using those words realistic and ideal to reference their meaningful use in classical philosophy in contrast to their superficial use as current terms of art in security/strategic studies):

1- Deflect
2- Absorb
3- Receive and Convert

All of those responses are expansionist and prepare the world historical drama for expansion.

CT doctrine is an iteration of the deflection response to harmful incoming energy.  This was the initial response profile of OEF and OIF, until al-Saud-funded AQ appeared in Iraq and al-Saud-funded Taliban appeared in Afghanistan.

Absorption is accepting and dissipating harmful incoming energy, usually in the form of heat.  It contemplates simple defeat of the incoming: unconditional surrender, in fine old words of our sainted ancestors.  WWII and most of OIF employed the absorption response to harmful incoming energy.  COIN doctrine is an iteration of this response.

Reception/Conversion is receiving the harmful incoming energy and immediately converting it into harmless, less damaging or even useful energy.  This is the most synergistic and, long-term, commercially promising response to harmful incoming energy.  It requires the more complex, creative, doable (“anything is doable”) and potentially profitable unconditional defeat of harmful incoming energy by making it something it originally was not.  A more difficult road but one which, if passable, is beneficial long-term.

Current US military, diplomatic and financial policy has no iteration of the Reception/Conversion response to harmful incoming energy.  This is a scandal, a disgrace.

There are different kinds of harmful incoming energy.  Some must be deflected, some can be absorbed, some can be received and converted.  The different kinds of harmful incoming energy should be characterized (profiled), the choices of response appropriate to each kind should be itemized (tabulated) and a complete threat/response matrix comprising those anticipations (order of battle) should be prepared and continuously updated.  No doubt something like that already exists.  However, no iteration of the receive and convert response is currently available for public perusal and discussion.  That indicates none exists.

Expansionist Doctrine frees one from a cement-hard puzzle created by distant hard lines of defensive perimeter.  Much of the self-defeat in contemporary security/strategic discussions comes from assuming the world is like a picture puzzle, a jigsaw, comprising fixed pieces moving any one of which destroys the picture.  In other words, assuming that international relations is a set-piece to be held together and we know what it should look like and will ensure it does.

This is bunkum, malarkey.  Nothing is a set-piece and nothing is totally known.  Thinking we have to maintain a set-piece of international relations is playing God.  Even if there is a picture of the world that “we want,” that picture does not endure more than an instant.  Immediately we think what it is and how we want it to be, the real conditions have changed and our picture, and depending wishes, are vacuous.

No, the world is far more Bach and Puccini than it is Mozart (well, until his last years) and Ravel or Debussy.  It is more fugue and hymn than sonata and tone poem.  It keeps moving, and trying to control its movement is futile and stupid.  That’s what Containment Doctrine does.  It’s futile.  Better to develop survival functions, deal with what happens and keep its destructive energy from overwhelming oneself.

In this sense, government is not about making things happen, about creating new worlds or new world conditions.  It’s about preventing destructive things from happening, not at their source – you can’t blanket the world with force and no one has intel, or can have, good enough to see everything coming before it explodes forth – but as they get in proximity and their trajectory and predictable consequences are clearly seen.  It’s about protecting, ensuring survival of the nation for whom the government works.

The Military, Diplomatic and Financial arms of government must be integrated and pointed in the same direction, to the same missions, and, fundamentally, that means to keep evolving and maintaining a protective shield close to the nation that serves her in the same way the earth’s magnetic field/shield serves her, that is, by always being ready and able to protect her life, her indescribable self-creativity, self-integration and self-transcendence.

There is zero need to whip up the nation to take care of herself and to be prolific and productive.  Doing those things is her nature.  Just as having an iron core that produces her magnetic shield/field is the earth’s nature.  No need to make it happen.  It’s natural.  Self-protection is the way of life.  It’s already there, happening.  There is need to not frustrate it, to not think one knows better than what is internal to the system, in this case the nation and the powers and directions that spring naturally from her people.  Protecting from destructive force all of those powers, and the people from which they come, is the role of government.  That is the very reason people install governments, to protect them so they can be themselves.  Just improve and maintain the protective shield in full readiness to initiate those three responses:

1- Deflect
2- Absorb
3- Receive and Convert

The same basic principle applies in international relations.  The nations have their own internal nature.  Let them be.  Let them be expansive, or not.  Let them provide their own protection.  If they don’t do that, let them go.  Or, if they have something one wants, move in and protect what it is one wants.  That’s the right of sovereignty.  And if anything destructive comes at one, pro-actively use one or more of the three natural, proven responses:

1- Deflect
2- Absorb
3- Receive and Convert

I think there are some useful conceptual tools, to include a powerful natural metaphor.  Emphasize the adjective “natural.”  Meaning, it works.

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: The Jihadis’ Master Plan To Break Us

Update 6: Richard Fernandez: The End Of Containment

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA