Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
DATELINE: The White House
23 September 2018
Transcript: POTUS Debriefs Nobody
Present: POTUS Trump, VPOTUS Pence, CoS Kelly, Ivanka Trump, Nobody
POTUS: Thank you for coming, Nobody. I know the trip is difficult and hard for you. So, thank you!
Nobody: You are most welcome, Sir. Thank you for inviting me here and to Ivanka for getting in touch and making the arrangements. Next after God, my wife, our offspring, and the company of graduates of a national service academy, the greatest privilege of my life is to be allowed to be here with you and your fine team.
POTUS: We here and others in the White House, State, and Pentagon, have been looking over your blog, Theological Geography, thinking concepts are there, opportunities are seen, which run parallel to or inline with things we contemplate and affairs we want to address.
So, you probably know I like to get right to business. Let’s start at the top. What is the top-level consideration we should undertake? Or maybe there are several bunched at the top. What do you see and commend to our attention?
CoS Kelly: What are our most important opportunities?
Nobody: Well, Sir, our most important opportunity is that of building an alliance of brother nations that supersedes the alliance of brother nations that is currently in its death-throes, the alliance that kept the peace in bygone conditions, following World War II. Our alliance of brother nations, a completely fresh alliance, must keep the peace in current conditions.
Ivanka Trump: A new NATO?
Nobody: A new system, but not a new NATO. NATO was built as part of a peace-keeping system that included Bretton Woods, Five Eyes and other elements. That system followed upon a huge military victory over two principal enemies and confusion and not a little despair at the emergence of a new war against a third. It worked, but conditions changed, as they always will, and so the system went gradually obsolete and then corrupt and now saturnine unto death.
Nothing is needed forever. Everything has a pull date. NATO, Five Eyes, Bretton Woods and the lot dating from the late 1940s are well beyond their pull date.
VPOTUS: OK . . . .
Nobody: Our situation today is different. We need a peace-keeping system, no doubt about it, but we have no huge military victory by, primarily, the Anglosphere filling our sails and no new enemy emerging who would go cold-war against us. 1940s concepts of ideal inter-national relations are completely irrelevant today. We have two enemies, neither of them is just emerging, and both of them mounting hot-war against us: China and the Salafi/Shiite Jihad.
POTUS: That is our situation.
Ivanka Trump: Are you sure, Mr. President? We have good relations with China.
POTUS: We have good relations with President Xi.
VPOTUS: Our European friends would find this talk dangerous.
CoS Kelly: We saw how friendly they are in July. One member of the British Royal Family greeted us, a 92-year-old lady, on her own. The Prime Minister ambushed us at Blenheim, twice. First in a slut’s frock and then in an historic easy chair. London, the nation’s capitol city, flew a balloon mocking POTUS Trump and by implication his mother country. And NATO’s chief lectured us on combined strength as if we are addled school boys.
VPOTUS: Point taken.
Nobody: Perhaps that topic of friendliness is a good place for me to continue . . . .
POTUS: Go ahead.
Nobody: Those signs of unfriendliness right in the historic home of the Anglosphere demonstrate the present morbidity of the peace-keeping system built following World War II. The system was fine for its time. It worked, well enough at least. But already by the early 1960s it was going obsolete. It allowed the assassination of POTUS Kennedy.
By the late 1960s, the late 1940s peace-keeping system was so decrepit that POTUS Johnson could not decide whether to win a war or lose it, spent 50+ thousand just American lives and two nations’ moral authority into the bargain, then threw up his hands in despair of ever laying them on the problem, which was, in the words of General Krulak to POTUS Johnson, Win it [the Vietnam War].
And this late in the day that system is positively putrid.
This is not a bad thing. It is simply the nature of systems. They are built for a purpose. When the purpose leaves, the build is left with nothing to do and we all know what happens to idle hands. So nothing here is shocking beyond perhaps holding onto a useless vestige and getting covered in its effluent: trade deficits and prestige dwindles.
In the American West, we see abandoned buildings rotting back into the earth. Life goes on. But the rotting tells us that every build has a pull date and no build is permanent.
Ivanka Trump: You make it sound natural, like the careers of bodies.
Nobody: Thank you, Ivanka, yes, I hope to because I think that is a proper way to think of human affairs, as natural vice unnatural. Or, if one prefers, normal vice abnormal.
For example, it is natural to burn or bury bodies before they undergo putrefaction. It is unnatural to attach to a body that are dying. Whereas it is natural to let dying builds die, and to honor them for what they accomplished during their careers — such as NATO, Bretton Woods, Five Eyes and their siblings certainly deserve — it is unnatural to support them past their ability to self-vivify.
POTUS: OK . . . .
Nobody: Why, for example, do most NATO nations freeload on American defense assets? Again — and a parallel to that — why do coalition partners on deployment expect and demand to operate with American intel fully open to them but hide most of their intel from American commanders and as well use American intel that is open to them to subvert American operations? The answer is simple, hidden in plain sight: they are not friends of America.
POTUS: I saw that when we were there in July.
Nobody: And because they are not friends of America, NATO, Bretton Woods, Five Eyes, etc., are not friends of America. And those countries do not pay up to NATO because NATO is an obsolete peace-keeping system and those countries know that it is because they trust that they accurately see that it is. The non-payers are more insightful, more intelligent than the payers, in this case. The non-payers make the case for America walking away from NATO, Five Eyes, etc.: NATO is obsolete, dying, on the cusp of putrefaction. We should get away from it and help the non-payers burn or bury NATO, etc. They are in the right on this one.
CoS Kelly: OK, say we do that, then what?
Nobody: Then — actually, before then, and you have already started doing this, thankfully — we build the next peace-keeping system. The one addressed to current conditions. Fresh, not cloned from a dying or dead body. All the DNA has to be fresh, focused from current experience.
First step, observe, penetrate and appreciate current experience. Do so knowing that any analogy or metaphor one uses has ontic reality. Put another way, the words we use to discuss experiences we have are powers of being ipso facto. Never think that what you think is unconnected from reality. At the very least, what you think is connected to the reality that you think it and can speak it and can at least try doing it.
That may sound abstruse. It is bitingly practical: think, don’t dream.
Second step, reacquire rational grand national strategic objective. This is actually an easy one. It is: maintain national sovereignty. Simple answer, complex implementation.
Third step, discover rational grand national strategic interests. Here we must start with a shift in metaphor, to family of nations from community of nations. Family of nations is an observable reality and an ancient, classical concept. Community of nations is a Communist dream and jejune but bumptious agenda.
VPOTUS: Classically, Christians, at least in the West, have spoken of the family of man and also of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. So I guess the metaphor you are urging there is at least grounded in our tradition and maybe even useful in discharging our duties here at this place.
It is also political C4. I can hear the entire foreign policy establishment hitting the roof over this one. Just that metaphor change overturns thousands of rice bowls.
Nobody: Indeed.
Ivanka Trump: But rice bowls do not make rice. They only help someone consume it, and then the rice is gone and someone has to make more of it to go in the bowl. A farmer, an array of distributors, and a cook.
POTUS: So are you saying we can afford to ignore the foreign policy establishment?
Nobody: No, Sir, I am saying we cannot afford to listen to it. It is a Siren. Would it were otherwise, but it is a Siren, at least presently.
Instead, let us think of a family of brother nations and, among those, who are the senior brothers? In this way ordinary life works and states should as well. It is natural. In our history, the foreign policy concepts of Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt evidence thinking of inter-nation affairs as family affairs. I think those POTUSs point the way for us. The question, then, is, who today in the family of nations are the senior brothers?
CoS Kelly: How would one even measure such a thing? How could one know? Is there one senior brother or several? And what about the junior brothers, how do they feel?
Ivanka Trump: And what about the sisters? Where are they in this metaphor, this picture?
VPOTUS: And again, political C4.
POTUS: Proceed.
Nobody: The father of the family of nations is God. Their mother is the earth. The brotherhood of man is half sister, but it is called brotherhood because the organizing principle (form) of the universe is masculine. The energy (function) of the universe, however, is feminine. Probably more metaphorical philosophy than you expected. But that fleshes out the metaphor, at least.
[Merry laughter.]
The Lutheran mystic Friedrich Christoph Oetinger said, The end of the ways of God is corporeality. He also said, My religion is the parallelism of Nature and Grace.
Anyway, I was coming to the question of rational grand national strategic interests. Strategic interests are the bits of geography friendly control of which conduces to fulfilling our grand national strategic objective: maintaining our national sovereignty.
The distinction between grand national strategic objective and grand national strategic interests is consequential. The former is singular, the latter is plural. The former controls the latter and the later serves the former. When that is the case, both national objective and national interests derive rationally, integrally from the nation’s existence. When that is not the case — such as when leadership aims to subvert or destroy the nation’s character — neither national objective nor national interests derive rationally from the nation’s existence and the nation, in direct consequence, suffers sorrow, diminishment, and dis-ease.
SoC Kelly: Sounds like Von Clausewitz.
Nobody: It is.
[Merry laughter.]
And since you mention him, Sir, allow me to quote this of his:
The impulse to fight a great battle, the unhampered instinctive movement toward it, must emanate from a sense of one’s own powers and the absolute conviction of necessity — in other words, from innate courage and perception, sharpened by experience of responsibility.
Apt examples are the best teachers, but one must never let a cloud of preconceived ideas get in the way; for even the rays of the sun are refracted and diffused by clouds. It is the theorist’s most urgent task to dissipate such preconceptions which at times form and infiltrate like a miasma. The errors intellect creates, intellect can again destroy.
VPOTUS: Where is this going? I am getting the uncomfortable feeling that we are discussing matters way beyond what we need to discuss given our diplomatic, financial, and military responsibilities. And the politics is not adding up.
Ivanka Trump: Yes, I think maybe we are far afield from the needs of American workers and other matters.
POTUS: I think so too, but I want to hear him out. There is some insight there. You don’t have to tell everyone everything you are thinking. In fact you never should. But everything you are thinking shapes and powers everything you have to tell everyone. So, listen.
Nobody: Definitionally, a citizenry thinks highly of their nation and of themselves as her sons and daughters. Stalin could not rouse his subjects as Soviet Red Army recruits, craftsmen, or conscripts in numbers sufficient to repel the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. But he could rouse them as Russians fighting in the Red Army to defeat an invader of Mother Russia. To this day, Russians celebrate the victory of the Soviet Red Army over forces of the Third Reich as a victory of Mother Russia over foreign invaders, not a victory of Soviet Communism over Fascism. The distinction is consequential.
Current Russian leadership and citizens have in mind restoration of the Russian consciousness of Catherine the Great, not the Soviet consciousness of Lenin, Stalin, or even Khrushchev. Russians today are, in their minds, the Third Rome, not the Second Soviet.
Only Socialists — Communists, Fascists, Progressives, Liberals, Leftists, Democratic Socialists — calumniate their mother country. They only are perpetually aggrieved and dis-eased. Abnormal. Everyone else is normal, patriotic, no matter the form of their government at a moment in their history.
POTUS: Got it . . . .
Nobody: Now, turning to General Kelly’s question of a few minutes ago, we are looking for the senior brothers in today’s family of nations. The leaders of the family. How do we know who they are? What characteristics identify them?
The senior brothers in any family are the ones who most embody the wealth of the family — spiritual, genetic, intellectual, geographic wealth — and are most in position to expand it’s weight (glory) and potency (fecundity). This is a character thing first and sometimes — and luckily when it is — an order-of-birth thing. I posit that senior brothers in an ordinary family — and this includes sibling sisters — have the following characteristics, which also, therefore, identify the senior brothers in today’s family of nations:
- They have decisive wallop
- They want to maintain their sovereignty
- They are multi-ethnic and generally peaceful
- They are multi-religious and generally peaceful
- They do not share the same type of government
Who has these characteristics has authority today and futurely as senior brothers in the family of nations. All natural.
POTUS: Got it . . . .
Nobody: Three nations in the family of nations today have these characteristics:
- India
- The United States
- The Russian Federation
VPOTUS: Whoa . . . .
CoS Kelly: Yeah . . . .
Ivanka Trump: Uuh . . . . Lights!
Nobody: So there are the three senior brothers, leader cadre of today’s family of nations. And eminently doable.
VPOTUS: Politically C4, but eminently doable.
Nobody: They are not a Triumvirate because they steward three nations, not one. Nor are they an Oligarchy because at most they are primus inter pares, not supreme in the family. They cannot command, but they can regulate. Think of their relationship as a three-way bi-lateral.
I suggest designating them Co-Coordinators. Their duty as senior siblings is to regulate affairs of the family of nations to these ends:
- border order
- reciprocal trade
- freedom of movement
- punishment of disruptors
- protection of emerging nations
What is good for these three brother nations is good for their family of nations. Their authority is their embodiment of the five characteristics of leader nations as enumerated above and again here:
- They have decisive wallop
- They want to maintain their sovereignty
- They are multi-ethnic and generally peaceful
- They are multi-religious and generally peaceful
- They do not share the same type of government
CoS Kelly: You mentioned rational grand national strategic objective and rational grand national strategic interests. You say the former is simple: maintain national sovereignty. What of the latter?
Nobody: Yes, not so simple because plural. Strategic interests are bits of geography that, in friendly hands, conduce to our national sovereignty and, in unfriendly hands, contemn it. Any identifiable bit of geography, to include ocean bottoms, will be in one kind of hands or another, friendly or unfriendly.
Actually, it is an accomplishment of modernity to have enlisted to its service — and also peril — all five geographies: space, air, fire/cyber, water, and land. Previous generations faced two or three of those geographies: land, water, and, recently, land, water, and air. Now we face all five, all at once. Our itemization of rational grand national strategic interests is more complex and plenary than it was for previous stewards of our and other nations’ sovereignties. We all feel this. Another reason 1940s peace-keeping systems are obsolete and their continuance dangerous.
Not a few outside this room are terrified of the perils and contribute naught but hysteria to the study of national interests, opportunities therein, and systems for address. All they can do is scream their terror to obstruct constructive labor. Difficult as it is, they must be ignored as propagandists or punished as criminals, as circumstances of their activities present.
If there is a global order — and there is, inherently, brooking neither doubt nor dispute — it comprises these five geographies: space, air, fire/cyber, water, and land. Rules-based global order? Piffle. The global order is geography-based and five-fold.
CoS Kelly: Come to the point.
Nobody: Yes, in sifting intelligence for strategic national interests, we are modeling geographies, not playing 5-dimensional chess. It may look and sound like space or fire/cyber, but its reality is a geography. Water covers an extent, has surface and sub-surface, and moves through its own domain. Geographies move. Chess boards do not. Furthermore, the domains in which the five geographies move interpenetrate. Air and water co-mingle. Space and air abrade.
Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) is applying the three assets of statecraft — Diplomacy, Finance, War-Fighting — throughout the five-geography global order simultaneously and successfully for the purpose of maintaining national sovereignty. There are five domains, total, all geographic.
Géographie, géographie, toujours, géographie.
If the ownership of or residence upon a bit of geography negatively affects our sovereignty, that bit of geography is inside our national interest. If said ownership or residence positively affects our sovereignty or is neutral toward it, the geography on which it reclines is outside our national interest. Only that bit of geography which threatens our sovereignty is inside our national interest and therefore merits expenditure of national time, energy, and treasure . . . to annihilate the threat.
It will be observed that as one surveys through the five geographies from the most gross (land) to the most subtle (space), the amount of geography potentially coming inside our national interest increases. Relatively little land geography threatens our sovereignty and therefore comes inside our national interest whereas virtually the entire space geography does. More water than land is inside our national interest, more fire/cyber than water, and more air than fire/cyber. Space geography has all of our interest, and for teaching us that lesson we owe thanks to The Soviet and Yuri Gagarin.
VPOTUS: We’ve been here a while, I need a break. I know what the others want, what would you like, Nobody?
Nobody: A shot of rum, a shot of pure lemon juice, and two shots of white zinfandel over ice, thank you very much.
VPOTUS: Great, I’ll get everything.
Ivanka Trump: Nobody, what can you tell us about yourself, where do you come from?
Nobody: Well, thank you for asking. I am a Hoosier, in fact, born in Elkhart, 1943. The doctor who delivered me delivered my mother. He was an uncle of hers. But I grew up in Southern California and schooled there and in New York City. My father was a fine church organist and popular philosophy teacher and an unsuccessful clergyman. He liked to study. My mother became a school teacher. She was frugal. They divorced when I went to graduate school in New York on Morningside Heights. My father and I graduated at the same school there. My mother graduated at Barnard.
POTUS: So far you have told us nothing about yourself.
Nobody: True. I am a hermit by nature and a classical, orthodox Christian, also by nature. My theological mentor is Paul Tillich. My theological cynosure is St. Jerome. My hero is General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. I like to write, and study, and write. I write in order to study. Since as early as I can remember, I am fascinated with political philosophy. Not political science, which is manipulation techniques. Political philosophy, which, as I see it, is the most general phenomenological inquiry. My wife says I am a mystical philosopher. I think Hegel did it to me.
CoS Kelly: Better . . . . But . . . General MacArthur?
Nobody: I know that story, General. <smiles> With respect, Sir, yes, General of the Army Dugout Douglas MacArthur.
CoS Kelly: OK, point taken.
[Smiles all around.]
Nobody: I read Hegel during my sixth grade year and after. I rejected an academic career. I rejected a clerical career. I rejected a career in church music. I never even considered a career in business or finance. I also never considered a blue-collar career, which, to paraphrase The Immortal Bard, was a grievous fault, and grievously did I answer it . . . until given a chance to correct. Had I self-confidence then (the opposite of arrogance), I would have worked towards acceptance at CalTech. I did consider a military career, as a Chaplain, and was rejected for that by my ordaining denomination.
CoS Kelly: Which was?
Nobody: United Church of Christ. I became an Episcopalian — regarded as laity, never sought nor was offered Episcopalian ordination — and remain that though inactively by their standards. My local Vicar and I are personal friends. I think if you recite the Nicene Creed you are a Christian and if you bear ordination in one Christian denomination you bear ordination in all of them.
Otherwise, I did a lot of rejecting. Unsurprisingly, this brought forth a lot of rejection. But it all helped get me to conditions in which I was happy, meaning I could study and write as I pleased. And that is what I have done for many decades and continue doing.
VPOTUS: Here are refreshments, everybody. I heard that last part, Nobody. So you would say you are happy?
Nobody: Yes, Sir.
Ivanka Trump: Good!
POTUS et al.: Thanks Mike.
POTUS: Wife? Children?
Nobody: One wife, three children, all well because they have a fine mother. My wife is an artist, a painter, who supported us as a waitress and then as a public transit operator. A bus driver. Two of our offspring are military officers and the other is a railroad engineer who has also served twice as a civilian contractor diesel mechanic in Iraq supporting US military operations. Our family bear our share of the burden of maintaining our national sovereignty. Two of our offspring are married with children.
POTUS: And you, what did you do to support your family?
Nobody: I served as a church organist and homeschooled our offspring on a comprehensive reorganization of the academic curriculum I call Quintivium. And I wrote, and although never being paid in cash for that — though once gifted so — I have provided historical, ethical and intellectual ground on which our offspring could develop their careers. And, like my wife, I drove public transit for a large county agency. She drove 19 years, I drove 23. Same agency. So our careers, like those of our offspring, are government-related.
And when my mother unexpectedly left me an inheritance, my wife and I paid off our mortgage and commercial debt then gifted over half of the original inheritance to our offspring as legs up.
POTUS: OK, back to work.
CoS Kelly: We were on national interests.
Nobody: Yes. It may seem tedious and/or ignorably abstruse, however, the command and control relationship between activities in the five geographies is germane to this debrief. If you will bear with me . . . .
To command/control land, one must command/control water next to it, if any, and in it. To command/control water, one must command/control fires/cyber that can drop on it. To command/control fires/cyber, one must command/control the air around its fire bases. To command/control a bit of air geography, one must command/control the space around it.
Not only are statecraft’s battle space and operations multi-domain — in all five geographies of life — so is the sifting of strategic national interests.
The first and always fundamental geography is land. Man is designed to live on land. The family of nations is, par excellence, a land-based phenomenon. Therefore, national land-based assets are a nation’s top priority with respect to maintaining national sovereignty. Next in order of national priority are water-based assets, then fires/cyber-based assets, then air-based assets, and then space-based assets. So, even though space geography is the most subtle and therefore most affective geography for national multi-domain operations, it has the lowest priority with respect to national resource allocation because it is not the geography on which nation states live. They live on land.
POTUS: I hear you.
CoS Kelly: So do I.
POTUS: It is counter-intuitive in a way but reasonable.
VPOTUS: Yes, it is.
Nobody: So, first we survey bits of land geography, who owns or resides upon them, and the posture of those families and personalities towards our national sovereignty. If they have no interest in disputing, disrupting, or degrading our national sovereignty, we have no interest in them. If they do, we do. In this sense, our statecraft is re-active, not pro-active.
But if those people want to dispute, disrupt, or degrade our national sovereignty, then our statecraft is preemptive to the point of extracting from them a posture and statement of unconditional surrender to us even before they attack us tangibly, palpably, through any of the five geographies/domains.
POTUS: Still reasonable. Proceed.
Nobody: Now, in the context of the three brother alliance, as commended earlier, the same considerations are valid for all three brothers. And indeed, the alliance means that the three brothers support one another’s statecraft to the same end for each. The combined national sovereignties of India, The United States, and The Russian Federation are the peace-keeping system of the modern world. Their sovereignty considerations co-coordinate globe-wide traffic.
The alliance is really, therefore, an allegiance alliance, orders of magnitude larger and heavier than an alliance de commodité much less a mere military or diplomatic alliance. It is a mutual sovereignty alliance, and that concept, building out (economics) from each of the three nation’s characteristics marking them as senior brothers in the family of nations, marks off what I am describing as unique. I will go so far as to call it incipiently salutary.
VPOTUS: Whoa . . . .
Nobody: With these three brother nations, Co-Coordinators, leading and regulating world affairs by delectating their own sovereignties, dismissing old systems, and building together new ones for global peace-keeping, I would expect to see emerging successors to NATO, SACEUR, Bretton Woods (officially), Five Eyes, EUCOM (at least repositioned state-side), USAID, OCED, UN, and other nests of now mosquitos and mud-wasps who once had a fine purpose and fulfilled it as busy bees but, as all things are, were overrun by circumstances and went south, which is to say, sucky and waspish.
The Anglosphere is vanished. That was clearly visible in your visit to Great Britain last week, Sir. The Anglosphere built the peace-keeping system at the conclusion of World War II. It worked. Its time is past. Now it disgraces itself by degrading its own best interests. It does not exist as a constructive inter-nation system. We cannot remain both attached to the Anglosphere and an independent, sovereign nation. Those are incompatible postures that necessitate irrational locutions and operations. Let Australia and New Zealand decide their allegiance. Canada and Great Britain are jejune and Moslem, respectively, therefore identifiably not friends.
I recommend forming a Three Eyes comprising India, USA, and Russia as part of a general peace-keeping system for diplomacy, finance, and war-fighting. I estimate that commercial elevation will proceed and propagate from an allegiance alliance of these three sovereign and brother nations.
Ivanka Trump: OK, give us an example of how your views on national interests apply in a bit of land geography, say, the Middle East.
Nobody: Certainly, thanks for asking. First, we assess our national interests in the Middle East in concert with Russia and India, not Europe. Europe is Moslem Lebensraum. Three Brothers allegiance alliance is our coalition force in the Middle East, not reinforced NATO/ISAF, etc. From that frame of reference, what are our national interests in the Middle East? Put another way, what Multi-Domain Operations there require deployment of our three assets of statecraft: Diplomacy, Finance, War-Fighting?
We have no territorial ambitions there, we are not a colonialist power. Humanity’s chief interest, always, is life-and sovereignty-supporting chemicals, and we are self-sufficient with respect to the chief chemical asset of the Middle East: hydrocarbons.
Afghanistan is another matter. It has chemicals useful to us and other major nation states, such as China, who already mines there. Said chemicals also are undeveloped wealth for Afghan tribals. Then there are the opioids . . . .
Iran also is another matter. In Persian hands she is friendly. In Shiite hands she is unfriendly. Iran is in Shiite hands. And Shiite hands ally — for convenience — with the Moslem Brotherhood, who owns Turkey.
The three brother nations should survey the Middle East and resolve to assist one another achieve whatever are their individual objectives there. Russia, for example, wants long-term, dependable naval and air access to Syrian bases on and near the Mediterranean Sea. USA and India can provide perimeter for Russia’s achieving that objective. Russia and India can provide perimeter for American, Russian, and Indian companies investing in Iraq and Afghanistan as tourist destinations and chemical production (but not opioids). Russia and USA can provide perimeter for India’s dealings with Pakistan and China. All three can elevate Iran to Persian government, killing off the Shiite kakistocracy. And all three also can check China’s ambition to own the globe and everyone on it. In fact only these three brother nations can do that.
VPOTUS: OOOOKAAAA . . . .
Nobody: Here is another one. USA has no strategic interests in and about the Black, Azov, or Caspian Seas, but Russia does. She wants to restore the Second Caesar, Constantinople, to Orthodox Christian control, expel Moslem occupation of Southeast Europe, and institute specifically Russian Orthodox Christian control, — the Third Caesar — westerly of the Bosporus and Dardanelles. She wants to guarantee for herself at least free passage of those waterways. And she already has, on interior lines, medium-large bottom water passage between the Caspian and Black Seas, a consequential strategic fact perhaps insufficiently appreciated outside Russia.
What threat is there in those Russian strategic interests to rational USA or Indian grand national strategic objective or interests? None that I can see. Russia is not an imperialistic power. She wants to protect her borders and have global access for her commerce. She has never marched east into Europe except under Mongol or Communist rule. She never sent gun boats into New York or San Francisco, at least not to shoot them up. She did send her Baltic Fleet to New York and her Far East Fleet to San Francisco in 1863 to prevent their blockade in home ports by the British Navy. I have here a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, written to welcome Russian Grand Duke Alexi to America in 1871, which recalls this history:
Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December,
Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow;
Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember
Who was our friend when the world was our foe.
Fires of the North in eternal communion,
Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star;
God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union
Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar!
To celebrate a visit to St. Petersburg by a U.S. Navy monitor in August, 1866, Holmes wrote:
A nation’s love in tears and smiles
We bear across the sea,
O Neva of the banded isles,
We moor our hearts in thee!
It is right to hate Communists. It is wrong to hate Russians or fear them. POTUS Lincoln had no qualms conducting felicitous statecraft with a Russian Czar, an Imperial Monarch, and neither did the great liberal pantheist Oliver Wendell Holmes. Nor should we with a Russian Czar successor.
Russia has the world’s most nightmarish border security problem and, of heavy manufacturing nations, most difficult access to world markets. Russian interests in, on, and about the Black, Azov, and Caspian Seas are no threat to USA national sovereignty or interests. In fact, we should help them if asked, providing perimeter protection. Far better for our sovereignty and interests that Russia control land access to Southeast Europe than that the Moslem Brotherhood’s Turkey or Iran control it.
Speaking of Iran: Russia’s best and newest naval forces float in the Caspian Sea facing Iran. When the USA and some Middle Eastern nations resolve to bury the ayatollahs, on which side would Russia rather be aligned?
POTUS: OK, yeah, I follow. Anything else?
Nobody: Yes, one thing, Sir, and still trying to answer Ivanka’s question. On the back side of asking what is inside our national interest is the question what is not inside our national interest. I recommend starting any discussion with the latter question, actually.
Assume a bit of geography, any bit of geography, even our own national territory, is not inside our nation interest. In other words, no bit of geography has standing on it persons who threaten our national interests. This clears the conceptual landscape immediately and compels reasoned thought over indolent assumption.
The initial impulse for national sovereignty and interest is from parents protecting themselves and their offspring. The next impulse is from makers, sellers, and buyers protecting their commerce. The next impulse is from representatives protecting their constituents. Now police and military forces are called forth to rationalize and guarantee protection for families, commerce, and their representatives. By this point in time a national character is forming and with it lines marking the start and stop of the emerging nation’s perimeter. The lines become borders. The nation is formed in principle and now must (1) defend its borders and (2) define its intentions, the extents of its sovereignty, and the specifics of its interests in every other bit of geography there is.
That national borders are inside national interest is easily demonstrated. Internal threats endanger national independence and sovereignty more than external ones do. Beyond that, I think protection of the nation’s families and commerce most clearly indicates the bits of geography which are inside or outside our national interests. Any geography from which spring threats to USA families or commerce — that is, to Main Street, to the Middle Class — threatens USA sovereignty and so is inside our nation’s interest. Freedom of familial and commercial movement is the benchmark for recognizing and operating national interests.
Geographical origins of threats to our Constitution also indicate bits of geography which are inside our national interests. However, threats to our familial and commercial freedom of movement earliest indicate such geographies.
Ivanka, I hope that answers your question. Long time getting to it, I know. Background is important.
Ivanka Trump: I think it does . . . . maybe it does . . . .
Nobody: Responsibility to protect, guarantor of world peace, and policeman to the world are Socialist, Communist concepts, not elements of rational USA grand national strategic objective or interests. They mask the cut-purse hiding in not a few hearts.
A cold, non-assuming assessment of current USA asset deployments in diplomacy, finance, war-fighting shows that a small number of them cultivate rational USA grand national strategic objective and interests and a large number of them — especially diplomatic and war-fighting deployments — humiliate rational USA strategic objective and interests. This mismatch more even than parental and academic malpractice drives the nation towards enslavement to Socialists, to Globalists.
We should detach from entanglements, redeploy the large majority of our diplomatic, financial, and war-making assets, shut down World War II legacy peace-keep systems, deny the CIA kinetics and meddling, learn Multi-Domain Operation in all five geographies/domains simultaneously, and build peace-keeping systems in the framework of today’s three senior brother nations, Co-Coordinators of the extant family of nations: India, USA, Russia.
CoS Kelly: That is a tall order. Very, very tall.
Nobody: Yes, Sir, it is. To wrap up, may I say a few words regarding three concepts current in our legacy foreign policy establishment?
VPOTUS: Keep it brief, you have already put us through a lot.
Ivanka Trump: I’ll say!
Nobody: Roger, Sir, Ma’am. A nation state is a power of being, not a geo-political construct, much less a social construct. A nation state makes geo-political and social constructs but itself is permanent reality, like it or not, even when it appears to disappear into the sediments of history. This is because a nation state comprises three elements — land, families, and a system of laws derived, more or less, from a constitution — at least two of which persist.
The Treaty of Westphalia recognized the nations then comprising Europe and their sovereignties. It did not create those nations or their sovereignties. In principle, the Treaty recognizes the phenomenon of nationhood everywhere on the globe that it exists, which is everywhere. Nations are acts of God, not dalliances of men.
Three concepts current in our legacy foreign policy establishment subvert USA sovereignty and muddy the development of Multi-Domain Operations. One is the concept that nations compete. Another is the concept that armed conflict is a phase of perpetual inter-nation competition. And another is the concept of national activity as whole of government.
Businesses compete. Teams compete. Even families compete. Certainly think tanks compete. And ideologists compete. But nations do not compete. Nations coordinate, conflict, and, now and again, conjugate. A nation is the will of her citizens to be independent and sovereign. A sane nation enters upon armed conflict in order to avoid competition, not to engage in it. As a nation, her internally-competing citizens simply desire and maneuver to maintain power to compel their own destiny. That is scorched earth, not competition. Every sane nation wants peace with other nations, not competition with them, and will go to war to make the peace. And rightly so. By definition, at the nation-state presence of being, competition subverts sovereignty. Nations want never to compete and will make war to prove it.
For example, there is war and there is trade. There is never trade war. Nations want trade or they want war. When a sane nation wants war, it is to remove obstacles to trade. Insane nations conjure war to impose obstacles on trade, to impede freedom of communication.
Nations also want never to enter upon armed conflict, war, because it is costly and its outcome is unpredictable. A great truth of war is that it is won in the minds of its commanders, not in the bodies of their troops. Thus the Roman Triumphal Procession. Soldiers and their families, especially, eschew war because they must carry the burden of it in their persons. Nonetheless, when the war tocsin sounds, the Soldier will be the most eager to see its denouement in unconditional surrender by the opposing nation or group.
If you want to lose your national sovereignty and see no Soldier willing to fight for you, talk about incessant, indecisive armed conflict as a mere phases of inter-nation competition. That will do it. That in fact is the end state nursed and nudged by our legacy foreign policy establishment. They have that old Communist vision, that dream of a rules-based global order made and administered by people of the right sort: the legacy foreign policy establishment.
Feeding that dream is the concept of national activity as whole of government. As if the nation is her government and whole of nation is an irrelevant, cheesy concept. Whole of government has its place, for example, in war-fighting, when State, Treasury, and Defense should be singing from the same hymnal. But if whole of nation is not upholding whole of government, whole of government is doomed. Government is one of several stewards of national sovereignty and interests, citizen parents being the first and foremost. If government, whole or part, takes itself as master of their nation’s citizens and of those citizens’ national sovereignty, it is ruling, not governing, and that for not very long.
National activity is whole of nation, not whole of government. Multi-Domain Operations will be whole of nation or they will be laughed and cried into oblivion and national sovereignty and interests with them.
Soviet subversion of USA and other nations aimed to preclude their having a whole of nation ethos because, without that, USA and other nations would be unable to discriminate between what was and was not inside their strategic national interests.
In Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, less than one percent of the nation’s citizens bore the national interest burden of over ninety nine percent of the nation’s residents. Whole of government is a jejune, totalitarian vision in the absence of whole of nation authority.
Government’s sole authority is the consent of the governed. A nation’s sole authority is Being Itself, God. Government serves its authorizing nation. Nation is a corporeality of God. That is the Treaty of Westphalia.
A government removes obstacles to competition among citizens of the nation they serve and with citizens of other nations. That is government’s role, its sole role. This is natural activity and natural order. A government punishes anyone, foreign or domestic, or any nation, who inhibits the freedom of citizens of the nation they serve to compete amongst themselves and with citizens of other nations. In this way, a government maintains the support of the citizens who consent to its founding and maintenance.
Punishment a government delivers is decisive. It annihilates the will to obstruct others’ freedom whether the will is individual, group or national. Government removes obstacles put up against freedom of movement and, more to the point, the will to aggress which caused those obstacles to go up.
After use, the instruments of punishment — Diplomacy, Finance, War-Fighting — are redeployed to home port, to home garrison, there to refit and prepare against a day of further use, which will come when it will come.
There, I have said my peace. Thank you all for allowing me to be here and for debriefing me. I am deeply grateful to you and wish God’s fullest blessing upon you and your endeavors. Thank you!
POTUS: Thank you, Nobody. You have been gracious and informative. I like you. General Kelly’s aides will see you out. We wish you a safe journey home with our fullest thanks.
[Exit Nobody.]
POTUS: John, set up a meeting here with Pompeo, Mnuchin, and Mattis. Then set up another one with Putin and Modi, but not here. Just the three of us and close staff. Off record, two or three days, no press. Safe location, maybe Israel, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Diego Garcia, Guam? See what you can do. ASAP. Quiet. No leaks.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: EU wants to join alliance to check China . . . ?
Update 2: How tech’s richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
Update 3: Ed Luce: Kissinger: ‘We are in a Very, Very Grave Period for the World’
Update 4: Spengler: American Narcissism and China
Update 5: Mark. E. Rosen: How Diego Garcia Can Play a Pivotal Role in America’s Relationship with India
Update 6: Don Surber: Trump’s Reverse Nixon on China and also Trump Worries China and also Trump Was Right In 1987, And Is Still Right Today
Update 7: Todd Wood: America really did have a Manchurian Candidate in the White House
Update 8: Sundance: President Trump Confronts Multinational Big-AG, Proposes Bridge Subsidy To Break Up Controlled Markets and Exploitative Contract Farming
Update 9: Modi and Putin agree to start work on first joint project in Afghanistan
Update 10: Oil’s Journey From Azerbaijan to a Station Near You [In Israel]
Update 11: Claire Berlinski: Contra successor to NATO etc.
Update 12: Did Brennan Sanitize [The Fraud’s] Passport Records?
Update 13: Rand Paul on John Brennan
Update 14: Trump Has Been Set Up, Framed And Relentlessly Persecuted By The American Intelligence Community
Update 15: VDH: Continental Drift
Update 16: Christian heartland opens window into fight for China’s soul
Update 17: Austin Bay: Erdogan’s Turkey and Nato
Update 18: An acquaintance comments:
I just finished reading your piece “Piercing Eloquence…” and I must say, wow! Absolutely perfect movement from understanding -> implementation of Three Brothers Doctrine. There are also at least a handful of volumes buried in there – Holmes would no doubt call them monographs – that could be written to expand on some concepts.
Your characterization is charming. All involved speak in a way that clearly brings their face to mind.
Some thoughts:
Metaphor of NATO as once useful but now putrefying body helpful to understanding its obsolescence.
“1940s concepts of ideal international relations are completely irrelevant today” – neat that I’ve seen this thought reflected multiple times by Reynolds when he says that the biggest part of the Trump presidency is the renegotiation of post WW II relations.
Nice distinction – by which I mean I hadn’t thought of it and now view the situation in a different way – of the difference between good relations with China and good relations with President Xi.
“a slut’s frock” so naturally I had to check. I don’t watch the news. Holy shit. Perhaps some 61 year old women could carry that off (Christy Brinkley?) but PM May is not one of them. Ouch. WTF was she thinking? I’ve seen women think it’s a power-play to dangle their sexuality with the thinking that their power is increased in proportion to the inability of the target man to take them to bed. It’s a weak play that should only be used if a woman has nothing else and even then diminishes her future power; when used by someone like May it seems sad or insane.
“words have power of being” which is why I won’t ever use an unnatural pronoun. “Mutilate yourself however much you’d like, kiddo, you aren’t what you aren’t.” Everyone instinctively knows this and it’s one reason Jordan Peterson is so popular.
Land > water > fire/cyber > air > space. Excellent! Relating everything to geography like this is a different way of thinking for me.
Looking at threats/needed actions from perspective of threat to geographical sovereignty – magnificent. Throw away the poli-sci BS.
Mutual sovereignty alliance. New way of thinking about it and extremely disruptive to status quo. Similar to family vs. community of nations.
Anglosphere has vanished. I hadn’t thought of it like that but yes, it has. England may as well be a de facto Islamic suzerainty.
Coordination, conflict and conjugation instead of competition. I’m still thinking about this to fully understand it; for me, it is one of your more subtle points. I get it at a gut level and I’m letting my head figure it out.
“Whole of government” vs. “Whole of nation” another concept that seems apparent in retrospect but only then. It’s embarrassing how well The Opposition can shape one’s thinking so that the concept of “whole of nation” doesn’t jump forward.
That is a really long list. There’s a lot more! It’s neat how well the device of a conversation works to develop an idea.
Update 19: L. Todd Wood: Putin Getting Played By China, Needs A Deal With Trump
Update 20: ISW: How We Got Here With Russia: The Kremlin’s Worldview
Update 21: James P. Pinkerton: Why Buying Greenland Is One Of Donald Trump’s Best Ideas
Update 22: David Archibald: Advice for Our Vietnamese Friends on China
Update 23: Francesca A. Graham: Putin’s political philosophy: implications for future Russian military activity
Update 24: Steve Leonard: You Really Think I’m Irrelevant? LOL. A Letter To Clausewitz Haters From Beyond The Grave
Update 25: Jacob Nordangard: The Elite Technocrats Behind The Global ‘Great Reset’
Update 26: Andrew Roberts: The Wall Street Journal: “It’s Time To Revive The Anglosphere”
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
