Scimus autem quoniam diligentibus Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum, iis qui secundum propositum vocati sunt sancti. And we know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints.
AMERICAN FOREIGN RESPONSIBILITIES
Be Fair
Be Firm
Be Faithful
American foreign policy — the province of structures of government — can be adduced only from American foreign responsibility – the province of Americans united. To be legitimate, American governmental policy must and can only reflect Americans’ resolve regarding their own united responsibility. Their government cannot lead Americans. Americans can and must lead their government. In their foreign (and domestic) affairs, that means Americans united must decide what is their responsibility and what is not.
Thinking our problems are political is a distraction cleverly conjured by foreign lodgments in Americans’ structures of government. Our problems are of our own making: that we neglect to ponder and resolve what are and what are not our responsibilities. In the absence of that labor, we expose ourselves to desecration by connivers and opportunists, as today grin rampant over us. Falling victim to such is our own fault. We Americans have been derelict in our duty to resolve upon our own responsibilities and non-responsibilities and to put up structures of government which make and execute policies accordingly.
What are our responsibilities as Americans? What are not our responsibilities as Americans? Answering these questions and putting those answers into practice determine our politics and resulting structures of government and policies. This is a never-ending process because conditions are never the same. AEI and Brookings have no competence making policy for Americans’ structures of government, much less creating those structures.
Making our lives about political parties shows colossal stupidity. Long, long before we get to politics, which have their place, we have to face and resolve the matter of our own responsibilities, over and over again, what we want and do not want them to be. This truth compels our response to matters domestic as well as foreign.
What we Americans, united, want our foreign responsibilities to be — and not to be — trumps what we may be told our responsibilities are. In fact, no one can tell us what our foreign responsibilities are because, whatever they are, they are ours inalienably and we undertake them as sovereign persons and states. Or, we reject them as not us. Responsibilities come from within. They are co-terminus with our human nature, which is divine. We can agree what our united responsibilities are, based on the divine nature we share as humans. No external agencies — such as lodgments within a structure of government — have authority to tell us what our responsibilities are. Quite the opposite: structures of government have responsibility, delegated by us, to implement policies — domestic as well as foreign — that reflect united responsibilities we Americans agree we share.
The immediate objective of American foreign policy is: detach the funding hoses that run between federal agencies on the one hand and academe, private industries, sovereign wealth funds, and think tanks on the other. If the latter want influence inside government agencies, let them sponsor persons elected by the generality of Americans to carry forward that wish on their behalf. The personal and national sovereignties of American citizens, the electorate, must be neither suborned nor substituted.
Her citizens subsist in the one nation.
The next objective of American foreign policy is: hose down the US State Department and hose away USAID, CIA, DOJ, DOEd, NIH, DHS, OECD, and others federal departments and agencies, boards and commissions. Correlatively, expand the federal Supreme Court to 59 Justices, collapse the federal Appellate Courts by 54%, and collapse the federal District Courts by 81%. Providing fewer courts will encourage people to settle their differences outside public expense. Private disputes are private, and taxpayers should not be on the hook for litigating them.
The next objective is creating — with India, USA, and Russia, Japan and Egypt — new earth-wide stability structures. These replace those made as WW II ended and that should have been replaced after the Soviet disappeared. Tyrants galore exult right now because earth-wide stability structures are not present to prevent or extirpate their machinations.
A Man of God needs a room to pray, work, eat, and sleep. A garden or path to walk along helps. Jesus walked among the rich and poor alike, and it was clerisy, legal and religious authorities, not law enforcement or ordinary people, who agitated and engineered His harassment, arrest, and execution. It was commoners to whom He appeared afterwards. I think the drama was to justify throwing the Army of Titus at said clerisy. Again and again, over two millennia, they showed consistent unwillingness to abide the rules of the road and discharge the responsibilities they swore to undertake.
It doesn’t matter where you are.
Bloom where you are.
Fight where you are.
Cut back the weeds where you are.
Save America, save the world.
God has no need of a comms shop. The pretense of “bringing people to Christ” is preposterous. The pretense of “bringing Christ to people” is even more preposterous.
Many people can do a thing. Few can do it properly. Many people play the piano. Few produce music when they play the piano. A school cannot produce a Glenn Gould or a J. S. Bach. God alone can do that. There are the good and then there are the great. There are Generals and then there are Generals. There are evening jackets and then there are evening jackets. There are husbands and then there are husbands. There are wives and then there are wives. Excellence never comes in quantity. The genuinely superlative is genuinely rare and sought-after, therefore precious. Happy the man who recognizes its presence.
The churches and schools were done in by Liberation Theology.
Close most of them and convert the rest to prayer halls for all believers.
The courts and lawyers were done in by Critical Theory.
Close most of them and assign most of the rest to state and county jurisdiction.
The armed forces were done in by Revolution in Military Affairs.
Structure the joint force to accomplish the mission of the land force.
Think tanks and banks were done in by Containment Theory.
Defund, deregulate, investigate, and prosecute.
Entrepreneurs were done in by Complexity Theory.
Teach self-confidence, self-satisfaction, and self-sacrifice.
A common thread among these do ins is the disabling of reason and the enabling of rigidity. Or, put another way, the rejection of reality in favor of the enticements of reverie. I excerpt at length from what is probably Angelo M. Codevilla’s last essay and certainly comprises at least one contrapunctus of what would be his The Art Of Fugue (with emphasis added):
But the deepest philosophical causes are not in dispute. After Descartes’ Discourse on Method reduced reality into something wholly comprehensible by truncating it, the very peaks of Western philosophy reversed the relationship between reality and the observer. Kant and Hegel’s “idealism” is neither more nor less than the further affirmation that the mind, for its own sovereign convenience, can take possession of what it perceives. From these philosophical peaks, any number of streams of far less sophisticated thought have flowed that effectively and explicitly place the mind’s product under the sway of man’s will, and hence of man’s various interests.
The intellectual mechanism is straightforward: presume to abolish the objective status of what you see, and presume to retake possession of what you then suppose to be reality, based on what matters to you. [The technical name for this process — or mechanism as Codevilla puts it — is switching out Realism for Nominalism. It has never a happy ending. Nominalism’s arguably most illustrious proponent is Peter Abelard, who was castrated for his troubles. The most thoroughgoing exposition of difference in outlook as between Realism and Nominalism is given in exchanges during early years of the 5th Century between St. Augustine, a Black African, and Pelagius, a Scots-Irish ascetic.]
From Ludwig Feuerbach’s injunction to worship Christianity as our own creation, to Karl Marx’s assertion of sovereignty over the mind’s products as “superstructural,” to class interest, to Sigmund Freud’s assertion of perceptions as reflections of sexuality, the main streams of latter-day high Western thought have de-valued reason and reality in favor of all manner of self-indulgence. Today, colleges teach students to disparage reference to facts and logic as “logism.”
Loosening our bonds to reality is attractive also because calling things by whatever names serve our immediate purpose liberates us from the hard work of understanding things not of our making, and gives us the illusion of mastery over our environment. It is especially attractive to those who have power over others, because it frees them from having to persuade the rest of humanity. For society’s mob of lazy under-performers, pleasing the leaders is an easier way of securing one’s place than competing for merit. Anyhow: intellectual/moral deterioration has ever been an easier sell than the hard acquisition of skills and virtues.
In our time as ever, there does seem to be a natural concurrence of interest in imprecision and lack of discipline between those who are happy enough to be barbarians and the despots who naturally dominate barbarians.
Every man’s most immediate and dangerous enemy is his own mind, and behind that, his own ego. There are techniques for killing the one and crucifying the other. The techniques work. Few parents know them and teach them to their children. Life cannot be happy apart from their successful employment.
This is important for the development and execution of foreign policy because a person whose mind jumps about and whose ego is rampant simply cannot do either to a happy effect. They cannot develop or execute foreign policy that benefits their nation. On the other hand, a person submerged in their own mind’s heated rampages and driven by their own ego’s ludicrous claims are fitting servants for every cockwomble and authoritarian who shuffles through the door. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh, GA MacArthur intoned in his Address to Congress.
Spiritual excellence is the foundational authority for foreign policy success. It is also the operational rallying point of statecraft altogether. Addressing the Corps of Cadets at West Point, GA MacArthur observed the foundational authority of spiritual excellence while commending Cadets, Command, and Staff to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
Facing facts rather than loading out a prioris is not a nice idea. It is an operational necessity. He who comes in telling the earth what she is and should be rather than listening to the earth and seeing what she is and wants to be, well, the earth will be none too pleased at the insult and has six ways from Sunday for making her puissance practical with extreme finality.
Foreign policy development and execution starts there. US IC/Foreign Policy Establishment cockwombles reject Donald Trump because their hearts are unclean.
Successful statecraft — development and execution of foreign and domestic policy — depends on hearing and seeing earth’s signals. The most terrifying condition into which a person or a nation can be thrown is hearing but not understanding and seeing but not perceiving. Jeremiah 5 and Isaiah 6 describe this condition in heart-rending imagery. The prius of hearing and seeing earth’s signals is spiritual excellence.
You want to conduct the difficult art of statecraft? Remember the Name of God at every moment of your life. Only in that condition will you receive your countrymen’s approbation for a job well done. The very purpose of statecraft is expansion of the sovereign freedom of the state and her citizens.
A statesman is a forensic specialist, and the questions most pressing and continuous in their mind is, What am I not seeing?, What am I not hearing? Probably in someone’s classic statesmanship manual there are words to that effect.
Reality is in motion, reality is movement. So:
What do I see?
What do I not see?
What do I want to see?
What should I be seeing?
What can I make myself see?
What can I make seen or not seen?
I seems to me that pseudo-statesmen soon enough wave off the first two questions to focus on the last four questions, and finally, on the last question. For example, all signals I get from the Euro-American Foreign Policy Establishment today, especially CIA and FBI, derive from their institutional devotion to the last question. The signals say persons who fill and dominate those institutions want to present and do present as the Fourth and Final Branch of US Government, superseding the previous three Branches, on pain of death to doubters.
Were I CJCS, I should put a big world map on a wall and ask a handful of polymaths, theologians, O5s, E8s, and E9s to discuss and mark thereon the nations’ movements. I should ask them to check those movements as possible subsystems of larger movements. I should ask them to discern what protecting and defending the US Constitution — aka, protecting American citizens’ freedoms and their states’ and nation’s sovereignties — entrains in context of those movements. In that exercise, I should expect the question, What do I not see? to prevail.
Then I should repeat that exercise with other handfuls of polymaths, theologians, O5s, E8s, and E9s.
For example, when a platoon in training captures the OPFOR’s commander in his TOC, the relevant AAR would discuss, What did OPFOR not see and why did they not see it? That was the relevant Q on 12 September 2001 as well, applied in that case to Whole of Government, including Courts and Congress.
Were I a COCOM Commander looking to check CCP, I would move forward — to flank her BRI tracks — a multi-national, multi-domain networked cloud of Battalion Task Forces (BTN TFs) supported by massively redundant lines of communication. In present circumstances, that would be statecraft indeed.
The BTN TF is the decisive kinetic formation on the modern and future battlescape. Twenty years ago, the decisive kinetic formation was the Brigade Combat Team (BCT). Before that, it was the Division (DIV) and before that the Regiment (RGT). Now, because lethality, authority, maneuverability, diplomatic and financial initiative and puissance, and logistical competence have been pushed down the formation scale even further, the decisive kinetic force is the BTN TF.
This is the true RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs). It is to be welcomed. It signals a return to the decisive importance of the private soldier — first and foremost a private citizen — to the difficult art of statecraft.
Had they brought in the Russians to ally in checking CCP, then things would be going swimmingly. In time, in time. In fits and starts, India, USA, and Russia are creating the new earth-wide stability structures, to succeed those made as WW II ended, and to do what should have been done after the Soviet disappeared.
None of us sees much of anything. We always only deal in transients and incidentals, the best of us trying to suss out deeper meaning from those indications. The last thing a wise person wants to do is assume they see what is in front of them.
Intelligent American foreign policy hinges on cleaning American hearts so that American eyes see and American ears hear. The objective is constant: maintain sovereign freedom for the nation, her states, and her citizens. The means are constant: keep little so you can do much.
A War-Fighter Code
Train Hard
Fight Easy
Win Early
The more you have, the less you can do because your time is consumed taking care of what you have. To grow strong, lost weight. Love God first. Love yourself last. Do what you want. Follow the tyrant and flick his haunches.
The gist of cleaning American hearts is decentralized authority: that persons, especially judges, not familiar to, or inimical to, a locale of peoples should not have authority over their affairs, at least not unappealable or non-replaceable authority. This is also the tenor of our Constitution and much of our legislation and jurisprudence. No rule by foreigners! It ain’t too late to get started in this direction, but we ain’t going back to some golden day. We are going forward — or better, inward — to structures of inter-nation peace still to be widely seen and accepted. CIA-Globalists’ entire enterprise runs for, plays to, and plays on rule by foreigners. Expert practitioners they call them, meaning of course, themselves. All that can be wiped away in a trice.
The Übermensch Friedrich Nietzsche did end up in an insane asylum, after all.
Laws are cartridges.
Lawyers are guns.
Persons who hire lawyers are active shooters.
You want less violence?
Repeal laws and decertify lawyers.
And don’t replace them.
Allowing clouds of laws and torrents of lawyers in a country is the same as leaving loaded guns all over in a house full of children. What do you expect?
Two sets of laws to repeal and not replace which would really help Americans and America are the federal voting and civil rights acts. Let people and states handle their own affairs, locally, for God’s sake. It’s the only way to make peace. People handle their own affairs or unity be not aboard. If they go for secession, that is another matter altogether, one already settled: NO! However, this side of going there, let unity arise organically from local control.
Patience is indicated. Patience and Fortitude. When the time is right to strike (kairos), we will know it all simultaneously at the same time (chronos). No one will have to tell us the right time is here. We will know it in our hearts and souls. Count on it. Trust the Master. He is closer to us than we might think or realize.
That said, I invite a reader’s attention to Three Principles of American foreign responsibility — and policies implied therein — which follow the next picture.
usmcwarrior: The Art Of Polishing The Turd
PLA COLs: Unrestricted Warfare
Principle I
Principle II
Principle III
An order to deploy which lacks or frustrates intent to compel a target to sign a declaration of unconditional surrender is an unlawful order by the Rules of Just War, the Conventions of War, Common Sense, and the Spirit of America.
The mind is very powerful. Without understanding its power, man feels proud of his limited knowledge. It is utter foolishness. He feels he knows everything. He is diverting his mind on trivial objectives without trying to know the Atma. This is the reason why man is subjected to difficulties and misery. You are responsible for your happiness or misery. You should not blame others for your condition. As you are unable to realise your true Self, you are experiencing the dualities of pleasure and pain. Once you know your true Self, you will not be affected by them. It is a sin to blame others for your suffering. You suffer because of lack of morality in your feelings and of improper conduct. Your destiny is based on your character. Character is based on actions. Actions are based on thoughts. Therefore, cultivate morality and sacred thoughts.