"Exceptionalism Always Wins" No Matter Who Holds the White House?
Wednesday, Oct 21, 2015 07:01 PM EST
This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn’t control
Foreign policy never really changes regardless of who holds the White House. This is why exceptionalism always wins
Patrick L. Smith
There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan as previously planned. You can look back over President Obama’s record in such matters or you can face forward and think about what this decision means, or implies, or suggests —or maybe all three—about the next president’s conduct of foreign policy.
I do not like what I see in either direction. What anyone who looks carefully and consciously can discern in Obama’s seven years in office are limits. These are imposed in part by inherited circumstances, but let us set these aside for now, appalling as they are. My concern is with the limits imposed by the entrenched power of our permanent government, otherwise known as the “deep state.”
With the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week, the serious party joins the unserious party in articulating a vision of America’s proper conduct abroad. The question Obama’s two terms force upon us is how much any of what we hear from the Democratic candidates will matter even if we assume one of them succeeds him.
The Obama administration’s accumulated inventory on the foreign side is a mixed bag to put the point mildly, and one has to count it heavily net-negative at this point. The big accomplishments, of course, are the accord governing the Iran nuclear program and the resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba. While both represent hard-fought political victories, there was considerable backing for these undertakings in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department bureaucracy and the corporate sector. Hang on to this distinction.
Against the successes stands a long list of failures, reversals and something else that does not make such punchy headlines but is just as important as the policies that do: I refer to the president’s unwillingness or inability to counter what we can call policy momentum. Time and again, Obama has allowed State, Defense and the intelligence apparatus to proceed with programs and strategies not remotely in keeping with his evident tilt toward a less militarized, interventionist and confrontational foreign policy.
I put this down to two realities. One is Obama’s ambivalent thinking. Many, many people misread what this man stood for and against when he was elected seven autumns ago, and we are now able to separate the one from the other. More on this in a minute.
Two is the “power elite” C. Wright Mills told us about in the book of this name he published many decades ago. “They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives.” They are, in short, the deep state.
Mills’ book came out in 1956, when the phenomenon he described was newly emergent. Having ignored this elite’s accumulating influence in the 59 years since, we get the questions Obama’s experience raises: Does it matter who we put in the White House? Is there any prospect at all of changing this nation’s conduct and direction? Are our policy-setting institutions any longer capable of self-correction?
The best that can be said now is that the power elite/permanent government/deep state, take your pick, is greatly more visible. At least we know enough, some of us, to ask the questions.
Where to begin?
ASKING QUESTIONS! MORE AT LINK:
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/21/this_is_not_a_democracy_behind_the_deep_state_that_obama_hillary_or_trump_couldnt_control/
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