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
By Patrick L. Smith
October 25, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Salon"
- 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?
Well, Obama came to office promising to end the
American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will leave having ended
neither. With the new decision to keep 10,000 American troops in
Afghanistan, it is plain that (1) he has no serious exit strategy in
either case and (2) no one at the Pentagon is especially concerned
with developing one.
Closing the prison at Guantánamo was one of
Obama’s signature commitments when he was elected, and now look: His
own defense secretary, the worrisomely unintelligent Ashton Carter,
stands in open defiance by refusing to sign release papers for 52
detainees cleared to leave. Just as astonishing, the president can
apparently do nothing about it.
As to Syria, the president has taken to blaming
others for the ever-worsening debacle on the argument he was not
behind this interventionist program from the start. Unseemly is the
very kindest word here. There is no reason to doubt Obama’s word,
but he begs a question almost too large to contemplate: If you
opposed the policy, Mr. President, why are we there and why is your
name on it?
By way of the Iran agreement, it appeared that
Obama had a serious chance to alter Washington’s profoundly
distorted engagement with Israel. But this, clearly, was never the
story. The story all along has been to preserve Israel’s
nuclear-weapons monopoly in the Middle East while keeping neighbors
either onside or off balance. Hence the obsession with removing the
Assad government in Syria. Hence Washington’s explicit green light a
matter of hours prior to the coup deposing President Morsi in Egypt
two year ago.
Other matters. The wholly unnecessary
confrontation with Russia will stand as the worst and most
consequential blot on the Obama administration’s foreign policy
legacy, in my view. Who runs this policy and why? Tension in
Sino-American relations is less charged but not less stupid. And as
the evidently ongoing program to destabilize the Maduro government
in Venezuela suggests, the subversion machines at the CIA and State
continue firing on all eight.
This is the backward glance. What does this
splattered, pockmarked record tell us as we look forward and wonder
what the policies of Obama’s successor will look like? It is time to
consider this question carefully. Now that Democrats join
Republicans in advancing their thinking—is this the word?—as to
America’s conduct abroad, what are we hearing?
*
The foreign policy of any Republican candidate now
in the race, with the exception of the rapidly vanishing Rand Paul,
is a no-brainer, and I mean this literally. We find among them a
seamless unity behind reactionary policies that lie between
unworkable and dangerous. In this respect, the most worrisome G.O.P.
aspirants are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the two who purport to have
operational agendas.
I do not find anyone in the right-wing lineup
electable, but I will stay short of any prediction. It is not my
point. However little sense they make, they are a very influential
presence in the national political conversation, and no one can
afford to miss this. Two reasons.
One, the Republicans’ argument for militarized,
often-perilous assertions of American prerogative abroad are
perfectly congruent with the ideology that sustains the deep state.
In effect, the G.O.P. is the agency through which the exceptionalist
consciousness that drives the deep state remains a political
imperative for anyone seeking high office.
One may find the Republican leadership—in Congress
as well as on the stump—primitive nostalgists lost in a
half-imagined version of the past. But these people exist among us
because we decline to dismiss them as frivolous—which they are and
which we should.
This is partly the fault of our “political-media
ecosystem,” as Paul Krugman put it very cogently in a recent New
York Times column. “The modern Republican Party is a post-policy
enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems,” he
wrote. “And the news media really, really don’t want to face up to
that awkward reality.”
Too true. But it is a cheap dodge to place all
blame on those media operating as a deep state appendage. We all own
a piece of the Republican charade, in my view, so long as we remain
unwilling to look squarely at the system—including the press and the
broadcasters—that puts political vandals before us as somehow
credible.
Two, in the circumstances just described the G.O.P.
has an unmistakable influence on America’s foreign policy discourse.
Maybe all societies have categories designating what is sayable and
unsayable, but ours is drastically skewed. It should be obvious to
all that even those candidates not part of the Republican clown show
will find it that much more difficult to advance any seriously
innovative policy proposals.
And so to the Democrats.
As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir suggested in a superbly
pithy piece after the first Democratic debate last week, it is
impossible to know whether Hillary Clinton is a progressive
candidate or a political predator intent on swallowing Bernie
Sanders whole, but it grows more likely that she will win the
Democratic nomination before we are able to tell.
Here is O’Hehir’s piece.
I do not buy into the idea that last week’s
exchange in Las Vegas was Clinton’s triumph and the beginning of
Sanders’ decline. When I read as much in the following morning’s
Times, the report struck me as a hopelessly bald attempt to mold the
truth—as power elitists always think nothing of doing. I thought
Sanders carried the evening.
This said, weaknesses appeared in Sanders’
positions, and foreign policy was high among them. He does not, it
grieves me a little to say, appear to have much of one. Senator
Sanders’ opposition to the Iraq war back in 2003 is greatly to his
credit. But Candidate Sanders seems to take the safe, default
position on one question after another—Russia, the Middle East, most
recently Obama’s decision to keep troops in Afghanistan.
I do not see that this will do. But neither will
Clinton’s righteous faith in spreading neoliberal ideology across
the planet, her stacked-deck idea of humanitarian intervention, a
liking for military solutions in foreign affairs that sometimes puts
her closer to Republican candidates than to her boss when she was
secretary of state. Whatever Clinton wants us to know or not know
about her thinking, exceptionalist consciousness is inscribed in
every sentence she utters.
What have we got on the Democratic side? A
candidate smart enough to understand that were he to propose an
authentically progressive foreign policy agenda he would be mauled
for the positions it would logically include? Another candidate who
is very likely more at home in the deep state than anyone else from
either party? It is hard to say, but maybe.
Easier to say what we do not have on foreign
policy questions in this election: much of a choice.
*
Is this by design?
I put this question to David Talbot in a telephone
exchange Tuesday. Talbot (who founded Salon 20 years ago) has just
published “The Devil’s Chessboard,” an account of the deep state
focused on the crucial role of Allen Dulles as it emerged in the
1950s. Dulles directed the CIA from 1953 until President Kennedy
fired him in 1961. It is Talbot’s contention that elements of the
deep state, probably including Dulles, were responsible for
Kennedy’s assassination two years later.
“Presidents have to be thoroughly vetted before
getting to the White House,” Talbot replied. “Kennedy was probably
the last president not thoroughly approved by the deep state. This
may be edgy, but I think there’ve been lessons in this for every
president since. It’s a question of what a president can and can’t
do, or what he does at his own peril.”
If “edgy” means very far from the orthodox
version of events, O.K. But I see no grounds whatsoever to
push any part of Talbot’s thesis off the table. The reality
we must all grasp if we are to straighten out our nation’s
bent path into the 21st century is that a very
vast swathe of history requires a fundamental rewrite.
“Every president has been manipulated by
national security officials,” Talbot said in a long Q & A
with Salon’s Liam O’Donoghue when “the Devil’s Chessboard”
was published last week. You can
read that interview here.
Return briefly to Obama’s foreign policy
record. In my view, it is the story of a president
discovering the limits of his prerogative as defined by
various elements of our permanent government—primarily
uniformed military officers and the national security
officials Talbot mentions. He appears to have won (Iran,
Cuba) or lost (most of the rest) depending on whether the
deep state sanctioned the policy direction.
“Obama came up through all the usual
institutions—Columbia, Harvard Law,” Talbot remarked when we
spoke. “He has the basic ideology of the group, which is
American exceptionalism.”
It is an interesting observation in that
it helps us to read into Obama’s choices. Without exception,
every one of his initiatives abroad concerned how policy is
executed—never the policy goals. The ancient Greeks
distinguished between techne—means, method—and
telos, meaning purpose, intent, desired outcome. Obama
concerns himself solely with the techne of American
policy. As Talbot put it, “He wanted to moderate and
modulate some of the excesses.”
And this, I conclude, is the borderline
that will circumscribe the choices of any candidate voters
and wealthy donors, many of them deep state inhabitants,
send to the White House in 2017. We are to see nothing more
than tinkering at the edges.
*
I read an extremely compelling piece on
environmental politics the other day. Wen Stephenson’s
“Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Climate Justice
Movement” came out in The Nation and is taken from his
just-published book, “What We’re Fighting for Now is Each
Other.” The
Nation essay is here.
I had better say right away why I end a
column on our foreign policy prospects with mention of a
piece on the climate question. It is very simple.
Stephenson is concerned with the failure
of incremental change of the kind attempted by mainstream
Greens over the past several decades. He writes about
“wide-awake people” and their ideas as to what needs to get
done to put effective, planet-saving policies in place.
Their thinking runs to “changing power structures.”
“To be serious about climate change is to
be radical,” Stephenson writes. He quotes an activist (and
divinity student at Harvard) who tells him, “The kind of
change you’re talking about—anything feasible within the
current political system—really won’t do us any good. You’re
talking about going off the cliff at 40 miles per hour
instead of 60.”
What is the topic here? Fair enough to say
it is the ability among our political and policy-setting
institutions to self-correct, to advance toward rational,
life-enhancing outcomes. They have lost it. The urgent task
is to face this.
And now you know why this column ends as
it does: The truths carry over, perfectly congruent.
Patrick Smith is Salon’s foreign
affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly
for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he
is also an essayist, critic and editor. His most recent
books are “Time No Longer: Americans After the American
Century” (Yale, 2013) and Somebody Else’s Century: East and
West in a Post-Western World (Pantheon, 2010). Follow him @thefloutist.
His web site is patricklawrence.us.
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