Was Franklin D Roosevelt the father of the neo-cons? His predecessor Herbert Hoover in his memoir "Freedom Betrayed" (which shocked his children and which wasn't published until 2011) said Britain and France made a mistake in going to war with Germany and accused Roosevelt of provoking the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The latter is certainly true. In contrast to how a Hoover administration would have acted, Chamberlain told Joseph Kennedy that the Americans were the reason he went to war with Germany.
FDR created the American empire that we have today, asset stripping the British empire in the process. The first neo-cons renounced Trotskyism to become New Dealers and replaced a millennial belief in a Marxist eschatology with a belief in a world remade by American liberalism.
On the other hand, FDR's focus was on defeating the Axis and he allowed Stalin (whom he viewed almost benignly, for example at Tehran and Yalta, very unlike the thinking of the Edwardian imperialist Churchill) to capture Eastern Europe, China and North Korea.
Sean McMeekin thinks Roosevelt's decision to make unconditional surrender a war aim, taken to please Stalin who seemed not to care and was anyway talking to Germans about a negotiated peace, was a mistake. It seems to prefigure the morally driven attitude of the neo-cons.
Like the neo-cons, Roosevelt was very keen on a Jewish homeland but failed to convince the King of Saudi Arabia that it should be in Arabia. The King suggested not unreasonably that it should be carved out of Germany.
The received version of the history of the Second World War is the template for later American wars.
It means they are morally driven against evil men who resemble Hitler and should end in his total subjugation, without any negotiations with him.
I switch on the BBC World Service a moment ago to hear Zelensky saying that Putin has started the Third World War, is trying to impose a different way of life on the world and must be stopped.
At least Donald Trump has abandoned moralism and millennialism in foreign policy, but he has also abandoned international law in favour of doing what his donors and billionaire friends want.
Was FDR the first neo-con? Was Walter Winchell the first blogger? Joe McCarthy, was he the first MAGA influencer?
ReplyDeleteThe Red Army allowed Stalin to capture Eastern Europe: the western allies were a long way away when the Red Army reached Poland. When Roosevelt died, the Japanese still held a fair chunk of China. It was four years later that Chiang's forces conclusively lost. And Chiang did not lose to Stalin, but to Mao.
True but had FDR done what Churchill wanted and attacked Yugoslavia not Italy and had a negotiated peace been made with Germans of the Canaris type? Had the UK gone to war with Stalin as almost happened the USA would presumably not have given Communist Russia (USSR) Lend Lease but that was Churchill's affair.
Delete'FDR created the American empire that we have today, asset stripping the British empire in the process.' No, and again no.
ReplyDeleteChurchill drove his country into a ditch and believed he could once more lean on the Ammie cousins to pull him out. He seriously expected more free money with no collateral, as Britain and France received in 1914-1919. But of course FDR's hands were tied because of Neutrality Acts. The Republican Congress wasn't going to sign on to any wartime lending to belligerents who couldn't begin to pay the money back.
Lend-Lease was the best FDR could do, and even then he had to twist Joe Kennedy's arm to give it lukewarm endorsement when Ambassador Joe spoke before Congress in January 1941. And to get Lend-Lease, Britain was required to sell off much of its corporate assets in America (in lieu of collateral, which they could not provide).
So there's that 'asset-stripping.' Actually a down-payment on a loan that was likely to go bad.
The 'American empire' did not begin with FDR; we had Alaska and the Hawaiian archipelago and the Philippines and Guam and Cuba and Puerto Rico and Panama long before that (and we offered and gave independence to most of them, if they wanted it). We didn't demand or take over Malaya and Singapore and Hong Kong and New Guinea, or Nigeria and Gold Coast and Kenya and the Rhodesias and Swaziland (etc. etc.).
It's a kind of rote whinging one repeatedly hears from Aussies and Newzies, far more than from Brits: this fable that Americans (or 'the Yankees,' as say the geographically challenged) lolled about for years at the beginning of the World Wars, jumping in only at the end and then unfairly taking credit for winning them. It took advantage of the poor broken-suitcase Empire when it was all tapped out. Just pop-cult misinformed history without a lick of truth to it.
The fact is, America shouldn't have been involved in those wars to begin with. Any more than the US of A should have got involved in the Suez thing or Indochina in the mid-50s, or in the pointless Zionist conflicts our Israeli masters keep chivvying us towards.
I agree with most of this. Asset-stripping was not the right expression. The UK should have renewed our alliance with Japan in 1923 but did not under US pressure. Ideally we and France should have kept out of war - Japan not Germany was the danger to both countries.Yes the American empire goes back to the 19th century - I meant by empire the American unofficial very very real rule over much of the world, the sense in which Caitlin Johnstone for example uses the phrase.
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