Martin Sieff writes:
Russia and China today both enjoy the same
grand-strategic advantage against the United States that the United States
enjoyed through the 44 years of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was then the superpower of the
left, as the left had been globally understood since the French Revolution. It
was the state committed to the promotion of revolutionary change across the
world. The United States, by contrast, was the
superpower of the right. It was committed to the maintenance of stability and
continuity in government systems around the world.
The United States won the Cold War. The craving
for stability, peace, and continuity among governments and populations alike
proved infinitely stronger than the fleeting flashes of revolutionary fervor.
The Soviet Union eventually became physically exhausted and globally isolated
by its ideological commitment to revolutionary change. Today, however, the roles of the two great powers
have been reversed. Since the advent of Madeleine Albright as secretary of
state in 1997, the United States has become increasingly ideologically
committed to the spreading of “instant powdered democracy” in every nation of
the world, as defined and approved by the United States. Russia and China have
become the main “conservative” or “right-wing” powers committed to preserving
the status quo.
Ironically, the U.S. commitment to continual
revolution around the world is a revival of the discredited concepts of Leon
Trotsky. Josef Stalin abandoned Trotsky’s ideas in the 1920s when he took power
in the Soviet Union. This gave him the ideological flexibility to create the
Grand Alliance with the United States and the British Empire that won World War
II—the Great Patriotic War. But Nikita Khrushchev revived Trotsky’s
disastrous concept: he and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, drained their
superpower dry by pouring resources into promoting revolution throughout the
developing world, from 1954 in Egypt to Afghanistan in 1979-87. This led to the
collapse of the Soviet system. It also prompted governments around the world to
seek protection from efforts to fan the flames of revolution within them by
turning to the United States for security on U.S. terms.
Today, it is the United States under presidents
of both parties that has embraced the Trotskyite delusion. The bipartisan
policy of the United States has become Permanent Revolution until Total and
Perfect Democracy is finally achieved. This can only end the way it ended for
Maximilien Robespierre in the French Revolution and for Trotsky in the
Bolshevik one. It is fitting that so many of the older
generation of American neoconservatives started life as communist enthusiasts
in the 1930s and ’40s. For today’s neocons are really neo-Trotskyites promoting
the old, doomed enthusiasms under a new label. By contrast, Russia and China are led by
pragmatic governments guided by the concepts of profit and self-interest. They
support and want to do business with existing governments and governing systems
around the world. This has made them the 21st century’s major global powers of
the right.
This is the strategic and psychological force
behind China’s immense success in displacing the United States and the European
Union in Africa. Chinese investment and aid comes free from the destabilizing,
potentially revolutionary ideological strings that undermine existing systems
of government throughout the region. The governments of China and Russia hate and fear
revolution and see the endless ideological promotion of democracy
American-style in small countries around them and in their own homelands as
planting the seeds of chaos and disintegration.
Democracy works admirably in societies where it
is allowed to develop organically. But when other governments try to accelerate
its growth artificially or hasten its triumph from outside, especially when
they resort to military force to do so, the result is almost always a fierce
reaction against the forces of democracy. This reaction often generates extreme
fascist, repressive, and intolerant forces. And these forces usually win and
take power. Then they impose themselves on the societies in question, delaying
any real democratic development for decades or generations.
The efforts of the French Revolutionaries and
Napoleon to export liberty, equality, and brotherhood across Europe by fire and
sword instead ensured the survival of the old traditional empires for another
120 years. The efforts of Lenin and Trotsky to export socialism and communism
by similar means were even more catastrophic. The backlash against them in
Germany propelled Adolf Hitler to power. It is not in America’s interests to follow in
those footsteps—to put it mildly.
Hostility to Russia and hostility to China are, like the desire to bomb the world into freedom'n'democracy, frequently nothing more than the student Trotskyism of those who manifest it. They ought to have grown out of that a long time ago.
Hostility to Russia and hostility to China are, like the desire to bomb the world into freedom'n'democracy, frequently nothing more than the student Trotskyism of those who manifest it. They ought to have grown out of that a long time ago.
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