Israel and the totalization of power
In a State Department memorandum titled “Review of Current Trends” and marked “Top Secret,” George F. Kennan reflected on America’s circumstances as they were on 24 February 1948, the date atop his report. The 1945 victories were but three years in the past. The United States suddenly found itself a global power. And as Luigi Barzini, the noted Italian journalist, remarked a few years later in Americans Are Alone in the World (Random House, 1953), Americans were as nervous and uncertain as they were powerful.
Kennan went on to become America’s most celebrated diplomat during the Cold War decades, the architect of Washington’s “containment” policy. Here is a brief passage from his postwar review:
We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming…. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
Further in his paper Kennan speculated:
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
How strange it is to read these words three-quarters of a century later, as the Biden regime prosecutes via its Israeli client a genocide so raw, so uninhibited in its savagery, we must search the decades that separate Kennan’s time from ours for comparisons. And when we find them—the firebombing of North Korea, the napalming of the Vietnamese— we are face-to-face with the horror hidden in the “straight power concepts” Kennan anticipated as America began its pursuit of global hegemony.
The policy cliques and apologists in Washington have never, in all the decades of America’s postwar primacy, run short of “idealistic slogans.” The Biden regime recites them routinely as it finances and supplies terrorist Israel’s murderous assaults on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank and lately on the Lebanese. We will never be without these official avowals of benign intent—“world-benefaction,” in Kennan’s sloppy phrase. But those making such professions have sacrificed—sacrificed to power—all credibility since the events of 7 October one year back.
This is widely understood, even universally understood. Those claiming to act in the name of justice and the human cause know perfectly well the emptiness of these claims. So do those to whom they are addressed. Mere pretense is sufficient in our post–7 October world. It is preferred, just as Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that people subjected to relentless propaganda come to prefer deception. Deception offers refuge in a constructed reality, a meta-reality, a reality parallel to the reality we have created but cannot bear. I rank this—let us call it the temptation of deception—among the consequences of the Gaza genocide and the Western powers’ sponsorship of it.
If the events in West Asia this past year have anything to tell us, it is that the Zionist state—as the grotesque creature of the American imperium, let us never forget—has led the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies into a new time—a new and unbearable time. This is a world-historical transformation the significance of which it would be difficult to overstate.
The “straight power” of the postwar decades emerges now as totalized power. This is power as Palestinians endure it daily—power that reduces humanity to a state of incessantly contingent survival. Agamben described this state as “bare life” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998) and elaborated on it in The Use of Bodies (Stanford, 2016). This is power as late-imperial America now begins to project it in its late-hour defense of global primacy. We can read the Gaza genocide as an announcement of what this portends. The Palestinians are our exemplars, our warning of the threat that hangs over all people, institutions and nations the imperium judges to be impediments to the exercise of its will.
Jonathan Cook, the noted British commentator and author, went straight to this point in an essay published 21 October under the headline “The West's support for Israel's genocide is destroying the world as we know it.” Cook wrote in response to the much-remarked death of Shaaban al–Dalou, a 19–year-old Palestinian who was burned alive, along with his mother, while receiving medical treatment in northern Gaza the previous week. Here is a passage in what I consider the most penetrating piece of writing on the Gaza crisis since it began 7 October 2023:
What Israel has made clear, supported by western capitals, is that there is no safe place, not even for those recovering in a hospital bed from Israel’s earlier atrocities. There are no “non-combatants,” no civilians. There are no rules. Everyone is a target.
And now that includes not just the peoples of Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and Lebanon, but the very body supposed to serve as the guardian of the humanitarian codes of law created after the Second World War and the Holocaust: the United Nations.
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With the benefit of hindsight, there were various signs, pre–7 October, suggesting that the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic clients were intent on totalizing power such that force will supersede law, institutional authority, humane norms, and all other sources of global order. The flagrantly abusive incarceration of Julian Assange in a London prison, after farcically illegal court proceedings, was one such case. Assange is free, but we witnessed the shocking extent to which Britain and the U.S. operate in a state of exception, wherein the makers of law stand above the law.
We must count the Western powers’ proxy war in Ukraine another such case, given it has resulted in deaths numbering well into six figures—this after the U.S. and Britain sabotaged various efforts to achieve a peaceful settlement. And the long, murderous covert operation against the Assad government in Damascus, which has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced, internally or abroad, millions more: What is this if not the state of bare life imposed on an entire population?
But it was difficult to read such events as theaters in a larger war, so to say, until Israel began its expanding campaign of terror in West Asia. Now matters are perfectly plain—providing one recognizes the Zionist state as the American imperium’s instrument and not, as the Biden regime pretends and as some among us believe, an autonomous agent beyond America’s control. It is bitter to recognize this, but all the Zionists have done since they began their attack on the Palestinians of Gaza on 8 October a year ago is according to Washington’s grand plan in West Asia—and, I would say, the world beyond it.
The destruction of law—international law, the laws of war—the normalization of terror, systematic starvation, the mass murder of civilians, the targeting of journalists (128 by the most recent count), attacks on hospitals and their staffs, on international aid workers, on U.N. peace contingents in southern Lebanon: All this is in conformity with America’s overriding objective as it blunders forward into a century it does not understand: This is the subversion of the post–1945 world order, flawed as it has been, in favor of the preposterously misnamed fraud Washington now proclaims as “the international rules-based order.”
In a highly informative interview published under the headline “Gaza: The Strategic Imperative,” Michael Hudson, the dissident economist, views the Zionist state’s latest aggressions, the worst in its history, as the logical outcome of the foreign policies long advocated by the right-wing American ideologues known as neoconservatives. Hudson traces their influence, and the prominent presence of Zionists among them, to the 1970s. The neocons began to achieve positions of influence during the Reagan years. At this point, Hudson argues correctly, their power over U.S. policy is perfectly legible:
What you’re seeing today isn’t simply the work of one man, of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the work of the team that President Biden has put together. It’s the team of Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, [Secretary of State] Blinken, and the whole Deep State, the whole neocon group behind them, Victoria Nuland, and everyone. They’re all self-proclaimed Zionists. And they’ve gone over this plan for essentially America’s domination of the Near East for decade after decade.
The historical context Hudson gives “the seven-front war,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu calls the Israelis’ expanding terror campaigns, is very useful to build upon. While the Zionist cause has long been high among the neocons’ priorities—I would say it is their highest—they were, also and always, the most vigorous of Cold Warriors. Their ideological descendants deviate little from this inheritance. They are similarly dedicated to the Zionist cause and, as frenetic Russophobes and Sinophobes, as committed to the subversion of Russia and China as their forebears were to the destruction of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic.
Let us not miss, I mean to say, that as Israel viciously rends all notions of order as it attacks the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and sooner or later the Iranians, the consequences will be global: It is effectively defining what totalized power will mean as America exercises it anywhere else it so chooses. This is what I mean by a world-historical transformation whose importance one cannot overestimate.
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Some years ago, I sat with Ray McGovern, the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and now a prominent critic of American foreign policy, in the lobby of the Metropole Hotel in Moscow. As we found ourselves in Kennan territory, if I can put it this way, I asked McGovern if the famous diplomat’s thought of “straight power concepts” remained an adequate explanation of American conduct abroad.
“I see the same spirit of entitlement, the same undisguised feeling of superiority,” McGovern replied. “But I also see a lot of fear.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said with alacrity. “Beneath the chest-out bravado we’re a frightened people.”
McGovern thought for a moment and then had the last word on this topic. “Yeah,” he said, “I think intelligent people know that the empire is on the downhill.”
This exchange took placein late 2015, when McGovern and I met while attending a conference sponsored by RT, the Russian broadcaster. The wave of hysteria known as Russiagate was just then gusting like wind through America’s public discourse. I recorded and published our conversation, which extended over a couple of hours, as an interview in two parts. These can be read here and here. I recount this passage in our conversation because it goes a considerable way to explaining why we live amid the transformation I describe, as “straight power” gives way to totalized power in the West. Fears, insecurities, apprehensions of what is to come: How often have these prompted the conduct of nations prey to them?
As I have argued severally over the years, all Americans, not least the nation’s policy cliques, were profoundly shaken by the events of 11 September 2001. History, to put a complex matter simply, had abruptly arrived among a people who had spent four centuries assuming they were immune to it. Reflecting a measure of uncertainty Americans had not felt since those early postwar years Luigi Barzini so well captured, post–2001 foreign policy, beginning with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, has become increasingly aggressive, increasingly lawless, and increasingly irrational. By the time Joe Biden took office in 2021, the rise of non–Western powers, notably but not only China and Russia, had heightened the fright of which Ray McGovern spoke to the point it became a very powerful factor in determining the character of American policy.
The summit of the BRICS nations in Kazan, 22 to 24 October, could not have been better timed to underscore this point. What more effective reminder could there be that a new world order, one worthy of the term, is gestating as swiftly as the West self-destructs? No American administration in this century has conducted itself abroad out of confidence. In our time, the haunting awareness that “the empire is on the downhill” while non–Western powers rise has induced among Biden’s national-security people a go-for-broke, now-or-never mood. To “frightened” we must add “desperate.”
This is my read of the current American regime. It is out of desperation that Biden’s Washington pursues a reckless policy of aggression toward Russia that risks a nuclear exchange, and out of desperation it dispatches the Zionist state to “remake the Middle East”—the neoconservatives’ phrase—while subverting all rules of international conduct.
The United States had a choice after the events of 11 September. It lay between proceeding into a changed world with grace, imagination, and courage, and—forlornly, violently, pointlessly—resisting the turn of history’s wheel. It was never difficult to see that the policy cliques in Washington would choose the latter course. But who could foresee the extremes to which its creeping anxieties would carry it, chief among them the depravities it now sponsors in Gaza? Who could anticipate its self-destructive lurch toward a form of power that has force but no dignity, that will endure only as a stain on the human story long after its time has passed?
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