Analysis: The Foreign-to-Domestic Policy Pipeline

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

Conventional wisdom dictates that foreign policy and domestic policy are distinct spheres of governance, ne’er to intersect.

A neat and tidy dichotomy, it’s also totally wrong.

International relations scholars, a lot of them at least, predicted that “history would end” with the collapse of the Soviet Union and something approaching a liberal utopia would emerge from the ashes of the Cold War.

John Mearsheimer, a realist, and a hardcore offensive realist at that, was not among them.

Here he explains how the current authoritarian regime in permanent Washington — which gets progressively more authoritarian by the day — manifested on the scaffolding of U.S. foreign policy in the last century:

“It’s very important to understand that, starting in the late 19^th, early 20^th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we developed, and this was true of all Western countries, a very powerful central state that could run the country. And over time that state has grown in power, and since World War II, the United States, as you all know, has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world fighting wars here, there, and everywhere, and to do that you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But, in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level bureaucrats, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence community, you name it, and they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy… Remember, when the Cold War ends, we have no rival great power left, so what are we going to do with all this power that we have* ? What we decide to do is go out and remake the world in our own image.”

(*As an aside: I’m not a big fan of all this “we” talk. It’s common in parlance regarding foreign policy — the “American government does X” becomes “we do X” — but the reality is that the average person, even renowned international relations scholars like John Mearsheimer, exert little to no effect on foreign policy. There is no “we.”)

Continuing via Mearsheimer:

“Do you think that we can run around the world imposing liberal democracy on other countries and, in some cases, shoving it down their throat, doing it at the end of a rifle barrel? And my argument is that’s almost impossible to do, it almost always backfires, think Iraq, Afghanistan, so forth and so on, and secondly, you begin to erode liberalism in the United States because you fill the Deep State. And you want to understand that a lot of the complaints here about cracking down on freedom of speech and so forth and so on are related to the fact that we have this ambitious foreign policy. Those two things go together in very important ways.”

Case in point:

“Retired”-CIA-Director-turned-cable-news-pundit John Brennan on MSNBC, immediately after January 6^th, 2021, compared American citizens upset about an election being stolen — which, regardless of whether that factually happened or not, free people have a right to assert and protest — to fanatical insurgents in Iraq, the obvious implication being that the tactics the U.S. security state used to quash them there should be deployed against domestic terrorists here:

“[The Biden intelligence services] are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas…

It brings together an unholy alliance, frequently, of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians. And unfortunately I think there’s been this momentum that’s been generated as a result of unfortunately the demagogic rhetoric of people that’s just departed government, but also those who continue in the halls of Congress and so I really do think that the law enforcement, Homeland Security, intelligence, and even the defense officials are doing everything possible to root out what seems to be a very very serious and insidious threat to our democracy and our republic.”

Thus spoke the Deep State mouthpiece, and the War on Domestic Terror was off to the races.