True to Kennan's 'prophecy' then, the Soviet Union had barely sunk, Titanic like, 'under the waters of the geopolitical ocean' when a group of folks in the U.S. began busying themselves inventing new adversaries, devising new threats and drafting commensurate doctrines to meet and challenge them so as to pre-empt the "unacceptable shock" Kennan hinted at.
In fact for these folks (we all know who they are), the biggest threat facing America was that it faced no threat at all! Like their Cold War architectural 'ancestors' circa '45, talk of any "peace dividend" was anathema--nay, heresy--to their way of thinking. For them, there really wasn't any point in having this great military machine if "we" weren't going to use it.
Throughout the nineties and in the lead-up to 9/11 and beyond then, it was this not-so-loose 'confederacy of hegemons' that would go on to profoundly alter the impetus and focus of American strategic policy, if not its broad direction and end game, which may have already been defined.
Either way, they would do all this in ways and by means in which it's difficult to see how Kennan and his ilk might've contemplated in their wisest imaginings, with or without a Soviet-style threat. That this recalibrated "impetus and focus" in strategic policy plays out today is a given, despite the disasters it has engendered, the enormous cost in blood, treasure, economic stability and geopolitical credibility, and most importantly, the genuinely existential risks posed by its unfettered continuance.
Indeed, these New American Centurions repudiated anything resembling what the Wise Men would've considered prudent. For the latter, unilateralism and preemption weren't part of their policy lexicon. In later years Kennan was sharply critical of such actions taken by both the Bill Clinton and George W Bush regimes. According to Miscamble, along with opposing policies for NATO expansion and [to] what he saw as the West's 'exploitation of Russian weakness', he expressed considerable reservations about U.S. interventions in places like Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo, irrespective of their alleged 'humanitarian purpose'. In his 98th year, a 'still intellectually vigorous' Kennan harshly criticized Bush's National Security Doctrine, especially decrying the Iraq invasion.
It's hard moreover to imagine he would've thought much of Obama's policies either, given what has taken place on his watch in Syria, Libya and in the Ukraine, to name just three globally destabilizing, avoidable conflicts of note to which the incumbent effectively lent his presidential, peace-prize winning imprimatur. By way of no small understatement, Miscamble noted of Kennan, [that] '...[his] long-expressed reservations regarding U.S. overextension and excessive reliance on military force proved remarkably consistent whatever the changed geopolitical circumstances...'
- In a Fearful, Bunkered Nation (How did we get here?) -
One suspects Kennan might've also observed supreme irony in the way this post-Soviet reimagining and subsequent rearranging of the world order--in particular America's consequent place and part in it--unfolded. For the duration of the Cold War, this was ostensibly the great fear he and his contemporaries had of the Soviet Union, which was that it was positioning itself to do same. After all, was this not the basic premise of containment-- to keep a lid on the gremlins in the Kremlin and curb their presumed gusto for sabre-rattling destabilisation, military one-upmanship, Third World exploitation, geopolitical mischief-making, nuclear brinkmanship, proxy war mongering and eventual global hegemony?
And though this fear of Soviet ambition we can now say with some certainty was not founded on much resembling a viable prospect for them or even a genuine objective, nonetheless it determined the course of geopolitics, international relations, military affairs and history--along with the balance of world power, and we might add, the global financial system and world economic order--for almost half a century. We might also say the Soviets were themselves 'containing' the Americans as much, if not more so, than the other way round.
As for the Machine itself, it's significant that as early as 1956, in his seminal book The Power Elite, Charles Wright Mills made much of the unholy alliances, interactions and relationships between and across the economic, political, defense, industrial, legislative, intelligence, and academic hierarchies in U.S. and the economics that have been it's wellspring, what came to be called the "military-industrial complex". Mills--who died in 1962--noted that since 1945,
'.... the US power elite has [become] increasingly immoral, irresponsible, ignorant, [and] stupid...mindless in its quest for wealth and power.'
Fast-forward sixty plus years. Of all the seemingly disparate elements of Mills' "power elite", it is with the military-industrial-security complex his observation really comes into its own. Along with reinforcing this view, the following might serve to underscore what should be one of our key concerns: The truly unsustainable and literally incalculable cost of keeping the machine in perpetual motion!
In his introduction to the indispensable 2011 handbook The Pentagon Labyrinth, retired Defense Department official Chuck Spinney noted that even allowing for the cumulative effects of decades of inflation, twenty years after the Cold War's end--and with that the disappearance of the singular threat upon which the whole national-security edifice had hitherto been constructed--the U.S. spends more on defense 'than at any time since [1945]'.
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