Thus, he also draws a bright red line -- not between the American empire and its enemies, but between America and the entire outside world, all of which is seen in its entirety as hostile and ungrateful.
It's an echo of the "Little Englander" movement of the Nineteenth Century, one that held that Britain had no need of faraway colonies filled with unappreciative black and brown people and that it should therefore withdraw into the cozy little world of yesteryear. It's an insular and conservative viewpoint.
But those who opposed it did so not because they were less racist, but because they were more. The upshot was a new explosion of imperialism that culminated in the "scramble for Africa" in which 90 percent of the continent came under European domination, the "great game" for control of Central Asia, and so on.
The competing sides were caught up in a dialectic of destruction that culminated in the bloody debacle of 1914 in which the Great Powers, running out of places to plunder, fell to plundering among themselves.
A Dangerous Tipping Point?
Is America at a similar inflexion point? Evidence is growing that it is. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter's successful push for U.S. bombing operations against ISIS in the coastal city of Sirte is one indication that the tide is now turning in the neocons' favor.
A third was Vice President Joe Biden's enthusiastic endorsement of Turkey's recent Syrian incursion, an act so flagrantly at odds with international law that long-time liberal interventionists like The Guardian's Martin Chulov were left aghast. A second was the Pentagon's establishment of a de-facto no-fly zone in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakah where U.S.-backed Kurdish nationalists were seeking to oust pro-government forces. [See Consortiumnews.com's "US Hawks Advance a War Agenda in Syria."]
A fourth, finally, is the Russophobic propaganda barrage led by The New York Times, with The Guardian and Washington Post pulling up the rear. Putin is out to steal the November election! He's taken over Wikileaks and is using it to his own advantage!
No Putin-bashing story is too thinly-sourced, unlikely, or one-sided to be disbelieved. The result is a hysterical atmosphere reminiscent of the 1950s in which dodgy doctrines like American exceptionalism go down all the more easily.
Of course, the fact that Trump is indeed a bigoted, sexist know-nothing makes Clinton's job all the easier. If the anti-exceptionalists are so awful, then her argument that law and morality are all on the side of U.S. imperialism becomes slightly more plausible.
But it shouldn't. The U.S. has helped destroy at least four Middle Eastern nations -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya -- while it is now busily reducing a fifth, i.e., Syria, to smithereens.
Perhaps the most important line in Clinton's Cincinnati speech referred to U.S. troop reductions in the Middle East: "We have redeployed well over 100,000 troops from Iraq and Afghanistan so they can go home, rest, and train for future contingencies."
What might those contingencies be? Another round of intervention in Syria is the likeliest, although neocons no doubt have their eyes on other targets as well: the eastern Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics, and the Pacific as well. The more Clinton's election prospects brighten, the bolder the neocons' ambitions will grow.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon."]
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
