Why Nationalists Hate Dumb Liberal Wars

Ben Burgis has written an article at Jacobin in which he explains why the Far Left is generally opposed to the war in Ukraine. It is because of their internationalist tradition.

Jacobin:

“As the Russian government’s criminal war in Ukraine continues, socialists in the US have forcefully condemned the invasion while focusing most of our energy on opposing the potentially catastrophic escalation in tensions between Russia and the United States. This in turn has resurrected a common accusation from the post-9/11 years — that in taking such a strong antiwar stance, the Left isn’t being true to our own values.

After all, the criticism goes, we’re supposed to be “internationalists.” But if we’re willing to “abandon” the Ukrainian people by criticizing the US government coming to their aid — or, in earlier versions of this accusation, if we oppose the military “liberation” of Iraqis or Afghans — aren’t we showing ourselves to be not internationalists but “isolationists”?

Absolutely not. Opposition to war and the militarism of our own government has always been at the heart of what leftists mean by “internationalism.” …”

Obviously, this isn’t our perspective.

We’re not opposed to the war in Ukraine because of “internationalism.” It is the doctrine of liberal internationalism and its incarnation in NATO which has provoked the war.

I’m not a pacifist. I believe there are smart wars and dumb wars. There are also times when war is necessary. Most of America’s wars in the 18th and 19th century fall into the former category. Most of America’s wars since the Spanish-American War fall in the latter category.

In the American Revolution, the United States won the independence of the original 13 colonies and Trans-Appalachia. The war was an enormous boon to the United States. The future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama were carved out of Trans-Appalachia and were settled by American veterans and immigrants. The Mexican War secured Texas and the future states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Similarly, the Indian Wars like the Creek War had the same effect of pacifying the North American continent and opening up vast swathes of the American Heartland to White settlement.

The Far Left denounces these wars as “white supremacy” and “settler-colonialism.” The main beneficiaries of these wars, however, were White settlers and their ungrateful descendants. Florida was technically sold to the United States by Spain, but only after military interventions there by Gen. Andrew Jackson. Napoléon Bonaparte sold the Louisiana Purchase to the United States during the Napoleonic Wars. In all of these cases, White American settlers moved into the new territories and made them into new states which were admitted as equals of the existing states. These were wars of expansion and organic growth.

In the War Between the States, we were fighting for Southern independence. We were fighting in self defense of our homeland. The stakes of that war were enormous. Even if you believe that slavery was the cause of that war, you must concede that what was being proposed was the destruction of the Southern economy and with it the Southern middle class as most slaveowners only owned a few slaves. The entire Southern social and political order was also threatened by abolition.

Sure, there were land speculators who made enormous profits off of our wars of expansion in the 18th and 19th century (George Washington was one of them), but that was nothing compared to the bounty reaped by all subsequent generations of White Americans who found themselves living in the freest country in the world on top of the best real estate with the most enviable security situation in the world. The difference between all of those wars and our recent wars by liberals was who benefited from them.

In the wake of the War Between the States, America’s ruling class in our Eastern states began to fall under the spell of Great Britain. New England had always been more influenced by Britain than the South and West which rejected Atlanticism after the American Revolution in favor of the Jeffersonian vision of westward expansion across North America. Europe’s great powers were racing with each other to expand their empires in the Scramble for Africa. There were American elites like Teddy Roosevelt who were envious of Great Britain and Imperial Germany and who wanted America to join the club of Great Powers.

The Spanish-American War and the annexation of Hawaii and other Pacific islands was the turning point. It was at this point that Americans began to embrace imperialism and militarism. Traditionally, Americans had avoided conquering and incorporating into the United States densely populated areas full of non-Whites. This is why the Mexican Cession was limited to the Southwest. It is why it took decades for Oklahoma, New Mexico and Hawaii to be admitted to the Union as states. It is why Puerto Rico never became a state and why Cuba was not annexed and granted its independence. Americans were also hostile to standing armies and government surveillance was simply unthinkable and unconstitutional.

In the 19th century, Americans were still acutely conscious of their origins and were innately suspicious of Great Britain. Americans had a fought a war of independence against the British Empire. Americans saw themselves as rejecting imperialism, militarism and monarchism in favor of republicanism. Americans distinguished between expansionism which was the process of creating and incorporating new states into the Union (settlers from Illinois moving to Iowa and essentially reproducing their communities) and imperialism. The British Empire subjugated places like India and sent governors there while Americans in Kansas or California governed themselves and sent representatives to Washington.

Even before Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy,” America’s liberal imperialists were busily subjugating the Caribbean, Central America and East Asia to American capitalism. This is where the phrase “banana republics” comes from. American marines helped the British put down the Boxer Rebellion in China. Teddy Roosevelt created Panama. Woodrow Wilson occupied Haiti and invaded Mexico. In retrospect, we can look back on this period as the point when America began to accumulate a nascent empire which was separate and distinct from the United States and build up a military to protect it. We got into the business of interventions for the sake of hegemony and securing markets. The Philippine-American War was the first war in this tradition.

The Great Rapprochement between the Uncle Sam and John Bull in the twenty years before World War I set us down the road to liberal imperialism and emulating and eventually taking over the British Empire and the responsibility for securing and maintaining the “liberal world order.”

A century later, we have become the very thing our ancestors revolted against and sought to avoid in the 19th century. We’re now a globe spanning empire with the responsibility for maintaining the “liberal world order.” The United States is merely the “Homeland” now. It is a dumping ground for refugees from all of our foreign wars. We now live under an all powerful globalist oligarchy who has corrupted our political system. We live under the rule of multinational corporations which are wealthier and more powerful and less accountable than most governments. We live under a vast government bureaucracy and surveillance state which erodes the Constitution. We live under a military which is indifferent to our own borders, but zealously protective of its spiderweb of overseas bases because it is addicted to militarism.

America’s elites are now like the British elites of the past who were obsessed with their pink maps which showed their expanding realm around the world. British soldiers died in the Sudan and Hindu Kush for nothing. Foreign policy has been removed from democratic control and is made by unelected bureaucrats. The president of the United States now answers to bureaucrats like Alexander Vindman, not the other way around. The so-called “intelligence community” was weaponized against the last president and repeatedly undermined his office. “Journalists” parrot state propaganda from the Pentagon and the “intelligence community” and Big Tech censors dissidents who challenge the official narrative. American tax dollars flow out of the United States to Ukraine to support the latest adventure of our foreign policy establishment.

This is where the contrast between our previous wars and our current wars launched by our liberal imperialists becomes especially acute. Those wars at least accrued to the benefit of the American working class and middle class and especially to future generations and left us with our beautiful country. In contrast, the war in Ukraine is only enriching the military-industrial complex, imperiling our own security and is devastating the working class and middle class with higher inflation and gas prices. This is also assuming we are not ultimately asked to fight a hot war with Russia over the status of Donbas. These wars also lead to more censorship, government and corporate surveillance and loss of civil liberties.

By and large, the wars for North America were worth it. The wars for imperialism in Eurasia are not worth it. Not even close. Even the geopolitical rationale for these wars, not allowing a Great Power to dominate Eurasia and thus challenge the American “world island,” is not being served by the war in Ukraine which is driving Russia and China and Iran and all of our other various enemies over there into an unnatural and unwieldy alliance against us. These wars for world domination are only aggravating existing undesirable domestic trends while creating bloodbaths which turn into humanitarian disasters abroad.

Millions of White Americans owe their existence here in the United States to the choice that their ancestors made TO ESCAPE FROM ABSURD EUROPEAN IMPERIALIST WARS. Their ancestors came here to live in freedom to practice their religion or to make a living. Now, our sons are sent from here back over there to fight dumb liberal wars in completely irrelevant places all over Eurasia.