Trump’s National Security Strategy: The return of “great power” military conflict
20 December 2017
The new US National Security Strategy released this week and the speech delivered by President Donald Trump Monday to introduce it constitute a grim warning to humanity that US imperialism is firmly embarked on a road that leads to a nuclear third world war.
While the document has largely been passed over in silence by the president’s ostensible political opponents in the Democratic Party and given relatively short shrift by the establishment media, more thoughtful ideologists of imperialism have noted the far-reaching changes presented in the document.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the historian Arthur L. Herman declared Trump’s National Security Strategy heralds a “profound shift back to the world before 1917: an anarchic international arena in which every sovereign state, large or small, has to rely on armed strength” for its security.
“In this new era” Herman writes, “might inevitably makes right.” Only power matters, and “the big powers inevitably dominate the small.”
Herman adds, “This is the world of Otto von Bismarck, who said in 1862: “The great questions of the time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions. .. but by iron and blood.”
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal lauded the document’s unvarnished realpolitik, praising its identification of China and Russia by name as “revisionist powers” that seek to “challenge American power, influence, and interests.” With a glee that resembles nothing so much as the war fever gripping the ruling classes before the First World War, the Journal hails the document as an “important corrective from the sunny assurances of the Obama years” and his proclamations that…