Crooke: The Folly of Diplomacy Via Narrative

Alastair Crooke in today’s SCF essay looks at the use of narratives in diplomacy as a way to cover dishonesty of the sort long experienced by Russia and the wider world. IMO, the Outlaw US Empire has lied so long about most everything that it no longer knows what Truth and Honesty are and how important they are in conducting any sort of relationship. The essay’s title is “The coming Novus Ordo Seclorum – Change we must; there is no choice!” (“Novus Ordo Seclorum is Latin – ‘a new order of the ages.’ The other motto – Annuit cœptis – translates as ‘He favors (or has favored) our undertakings’”), which as Crooke points out are two of the three Latin mottos on the Great Seal of the United States. Crooke’s reasons for using those terms become clear at the opening of his essay. In his chat with Judge Napolitano this morning, Crooke makes it very clear where the danger lies in using narrative to accomplish anything, especially diplomacy.

As chance would have it, RT published an op/ed by one of its editors, Henry Johnston, whose theme is rather similar to Crooke’s although he uses a different descriptive term, “Trump and ‘our democracy’: What happens when a political system becomes a meme?” I generally find RT’s op/eds to be poor, but this is one of the few gems I’ve read. The subtitle shows how it links with Crooke’s essay: “It is a sign of deep crisis that the concept of democracy has devolved into an ideologically tinged narrative that is defended with empty and exaggerated rhetoric.”

So today we’ll begin with Crooke’s essay then move onto Johnston’s:

On a visit to Oxford a few weeks ago, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative, (Walter Münchau writes), made an interesting remark: “Diplomacy is the art of managing double standards”. Münchau illustrated its inherent hypocrisy by contrasting the enthusiasm with which EU leaders supported the ICC’s decision to seek an arrest warrant against Putin last year, and “yet not to accept it – when it hits a member of your team” (i.e. Netanyahu).

The most egregious example of such double ‘thinking’ concerns its correlate – the western ‘management’ of created realities. A double standard – a ‘narrative’ of us ‘winning’ – is crafted, and then set against a narrative of ‘them failing’.

A resort to the manufacture of narratives of winning (instead of actually doing the winning) may seem rather clever, but the uncertainty it causes can have unforeseen potentially disastrous consequences. For instance, President Macron’s deliberately obfuscated threats to send NATO forces to serve in Ukraine – which only contributed to Russia preparing for a wider war against all NATO, accelerating its offensive operations.

Instead of deterring – as likely intended by Macron – it brought about a more determined adversary, with Putin warning that Russia would kill any NATO ‘invaders’. It was not so clever, after all…

Take as a more substantive example President Putin’s response to a press query during his visit to Uzbekistan: ‘These representatives of NATO countries, especially in Europe, … firstly provoked us in the Donbas; led us by the nose for eight years, deliberately deceived us into supposing they [the West] wanted going to resolve things peacefully – notwithstanding their seemingly contrarian attempt to force the situation ‘towards peace’ – through armed means.

‘Then they deceived us during the negotiation process’, Putin continued, ‘having, a priori decided in secret to defeat Russia on the battlefield – and thereby to inflict a strategic defeat on it. This constant escalation can lead to serious consequences (Putin probably refers to a ratchetting missile exchange ending – even – with nuclear weapons). If these serious consequences occur in Europe, how will the United States behave in view of our strategic arms parity? Do they want a global conflict? It’s hard to say… Let’s see what happens next’, he concluded. (This is a paraphrase of what was a long and extensive question and answer session by President Putin).

Naturally, some in the West will say that this is just a Russian ‘story’ – and that the West has acted reasonably throughout, in response to Moscow’s actions.

‘Rational thinking’ and reasonableness pretentiously are taken to be the defining qualities of the West (inherited from Plato and Aristotle). However, to attempt to use secular rationality as the predominant analytic tool by which to comprehend geo-political events may be to commit an error. For such a limited instrument forces a brutal amputation of the deeper dynamics of history and context – which risks yielding distorted analysis and flawed policy responses.

Just to be clear: What has this deceptive diplomacy achieved? It has resulted in Moscow’s complete distrust of European leaders and the wish to have nothing further to do with them.

Is it ‘rational’ to leave actors such as Putin wondering whether indeed Russia faces a West determined to “inflict a strategic defeat” on it, or whether Washington just wants to craft a ‘winning narrative’ ahead of November?

Putin pointed out (at the press conference) that Ukraine-based high-precision long-range weapons, (such ATACMS) are prepared on the basis of ‘space intelligence and reconnaissance’, which then is translated automatically into the appropriate target missile settings (with the operatives possibly not even understanding what co-ordinates they are entering as the target).

This complex task of readying a high-precision missile, however, is being prepared not by Ukrainian servicemen, but by representatives of NATO countries, Putin underlined.

Putin is saying: ‘You – Europeans, who supply and operate such weapons – are already at war with Russia’. Trying to ‘manage these double standards’ won’t work; you cannot claim on the one hand, that once your munitions are transported, they magically become ‘Ukrainian’, whilst ‘narrating’ too that NATO – its surveillance assets; its ISR technicians, and its missile handlers – do not translate into ‘war with Russia’.

In his explicit answers, Putin gave the West a clear warning: These representatives of NATO countries – especially in Europe; especially in small countries – should be aware ‘of that with which they are playing’.

Yet, in Europe the idea of striking deep inside Russia is presented as being entirely rational – in spite of knowing that such strikes into Russia will not change the course of the war. Plainly put, Putin effectively is saying Russia can only interpret western statements and actions as an intent for wider war.

The same ‘double narratives’ may be said to hold for Israel too. Netanyahu and his government, on the one hand, are cast as a messianic entity, pursuing a Biblical apocalypse. Whereas, the West claims it is simply pursuing its own rational understanding of what is in Israel’s true interest – i.e. a two-state solution.

It may be uncomfortable to say it, but Netanyahu’s ‘non-secular, non-rationalist’ zeitgeist probably reflects a plurality of opinion today in Israel. In other words, like it or not – and almost all the world does not – it nonetheless is authentic. It is what it is – and there is little point therefore to crafting strictly secular policies that simply ignore this reality (unless there is the will forcibly to change that reality radically – i.e. imposing a Palestinian state by force).

The reality is that a trial of strength is coming in the Middle East. And in its wake – with one or the other parties exhausted – a political current, or a shift in zeitgeist (were Israel to reconsider special rights for one population group over another living on shared land), might open a more productive path to a ‘solution’, one way or another.

Again, the insistence on a secular, materialist optic invites a misreading of the ground, and may make matters worse (by cornering Israel into the massive escalation on whose brink we stand).

When Gantz – regarded as a possible, more reasonable alternative to Netanyahu, calls for an early election, he is calling for it, writes Roger Alpher in Haaretz, “to renew the contract between the people and the government and to mobilise for a second war of independence. Under the new vision, Israel is at the start of a long, blood-soaked war for survival”.

“Gantz isn’t a secular person; his mentality is religious … When he accuses Netanyahu of bringing ulterior motives into ‘the holy of holies’, as he put it – i.e., defence considerations – he’s expressing his religious belief in the nation’s faith. The state is holy, the state before anything else”.

“His differences of opinion with Netanyahu are blurring a broad consensus – including Yair Golan, Bezalel Smotrich, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, Naftali Bennett, Yossi Cohen and the Likud party with or without Netanyahu – that the war is the thing. The Israeli public is a hero because of the war. It’s at its best during its wars: A nation has no greater spiritual elevation than a love of sacrifice in “carrying the stretcher,” as Israelis put it”.

Plainly put, Gantz – like Netanyahu – is not in the western, liberal secular camp.

And here is where Josep Borrell’s ‘management of double standards’ meme enters into the equation: Can Europe or the U.S. continue to tolerate such an ‘unreasonable’ Zionist world view, with all its adverse implications for an increasingly volatile U.S. hegemony?

Well, there is a certain ‘rationality’ to the Netanyahu vision, but it is not one rooted in our mechanistic ontology.

Perhaps too, Netanyahu’s Biblical references to Amalek (the people King Saul was ordered to annihilate), touch on raw western nerves: Wasn’t the Scientific Enlightenment supposed to have ended that ‘other’ ontology? Does it remind the West of its own colonial ‘sins’?

Professor Michael Vlahos, who taught war and strategy at Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Naval War College, and was Director of the Centre of Foreign Studies at the State Department, contends that America too is “a religion” consumed by the eternally recurring apocalypse, and that war is its “cleansing ritual”:

“The Founders—our “creators”—had imagined more than a nation … They had also drafted the story arc of a divinely heroic journey, centring the U.S. as the culmination (to be) of History. This is America’s sacred narrative. Since its founding, the United States has pursued, with burning religious fervour, a higher calling to redeem humanity, punish the wicked, and christen a golden millennium on earth.

“While France, Britain, Germany, and Russia stalked the world in search of new colonies and conquests, America has steadfastly hewed to its unique vision of divine mission as “God’s New Israel”.

“Thus, among all the revolutions unleashed by Modernity, the United States declares itself — in its own scripture — to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity. America is the exceptional nation — the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden: The “last, best hope of earth”.

President Biden said this catechism precisely at West Point on 25 May 2024:

“Thanks to the U.S. Armed Forces, we’re doing what only America can do as the indispensable nation … the world’s only superpower, and the leading democracy in the world: The U.S. standing up to tyrants” worldwide: It is “protecting freedom and openness”.

“We’re standing against a man [Putin] who I’ve known well for many years, a brutal tyrant. We may not – we – and we will not – we will not walk away”.

This is the catechism of the “American Civil Religion”; Professor Vlahos explains:

“In the world’s eyes, all this may seem like a ritual of self-serving vanity, yet the Civil Religion is the national article of faith for Americans. It is Holy Writ, which takes rhetorical form through what Americans take to be History.

“American Civil Religion is inextricably linked with the Reformation, Calvinist Christianity, and the bloody history of Protestantism, with America’s sacred narrative shaped and christened through the country’s first and second Great Awakenings. Although its scriptural reading became secular in the Progressive era – the American religion still remained tethered to its formative roots. Indeed, even our contemporary “Church of Woke” cannot escape its original Calvinist Christian tubers”.

 “Since 2014, a rapidly-growing new sect—“The Church of Woke”—has sought to transform and fully possess the American civil religion, to reign as the successor faith. Ironically, the fervour of its evangelism channels the post-millennialism of the First Great Awakening, whose messianism was codified in Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages)”.

What is the point here? Hubert Védrine, a former French Foreign Minister and Secretary-General of the French presidency under President Mitterrand says that the West (that is to say, embracing Europe, too) – the “descendants of [Latin] Christendom” – is “consumed in the spirit of proselytism“.

“That Saint Paul’s “go and evangelize all nations” has become “go and spread human rights to all the world” … And that this proselytism is extremely deep in our DNA: “Even the very least religious, totally atheist – they still have this in mind, [even though] they don’t know where it comes from”.

Is this the raw nerve? ‘The U.S. as the New Israel’ – in Professor Vlahos’ telling – that cannot be looked directly in the eye? Yet if we look in the mirror, is this what we see?

“This is by far the most profound and important question facing the West”, says Védrine.

“Is it capable to “accept alterity – one that can live with others and accept them for who they are … a West that is not proselytizing, and not interventionist?”, he asks.

To which he retorts: “There’s no choice”. Absolutely not —

“We are not going to become the bosses of ‘the world that’s coming’. So we are forced to think beyond; we are forced to envision a new relationship for the future between the Western world and the famous global South”.

“And what happens if we can’t get to accept this? Then we’ll continue being marginalized – increasingly cut from the rest of the world – and increasingly despised for our misplaced sense of superiority”. [Bolded Italics My Emphasis]

IMO, Védrine has it correct and Vlahos has it wrong as the Outlaw US Empire cannot look at the mirror and never has in its entire history. And was it really a “new order” 1776 ushered in or just a slight alteration of Class and “peerage.” IMO, the narrative habit began in the years prior to 1776, certainly from 1763 onwards, and was vastly resumed when it came time to sell the results of the overthrowing of the Articles of Confederation. The warning about Russia is quite correct but even more important is warning about the complete misreading of the Zionists, which Crooke greatly amplifies in his chat with Napolitano. (And yes, it was very cool to learn he or someone close to him reads the Gym as the essay linked to the transcript of Putin’s Uzbek Presser.)

Policy based on falsehoods is very unlikely to succeed. For most of its life, the USA never had to contend with concerted opposition to its hegemony and thus was never forced to consider just how wrong its hegemonic policy is. But that’s all changed now as Russia and China have vowed to end the Outlaw US Empire’s hegemonic system and bring justice and freedom to the Global Majority and a host of nations have joined that quest. And then to further complicate matters, there’s now an ongoing battle within the Empire about what it really is, with the ongoing Trump/Biden drama providing the stage. One thing it most certainly isn’t and has never been is a democracy. Here’s Johnston:

The verdict in Donald Trump’s hush money trial has bestirred the usual characters in all the predictable ways. And never far from anybody's lips is the word ‘democracy’.

“Donald Trump is threatening our democracy," President Joe Biden himself opined, calling the ex-president's questioning of the verdict "dangerous.“ The editorial board of the New York Times lauded the “remarkable display of the democratic principles” on display in convicting a former president, arguing that this proves that even men as powerful as Trump are not above the law. 

The word democracy is everywhere in the Western world these days. Hardly a day goes by without pleas to defend it, protect it, fight against its sworn enemies, or celebrate its virtues with pompous clichés. Precise and neutral usage has given way to an ideological tinge that is as electrified as it is vague.  

One senses the word is invoked in defense of a certain decaying America-led order and the elite institutions that uphold it – and yet, like its cousin the ‘rules-based-order’, it is never quite defined. In the 2024 US presidential election, we are told, democracy itself is on the ballot. Whatever that means. If Trump is the archetypal demonic figure in the eyes of polite society, democracy is the bulwark against him.

Democracy has been imbued with a primitive metaphysical potency that almost seems a stand-in for religious faith.

Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address contained an exhortation to cure cancer once and for all, followed immediately by a grand summation of what has underpinned all American successes for all time – and, implicitly, will underpin futures ones, such as curing cancer.

“Folks, there’s one reason why we’ve been able to do all of these things: our democracy itself.”

Biden concluded: “With democracy, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is.”

Turn back the clock a century or so, replace the word ‘democracy’ with ‘the grace of God’ and give the same speech and nobody would bat an eye.

Democracy is a shield against accusations of wrongdoing. The defense being mounted against the war crimes charges facing the Israeli leadership is that the country is a democracy. As if how a government elects its leaders somehow changes the laws of war.  

But what is curious is that this nauseating ubiquity of the word democracy has coincided with a period of deep dysfunction in actual self-proclaimed democracies. The more it is talked about, the less it seems to work and the larger the chasm between what is proclaimed and what is practiced. Many of the countries most vocally proclaiming democracy are the ones at the forefront of implementing highly undemocratic policies.

It would be easy to become carried away pointing out the blatant hypocrisy in the Western embrace of all things democratic while at the same time leaning hard into authoritarian tendencies. Take your pick of stories: Earlier this month, for example, a German court rejected an AfD complaint about the classification of its youth organization as an extremist movement, meaning Germany’s domestic intelligence service can continue to monitor the activities and communications of the party itself. This was hailed as a victory by the government. “Today’s ruling shows that we are a democracy that can be defended,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said.

Clearly, for the current Western elites, democracy has come to mean a system not intended to be run democratically in response to the will of the people but run by self-proclaimed democrats. 

But more interesting than simply laying out further instances of double standards and hypocrisy is to seek to grasp what explains the proliferation of democracy as a meme in exact proportion to the decline of the real thing. After all, the word democracy wasn’t always on the tip of every politician’s lips.

Even Woodrow Wilson, the consummate evangelist of the American political order, whose “make the world safe for democracy” quote is now indelibly associated with his name, did not play loose with facile references to the political system through which everything is apparently possible. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 upon the conclusion of World War I, Wilson’s opening speech contained only one passing and modest reference to democracy.

And yet at that time, America could much more reasonably than now lay claim to being the world’s preeminent democracy. What to make of this paradox?

Offering a framework to think about this phenomenon is the South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his most recent book, called ‘Crisis of Narration’. “A paradigm becomes a topic… only when there is a deep-seated alienation from it,” Han argues. “All the talk about narratives suggests their dysfunctionality,” he says. In other words, the fact that democracy has become a hot topic and that a narrative is being projected about it are themselves signs that something is amiss.

Han continues by explaining that as long as a narrative serves as an “anchor in being” – an organic part of the fabric of life that provides meaning and orientation – there is no need for such exaggerated talk about narratives. But, Han explains, the “inflation in the use of such concepts begins precisely when narratives lose their original power, their gravitational force, their secret and magic.” He concludes by saying that “once they are seen as something constructed, they lose their moment of inner truth.”

Whether American democracy – or any other Western democracy – ever truly possessed any “inner truth” is a matter for historians to decide, but there undoubtedly was a time when a democratic political culture was simply ‘lived’ rather than constantly defended, attacked, or invoked. What was on the ballot was not democracy itself but simply whatever batch of politicians had emerged from the democratic process.

Prior to our contentious era, Western democracy was lived with the sort of assumed assurance that comes from a worldview that has not yet been shattered. That does not mean that politics didn’t have its fair share of all the usual bickering, backstabbing, sophistry, chicanery, and even outright dysfunction. Read any account of the presidency of Warren Harding to be disabused of that illusion – the term ‘smoke-filled room’ derives from that era. But what is important is not the relative merits of the politicians of one era or another but rather the fact that political life took place within a system that itself was seen as secure and to whose defense society wasn’t perpetually being exhorted to rush.

History offers other examples of a once vital political theory being reduced to an obsessed-over narrative in its moment of terminal crisis. Most medieval monarchs believed that they derived their authority directly from God and were not accountable to earthly authorities. The strong ecclesiastical element in ancient coronation ceremonies attests to the intermeshing of the divine and earthly kingdoms. But in medieval Europe, this was never defined with any rigor, nor had it taken on the contours of a political system that would then need to be defended, justified, or really even explained. Kings did not offer daily reminders of their communion with God.

It only congealed into a succinct political doctrine – called the ‘divine right of kings’ – quite late in the game, when any real conviction that kings were truly God’s emissaries on Earth had all but disappeared. The theory was most comprehensively developed by King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) – he is even credited with coming up with the expression ‘divine right of kings’. To use Han’s language, something that had at one time been an “anchor in being” had been turned into a narrative – even a meme, we could say. When King James stood up in front of Parliament in 1610, (it was not exactly a State of the Union address) and declared “the state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,” little did he suspect that the doctrine he was espousing so vigorously was mere decades away from disappearing forever – at least from Europe.

His reactionary and hopelessly out-of-touch son, Charles I, continuing in his father’s tradition of believing he answered only to God, ended up being shortened by a head over the matter. Elsewhere in Europe, similar processes were playing out. In France, Louis XIV saw himself as God’s representative on Earth, endowed with a divine right to wield absolute power. He spent much of his time quashing brewing rebellions and establishing his legitimacy by the sweat of his brow. But his preposterous, primitive, and overwrought claims – the type that would fit nicely into Biden’s State of the Union address – can only be seen as a telltale sign of crisis. 

For many hundreds of years, Europe produced good kings and bad kings, but even the reign of a terrible king did not undermine belief in monarchy as an institution or in the implicit connection between the divine and earthly kingdoms. Monarchy itself was not ‘on the ballot’ every time a new king took the throne. But when the magic disappeared and kings found themselves on the defensive is exactly when they began to invoke the importance of their office with exaggerated effect. It is not hard to see the insecurity lying just beneath the surface. 

The cartoonishly inflated reaction to the threats supposedly emanating from Trump and others menacing the temple of democracy is merely a small part of a much larger drama – and no less a manifestation of insecurity. What this signifies is that the magic has drained out of the current iteration of Western liberal democracy. It will be defended, attacked, idealized, invoked all the same – until it simply disappears and is replaced with something else. [Bolded Italics My Emphasis]

As most serious historians know, the USA isn’t and never was a democracy. The so-called Founding Fathers were very much against any possibility that the “mob” would become the rulers. The far more enlightened and democratic Articles of Confederation were deemed obstructive to the desires of the post-Revolution’s Upper Class so much so that a secretive assembly was called for to gather in Philadelphia to make improvements but ended up performing a coup that rejected it completely and aimed to replace it with a completely new document and governance format. Indeed, notes on the discussions were to remain secret forever—is that democratic? It was 50 years later when notes of the Convention were finally made public. Very little of the actual arguments from that crucial time period are learned/discussed in America’s classrooms any longer. That the actual study of the past is being replaced by the democracy meme is critical. Although the USA has yet to become as authoritarian as the EU, it’s well on its way to that point and many will argue we’re already there. Was the “Church of Woke” democratic or authoritarian?

Given what’s in the public domain, Joe Biden should have been impeached, convicted and removed from office by the middle of 2022, and his son Hunter deserves to be in prison along with many like Hillary Clinton for her law breaking. That those and many other figures remain free testifies to the failure of the American System. What’s worse is that the American System’s been a failure for most of its life if it’s judged by what it proclaimed itself to be in the Constitution’s Preamble. But then again, the USA’s Upper Class has never wanted its prerogative to rule challenged, so it erected defense mechanisms like today’s Propaganda System that produces the Establishment Narrative and its Police State Institutions.

Can democracy be in danger where it doesn’t exist in the first place?

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