Woodrow Wilson and the End of the World

Antony Blinken and the diplomacy deficit – Responsible Statecraft

A few weeks before, I cited Seymour Hersh’s important scoop that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan really was so pathetically ignorant, stupid and incompetent that he believed that the Ukrainian counter-offensive over the summer was going to break the Russian Army and trigger the entire disintegration of Russia – Zbigniew Brzezinski’s lifelong mad dream (and I knew him well) fulfilled at last.

By Now Jake Sullivan Expected Russia to be Destroyed – New Kontinent

Sullivan even organized the farcical Jeddah conference on reconstruction after the Ukraine war, Hersh reported, in the fantasy that he was setting up a second Versailles Peace Conference comparable to the gathering that catastrophically redraw the map of Europe in 1919 as nothing had done since the Dark Ages.

Sullivan, amazingly, is supposedly a high-powered lawyer. He edited prestigious reviews at both Oxford University and Yale. He is therefore, presumably, familiar with the fundamental legal principle “fruits of the poisonous tree.” But he clearly is not aware that he is one such luscious, lethal, deadly poisonous oversized rotting fruit of such a tree himself.

104 years ago, President Woodrow Wilson sailed to France on the liner George Washington determined to pose his own simplified, hick-vision of a perfect peace to last forever and end the great wars of Europe and the world for all time. He planned to impose a simple formula on all the endless complexities, memories, cultures, hatreds, memories and feuds of the human race: It was called “national self-determination.”

The awful, catastrophic but also very funny story of how Wilson and his gang of energetic, eager, arrogant, ignorant young American intellectual-know-it-alls from such still all too familiar stinking rat holes as The Nation, The New Republic and the universities of Harvard and Yale pored over the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica – the Wikipedia of their day – on the leisurely voyage over to make themselves instant geniuses on the nations of Europe is now well known.

However, Sullivan’s typically maladroit faux pas in setting up his ponderous ridiculous Jeddah conference and then having nothing to show for it reveals Wilson’s poisonous tree is still dropping its stinking, infernal, rotting fruit, its ashes of Sodom, deadly as plutonium over the entire human race.

For, Sullivan revealed that he – along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the rest of their neoliberal and neoconservative Gadarene Swine – remain convinced that America’s Time has come again.

Forget the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in Christianity, or that of the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam in different versions of Islam. Forget the Jewish conception of the Messiah. Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland – as the long-awaited true Heirs of Woodrow Wilson – are here to complete the job and finally achieve Wilson’s goal.

The problem of course is, as countless historians have documented and the great Sigmund Freud showed in his classic psychoanalytic biography of Wilson – co-written with veteran US diplomat and eventual Ambassador to both the Soviet Union and France Bill Bullitt – that Wilson was a raving, delusional lunatic.

 Far from bringing peace, Wilson’s Versailles settlement was so stupid, so arrogant, so ignorant and so bungled in both conception and execution that it paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler and a new dark age of fascism, inflamed racial hatred and economic ruin that reduced Europe to a charnel house over the next quarter century.

President Franklin Roosevelt in World War II had served as a relatively senior official in Wilson’s administration. He ran the US Navy energetically and very ably for eight years as its assistant secretary: a position equivalent to a deputy secretary of defense today. FDR did not repeat Wilson’s crazed micromanaging at the end of World War II.

Much criticized afterwards, his 1945 Yalta agreements with Josef Stalin saved Western Europe for a new unexpected golden age of recovery and prosperity that has continued to this day. And a contained Soviet bloc eventually collapsed from its own internal contradictions, just as major Western leaders at the time like George Kennan and Harry Truman had assessed and predicted.

However, the mad secular messianism that Wilson injected –  more lethal than mainlining heroin – into US foreign policy and US mainstream “thought” or what passes for it never went away. And today we see the inevitable, awful, fearsome consequences.

As James Carden pointed out: American diplomacy is not merely inept: It is stone cold dead. It is more inert than Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot. Wilson’s self-righteous madness – since mainlined by Hillary Clinton and her carefully cultivated heirs Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan = destroyed it. An entire generation of US diplomats is now catastrophically incapable of maintaining the security, the healthy trade and the reciprocal financial arrangements with other nations essential for the prosperity and even survival of their nation. 

Russia and even China must be first de-stabilized then dismembered and destroyed. All this is demanded as essential for the preservation and continuing of the US global world leadership through eternity.

It does not matter that endless previously peaceful and relatively happy and stable nations for Afghanistan to Ukraine, and Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen – the list goes on – must be bombed, destroyed, impoverished, reduced to anarchy, despair and ruin. All this needs to be done to appease the god, the goal of eternal theoretical happiness for the human race: Free market, open borders, minimum government, unlimited military spending, Wall Street and City of Lindon direction and profiteering – Our Way. Free elections everywhere all the time! But only when they produce the results, always that “we” approve must be pursued ever more frantically, ever more insanely.

American self-interest is dead. The very concept has been destroyed. Only the endless pursuit of an endless One World, Flat Earth vision survives – endlessly proclaimed by the False Prophet of Thomas Friedman of the towering New York Times.,

And therefore the appalling criminal sacrifice of the Ukrainian people and their precious youth continues – at least half a million dead so far, thousands more by the day. The rush to provoke Russia to thermonuclear response and the possible annihilation of the United States, Britain and their allies in a matter only a few years, perhaps even mere months now, continues. However, none of this matters: For these realities are not allowed to exist in the minds of Biden and Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland and all their many Republican and neocon cheerleaders as well.

As Barry McGuire warned us back in 1965, we are now On the Eve of Destruction.

We really are. 

Honest

No joke.

Martin Sieff is a Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow, former Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Times and former Managing Editor, International Affairs for United Press International. He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for International Reporting. He is the author so far of seven published books and has reported from 70 countries and a dozen wars.