THE GREAT AMERICAN RETREAT - Part I

Even before Thos Jefferson, John Adams & Ben Franklin, America became a neo-con nation via George Washington!

Apr 05, 2023

America’s conservatives have split themselves between the principles of Classical Liberalism and Isolationism. Classical liberalism birthed modern neoconservatism. It is the legacy of the Founders, of John Adams, Thos Paine, Thos Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, and Adam Smith.

Reactionarism and progressivism gave birth to isolationism. Neo-conservatives have always described themselves as classical liberals and internationalists, having allied America’s pro-active and involved national interests with Europe and the English-speaking world.

For the Founders these alliances were coupled to trade and the free passage of people, culture, supplies, and commodities. This policy proved to have forged the path to widespread American prosperity and the growth of the middle class.

Conversely, isolationists have a documented history of having absorbed progressive ideology. Quietly they advanced socialism and collectivism in behalf of NAZI socialism, Soviet socialism, Castroist and Maoist socialism - and always against the American interest in behalf of America’s enemies. Their narratives were pumped into 20th century American culture and consciousness by both Nazi socialists and Soviet socialists, through propaganda, elite capture of a sympathetic left media, one allied with the others. Targeted propaganda promoting isolationism was meant to weaken American resolve, morale, and put an end to American pushback against aggression and hostile nations’ dreams of empire.

Nazi Propaganda and the American Public

How Soviet propaganda mocked the U.S., NATO and the CIA

a. WIKI: The Nazi Party,^[a] officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei^[b])...

b. WIKI: The Soviet Union,^[n] officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics^[o] (USSR),^[p] was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991…

c. WIKI: Neoconservatism is a political movement that began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s…

d. A Timeline of U.S. Anti-War Movements. Anti-war-isolationist movements date back to the birth of the United States…

The antiwar isolationist movement was, and is, progressive in nature, sentiment and narratives. Antiwar sentiment has never conserved anything and there’s nothing “conservative” about it. It never conserved what is most important: life itself, for it repeatedly, and predictably, ignored genocide and genocidal maniacs.

The New York Post reported April 1: “In 1920, socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for president while serving a 10-year term for sedition at a federal prison in Georgia. Debs had been convicted under the later-repealed Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing US involvement in World War I.”

World War II was similarly opposed by progressives and (incorrectly-labeled) pseudo-rightwingers in the AMERICA FIRST movement. Fascist yes, right wing, no.

A famed leader of his time who rallied against the American Interest was the ‘hero’ Charles Lindbergh, whose narratives about the military-industrial complex's “warmongering,” almost to a ‘T’ were parroted by isolationists Tucker Carlson, Doug MacGregor, Tulsi Gabbard, Laura Logan and Glenn Greenwald.

Some of the cited (click the links above) have a documented record speaking for the political left. Others are outright “antiZionists.” MacGregor is allied with the Walt-Mearsheimer brand at Foreign Policy. All three write for that leftwing publication. All oppose American hegemony, security interests, and a muscular foreign policy. Meanwhile they advocate for the empire building of America’s enemies. Significantly, most of them have shown the same antipathy for Israel as Lindbergh’s and Ford’s AF movement of the 30s had shown against the Jews.

With their isolationist counterparts on the “right” (two sides of the same coin), progressive-isolationists rallied for two centuries against the national interest. For three decades between the sixties through the late eighties up to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, these marinated-in-propaganda folk agitated and marched into the streets of the world’s capitals, demanding America’s nuclear disarmament. Meanwhile they made no similar demands of the Russian nuclear arsenal which was significantly larger.

These strange bedfellow’s narratives toward today’s war in Eastern Europe are exactly the same.

MONTICELLO, NEW YORK: “…When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated in March of 1801, he inherited troubled relations with the Barbary states — the Ottoman Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, along with independent Morocco. The United States had treaties with all four, but tension was high and rising. American representatives in the region wanted an American naval presence…

"When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such Force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our Trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, we may…secure a large share of the Meditn: trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U.S. for the Cost of a maritime Force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith…

“The new president (Jefferson) was fully aware of the situation…privateers supported by the Barbary States of the North African coast had preyed on American ships. In 1784 Congress had appointed Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin as peace commissioners to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce with the principal states of Europe and the Mediterranean — including the Barbary states…The merchant vessels of any country without such a treaty were at the mercy of the state-sponsored maritime marauders…The commissioners reported this practice to Congress and sought guidance…

“The Barbary challenge to American merchant shipping sparked…great debate over how to cope with corsair aggression... Jefferson's early view guided him in future years. In November 1784, he doubted the American people would be willing to pay annual tribute. "Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them?" A month later, having learned that an…American brig had been seized by a Moroccan corsair in the Atlantic, he emphasized the hard line: "Our trade to Portugal, Spain, and the Mediterranean is annihilated unless we do something decisive…war is the usual alternative of these pirates…..“

March 14, 2023, Two Russian jet fighters take down American Military Aircraft over International waters: Biden administration apologizes.

October 2022 in IS UKRAINE IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST?

EXCERPT: "There are no friends; no enemies, just common interests."

“The United States’ common interests is shared with its trading and military partners and the world’s third largest economy, Europe. Europeans happen to be progenitors and scions of America’s founding fathers and America’s ancestors. In other words, they are us, and we are them.”

NATO’S STRATEGY IS THOS JEFFERSON’S, JOHN ADAMS,’ AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S STRATEGY!

“NATO’s strategy is to block Russian forces from seizing for itself the trade routes, ports, rail and access roads to the underbelly of Europe and the seven seas that serve all, Azov, Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, North and Baltic seas - routes to the Atlantic Ocean that connect them. These access routes are vital for American trade, American prosperity, global security, and the American military. Most importantly, these seas encircle the entire continent….”

We either have an American military, cultural and business alliance, and American prosperity to defend, or a genocidal Russian Empire bent on shattering them all.

As it was in 1791, it is today.

October 2022: “Rational foreign policy must advance freedom, trade, and global security across the world, which happens to be America’s historical, if unintended role. These are specifically in the national interest. Free and safe access to international waterways, the passage of Americans, markets, goods and supplies, and military action, happen to be among them.”

Isolationism was never long acceptable because it sabotages the national interest. Classical liberalism, subsumed into a historic proactive muscular American neoconservatism from America’s birth by Thos Jefferson’s Republicans, always was.

American retreat and global conquest is in Russia’s and China’s interests.

Defending Europe was always in America’s.

And we will!

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PART II: THE UKRAINE-RUSSIA WAR HAS SPLIT THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

PART III: THE AGE OF EMPIRE IS OVER

PART IV: THE CASE FOR WAR IS PEACE!

These essays on THE GREAT AMERICAN RETREAT bring us into the current debates.

VIEWS ASKEW by Andrew G. Benjamin

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