Obama and the New US Strategic Superiority: The Path of Regression

The Pentagon published a new strategic plan on Jan. 4, 2012, with great festivities, after a review that lasted nine months. The Pentagon plan formed part of the high strategy expressed by Obama, and represents the United States of America’s world ideology — with its expected changes — as well as its political, economic and military goals, and international alliances.

The concept of strategy has expanded throughout history beyond the issue of overseeing wars to include political, economic and psychological aspects of globalization, as well as the military aspects of administering national policies and determining the country’s goals. With this, the expression “high strategy” appeared as a translation of this conceptual expansion. This means using every source of power which the country — or a group of countries — has at their disposal in order to realize desired goals, whether in war or peace.

The speeches of government leaders do not always express their international ideological strategy, especially those of the United States, which is experiencing a stage that has become known as “the era of American decline,” as Brzezinski calls it. The declared strategy has political, media and psychological aspects geared toward deterring enemies and reassuring “friends” and the American public. Moreover, the high strategy is built on several suppositions and expectations, which make the strategy “the art of calculated risk management.”

Usually, high strategy expresses the interests of the governing class: their prevailing ideology and effective powers — like multi-national corporations; the military-industrial complex of oil; the financial sector and its overseas interests; the Pentagon and the State Department — and likewise expresses the current desires of the republic’s citizens, such as the “tea party” in the United States, especially before elections. Furthermore, high strategy changes or gets amended as a result of great victories or defeats, great innovations (the manufacture of the atomic bomb, for instance) and as a result of political and economic changes in the world.

The United States did not have a fixed strategy in the previous decades, especially on the military front. Every historical event pushed it to redevelop its strategy — within the scope of extensive constants — to preserve its dominance over the global capitalist system and several of the world’s countries. This hegemony was extended — when the U.S. was able to extend it — to the ability to reach strategic natural resources (like oil and precious metals) worldwide; to rule over their production and prices; to have control over their international trade and supply routes by preventing any other country from disturbing them; and to gain superiority over them militarily, economically and scientifically.

Sources of American Strategic Thought

American strategic thinking was drawn from its European heritage. Stretched over it on every level was “morality,” politics and the military. World War II moved the strategic thinking from its essence as merely overseeing military war to the concept of “comprehensive war,” which involved the entire world and touched every aspect of political, economic, technical and psychological life. It also introduced the media as one of the pillars of comprehensive war. Moreover, the Nazis crafted all of these aspects into a comprehensive strategic network. The United States’ strategic thinking adopted all of this, then developed and supplemented it with every scientific and technical innovation. The United States launched its wars on every level, and at the same time with ferocity and cruelty unlimited by covenants, laws and conventions. And it was impossible for any country in the past to claim control over the global economic and political infrastructure and its institutions in the same way that the United States did after World War II. America used these institutions to serve its own interests and to expand its hegemony over the globe.

The concept of complete war did not come as a surprise. From the vacuum, we find in the writings of German strategic leaders, especially, for example, Moltke and Schlieffen, a confirmation of the historical relations between war and policy-making, as well as the gradually increasing importance of the economy as a basis for strategy. Likewise, American strategic thinking drew from the writings of the Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930) who believed that aerial weaponry was the most important weaponry of the future, since it was capable, by itself, of deciding military battles, while land and naval weaponry were incapable of doing so. He said that air power “could defeat time and space.” Italian fascism proved the strength of his theory in the war with Libya in 1911, just as the United States achieved the goal of shredding Yugoslavia with weaponry unleashed by planes, as did NATO during the modern occupation of Libya, whose geography and demography are favorable for this.

American strategic thinking gives maximum importance to aerial weaponry. Today it is developing various types of planes without pilots (drones) with various sizes and missions. These abilities are distinct (to air power), especially in its wars on the countries of the third world, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and coastal and desert states that do not have the ability to combat these planes. Moreover, these planes can remain airborne for an entire day or more, undertake reconnaissance missions, take photographs and shell targets with precision.

The American thinkers have been guided by Alfred Mahan (1660-1783), who wrote the book, “The Influence of Sea Power upon History.” Mahan was a pioneer in imperialist American thinking. In his writings, Mahan insisted on the importance of commerce in wartime, and the importance of economic wars via naval power. He said that the countries that control the seas are able to exploit trade, global riches and economic resources more so than others. Consequently, these states can achieve victories in wars. American fleet-builders and presidents — Theodore Roosevelt for example — were committed to Mahan’s views.

Changes in American Strategy

Change in or amendment to a large country’s high strategy comes about upon the realization of desired goals and also upon the failure of these goals, as well as the occurrence of great changes in the world and the environment. After all, the Chinese-Russian disputes impelled Richard Nixon to visit China and to change his country’s policies and goals in East and Southeast Asia. The Arab oil danger pushed the United States to make strategic control of the Middle East region one of its priorities. In June, 1979 Brzezinski said that the Middle East could become equal with Western Europe and the Far East in terms of importance to the United States. This is what strengthened Israel within the American strategy, thanks to its being an American military base, or “the largest carrier of American aircraft in the world.”

The Vietnam crisis and the humiliating American defeat in that war pushed America into deflation, albeit temporarily, and impelled it to distance itself from delving into land battles, instead concentrating on complicated smart weapons tied to satellites in order to shell and cause destruction from a distance, without victims or casualties among American troops. Furthermore, the American defeat in Vietnam coincided and overlapped with the third crisis of the capitalist system in the 20th century, which stretched from the year 1965 until the year 1982. In 1982, the new conservatives came into power in Britain and America, carrying with them a new liberal ideology, with its economic, social and commercial goals to invade the countries of the globe economically. This was called for by necessity, and these changes led to what was called “Star Wars,” which started an arms race between the two world powers.

Moreover, the Iranian revolution shifted the scales of power in the Middle East and released new dynamics counter to Western and Israeli interests. Afterwards, the Iranian revolution pushed all of the countries of the Gulf into war. The United States adopted the policy of “creative chaos” and the policy of “restructuring the Middle East.”

Likewise, the fall of the Soviet Union led to an enormous change in American and Western European strategy. A new strategy fell upon NATO, too. NATO was transformed from an allegiance to defend Western Europe in the face of a probable Soviet attack into an aggressive imperial allegiance geared toward containing Eastern Europe and toward “defense” of imperialist American and European interests around the globe, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

As for the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, they led to the collapse of the American strategy aimed at occupying seven Arab and Islamic countries in five years. The world capitalist system crisis — the systematic and the structural crisis — along with everything that struck the centers of this advanced system, led to a sharp reduction in the military budgets of these countries. All this came to pass as a result of these crises. The crises also generated the beginning of great changes on the strategic level during a period of comprehensive American degradation.

And if we look at what four decades of time has reaped, we find that the march of American regression began in the middle of the 1960s, despite the partial “victories” and the phenomenon of false, artificial economic prosperity. In the 1960s, the hegemony of the financial sector over the economy spread. The “Monroe” doctrine in the American continent fell, America’s saying about its “backyard” collapsed and most of the dependent countries of Latin America went against the U.S., despite the fall of the Soviet Union and its umbrella, which had included Cuba for decades. The steadfastness of Cuba woke up the new Bolivian tide calling for the liberation and unification of Latin America. Moreover, the American-Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982 failed. Its goal was to include Lebanon in the Camp David Accords. This failure comprised a collapse of the Zionist-American “scarecrow” and the beginning of the decline of the Zionist entity, despite the phenomenon of its false power. Thus NATO’s eastward expansion was repulsed, and Russia was saved from America’s clutches and the “Washington Consensus” and the policy of “shock therapy.” During Boris Yeltsin’s rule, while Ukraine was gearing up for NATO and had its Orange Revolution, Russia engaged in “immunization” of the soft underbelly of Central Asia and the containment of the American-Zionist outpost in Georgia.

Furthermore, Central Asia has constituted the primary American-European goal since the fall of the Soviet Union. This region constitutes a field of intense competition between Russia, China, America, Iran, Turkey and India, since this region has a huge strategic importance, as well as commercial and economic importance, because of its many natural resources like oil, gas, lithium, copper, uranium and precious metals. America no longer has anything except for one military base in Uzbekistan and some troops in Kazakhstan. Moreover, America will lose the entire realm of Central Asia upon its withdrawal from Afghanistan. America is looking for a crushing defeat there along with the countries of NATO. Furthermore, Pakistan stands on the edge of an explosion in America’s face, because of growing popular anger at America and the increase of its crimes in the name of the peoples of the region.

The American withdrawal from Iraq represents a great strategic failure and signals America’s withdrawal from the entire Arab East. After all, the decision to withdraw from Iraq “is nothing but a decision reflecting a failure to achieve the mission that the war was launched in order to achieve,” according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Schlomo bin ‘Ami commented on this when he said, “the withdrawal from Iraq is a painful chapter in American history, for it is a chapter of excessive actions in the spread of Empire … since America was exhausted materially and wasted its energy on what was not considered fruitful.”