The Empire of Liberty Versus the Coalition of Tyranny
Without the right framework, the right words, and the right strategies, we will continue to flounder, remain ineffectual, and risk having freedom defeated by tyranny.
We are in a long-term global conflict between the Empire of Liberty and the Coalition of Tyranny.
Seen at a global level and over time, it is clear that the world is coalescing into a confrontation that will define history for centuries to come.
On one side is what Thomas Jefferson, in 1780, called the Empire of Liberty. It is fitting that on this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should look back to the Founding Fathers. They saw themselves as fighting for a universal set of principles that transcended the 13 colonies.
When you read the Declaration of Independence, it becomes obvious that they were writing for the entire world and for all of the future.
The very opening is a universal statement which we do not study often enough:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. “
Note that this is a universal declaration about the Creator endowing the rights of all people. It doesn’t specify Americans.
President Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address during the Civil War, based his case on the Declaration’s principles. Lincoln began:
“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Lincoln closed with a universal, timeless challenge: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
From the beginning, Americans took this universal sense of freedom seriously and communicated it to the world in missionary groups, businesses, ambassadors, writers, and a host of cultural approaches that defined the world of Emperors, Kings, and dictators as inferior and ultimately doomed to be replaced by freedom with the rule of law.
By definition, the American system is a threat to every leader who wants to dominate by force and fear rather than by persuasion and freely given permission.
This made us the natural opponent of Wilhelmine Germany, the Nazi-Fascist Imperial Japan Axis coalition (which President Franklin D Roosevelt declared “unconditional surrender” as our goal), and the Soviet Union. It also set us against today’s coalition of tyrannies, who are legitimately hostile to a system that declares their power to be illegitimate, their oppression of their people to be morally unacceptable, and their efforts to extend their tyranny into other countries a threat to our freedom.
Thus, we find ourselves in a global conflict between the Empire of Liberty and the Coalition of Tyrannies.
The current coalition, the replacement for the Axis powers or the Soviet Union as threats to a future of freedom, is essentially Communist China, the Russian dictatorship, the Iranian religious dictatorship, and the North Korean dictatorship.
These countries have come closer and closer together in their opposition to freedom in general and the United States in particular.
Seen from their standpoint, the coalition against freedom and against the United States in particular makes perfect sense.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States came very close to becoming a true hegemonic power. Our military was by far the most effective in the world. Our technology, especially in computing, artificial intelligence, and space, was accelerating ahead of the rest of the world. Our economy was the largest in the world, and on a per capita basis, it remains much larger than China’s. Our consistent reference to the rule of law and our willingness to use our dominance of the world financial system to sanction those with whom we disagree have all made us a mortal threat to any system based on tyranny, the suppression of its own people, and its desire to operate in the world without American approval or supervision.
The growing alliance among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea has produced patterns of mutual support that require global rather than regional analysis.
What happens in Ukraine will matter to the entire coalition of tyrannies. North Korean soldiers, Chinese economic and military aid, and Iranian drones have all helped sustain Putin’s effort to conquer Ukraine.
The minute the Iranian dictatorship can get a truce with the Americans, its coalition allies will help rebuild its missile and nuclear program (in 2007, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear program in Syria, which was designed and manned by the North Koreans).
If the coalition of Tyrannies wants to take the risk, they could fly a handful of surplus nuclear weapons from North Korea into Tehran and make Iran a nuclear power literally within days.
Any American analysis that does not begin with this worldwide conflict and this four-nation alliance of tyrants is inherently wrong and dangerous.
It has been impossible for our foreign policy and national security “experts” to explain what is happening because we have not had the right focus and the right language framework.
The natural tendency is to focus narrowly, locally, and on immediate events. This is strengthened by our news media’s need to fill 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with “instant news” and “breaking news”. There is remarkably little long-term analysis and thinking. What does exist tends to have been shaped by the memories of the Cold War and the assumptions of the last 40 years.
Words matter, and frameworks of reality matter. It was George Kennan’s February 22, 1946, “long telegram” on “the sources of Soviet Conduct” which, in 8,000 words, convinced most of official Washington that we were in for a long Cold War. Four years later, on April 7, 1950, the State Department issued NSC 68, in which Paul Nitze, in 58 pages, outlined the strategy of containment, which largely defined the next 41 years of American policy until the Soviet Union literally disappeared.
We do not yet have either Kennan’s explanation of reality or Nitze’s strategy for responding to that reality.
We are floundering in a sea of tactics, localism, presentism, and ad hoc invention of tactical responses to a long-term strategic global threat.
We need to look now for our generation’s Kennans and Nitzes.
Without the right framework, the right words, and the right strategies, we will continue to flounder, remain ineffectual, and risk having freedom defeated by tyranny.
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