Under the sign of exceptionalism

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By RICARDO CAVALCANTI-SCHIEL*

The Russians finally seem to have learned that any deal with the United States is never more than an opportunistic farce.

1.

The fall of empires has never been peaceful. Apparently, the intrinsic trait of empires is their arrogance. Otherwise, they would not be empires. And if arrogance is accompanied by an exceptionalist ideology, when empires fall, they fall agonistically, believing in the right to destroy whatever is around them. After all, for them, the best destiny for everything around them would be none other than simple destruction, whether for their own enjoyment or for their revenge.

The third decade of the 21st century hints at the beginning of the fall of one of the most powerful (precisely because it was the most arrogant and exceptionalist) empires in human history. We don’t need to go into the details of the cultural makeup of all this now. Many have already hinted at it; but perhaps we will only have enough distance when it is all over. Epitomized, in its final phase, by the United States and its ultra-predatory capitalism, we are beginning to witness the fall of a five-century-old polycentric empire that, in Immanuel Wallerstein’s terms, shaped the “world system” – a short empire by historical standards, but intense, due to the forces it unleashes – that of the colonial West.

Some may consider the “colonial” qualification for this entire socio-historical-cultural scope to be abusive or even merely sensationalist; even because there are several forms and consequences of coloniality. Colonialism from the 16th to the 18th centuries was fundamentally a settler colonialism (and this meant overcoming native spaces through a societal transplant). Oriented towards the New World and the lands south of Melanesia, it produced relatively disparate results, depending on the specific European cultural matrix that managed them: whether a space governed by possessive individualism[I] (with “libertarian” pretensions), weighed down by the “background noise” of moral puritanism; be a space governed by the logic of privilege (which can institute both the internal replication of colonialism and strong social inequality), weighed down by the “background noise” of transculturation.

Unlike the first, the colonialism of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century would become a colonialism of occupation, translated, in generic terms, by the British category of indirect rule. And finally, the last half of the 20th century gave way to what could be called a colonialism of control, progressively (up to today) improved, managed by the most diverse biopolitical devices,[II] and so apparently different from the other two that it could be designated as neocolonialism.

What is perhaps worth emphasizing in all this is that, under the logic of Western geopolitical hegemony, there has never been anything that can truly be called “postcolonial.” The “postcolonial” is merely a figure of speech incorporated by biopolitical mechanisms to conceal the neocolonial circumstance. For those who doubt the latter, the best demonstration is the current agonistic resistance of the so-called “rules-based international order,” which carries a liberal-progressive regulatory agenda that has as one of its poster boys precisely the discursive mirage of the postcolonial.

The most elementary logic that permeates and unites all these forms of colonialism is the assumption of civilizational superiority, secularized since the 19th century, in terms of technical and social “progress” (hence the teleological scarecrow of every form of “progressivism”: the assumption that, if something is more up to date, is also more virtuous). We know, however, that the assumption of societal superiority, in itself, is a recurring anthropological banality far beyond modern Europe. Colonialism of European origin has required, since the 16th century (already hinted at since the Crusades), something more in order to be properly substantiated. (And, no! It is not the categorical imperative – of apparent universal rationality – of the “interest” of capital).[III]

This something more is the messianic dogma (of Judeo-Christian origin?) of being the “chosen” society to rule, in its terms, all others. In a word: exceptionalism. And it does not necessarily constitute (honoring both Marx and Lévi-Strauss) a conscious symbolic matrix.

What makes the fall of the Colonial West particularly dangerous for the rest of the world now is its peculiar agonistic nature, fueled precisely by exceptionalism. Like the force it unleashes, its fall could also be rapid, but potentially explosive. The only hope it raises is that most of this expended energy will eventually be turned inward; or that the world around it will do so, through the arts of some judo (more than chess).

2.

Let us move on to the facts. At this point, only the very foolish, the very delusional or the very hypocritical would argue that the current conflict in Ukraine was provoked by Russia. This, however, is yet another of those curious situations in which the perpetrators completely lose control of the consequences of their expectations and are swallowed up by a reaction that is entirely contrary to them, finding themselves, by chance, in the obstinate contingency of doubling down, not caring whether this is a potentially suicidal course. This is where the agonistic impulse unfolds.

In the calculations made based on their peculiar worldview, they simply believe that they are immune to any suicidal course, just as they thought they had correctly calculated the actions that had just led those initial expectations into the abyss. Would the error be in the calculations? Or would it be in the logical matrix that arranges such calculations? We would be dealing with some Game Theory, enclosed in its self-determination, as the alchemical speculations of a Rand Corporation[IV]? Or is it something more? For them, however, questions like these make no sense. And here begins the geopolitical judo.

Risking a (as always imprudent and almost always idle) counterfactual exercise, it would not be too difficult to recognize that the current geopolitical order, with its corresponding degree of weakening of Western hegemony, would not be what it is if it were not for the large-scale catalytic character represented by the military conflict in Ukraine (and this certainly has more to do with Complexity Theory than with Game Theory). All this in less than three years! A record. Future historians may compare it to the Great World War, in terms of scope, or to the French Revolution, in terms of socio-historical impact.

And, of course, we are not simply talking about Ukraine. At this point, it is nothing more than a pretext, as, strictly speaking, it has always been from the beginning. Just as Taiwan is. And so is Syria. Each one, a pretext (or springboard) for a bigger target and with admittedly exorbitant risks, but blithely disdained by the still (or not so) hegemonic powers.

Since the end of World War II, the CIA has been using Ukraine as a platform to destabilize first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Here, political ideology, secular cosmology, and geopolitical pragmatism converge. Or perhaps it is better to say that they are all encompassed by an overarching ideology.[IN]: neocolonial imperialism, which continued to function, in logical-symbolic terms, in the case of the United States, just as its predecessor (colonial imperialism) had functioned in the British case.

Since the nineteenth century Big Game British in Central Asia, the discursive birthplace of the conspiratorial image of the “Russian threat” – after all, that the Russian Empire had political and commercial interests in Central Asia is something that can be deduced from mere geographical proximity; now, what Great Britain was doing there is already something that can be deduced only from the logic of imperialism –, that a territorial mass like Russia became a threat to the imperial control of the world, simply because it was just that: a politically unified territory that was too large (and potentially too rich).

Once China was tamed by opium, the “Russian threat” has always been, deep down, and since well before the Soviet Union, a symbolic threat to the exceptionalism that underpins the imperialist and colonial worldview. What can we say now about a Sino-Russian alliance? Not that the world is driven by natural (material) vectors – they would be nothing without the cultural management of governance – but the end of the five-century rule of the colonial West may have become today almost a matter of… arithmetic – but not only that, of course; and that is part of the story; a story that, of course, never ended.

After the Second World War, the British MI6 (until 1954) and the CIA (permanently) established direct ties of recruitment and sponsorship of the Ukrainian leaders and organizations that had zealously worked for the Nazi occupation (and efficiently exterminated about 100.000 Jews and Poles), so that they could maintain infiltrated clandestine networks that promoted political instability within the Soviet Union and spread fascist ideas, which would come to fertilize the political culture of western Ukraine and would reproduce until the current Ukrainian neo-Nazi organizations that formed the shock troops of the 2014 coup d'état (the Euromaidam). The shady promotion and sponsorship of the Islamic State was by no means the CIA’s first “extremist” experiment.

All of this is extensively documented, including in extensive and detailed publications by the United States government.[YOU], was traced to the historical update of ties between Nazis and contemporary American political elites[VII], and recalled with some insistence (in the face of the current denialism of the corporate media) by some icons of the independent media, such as Max Blumenthal (alternet e GreyZone) and Joe Lauria (News Consortium).

On the other hand, in the now famous top secret memorandum 20/1 of the US National Security Council, dated August 18, 1948,[VIII] which laid the doctrinal foundations of Russia's foreign policy in the decades that would follow, such policy was conceptually defined as “militant” (unlike, it is recognized, all the attitudes adopted by the country until then), something that, if it did not frankly mean (perhaps out of caution) “interventionist”, at least meant controlling – the term we used just before to characterize neocolonialism.

3.

Such control was then euphemistically referred to by means of the concept coined a year earlier by diplomat George Kennan: “containment”. In practice: to break any possibility of Russian power projection that could consolidate an alternative worldview to the American liberal paradigm. Literally, in the memorandum: “the myth that makes millions of people in countries far from the Soviet borders look to Moscow as the exceptional source of hope for human betterment must be completely detonated [exploded] and its functioning destroyed.”

And, unusually, further on, it is added: “if it were not Moscow that these people were listening to, it would be something else, equally extreme and equally erroneous, although possibly less dangerous.” Thus, behind, and before, the formal ideology (the concrete form) there is insinuated an ordering of dispositions (the logical form), which is none other than that expressed by exceptionalism. Everything else, as the memorandum states, would be nothing more than “irrational and utopian.”

At the time the famous memorandum was drawn up, American bureaucrats themselves admitted that “Ukraine is not a clearly defined ethnic or geographic concept; (…) there is no clear dividing line between Russia and Ukraine, and it would be impossible to establish one.” Everything would change suddenly, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At that moment, the operation of the networks of the stay behind, long sponsored by the CIA and filled with traditional Ukrainian Nazis, has shifted local political dynamics towards creating a national anti-Russian platform. Were it not for it, it would be impossible to define a Ukrainian nationality. This is biopolitics in action.

The operation of these networks represented, first of all, a political split in the newly independent Ukraine. Behind the pro-Western discourse was implicit (or frankly explicit) a virulent anti-Russian discourse, with its socio-geographic stronghold in western Ukraine. And even if there was no overtly pro-Russian discourse, its implicit position would signal skepticism towards the mirage of the West.

Already in the year 2000, the opposition to President Leonid Kuchma marked the presence of first pro-American positions fierce and bellicose, which would lead, four years later, to the Orange Revolution, a de facto coup d'état, financed for American “assistance programs,” which that country’s budget records put at $331,97 million, in addition to funding for “democracy programs” on the eve of the 2004 elections, which amounted to $88,81 million, channeled to NGOs such as National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the foundation of billionaire Geoge Soros (who most recently financed the academic tourism program of former Brazilian congressman Jean Wyllys – ex-PSOL, current PT – at Harvard University; after all, all of this is part of the same neocolonial game).

All of these amounts appear to have been totaled in the five billion dollars that former Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland stated, at the end of 2013, had cost the American “investment” program in the regime change operation that finally led to the Euromaidam coup d’état. This is control colonialism in action.

If the definition of the military outcome of the current conflict in Ukraine set at the end of the northern summer of 2023, with the frustrated Ukrainian “counteroffensive” in the Zaporozhye steppes, today, the defeat of NATO and the pro-Nazi regime established in that country with the Euromaidan coup d’état is more than predictable, incontestable and, above all, irreversible. And it is more than just the increase in the pace of advance of Russian troops on the ground, compared to which the sterile Ukrainian maneuvers for media purposes are little more than inconsequential spasms.

4.

Given the current situation (and its sustained trend) of the logistical conditions of the contenders – Russia, NATO and the Kiev regime – any European troops (such as the one hundred thousand soldiers dreamed of by Emmanuel Macron) sent into Ukrainian territory to secure any territorial reserve for the West (western Ukraine, for example) will be doomed to destruction. Even the Polish government of President Andrzej Duda seems to have already realized this.

Now, the full control of Ukrainian territory by the Russians and its eventual complete incorporation into the Russian Federation has become an exclusive decision of the Russians themselves. The “dividing line”, as recalled in the American memorandum of 48, disappears again.

First, there are very basic infrastructural criteria. The Russians know that if they do not occupy at least the middle reaches of the Dnieper River, they will not have access – as was the case with Crimea – to the water supply for Donbass, which will prolong the chronic humanitarian, economic and environmental crisis that has been dragging on since the Kiev regime cut off all water flows to this “ethnically Russian” region from former Soviet waterworks. Since then, the entire Donbass has been living under water rationing and expensive emergency works that are no more than palliative.

However, beyond the infrastructural criteria for the survival of the “new territories”, there are security criteria, the same ones that have guided President Vladimir Putin’s considerations regarding his borders since at least 2007. This could mean, for example, not making the same mistake as Syria, which accepted the maintenance of an enemy territorial reserve in the province of Idlib. In this sense, the preservation of any potential NATO enclave in Ukraine could simply mean a strategic defeat for Russia, even after an operational victory.

All this suggests to us that the Russians will not stop where they are. Too much blood has already been shed and, more than that, given the accumulated historical experience, there is an imminent risk of much more being shed if everything stops where it is. The Russian leadership can only decide whether or not to acknowledge the historical experience.

Under the current terms of the conflict, the elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, cannot do absolutely anything in the face of the above-mentioned situation of Russia's autonomous decision regarding the fate of Ukraine, unless he gives Russia something substantively very precious (namely, compliance with the security plan presented by Russian president Vladimir Putin in December 2021) – which is not in the president's plans. mainstream of American foreign policy, is not in the style of Donald Trump and, culturally, of any American.

For Donald Trump, between giving in and accepting defeat, the second alternative could even be more profitable in rhetorical terms, because it can simply be blamed on the Democratic Party. And this would be a decision made by the Trump leadership, and by no means by the government's institutional framework. They will never accept any defeat, much less by Russia.

Despite the stubbornness of the exceptionalist mentality, saying that a US president cannot do anything in the face of his country's evident military defeat means that the United States no longer has the political, diplomatic, military, logistical and economic (and, soon, financial) conditions to maintain its global supremacy. From a geopolitical point of view, even without the massive presence of US troops there, Ukraine has become, for the twilight US supremacy, a squared Vietnam.

And whoever is the president of the country is the only one who matters to those who are viciously tied to the United States – which implies a long scale, depending on the degree of sovereignty surrender. Leading this line of unfortunates today is Europe, which is energetically dependent on the United States, and not the old Latin American backyard. Coincidentally, the reason (mainly economic and commercial) for this last case is called China.

Thus, the only hopes of… I wouldn’t say “making America great again”, but… not making it collapse (pragmatically) under the obesity of its internal debt and (ontologically) under the collapse of its colonial rationale are: to desperately maintain the dollar primacy (which is already starting to seem unrealistic); now apply “containment” on Chinese economic pragmatism (an adventure that could prove as disastrous as the war in Ukraine); and keep the rest of the world occupied with its own insecurities (something seriously complicated now by the Russian factor).

5.

This whole scenario is the big news on the geopolitical board after this war. Recognizing their very disadvantageous position would mean, for the United States (and also for Europe), entering the world of negotiation (and not deception), and this is ontologically absurd for exceptionalist logic, since it contains a non-negotiable teleological truth: the exemplary superiority of the West; the same one that intends to dictate an international order based on its rules.

From this logic, it is as if, culturally, the five stages of mourning, from popular Kubler-Ross model, were summed up, especially for the American elites, in just the first, the denial. No longer a (cultivatedly European) Saturnian melancholy (thank you very much Susan Sontag), Donald Trump's second term may signal the beginning of a (perhaps) long historical pilgrimage of the country precisely under the sign of denial. If it occurs, it will mark the obsolescence of cyclic postulates – whether from Schlesinger or Klingberg –, who believed they could bring order to the oscillations of the exceptionalist canon, naturalize it and exempt it.

The other side of the same coin is that the Russians finally seem to have learned that any agreement with the United States is never more than a opportunistic farce (by the Americans). If Ukrainian “neutrality” is the great unknown in the Russian equation, its conditions of possibility quickly fade when confronted with the facts embodied in the recent initiatives of the neocolonial West in Russia’s immediate neighborhood: Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and (looking to the future) Moldova.[IX] For all these reasons, this war can no longer change course; it can only escalate to another dimension. This is where the most delirious dreams of the Western elites come in, precisely because they seem to believe that this springboard has not yet broken.

6.

This illusion seems to have been reinforced by the recent leaps on another springboard: Syria. Here, Russia is secondary. In addition to the possible threat to the two Russian bases in the Mediterranean – something that Russian diplomacy already seems to have circumvented – its loss is fundamentally reputational: not from having lost influence, but from having sold off an economically beleaguered ally, whose government was beginning to become erratic and even uncomfortable, without this being made explicit.

On the one hand, in the context of Middle Eastern politics, all this tends to be recognized as part of contingent business. On the other hand, however, in Syria, the West’s springboard is Iran. Turkey, the protagonist of the events surrounding the fall of Damascus, has its own objectives, probably inflated by Ottomanist mirages (which, with the abrupt development of the situation – and Israel’s opportunism – seem to have fallen into a trap). The Iranian vector, if not as geopolitically decisive as Russia’s, concerns the agonistic neocolonial context of the spread of insecurity; in this case, in this strategic region that is the Middle East.

At the same time that the operation to destabilize Syria was taking place – with North American logistics, British intelligence and Turkish operational support – the United States discussed plans for a big attack on Iran. However, three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Russia and Iran will sign their Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement. Once again, time is running out. And certain victories take on the appearance of Pyrrhic victories. But the risk here remains the same as in the Ukrainian case: an irrational (but desired) escalation by another (albeit inordinately bold and incontinently genocidal) proxy of the declining Western hegemony, and this time blinded by its own exceptionalism: Israel.

In the same vein as these events, Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, spokesman for the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), stated “untimely”, in a lecture given on November 20 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in Washington, that the United States was ready to carry out a limited exchange of nuclear aggressions with Russia (which it hopes to win), to ensure the maintenance of American leadership in the world (the admiral's words!).

The old illusion of a limited nuclear war has been the subject of several specialized analyses, and occasionally returns to the US military. Given the circumstances, it cannot be ruled out that it implies a bluff. More than 40 years ago, a study by Desmond Ball[X] estimated at the time that a possible limited nuclear exchange would immediately result in the deaths of at least 20 to 30 million Americans, which would be about 12% of the country's population, enough to devastate its economy and infrastructure. (To give you an idea, the percentage of deaths in the population of defeated Nazi Germany throughout the Second World War was 8,23%).

Today, with Sarmat-type hypersonic vectors, the devastation would be multiplied by several digits. The simple logical conclusion is that such a hypothetical adventure would compromise any American leadership from then on. That this idea has returned to the heads of government agents seems to indicate only the degree of strategic delirium to which they indulge. This delirium, however, has a cultural basis.

That the world is now much closer than ever before to a nuclear confrontation seems to be practically a consensus. Its motivations, as in the war in Ukraine, are far from pointing to any “Russian ambition”. If we were to speak in psychoanalytic terms, this argument would seem more like a projection of the way of thinking of the North Americans. But one should not mechanically apply (as seductive as it may seem) psychoanalysis to a supposed “national personality” (as some American anthropologists have already imagined).

Rather, it is a question of a profound cultural logic. According to this logic, the sense of defining oneself in relation to an Other imposes that this Other, even if ultimately Other, be subordinated and protected by the imperatives of the self as a model entity (that is, as a presumed standard of universality). This is just another way of reading the logic of exceptionalism, which seems to have been the foundation of all Western colonialism for a long time.

*Ricardo Cavalcanti-Schiel Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

Notes


[I] See Macpherson, Crawford B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism... Oxford: Clarendon Press.

[II] Foucault, Michel. [1979] 2004. Naissance of biopolitics. Paris: EHESS/ Gallimard/ Seuil.

[III] In this sense, perhaps needless to say, capitalism would be a consequence of the deep European cultural logics regarding domination, and not its cause. After all, throughout the world, the historical existence of markets did not ensure (and does not ensure) the emergence of capitalisms. This also means that a conceptual scarecrow such as “Chinese capitalism” requires a much more nuanced interpretation. Nuanced… by culture.

[IV] Created shortly after World War II by the US Air Force as a contraction of the term “Research and Development”, the RAND project began at the Douglas Aircraft company in Santa Monica, CA, with the aim of financing innovations in the arms industry through its characteristic business-military symbiosis. Over the decades, it became a corporation and ended up becoming the most influential “think tanks” of the American military-industrial complex. From his earliest studies, he incorporated Game Theory as part of his analytical tools, formulating with it the preponderant military-strategic principle during the Cold War, that of “mutual assured destruction” in a scenario of nuclear confrontation. It should be noted that this perspective only became conceivable after the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons. Hence the determining status of the context, and not the mere detached rationality of the actors. And the context also said that the Soviet Union was the decisive force and the greatest victor in the Second World War, which filled Westerners with fear. Before that scenario of “mutual assured destruction”, Winston Churchill had proposed, in April 1945, an alliance of Great Britain, the United States and Nazi Germany to destroy the Soviet army (Operation Unthinkable) as Harry Truman, in August of the same year, established a military action plan (Totality Plan) ― which the United States is now trying to disguise as a mere “disinformation” plan ― to bomb 20 cities in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons (once they were all made viable). Before this could happen, the Soviet Union showed the world its first nuclear tests. The Western plans did not come to fruition only because they did not guarantee full military success. The RAND Corporation had as an employee the mathematician John F. Nash Jr., author (based on Game Theory) of his own equilibrium theorem, which expands and modifies the liberal economic theories of equilibrium, of Walras and Pareto, and for which he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. Game Theory and its assumption of rational interactive sufficiency between actors, disregarding any relevance of the conjuncture (as exemplified above) and the symbolic environment in which such actors find themselves (or, perhaps more importantly, their dissonances), is probably one of the most ideologically determined and motivated modern scientific theories, and, despite its simplifying mechanism (or perhaps precisely because of it), it has become one of the most significant intellectual instruments of neocolonial imperialism. Today, instruments like this have spread especially throughout the field of Social Sciences, and almost entirely condition the agenda of problems conceivable in this field of knowledge.

[IN] Anthropologists will recognize that there is an implicit reference here to Louis Dumont's theory.

[YOU] See Breitman, Richard & Goda, Norman JW 2010. Hitler's Shadow. Washington: National Archives and Records Administration. Available at: https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf.

[VII] Bellant, Russ. 1991. Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. Domestic Fascist Networks and US Cold War Politics. Boston: South End Press. Available at: https://archive.org/details/russ-bellant-old-nazis-the-new-right-and-the-republican-party-domestic-fascist-n.

[VIII] In: Etzold, Thomas H. & Gaddis, John Lewis (ed's.). 1978. Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 173-203. Available at: https://archive.org/details/NSC201-USObjectivesWithRespectToRussia/NSC_20_1_book/mode/2up.

[IX] The last elections in Moldova were rigged to allow the pro-Western government of President Maya Sandu to remain in power, just as the last Romanian elections were illegally cancelled to prevent a Eurosceptic from coming to power. The current energetic “plot” between the Ukrainian regime and the Moldovan regime to leave Transnistria (“ethnically Russian”) in the dark within two months forces Russia to speed up the capture of Odessa, so that it can connect Transnistria to its new territories. On the other hand, the old Western plans to produce a color revolution in Belarus, including with effective military outcome, appear to have been postponed, but not necessarily cancelled.

[X] Ball, Desmond. 1981. Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. (Adelphi Paper #169).


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