Ambassador Chas Freeman, Jr on the legitimacy crisis

Charles W Freeman, Jr

China expert, Sinica Podcast co-host and former heavy metal guitarist of Tang Dynasty Kaiser Kuo posted the transcript of this speech to his social media page, and I think it’s well enough worth reading that I’m writing up a reflection on it here on my own blog. Retired US Ambassador Charles W Freeman, Jr spoke recently to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and what he had to say did not particularly spare any sensibilities.

I’ll preface this by saying that I have disagreements with Ambassador Freeman on several issues – monetary policy most notably. And unfortunately, monetary policy takes up a lot of Freeman’s intellectual bandwidth. Strangely enough, here I tend to out-realist the realist. Money’s primary significance is symbolic, and to a certain extent it doesn’t matter whether money is digital or physical as long as it can handle the four necessary attributes of monetary exchange (of which Freeman acknowledges three). Freeman – like many of our élites, to be fair – overestimates severely both the uses of ‘dollar diplomacy’ and ‘dollar sanctions’, and thus also overestimates the impact de-dollarisation will have on both the American œconomy and foreign ones. Much more important and worrisome, to my way of thinking, is the ‘hollowing-out’ of America’s industrial capacity and productive potential. This difference in our monetary-œconomic views does colour our different approaches some issues downstream, mostly with regard to trade and foreign alliances, but not so many that I fail to appreciate what he gets right.

And Freeman gets a lot right here. The first and most important thing he points out is the arrogant belligerence of the Blob, which has turned its back wholesale on diplomacy and now relies exclusively on ‘taunts, threats, unilateral sanctions, ultimatums, cyberwarfare, drone and missile attacks, assassinations, proxy warfare, military invasions and pacification campaigns’. He points out the exorbitant costs of this machinery for perpetual warfare and the organisation of our œconomy on a permanent war footing. He points out how the Bush-era ‘Global War on Terror’ has not only metastasised into a pretext for overriding any other nation’s sovereignty we choose, to the detriment of our veterans and into the creation of something like a self-fulfilling prophecy, with an almost guaranteed generational blowback from American imperial violence in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. Also, without any set conditions for victory or disengagement – yet another Bush-era precedent – we have set all of these military adventures up to fail in the long run.

He points out that we are in a self-engineered crisis of legitimacy among nations which have been our partners in foreign policy for decades. Having forsaken many of our obligations abroad, we are forcing other nations to set up alternative or parallel foreign-policy structures and arrangements in which we have no say. Europeans and East Asians both have grown fed up with American intransigence on Iran, our perfidy and heel-dragging on climate change agreements, and our hypocritical and self-serving policies on arms control.

Very importantly, Ambassador Freeman points out that American foreign policy élites have, going back at least to Clinton and possibly back to Reagan, systematically mistaken private interests and rent-seeking behaviours for the public and national interest. In particular, he’s saying that private military contractors and defence industry concerns are racking up massive profits at the expense of both the American state and – increasingly – foreign states, and that this is putting an intolerable pressure on America’s ability to keep up or even revise its commitments abroad. This is something I have been harping on for years, and it’s a gratifying thing to see an American official spell it out in such stark and plain terms.

Alarmingly, Ambassador Freeman points out that ‘there is now no policy process in Washington capable of considering how to shape the American and global futures’. Congress has irresponsibly, and unconstitutionally, outsourced its authority on foreign policy to various agencies acting under the executive branch – which in turn have become unaccountable and ineffective, on account of their being mere vehicles for career advancement by toeing a certain established political line. I think he might be getting some part of his analysis backwards here, but Freeman describes convincingly how the Blob is functioning. All the while, both the media œcology and our political processes have been fundamentally warped and compromised by plutocracy. In short, Freeman says: American cupidity – in terms of finance, in terms of political capital and in terms of moral consistency – have engineered a global scenario, in which the horizons for future action toward the greater good are prohibitively constrained.

Freeman is also completely unsparing with regard to where the responsibility lies.

The causes and catalysts of the many nasty possibilities before us are, for the most part, decisions made in Washington, not abroad. The rise of China and India and the resurgence of Russia are not irrelevant but hardly central to what is happening. When one creates a strategic vacuum, it’s easier to blame the powers that are sucked into it than oneself.

This is, of course, precisely what is happening now. Russiagate has reared its ugly head again. We are now in the throes of a new ‘Yellow Peril’ panic. And the single candidate on either side of the party line who appears to be receptive to realism is characterised as a Hindu nationalist. All of these incidences – with the American élite class pointing the finger to blame in turn Bernie, Tulsi, Russia, China – are precisely indicative of Freeman’s assertion that there is no real analytical or prescriptive work being done within the ambit of American statecraft and strategy. The fact that a diplomat and statesman of Chas Freeman’s calibre and experience is sidelined in the current political moment, itself has some rather disturbing implications. Our imperial ship of state is on autopilot, and no one is within reach of turning it off. And that should be quite scary.

As to Ambassador Freeman’s conclusion: can American academia summon the fortitude, perspicacity, self-awareness and moral clarity fit to take on the task of speaking actual truth to actual power? I hope so. I really do. But first, it strikes me that academia has to collectively stand up to the political abuses to which it is subject – both on environmental issues and on foreign policy ones. And for American academia to be able to collectively do anything or act with any sort of moral authority, it first has to put a decisive end to the methodologically-individualist and alienating trends of performative wokeness and gender-ideological nonsense that it is currently glutted with, and which are currently detracting from its ability to put forward any kind of consistent moral voice on the issues which really are killing our nation and killing our planet.

Even so, God bless Ambassador Freeman for the work he is doing and for the direction he is trying frantically to point from his perch in the political wilderness. A true patriot, whether his patria acknowledges him or not!