The Wages of War

RFK Jr.’s historic address on foreign policy.

“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”—Aldous Huxley

RFK Jr. delivered a speech on foreign policy in June in New Hampshire. Read on if you are willing to consider that foreign-policy “experts” out of their self-interest, moral cowardice, and intellectual laziness provide justifications for a dangerous, deceptive, and morally bankrupt foreign-policy orthodoxy.

Journalist elites who parrot the orthodoxy and call it “the news,” don’t want you to hear other voices. If they cover RFK Jr., they tell you he’s a dangerous loon, and warn you not to listen to him.

Andrew Doyle has observed, “Free speech is the marrow of democracy. Without it, no other liberties exist. It is detested by tyrants because it empowers their captive subjects… Free speech does not belong to anyone; it is a universal precept and a core human right.”

I hope you will consider RFK Jr.’s ideas before propagandists and self-proclaimed gatekeepers move us closer to a nuclear exchange with Russia or, down the road, with China. A devastating cyberattack against our vulnerable power grid is possible, too, which could kill millions of Americans.

To ask nuanced questions, and to indicate a willingness to explore solutions, is not to side with Putin; it is to side with humanity, including the suffering Ukrainians and Russians.

In his classic 18^th Century book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote, “History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” People's dominant sentiments shape a nation's history and thus its range of follies. If the United States is going to flourish and the world is going to escape from endless violence, one day, ideas like RFK Jr.’s on “peace and diplomacy” will be dominant sentiments. These sentiments harken back to John Quincy Adams’s admonition that America's “glory is not dominion, but liberty.”

Nothing is more important than avoiding the destruction of humanity and building lasting peace. JFK asked, “Is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights, the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation, the right to breathe air as nature provided it, the right of future generations to a healthy existence?” In his New Hampshire talk, RFK, Jr. liberally quoted from his uncle’s “Peace Speech.”

My recent essay, “Why JFK’s 1963 ‘Peace Speech’ Matters Today,” can be read as a companion to this essay.

The following excerpts are from RFK Jr.’s June 2023 foreign policy address. Any transcription errors are my responsibility.

How Others Respond to Us Begins with How We Respond to Them

RFK, Jr. asked us to consider America’s “deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s. Secretary of State James Baker, under President George H.W. Bush, promised Russia that if they removed their troops from East Germany, NATO would not move “not one inch eastward.”  The U.S. bamboozled the Soviets, and the consequences are being felt today.

NATO moved not one inch but 1000 miles to the east, and Kennedy pointed out, “we have surrounded Russia with missiles and military bases, something that we would never tolerate.” Kennedy continued:

Politicians and foreign policy “experts” have called for the “disabling and exhaustion of the Russian military and the dismembering of the Russian Federation.” None of these objectives have anything to do with helping Ukraine, which of course was the pretext for our involvement in the war… There is a broader geopolitical agenda and Ukraine is simply a pawn in a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Like teenagers playing World of Warcraft, these warmongers inside U.S. leadership play war games and scenarios and pretend that a nuclear war is winnable; that is a dangerous lie.

When we hold others in the belief that they are implacable enemies they tend to mold themselves accordingly to our view of them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy or prediction and launches all players into a cycle of suspicion.

Where We Stand

RFK, Jr. asked why today's communications with Russia and China have deteriorated to threats and insults. He recounted history: Roosevelt met with Stalin, JFK with Khrushchev, Nixon with Brezhnev, Reagan with Gorbachev. Genuine correspondence between these world leaders was common. Why, Kennedy wondered, has Biden not met with Putin? We know the answer, Biden is cognitively impaired and prone to angry outbursts; a meeting would risk exacerbating antagonism. Two world leaders with the power to destroy the world are not communicating. And the media and the American public play along with this existential threat to humanity. The American people are seduced by the simplistic daily messages fed to them on “the news.”

RFK, Jr. called on Biden to “start de-escalating right now.” Instead, Biden agreed in early July “to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions, the controversial and widely banned weapons that can often cause indiscriminate harm to civilians, especially children, long after the fighting ends.” These cruel weapons can act like landmines and lacerate victims with blades and ball bearings.

Who Do We Wish to Be?

Marxists and other collectivists have always had it backward. They imagine that the state shapes citizens. We shape the state, and our consciousness determines the kind of politicians we get. We are not victims of the world we see.

Thomas Jefferson clearly warned, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”

Sadly, the social contract in today’s America is don’t tell the truth. We know politicians are lying, but we want to be lied to. We want to hold on to our delusions. We eat junk, sit on our couch, and take in  “the news” which arouses our self-righteous outrage. We then repeat to others what has been programmed as though we have studied the issues before stating our opinions. We have about as much freedom as a non-player character (NPC) in a video game.

We form our “beliefs” from the propaganda we are fed, but we choose what propaganda we consume. Today’s propaganda is designed to pacify people who want to remain asleep and not arouse the inquiry and personal responsibility required to maintain freedom.

As if holding up a mirror, RFK Jr. urges, 

We must ask ourselves, is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is this what America’s founders envisioned? Is it any wonder that as America has waged violence throughout the world that violence has overtaken us in our own nation? It has not come as an invasion. It has come from within… Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being.

Examine the Mindset of War

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises; everything becomes a war: the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on cancer, and the war on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad with coups and bombs and drones and regime change operations, and support for paramilitaries, juntas, and dictators. None of this has made us safer, and none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority.—RFK Jr.

Reconsider Our Attitude. Don’t Demand Others Change First

We have been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies and domination. We’ve become addicted to comic book good versus evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and the legitimate cultural and economic concerns, and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations.

Peace comes from a changed attitude. At the bottom of the war mentality, that casts the world into a drama of enemies and threats and lies, is a biased view of human nature. When you see humans as fundamentally selfish and whole nations as fundamentally evil, then all you have available to change their behaviors are threats and bribes. Peace comes from a different place. It starts by seeing within others and within ourselves that which is not selfish but is brave and generous and idealistic and has good intentions.

I'm not saying that we should ignore the base elements of human nature or the dangers of the world, but if that's all we see, we’re going to be stuck forever in the mentality of war. That's where the military industrial complex wants to keep us, and we will reap forever it's poisonous fruits. —RFK Jr.

The Choice for War or Becoming a Moral Nation

Are we going to remain stuck in a self-righteous story in which America is categorically good, and our opponents are irredeemably evil? If we remain stuck there, so will every other nation. It’s not only America that has fallen into this simplistic good guy, bad guy thinking. That’s the example we have set for everyone in the world.

This tribalist us versus them thinking is tearing us apart. These are the wages of war. When we take the first steps toward peace, we will become once again a true world leader, a moral leader.— RFK Jr.

Warning of the dangers of tribal us versus them thinking is a perennial theme in my writing.

The Promise of Peace

Are we a peaceful, free people or a people who lack the courage to face the truth? RFK Jr. reminds us of what many deny.

We have a decaying economic infrastructure. We have a demoralized people, a despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil, and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war. What will be the wages of peace? It will be of healing all the symptoms of America's decline.—RFK Jr. 

RFK Jr. is not a savior. He is an external representation of a state of consciousness, as are Trump and Biden. His ideas on peace and diplomacy will only matter when a critical mass of Americans find their way to a mindset of peace. Who will emerge in 2024 depends on our state of mind and our dominant beliefs.