Status Updates From American Imperatives: The C...

"When the concept of Mitteleuropa reappeared in the 1980s, it was as a sort of utopian desire on the part of Eastern European intellectuals for the rearticulation of an older cultural unity, designed to eliminate their Eastern heritage and connect them up again with the West. Ironically, when that reconnection did happen, in 1989, Mitteleuropa disappeared again, its space taken over by a culture of hamburger joints."

US wars/military operations "cannot be grasped as the opposite of diplomacy. On the contrary, as the qualitative distinction between war and peace is erased or at least blurred, policing goes beyond simple repression to become a means of political pressure, even a form of diplomacy perhaps."

"I disagree with those left-wing accounts of the cold war that see the need for capitalist expansion as central. The cold war was a political move, a strategic way of putting the US into the world in no uncertain terms ... This is not unrelated to capitalism, but at the same time not reducible to it. An argument could well be made that a better solution for capital in 1947 would have been cooperation with the USSR."

US negotiations with the USSR around 1950 "did of course happen at times, but as John Foster Dulles said in a moment of candor, 'We did not actually desire to enter in negotiation, but felt compelled to do so in order to get our allies to consent to the rearmament of Germany.'"

After ww2, "there was every reason for Stalin to maintain stable relations with the capitalist powers ... Stalin lost this contest, partly because of Western superiority, partly because, as a crude reductionist, he had a very limited understanding of how the West actually operated. Thus he found himself faced with the scenario he most wished to avoid, a powerful US-led coalition against his regime in a cold war."

“When historical time has ceased to develop qualitatively on the inside and only pertains, as a series of stages, to the outside, it follows, critically, that outside opposition is irrational, if not downright criminal, while political quarrels on the inside can only take the form of an appeal to the principles and promise of the timeless, universal truth of the Origin.” … 1/5

“Yet the very same axioms can result in quite the opposite stance: when the Calvinist trope is fused, as it easily was, with a vibrantly secular and republican ideology, conceived around a spatiotemporal opposition between the New and the Old World, there opens up the possibility of a kind of interventionism drastically to redo the outside, to purify and clear it so to speak.” …

“Arguments along these lines would seem to land me in the diffuse debate about American exceptionalism. However, I do not want to go through all the preliminaries and caveats necessary to say anything substantial in that context.“

y’all don’t get, it’s not clocking to you, not only he’s standing on business, he is so fucking funny

“Ideologically, the US way of being toward the world has been at once massively traditional and strikingly arbitrary. On the one hand there is the inclination to invoke master narratives about the nation’s place in world history; on the other there is the tendency to abrupt changes and arbitrary action in actual policy.” …

“The US attitude toward the European system of international relations had always been problematic: surface acceptance amid relative geopolitical seclusion, punctuated by erratic and limited participation. One reason for this variance was that the United States, far more than the Soviet Union, was (and is) a world empire.” …

“For what drives diplomatic history in the United States is political controversy. Without it, the field has no direction, no character, no shape or form, no vivacity. This central feature is ultimately grounded in the fact that any analysis of the relationship to the outside world puts into question the very identity of the United States as an entity and a project.” …

“Yet beyond the conjuncture here, my attempts were really informed by the alarming fact, true then as it is true today, regrettable then as it is regrettable today, that everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in the world.”

bar.