A recent interview by Mike Krupa of Ambassador Chas Freeman and Colonel Douglas MacGregor showed these two masters in their respective fields — diplomacy and military science — touching on and striving to answer a deep question that only true philosophy can answer in full: In the Ukraine War, why are America's current political leaders fundamentally averse and opposed to negotiating with Russia to end the murderous conflict?
The answer to this question is not simple stupidity or simple ignorance of history or even simple failure by American leadership to recognize and foresee the inherent danger of escalatory warfare — by proxy or directly -- between nuclear powers.
While ordinary stupidity, ignorance and lack of foresight play a role, these factors -- whether taken separately or combined -- are not the prime causal mover here. The deeper answer to our question is as follows.
America's current (usurpatory, unelected) political leadership is possessed and driven by a hyper-abstract false-philosophical vision aptly called liberal universalism. False philosophy, in all of its various forms (and there are many), exists in this fallen and sinful world because of a lack (in many people) of the love of truth.
The liberal universalist thinks and acts, with revolutionary zeal and murderous ruthlessness, from the standpoint of a false philosophy originally formed and spun out by hyper-abstract "reason" (actually, carnal or unregenerate reason) and based on a favorite prejudice (for example, equality) to bring about or instantiate some favored conception of society or the Good (for example, equality of material condition, the sexes, the races, marriage types, etc.). This deracinated and therefore barbarous abstract reason, by its nature, rejects as valueless the authority of evolved norms, custom and tradition. Historical examples of such revolutionary false philosophy, which often masquerades as philanthropy and social progressivism, are French revolutionist Jacobinism, English and American abolitionism, Soviet Jew-Bolshevism, and Maoism.
All such false-philosophical political forms characteristically reject gradual, incremental, prudential, conservative reform and insist on immediate and sweeping regime change and total social revolution and transformation. Like the Borg of Star Trek fame, these political forms are, by nature, aggressive abroad and despotic at home, and are therefore ever-eager and driven to subdue (if not entirely assimilate) neighboring states. By nature, too, liberal regimes are highly centralized and consolidated internally, an organization that enables both external aggression and internal despotism.
Driven by abstract ideals rather than concrete, evolved interests, liberal-universalist regimes, once formed in a crucible of uncompromising revolution, dismiss as weak and bourgeois the concepts of tolerance, mutual accommodation and compromise, and set out to impose their uber-noble liberal ideals on other peoples and lands.
In prosecuting war, liberal-universalist regimes characteristically insist on total warfare against the opposing ("backward", more traditional) society, including warfare not merely on opposing armies but on the civilian populations themselves, a la Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas, Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, Pope in Northern Virginia, and the Soviet advance into Germany. If and as the liberal-universalist regime achieves force majeur, or overwhelming force, in a political-military situation, it insists on unconditional compliance and surrender. And then, after the enemy's surrender, the liberal sets about to morally and institutionally raze and then reconstruct the society of the defeated foe, using compulsion as needed, a la postwar Yankee military occupation of the South, the Weimar regime, and post-WWII Allied-occupied Germany.
So the false philosophy liberalism now rules America. And the ultimate goal of liberal universalism is to establish liberalism everywhere, or universally. But the desired overthrow of the reconstituted, free and Christian post-Soviet Russia of Putin is now proving a bridge too far for the liberal-universalist Yankee empire. Alas! The false philosophy of liberal universalism carries within itself the seeds of its own demise. With its homo-trans wokism and general dysfunctionalist policies, Yankee liberalism has itself -- in a development of supreme Providential irony -enervated and sapped the Yankee empire of the power and authority needed for continued global hegemon.
Long ago, the original, true, conservative, Christian America — as a voluntary political union of sovereign States -- was overthrown and supplanted by a Jacobin-Yankee, false-philosophical, godless and wicked "one and indivisible" Soviet Amerika. But now: Yankee-Soviet Amerika -a monument to sinful, murderous pride long masquerading as moral purity and superiority deserving of immortality -- will die and fall as did the Soviet Union. Then, may Christian Americans join Christian Russians in freedom.