Summary: For many Americans, being the world’s superpower means that everybody’s business is our business — in self-defense. Which is why Empires expand and die. Telling other people how to live makes enemies, violating the first and greatest rule of a successful grand strategy. As Secretary of State, Clinton should know this — but obviously does not.
Today’s madness from our rulers: “Remarks at the UN Commission on the Status of Women” by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, given at the UN on 12 March 2010. Excerpt:
This isn’t window dressing, and it’s not just good politics. President Obama and I believe that the subjugation of women is a threat to the national security of the United States. It is also a threat to the common security of our world, because the suffering and denial of the rights of women and the instability of nations go hand in hand.
… This focus on women has even been embraced by the United States Military. All-women teams of Marines will be meeting with Afghan women in their homes to assess their needs. Congress has joined this focus as well. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under Chairman John Kerry, empowered a subcommittee charged with global women’s issues that recently held hearings on promoting opportunity for Afghan women and girls.
Power makes people arrogant, as demonstrated here by SecState Clinton’s grandiloquent statement. Perhaps bad things anywhere — poverty, inequality, sexism, etc — threaten America’s national security in some sense (but probably not). But making everybody’s business our business — using our power to meddle in other nation’s internal affairs — has real costs. It violates the basics of a successful grand strategy. No nation can do so with impunity.
The late American strategist Col. John Boyd (USAF) said that a grand strategy focused our nation’s actions — political, economic, and military — so as to:
- Increase our solidarity, our internal cohesion.
- Weaken our opponents’ resolve and internal cohesion.
- Strengthen our allies’ relationships to us.
- Attract uncommitted states to our cause.End conflicts on favorable terms, without sowing the seeds for future conflicts.
— From Patterns of Conflict, slide 139.
However well-intentioned, other people will resent our interference with their societies — and dispute our knowledge of what’s best for them. Nor does Hillary — or other advocates of such crusades — propose asking the women of other nations if they want our meddling. In short, we’ll make enemies. Nations will ally with our rivals, like China.
We already have enough problems. Let’s not senselessly add to them.
“Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.”
— Dark Helmet in the movie Spaceballs
Other posts in this series about the proposed crusade to help women
- Bernard Finel shows how to end the Af-Pak in days. Now. Guaranteed., 6 November 2009
- We destroy a secular regime in Afghanistan (& its women’s rights), then we wage war on the new regime to restore women’s rights. Welcome to the American Empire., 12 November 2009
- Today’s propaganda: we must fight in Afghanistan to help its women, 10 August 2010
- About our sudden concern for Afghanistan’s women (& the desperate search for a reason to fight), 12 August 2010
- A non-violent crusade giving rights to the world’s women!, 14 August 2010
- Subjugation of women anywhere threatens US national security!, 16 August 2010
Other posts about women
- The Real Revolution in Military Affairs (it’s not what you think), 14 November 2005
- Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?, 7 July 2009
- A better answer to “why women outperform men in college?”, 8 July 2009
- Women as soldiers – an update, 25 August 2009
- Yes, it is a “mancession”, with men losing more jobs than women. Just like all recessions., 5 October 2009
- Update: women on top of men, 27 October 2009
- About honor killings, crimes of the community, 11 November 2009
- Update on the “mancession”, 2 December 2009
- Justice for slavers (esp sex traffickers): hang them high!, 20 August 2010
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