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March 11, 2025 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
25:12
The Warbloggers

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comPatrick Henningsen, of 21st Century Wire, and Richard Spencer cover geopolitics, the American empire, and changing world order. Introduction and Background of Patrick HenningsenPatrick Henningsen describes the evolution of his platform, 21st Century Wire, and his journalism in the Middle East, particularly during the Syrian civil war, and his educationa…

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What do you think about the whole kind of longer trajectory of American policy since 1945?
And, you know, when I was quite young, I can remember the Cold War and I can remember the Soviets.
I can remember...
I've been doing a lot of nostalgia here today.
I can remember going to Neiman Marcus with my mother during Christmas, and they were selling pieces of the Berlin Wall for like $50 or something.
Like, you can buy the Berlin Wall.
It was like the ultimate Fukuyama moment.
Capitalism's triumph of communism.
But anyway, I can remember the Cold War, but there's this long...
The trajectory of Cold War institutions, NATO being preeminent, but all of these institutions that came out of the Second World War and Bretton Woods, the UN, etc.
And there was this period of the 90s when there was a real identity crisis with the United States Empire.
And there was an identity crisis along with a triumph.
I mean, this was the point of...
You know, Crowdhammer's unipolar moment.
The world's no longer bifurcated.
There's one way.
This is Fukuyamism.
There's only one way.
Everyone is trying to get to liberal capitalist democracy, and they only have some criticisms around the edges.
They're not willing or able to really criticize the core of it.
So it was a kind of triumph, but then you're ruined by your success.
There was a sort of identity crisis.
And 9-11 came...
In a way, out of a dream for the American empire, because it gave us the ability to create a new dynamic and long-lasting paradigm for existing institutions and the U.S. military.
That we're fighting these...
Anti-civilizational forces that are taking over, that are even coming here into the country.
And everything that was stated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the like, was we're in this for the long haul.
This is going to be, yeah, mission accomplished, sure, but this is actually going to be a very long war, and in a way, a kind of last war.
This is it.
These are the last holdouts to Americanism.
And they are willing to do things that we aren't, that are sort of unimaginably evil and attack civilians and so on.
But it did come out of a dream in the sense that it was like...
The American empire could be motivated again.
We had a purpose and we were able to unify the country behind something for the first time since the Cold War as well.
So anyway, those are just some thoughts to maybe hopefully some of those ideas sort of get your mind started in terms of thinking about the broader trajectory of what we've lived through.
Yeah, I'll start with this entry point into that.
Formulated my master's thesis around economic sanctions, the weaponization of sanctions, specifically looking at Syria as a case study.
And so through my research, I was trying to, then it got me into, I need to prove that the U.S. foreign policy, or find evidence that the U.S. foreign policy has been to overthrow the Syrian government, and this has been a consistent...
And of course, I found that evidence from the 1950s forward.
I think there's something like 14 successful and unsuccessful coup attempts.
And then looking at their relationship with Israel as well.
And then through that...
Discovering, having to reread the Clean Break document and to restudy Project from the American Century.
And I just got pulled into it and I had kind of halfway through my master's thesis three weeks in and I just had to basically throw it away and start from scratch with a couple weeks left.
And I just realized something, it just kind of hit me that if you don't understand...
Where the center of power is and how power is executed and how it's leveraged, who holds it, how it reacts to other powers in the world, and who is the biggest hegemon, of course, is the United States.
I had to go back and study and understand what is the ideological motivation for U.S. Hegemony.
What is the story?
What is the narrative?
And I didn't want to because I had an adverse reaction to neocons during the whole Bush year, so that was like apostasy for me.
I don't want to even look at it.
I'm not going to read the memoirs of Dick Cheney or much less Charles Krauthammer.
But I just got sucked into it, listened to the speeches, and I'm like, actually, there is something here.
There is something coherent here.
There is a story here.
There is a narrative here.
And it's ideological, and it's drawing on aspects of U.S. history, and it's cherry-picking.
And this is what, when you read Krauthimer and some of his early essays, he absolutely predicted, in 1990, he predicted the unipolar moment, he said how long it would last, and lots of things.
He was bang-on accurate when you look and read his old essays.
And so they had something going into the 90s there, as they were preparing to take power and to flip where the United States was heading after the Clinton administration.
But to be honest, Bill Clinton, as a staunch neoliberal, neoliberal foreign policy, the warm-up act was the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Well, the first Gulf War was the onset.
That was the moment, the timing of that with the Iron Curtain falling.
But Yugoslavia was a big project.
Mm-hmm.
That was the beginning of the rules-based international order, was NATO's operation on Yugoslavia.
But as I got in there and started reading more, and then all of a sudden, the other questions just became academic.
They just became information.
But you had to find out, where does this neoconservative,
Neoconservative, Pax Americana come from.
And it's not just American exceptionalism.
And I started with that term Manifest Destiny.
And we read about that when we were in junior high history class in America.
It's a normal part of your curriculum.
Just to understand Manifest Destiny.
And Manifest Destiny really wasn't about...
That term wasn't born out of the...
Foreign policy conquest.
This was about annexing the Western territories, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Texas.
And that's where that term came from.
And it was birthed by a journalist named John O'Sullivan in 1845.
And it was really out of a critique.
It was a critique because while the U.S. was trying to expand, they were constantly being thwarted by the British and the French.
So his argument was, their argument was, they are trying to get in the way of our manifest destiny to settle this continent.
And from that point, then came American exceptionalism after that, because after the Civil War, there was a gestation period where America was developing its identity as a continental country,
as a...
Continental powers.
It's that settler, Puritan-driven, American settler idealism, English-Protestant mentality, that attitude that had been established.
Then you're getting into the Industrial Revolution, and then you're getting into...
When American exceptionalism kind of went international was President McKinley.
And this is when the real...
And it's funny, you look at that foreign policy and...
Below all of this talk about politics is economics, is hard economics.
And the U.S. started becoming a manufacturing powerhouse in the 19th century, but it started producing a surplus of goods.
So you had, what do you call it, deflation issues.
So it became clear to the leadership, we need to find new markets overseas.
And that's when it coincided with the Spanish-American War, and they did establish.
And that helped to power a new phase in American Economic expansion and political expansion.
And just the country became extremely wealthy during that period.
And so wealthy that they were able to finance the First World War.
Because America didn't get into the First World War immediately.
But what they did, and this is what people don't realize, is that the dollar is a reserve currency.
It's long before Bretton Woods.
If you look at the total amount of trade globally around the First World War, the dollar was already beginning to eclipse the British sterling.
What the US did was a genius.
They basically used, in part by the Federal Reserve Act and turning it into a fiat empire, they were able to lend money to European powers who were fighting each other and taking payment in gold.
So America emptied out the gold reserves of Europe in the First World War, and that's how America accumulated massive gold reserves.
That's what filled up Fort Knox, was World War I. And by the time the Americans came in, everyone was in hock to the United States.
Then they came in basically very late in the game and managed to have a sort of key position, Woodrow Wilson, in managing what the post-war system was going to be like, which didn't work out that well,
unfortunately. But America became a superpower.
Before, during, and after the First World War, not the Second World War.
And that's really important that people understand that because there's a financial component there.
And how I learned and understood and appreciated a lot of this was during my international relations.
I was reading Edward Hallett Carr, E.H. Carr, was a great British historian who's a great diplomat, very much a stalwart text for international relations, 20 years crisis.
And so he was in the interwar period.
And it just so happens this is very relevant to where we're at right now.
There's a lot of similarities between the interwar period, post-industrial revolution, a lot of changes going on.
The old systems of the old order is no longer functional and is begging to be replaced with something new, but nobody knows how that's going to take shape.
And a lot of monarchies quickly becoming democracies.
The nation-state...
You know, nationalism is a new thing as well.
So it's really a lot of things are in flux at that time.
And so, like now, a lot of things are in flux now as well.
So that was...
So American exceptionalism, understanding that.
And then, so where does neoconservativism come from?
It comes from not American exceptionalism, but American vindicationism.
And vindicationism is a type of American sexualism where you—it's almost like evangelizing, that we have been successful.
We have broken off from our colonial masters.
We have built a powerful world power here, a pluralistic society where we have—everybody's free.
We freed the slaves, all of these things.
We're leading in maritime power now.
I mean, so we are vindicated.
We've proselytized to the world our success and our system is the best system.
And that kind of became the basis of the Truman Doctrine.
As well, you know, to be able to make democracies happen and that was the basis of that kind of liberal idea of spreading democracy.
And that became the kind of raison d'etre or the raison d'etat of the United States on the surface in the foreign policy arena.
And then studying, you learn to become...
If you're fluent in left liberal internationalism and you're fluent in right and realist politics and discourse, you then begin to see the foreign policy has been almost identical between John Bolton and Samantha Power.
So it is the same thing.
It's democracy promotion.
It's the freedom doctrine.
And that was one of the basis of the...
The neoconservativism, which is really just a rehash.
So along the way, they all cherry-pick various aspects of things that work for them, whatever the movement is, and then put it together in kind of a new omelette, which kind of gets reified over time.
And that's what neoconservativism was.
We spoke about this on The Spaces, how out of the University of Chicago, your alma mater, and all the great IR thinkers are coming.
But also, the Trotskyites of the 50s and 60s rebranded themselves in the 80s and in the 90s as neocons.
Also, the Straussians, who weren't exactly Marxist, I would say, and what exactly Strauss believes is up for debate, let's put it that way.
But yeah, there's unquestionable...
I mean, I felt...
I felt like I was marinating in that world when I was there.
And I've actually taken a lot from Strauss and so on.
But let me jump in with a couple of things.
So one event that I've...
Always found quite fascinating is the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
And so that came after the Balfour, or was it, yeah, Balfour was 1917, Paris Peace Conference was 1919.
Balfour Declaration was a sort of...
Mission statement for Israel.
The Paris Peace Conference issued a mandate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
It was immensely influential in the Middle East.
It wasn't just the Versailles Conference, which is what's most remembered about, you know, dragging Germany over the coals and creating...
Revenge and putting revenge in their minds and so on.
But also it was much bigger than that in the sense that it was the use of nationalism within an American hegemonic umbrella in the sense that You know, in 1917, there was a Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
It's gonna smash the patriarchy and the monarchy and capitalism and everything.
But America had its own sort of Bolshevism, you could say.
That is a...
And what I mean by that is a global ideology that is politically disruptive, but ultimately stable and ultimately serving Washington as opposed to Moscow.
And so in the Paris Peace Conference, they recreated Poland.
They created Czechoslovakia.
They created the, what is it, Kingdom of Croats and Serbs that would eventually go into crisis as well.
And they engaged in ethnic redistribution.
You could say ethnic cleansing.
Although it was largely peaceful and done with good intentions, it was not done maliciously, but that's what it was.
And even in the post-45 era, when you have Germans being expelled from the East and what is becoming the Soviet sphere, you have this remarkable thing that Tony Jutt spoke about where...
These countries, after they defeated Hitler, they became, ironically, more ethno-nationalist.
Jews had been oppressed, expelled, in many cases killed.
Germans were returning to Germany.
It was almost, in some sort of ironic way, the hyper-ethno-nationalist won.
Like, Hitler won in some ironic way.
Don't take that too far, of course.
I'm just making a statement to illustrate a point.
But that also existed under the umbrella of American hegemony.
It existed as a market.
It also existed as a way of...
Giving people a kind of Goldilocks amount of power, you know, just enough but not too much.
You're no longer going to be oppressed.
You're no longer going to be stateless.
You're going to have a voice in your parliament.
You can have a military, etc.
But you're not the big kahuna.
And so that, you know, I think you're right to point this out.
Like the American century didn't begin in 1945.
There's been a much longer attempt.
To open up markets, subjugate competing nation states, and open up that space that benefits Washington directly, as you were pointing out, but also carries with it a kind of hope or ideological oomph that actually is very compelling.
I remember in the Bush era when I was rolling my eyes or making fun of all this freedom and democracy stuff.
The fact is, that is a motivating thing.
That is something that when you're presenting yourself as operating with the best of intentions.
It might cover up some war crimes, sure, but it also is a motivating force.
It's a kind of ideological, even religious-like paradigm that you actually can rule the world this way.
There's a reason why the Catholic Church, it wasn't just an institution, it had...
Christianity! You need an ideological kind of political theology undergirding what you're doing.
If I were living in Poland after the First World War, I would be pro-American and I would love the idea of bringing back Poland as a nation state where we can have a voice and there can be rules and so on.
And likely, if I were living in the Middle East, I might be compelled to support America and regime change.
I mean, certainly not everyone, but I can understand how people could take the side of that.
So it needs to have that religious-like veneer or religious-like animus at the heart of it.
And I guess maybe to bring us up to date, to bring us to 2025, Do you think there's this danger with Trump where, on the one hand, he's talking big and saying,
you know, golden age, we're bringing back American exceptionalism, more exceptional than ever.
But if you look at other aspects of his rhetoric and definitely his actions, it's this transactional, self-serving, kind of selfish.
Maybe even malicious attitude.
And I think that that's almost bringing this whole thing to a close.
In Trump's mind, we're all getting ripped off.
The world is ripping us off.
And he's been saying that since the 1980s.
NATO is ripping us off.
The UN, they're ripping us off.
We created that damn thing and we still run it.
The rules are completely on our favor.
It's like you're playing a baseball game and you have like 12 strikes and the other team has one strike and they're out or something.
It's an American institution.
It's not ripping us off.
Anyway, but the fact that he's so transactional and so sort of malicious, might this undermine all of the world order in the sense that American power is now not presented as...
Something wonderful, something that's bringing democracy to you, something that's bringing hope or riches or Hollywood or whatever.
It's no longer bringing that to you.
It's instead like, give us your rare earth minerals and we might help out.
Those rare earths are back payment on the guns we sent you.
I mean, it's just sort of brutal.
And I'm not being a...
The opposite.
I'm saying that you can't have a realistic military strategy without political theology.
Everything you do with bullets needs to be undergirded with Bibles.
To coin a phrase, there has to be some compelling motive to it.
And the Soviet Union, when it started to lose that compelling motive, when being a Marxist was sort of uncool with the new left, or when the promise of socialism started to be a little too gray and boring and so on,
what happened?
Boom. It vanishes.
And I think the American empire is in a similar danger.
If we don't have a compelling story, a bold neoconservative vision of democratizing the planet, or some sense that we're special, some sense that this is a new Jerusalem given to us by God,
where we can fully understand the meaning of the Protestant Reformation, which is something that's motivating to 18th century Americans, then it's going to collapse.
And all of this Trump realist stuff is actually building
Yeah, I mean, I'll start off saying...
On the last point, I'll start from there and work back.
Pete Hegseth, the new Defense Secretary, Fox Weekend host, turned Defense Secretary.
I mean, what a career jump.
And so he says, we're going to rebuild the U.S. military.
We're going to rebuild it, make it more effective, more responsive.
And my question is, responsive to what?
Effective for what?
You've got to have...
So you have to establish the political...
You have to establish what you're talking about there, Richard, is what is that national narrative?
What is that story?
What are people believing in?
Because if you don't establish that, what are you building there?
You could have a revolution in military affairs and, you know...
Pink elephants here and there, and it's not really going to suit anything that you're wanting to do anyway as a society and as a state going forward.
So that's typical.
The problem, I think, that neoconservativism fell down hard on was the real motivating factor was fear.
It was fear.
It was the clash of civilization.
They took Samuel Huntington and...
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