John has the periodization right. PNAC's unipolar fantasy died once already, against North Korea, and it's dying again against Iran. But calling this a repetition of neo-conservative failure treats a state mechanism as a bad idea some faction keeps recycling. Diplomacy worked. The JCPOA worked, on its own terms, until Netanyahu and McCain torched it. So why does the U.S. state keep reaching for war after the thing that worked better?
Not ideology. Structure. Poulantzas: the state condenses a balance of class forces, it isn't simply capital's transmission belt, and in a crisis that condensation can swing toward the executive at the expense of whatever fraction was invested in the negotiated track. Weber: patrimonialism, power personalized around loyalty to a man rather than routed through institutions. Put them together and you get what I've been calling patrimonial Bonapartism. Not "rising dictatorial tendency," which is what John's conclusion gestures at and then drops. A mechanism. Trump's personal discretion overrode the diplomatic track and green-lit a war that Netanyahu was already in Washington discussing in December, per Axios, before the Iranian protests that are supposed to have triggered all this had even started. "Both sides are right and both are wrong" sounds dialectical. It's foreign-policy realism wearing a dialectical coat. Neither war nor diplomacy secures the aims of U.S. imperialism, sure. But that's not the same question as why the war fraction beat the diplomatic fraction this time. Diplomacy didn't fail on its own terms. The coalition that tried to institutionalize it lost. One place John is dead right, and it's the sentence I keep coming back to: the thundering silence of the union leadership. That's not a footnote. That's the condition of possibility for Bonapartist discretion going uncontested at all. No organized proletarian pole, no friction on the executive. That's the thread worth pulling, not the neo-con genealogy, accurate as it is, which still treats this as a family quarrel among strategists of empire -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42688): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42688 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120484652/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
