GEO-POLITICS

PEARL HARBOR, SOLDIER-SCHOLAR MATTIS AND TRUMP

Exclusive: Wallace Henley stresses the importance of principled hegemony for U.S.

The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is a still-smoldering reminder that in a fallen world whose default is toward chaos and the abuse of power, there will always be a “hegemon” – a dominating state or civilization.

Japan sought hegemonic dominance in East Asia from as far back as 1915 when it demanded unique standing in certain areas of China. The United States seemed an obstacle to this push for hegemony. The disagreement festered until it erupted at Pearl Harbor.

Seventy-five years later rising nationalism and populism mean that Donald Trump will face a world that won’t easily fall into the old grids of hegemony.

The lure of power, however, will continue to seduce. Without unforeseen changes, Kim Jong-Un will maintain the dream of dominating the Korean Peninsula at the very least; Vladimir Putin will not cease exerting Russian dominance; and ISIS and al-Qaida will not surrender territory under their control without furious battles, to name a few.

The values and the worldviews of powerful states are of utmost importance. War-time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sought a Western hegemony characterized by Judeo-Christian values. These formed, he said, a “certain way of life” characterized by “the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself.”

The Nazis held opposite values, and the Third Reich had to be defeated by the Western Alliance at all costs for the sake of humanity, Churchill believed.

Today the struggle is still the same: Will power be used to oppress and enslave or secure freedom and opportunity?

Nations cannot escape the reality of hegemony, or their responsibility to develop the strength to resist those powers that would stomp across the world in the shadows of Hitler and other tyrants. There is, after all, the manifestation of the antichrist spirit in every age.

Powerful states must recognize the differences between principled and merely pragmatic hegemony. The former seeks strength to advance the values that make civilization civilization, while the latter uses power to exploit and control, robbing the states they dominate of their material resources and freedoms.

Hence Japan and Germany were natural allies in the milieu of the 1930s.

Principled hegemony must override merely pragmatic hegemony. The latter is what brought down the Japanese Empire that Tokyo, starved of natural resources, was hoping to protect in its assault on the United States. Principled hegemony believes that the goal of the powerful state must be that of providing stability within the highest of its values, not exploitive expansionism or empire-building.

Wallace Henley’s new book, coauthored with former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, explains the biblical cycle of nations and ways to restore constitutional principles: “Revival! Revolution! Rebirth!”

Under George W. Bush, American hegemony was framed in a neocon worldview, whether his intention of not. Barack Obama has tried to eschew any notion of U.S. hegemony. The neocons tend to turn every conviction into a crusade while, on the other extreme, the Obama doctrine has left a gaping sinkhole that has seriously threatened the stability of the global landscape.

Both are inadequate views not reflective of the way the world works in actual fact.

Nations are watching as the Trump doctrine of foreign policy and global security takes shape. The good news is that retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis will apparently play a significant role in helping form it as Trump’s secretary of defense. Mattis told a congressional committee in 2014 that “the perception (internationally) is we’re pulling back.”

Perhaps Mattis, a soldier-scholar, can help fashion a nuanced and balanced hegemony without the extremes of the Obama doctrine on the one hand or the Bush neocons on the other.

Mattis forms his own outlook through studying history. Military historian Jill R. Russell tells of an officer who once requested Gen. Mattis to comment on the importance of reading though a commander might be “too busy to read.”

“The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience) the hard way,” Mattis responded. “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed in any situation.” Reading history – especially that of similar past battles like a military leader faces in the present – “lights what is often a dark path ahead,” Mattis said.

President Trump’s secretary of defense is likely to understand the vast power under his stewardship in the context of history. 

“Volatility is going to get to the point that chaos threatens,” Mattis told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Sept. 18, 2014. 

The problem was the lack of a clear strategic view of the world, and the result was “strategy atrophy,” said Mattis.

The general will know from his study of history that Britain’s “strategic atrophy” in the 1930s was overcome with the shock of Hitler’s blitzkrieg against British ally Poland in 1939, and that America was jarred from her isolationist “strategic atrophy” on Dec. 7, 1941.

Many contemporary powers want to dominate their regions or the world itself, and no one relishes the role of global policeman. However, the United States must come out of her progressivist-induced idealistic haze and take responsibility for whatever task history and destiny place upon her.

Trump the pragmatist must grasp the importance of principle, or American hegemony will be abusive and coercive.

Perhaps James Mattis can teach him some hegemonic history.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/12/pearl-harbor-soldier-scholar-mattis-and-trump/#VXc4CfFFfbXIl4T5.99