Robert Wright writes an essay to better define the characteristics of the folks who subscribe to the pro interventionist Washington foreign policy consensus, AKA, "The Blob."
I understand that there needs to be a description of the group, because they steadfastly deny that they exist, but I think that my term describes the phenomenon succinctly, with the additional benefit of holding them up to ridicule:
The people claiming that there is some sort of unified theory of Blob-dom are not thinking clearly, said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. For one thing, he said, even within Brookings there is a wide range of opinion on Afghanistan. He supported the withdrawal, for instance—which would seem to make him a traitor to the Blob, even though he is, by any definition, in the Blob himself.
—The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2021The term “Blob” has arrived. Within the past two months this recent addition to our foreign policy vocabulary has appeared in the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, not one, not two, not three, but four times. In the first of those cases, I’m happy to say, I was the one uttering it. In the last of those cases, I’m also happy to say, it appeared in the headline; and, better yet, it appeared in the phrase “Beware the Blob”—which is something that those of us who embrace the term would definitely advise.
But what do we mean by the term? This has become a subject of contention. Some people we consider part of the Blob—such as Thomas Wright, quoted, above, in the last of those Times pieces—say it has no coherent meaning. Which is understandable: We’re using it as a pejorative, so the less sense it seems to make, the better for the people we’re applying it to.
But the truth is that “the Blob” is a useful term with a coherent meaning. At least, it’s as useful as many other common foreign policy labels, such as “liberal internationalists” and “neoconservatives.” Both of these labels encompass people who don’t agree on everything. In fact, it’s hard to find any belief that all people in either of those two categories share that isn’t shared by a fair number of people in the other category. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, this kind of fuzziness is characteristic of the labels we use to organize reality. There’s no distinctive property, he noted by way of example, that is shared by all the things we call “games.”
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And I think we must! I’m not kidding when I say I believe the Blob is a grave threat to America’s and the world’s future. (Which isn’t to say that blobsters are bad people; like most human beings, they mean well.) To come up with a working definition of “the Blob” is to sketch a vision of what American foreign policy shouldn’t be—and, by implication, to come up with at least some rough outlines of what it should be.
………Note the diverse forms of intervention: aerial military intervention, proxy military intervention, “peaceful” meddling in foreign politics (albeit meddling whose goals may have gotten a boost from guys with guns), and prolific drone strikes in countries we’re not at war with. Note also that all four of these policies had consensus support within the mainstream of the foreign policy establishment, from neoconservatives and liberal internationalists alike.
Sure, there was dissent on one or another of these policies from some people who carry those labels (more from liberal internationalists than from neoconservatives). For that matter, there were differences of opinion on the anti-Blob side; a few restrainers (not me!) are willing to accept fairly prolific drone strikes as a substitute for deeper military engagement. Still, notwithstanding such minor anomalies, these four Obama policies serve as a dividing line between blobsters and restrainers—while none of them serves as a clear dividing line between neoconservatives and liberal internationalists.
So there would seem to be analytical value, for at least some purposes, in squishing together liberal internationalists and neoconservatives (along with other, less salient foreign policy schools, such as “Jacksonians,” if you wanted to get more fine-grained about it) into a single category we call “the Blob.” Or, to put it in a slightly different way: For purposes of illuminating the divide in elite opinion on these four very important Obama policies, “liberal internationalist” and “neoconservative” are not very useful terms whereas “Blob” and “restraint coalition” are. So, all told, I don’t see how people can use terms like “liberal internationalists” and “neoconservatives” as if they’re meaningful and valuable while denying such status to “the Blob.” [Note: I’m not saying liberal internationalists are compelled by their core ideological principles to be blobbish. Indeed, there are no doubt liberal internationalists, especially in academia, who opposed all these Obama policies—and who, more generally, would qualify as restrainers. But people who call themselves liberal internationalists and are influential within the foreign policy establishment tend to be liberal interventionists—which is to say,blobbish.]
………I love liberal democracy and hate autocracy and authoritarianism. So do all the other restrainers whose views on this I’m familiar with. But most of them, like me, are suspicious of democracy promotion as practiced by America. That’s partly because it sometimes slides into proxy war (We were promoting democracy in Syria!); and partly because it sometimes involves economic sanctions that wind up harming lots of already needy people to no good end (Venezuelans, for example). And, especially for restrainers on the left, it’s because drawing a battle line between democracies and autocracies (which you’re starting to do once you hold a “summit of democracies”) could impede progress toward solving various global problems, ranging from climate change to pandemics to the control of such hard-to-control armaments as biological weapons and weapons in space. Restrainers tend to be very anti-neo-Cold-War. Blobsters, not so much.
OK, now for some positive blobology—a tentative list of inclinations exhibited by blobsters (with the understanding that, as Wittgenstein would say, these inclinations can qualify as characteristic of the Blob even if none of them apply to all blobsters).
1. Threat inflation. Blobsters don’t necessarily intentionally inflate threats. But they tend to get more freaked out by things (a single big terrorist attack, a decade’s worth of slowly creeping authoritarianism, growing regional assertiveness by a rising power like China) than is warranted. And they often favor policies in response to these things that could well make things worse—and in some cases already have.
2. Manichaeism. Dividing the world between “good guys” and “bad guys” (two terms uttered often, and not ironically, on Rhodes’s podcast) is common in the Blob.
3. American exceptionalism. We Americans, of course, are the good guys. Indeed, we are a light unto the nations—notwithstanding all the coups we’ve sponsored, the murderous authoritarians we’ve backed, the disastrous wars we’ve started or abetted, and the fact that our own democracy is in a state of advanced dysfunction, unworthy of emulation by any sensible country.
4. Meddling. Blobsters—having divided the world between good guys and bad guys, exaggerated the threat posed by the bad guys, and convinced themselves that America is the best of the good guys—feel that our country is thus justified in intervening in the internal affairs of other nations, if not by the massive application of military force (an option that is less popular even in the Blob than it was 20 years ago) then via subtler military means, or economic coercion, or other tools, sometimes covertly deployed ones. Blobsters are generally protective of American sovereignty but not so respectful of the sovereignty of other countries, especially the ones run by “bad guys” (though, on close examination, the bad guys whose countries we push around turn out to be morally indistinguishable from some bad guys we deem cherished allies).
5. Naïve do-goodism. This meddling is driven not only by a conviction that we know what’s best for everyone, but that we have the skill to bring it into being—even though the last few decades of history strongly suggest that we don’t and that, in fact, we often make things worse.
6. Hypocrisy when it comes to international laws and norms. There’s scarcely a blobster alive who doesn’t sing the praises of the “rules based order.” Many blobsters consider upholding this order—and punishing those who violate it—mission central. Their ability to overlook how often the policies that they themselves advocate break the rules that they themselves extol is one of the wonders of human self-deception.
It's the entire Council on Foreign Relations, the current Secretary of State, most of the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.
They have been in ascendance for roughly the past 75 years, and for most of that time, the results have been profoundly underwhelming.
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