Go Forth into the Fray, O Ye Willfully Ignorant Wretches!

Since Trump weaponized USAID I've been aware of a real tension baked into the veriest yea-lawd structure of U.S. Cold War strategy. The contradiction I'm feeling comes from trying to reconcile two different genealogies inside American foreign policy:

🔢 A Wilsonian–New Deal humanitarian tradition (aid, development, institution‑building)...

🔀 A Japanese‑imperial, empire‑management style adopted during the Cold War (client states, militarized peripheries, technocratic elites, anti‑communist containment).

These two lineages coexisted inside the same state apparatus, often in the same decade, sometimes in the same foreign country.

The “Imperial Japanese” style (which even overruled Hirohito)  isn’t about ethnicity or culture — it’s about institutional technique. After 1945, the U.S. absorbed:

💁🏽 Japanese imperial administrative structures in Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Southeast Asia; Japanese-trained technocrats (especially in Taiwan and South Korea); Japanese-style developmental authoritarianism as a model for anti-communist states; Japanese counterinsurgency and population-control methods (later used in Vietnam). This produced a foreign policy style that was hierarchical, military-forward, focused on compliant elites, comfortable with authoritarian “stability”; developmentalist while not particularly democratic.

This is what scholars sometimes call the “East Asian containment state” model.

This doesn't mean that I have forgotten America's absorption of Gehlen's network. Conscience can be such a liability when it conflicts with political expedience. My first encounter with Russian Manichaeism (or dualism) was a neuroglandular psychogalvanic total-body reset.

But SINCERELY, folks! At the same time, the U.S. also carried forward New Deal internationalism, the Marshall Plan ethos (which we desperately need domestically now), Point Four development programs, public health, literacy, and agricultural modernization missions (which worked in a half-vast way in these here United States) and genuine anti-poverty and anti-famine work. These were staffed by truly gee-whiz cadres of  idealistic New Dealers, agronomists, public health experts, - economists influenced by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and  people who sincerely believed in modernization as uplift

This tradition was real, and many of its practitioners were deeply committed. Unfortunately too many Americans remember the TVA in its sclerotic, ossified institutional form and think it was sprung that way fully-petrified from the brow of the Brains Trust. So how did they miss the rot'n'stink of Pax Americana's decay? Well, the SHOPPING was good. The acquisitive ethic had finally undid itself after it chucked the WASP ethic's prudence and thrift.

The two traditions answered different fears. The humanitarian wing was motivated by Depression-era memory and anti-fascist reconstruction.  The imperial-style wing was motivated by fear of communist expansion and the need for reliable peripheries. They operated through different institutions:

Aid programs → USAID, Peace Corps, agricultural missions.  

Imperial-style programs → CIA, Pentagon, State Department’s security desks.

These institutions often worked at cross-purposes. They targeted different social classes. Aid programs tried to build broad-based development. Security programs empowered military elites, landlords, and anti-communist strongmen.

This created a structural contradiction: uplift vs. control.

The U.S. inherited imperial infrastructures. In Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Southeast Asia, the U.S. literally stepped into - Japanese-built police systems, Japanese land registries, - Japanese bureaucratic hierarchies, and Japanese economic planning boards. This meant the U.S. was operating inside a pre-existing imperial chassis. (I love that line. I wish I had applied it earlier to the Nazi dress rehearsal. Veblen had warned us about both of these sociological phenomena, but missed the insight about Japan's status emulation of Germany, even down to its constitution.)

Und zo, the U.S. ran two foreign policies at once. Multi-tasking or national DID? Maybe I can reconcile the contradiction by recognizing that American Cold War foreign policy was not a single coherent project. It was a coalition of incompatible projects sharing the same flag. The humanitarian side was sincere. The imperial-management side was also sincere. They were not hypocritical so much as structurally entangled. Maybe this can be compared to the Thiel-Epstein overlap. Tactical. but strategically these two megalomaniacal agendas clash over monetary ontology. Interestingly this Thiel-Epstain Venn diagram is a projection, like two cones of light, from two old lanterns, one Confederate, the other Union. Any room for the Stars and Bars on that operational flag?

American power is not monolithic; it is a coalition of rival elite lineages whose foreign‑policy styles clash inside the same state. The humanitarian, New Deal–Wilsonian “Yankee” lineage, and the militarized, imperial, Pacific Rim–oriented pre-Cavalier-slave-plantocrat-cowboy-oiler lineage, Which are structurally at odds.

The American dialectic is far-famed everywhere else except the Benighted States:  East Coast, finance, diplomacy, multilateralism, development, technocracy versus Sunbelt, military, extractive capital, covert ops, anti‑communist hard power. This is not geography so much as institutional temperament. This tension — humanitarian aid vs. imperial management — is the kind of intra‑elite contradiction defines U.S. foreign policy. Other workable frameworks are the Anglosphere and my preferred Anglo-American Empire, analogous to the Medo-Persian. Citizen neglect has allowed this diorite Typhon to pursue its entropic contour in an exact Spenglerian fashion. This was helped immeasurably by the imperial and colonial infrastructures inherited and repurposed by the two-headed United States. Maybe like a Siamese twin. Dunno. But when you see USAID clinics next to CIA‑backed counterinsurgency, that’s not hypocrisy — it’s two elite lineages acting at once.

Built to meet too many design requirements, the Challenger disaster resulted in only two serpentine limbs writhing and branching like the Thera explosion. However, elite overproduction has produced many more than two. The  mushroom‑like umbrella cloud spreading laterally over the globe is the Money Power, rooted in the City of London but with pyroclastic flows surging at the base toward the Crown Territories. The Neoconfederate oilmen and MIC-sters now do the financial markets' biddings. Per Hedges I see Trump as a torpedo launched by private equity to break up the Koch-NAM-DE alliance, which may be all that's left. Wait a minnit.

Uh-oh.