Once an opponent has been categorized as immoral, they will be interpreted as simply aggressive when they escalate and weak when they are restrained.
Reminds me of Parenti’s line about the unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
Strategic thinking dies under moralism because strategic thinking is about setting objectives with limited resources. This entails thinking in terms of priorities, trade-offs, motivations, capabilities, and the perspectives of the other side to predict how they will respond. A hegemon does not need to prioritize, and a moralist hegemon will encourage people to think solely in terms of right and wrong, good versus evil. We no longer ask what the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians want; we only discuss what kind of people they are as opponents of our liberal democracy that will allegedly serve all of mankind.
💯 I’d also add that strategic thinking often gets framed as a false dichotomy with moralist thinking, i.e. it gets framed like “you either use cynical strategy with an absence of morality, or you use moralism and destroy the cynical views in the world, including strategic ones.” But Iran is a great example of how this dichotomy is false. They have clear moral lines that they draw in what kind of targets they are willing to attack, but they are nevertheless strategic both in preparation for a conflict such as the one they’ve dealt with this year, and in carrying out military operations during it.
Morality without strategy is just wishful thinking. Strategy without morality is psychopathy. The west as hegemon acted like the psychopath and used moralist language to cover for its moral emptiness, but by now has reached a stage where it starts believing its own lies and is more just the language of moralism without the strategy and with moral emptiness behind it. I think putting it this way helps me understand the hollowness of imperial core society.
Reminds me of Parenti’s line about the unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
💯 I’d also add that strategic thinking often gets framed as a false dichotomy with moralist thinking, i.e. it gets framed like “you either use cynical strategy with an absence of morality, or you use moralism and destroy the cynical views in the world, including strategic ones.” But Iran is a great example of how this dichotomy is false. They have clear moral lines that they draw in what kind of targets they are willing to attack, but they are nevertheless strategic both in preparation for a conflict such as the one they’ve dealt with this year, and in carrying out military operations during it.
Morality without strategy is just wishful thinking. Strategy without morality is psychopathy. The west as hegemon acted like the psychopath and used moralist language to cover for its moral emptiness, but by now has reached a stage where it starts believing its own lies and is more just the language of moralism without the strategy and with moral emptiness behind it. I think putting it this way helps me understand the hollowness of imperial core society.