My Take | How ‘the Blob’ frighteningly took over American foreign policy
In his latest book, French thinker Emmanuel Todd describes a ‘nihilistic’ Washington establishment that has become a danger to itself and world
In the sci-fi cult classic The Blob, a carnivorous amoeboid organism from outer space lands on Earth and attacks people by absorbing them, thereby growing ever larger and more aggressive. It is also the term that former senior staff member Ben Rhodes of the Barack Obama White House applied evocatively to the US foreign policy establishment.
This particular Blob is, according to one characterisation, “composed of both Democrats and Republicans – a disparate group of elite think tankers, lawmakers, journalists and others in official Washington – who coalesce around a hawkish foreign policy, championing the old-time gospel of American leadership on the world stage”.
The “others”, I would add, are mainly the army of lobbyists in DC, the highest-powered of whom get to help write laws and regulations that supposedly supervise their businesses and industries.
These are the people who actually run the American empire. They set the parameters of acceptable terms for public debate and the formulation of US foreign policy, however outlandish, destructive or self-defeating.
Many also make serious money and careers as they go in and out of the private sector, not the least in defence.
They are divorced from the everyday lives of ordinary Americans. In fact, it’s in the nature of their job to divert as many national resources away from benefiting average Americans and their families – to prosecute wars and perpetuate conflicts in faraway places that few Americans have heard of or would ever visit, but which they are told are essential to their “national security”.
In a new book, La Defaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), by Emmanuel Todd, there is a fascinating discussion on why the American Blob has become the way it is.
