- ‘De-escalation’ is 'vacuous' - Ferguson prefers 'peace through strength'
Posted by Ian M
on June 24, 2025, 7:25 pm, in reply to "Niall Ferguson's warmongering partnership with ICC fugitive Yoav Gallant in the Times"
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https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-what-comes-after-trump-surgical-strikes-iran Niall Ferguson: What Comes After Trump’s ‘Surgical Strikes’? As Kissinger often said, every success in foreign policy is just an admission ticket to the next crisis. By Niall Ferguson 06.23.25 — International What to make of Saturday’s “surgical strikes” on Iranian nuclear installations? Ask Vice President Vance: “We had an incredibly targeted, precise surgical strike on the nuclear facilities that are the target of the American operation,” he declared on Sunday. It was, he later added “a very precise, a very surgical strike tailored to an American national interest. And that national interest is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Americans, and especially Republicans, have long relished the term surgical strike, and it’s easy to understand why. Standards of surgery are exceptionally high in the United States, just as tolerance of military casualties is relatively low. The notion is therefore alluring that one can resolve an international problem—especially an intractable one such as Iran’s long-standing ambition to acquire nuclear weapons—with a single, swift, surgical procedure. Ironically, as Richard Nixon’s former speechwriter William Safire pointed out nearly 40 years ago, the term surgical strike originated as left-wing satire. The first use of the phrase, according to Safire, was in an article by Richard Barnet in Harper’s Magazine in November 1971. “Even [in] the language of the bureaucracy,” Barnet wrote, “the ‘surgical strike’ for chasing and mowing down peasants from the air by spraying them with 8,000 bullets a minute—takes the mystery, awe, and pain out of violence.” I thank God that the vacuous term ‘de-escalation’ has now been left to the Europeans, and that peace through strength is back. There was nothing surgical about the American use of air power in Vietnam. According to the diary of Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, Henry Kissinger also used the phrase at around that time, though the surgical strike he had in mind was a possible Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear facilities. Only with the advent and rapid development of precision weaponry such as guided missiles in the 1980s did the term lose its pejorative connotation. By the time Safire was writing—just after Ronald Reagan’s administration had struck Libyan targets in retaliation for the West Berlin discotheque bombing of April 1986—surgical strike had taken on the modern meaning used by Vice President Vance on Sunday. As with the revival of the slogan “peace through strength,” this is one of those conscious echoes of Reaganism that befuddle those who would misrepresent the second Trump administration as isolationist. Last week, when I was explaining why I expected Trump to strike the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, I pointed out that, despite frivolous jokes about the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade, Trump Enjoys Surgical Strikes (TESS). We saw that three times in his first term: in April 2017, when he dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan; a year later, when he ordered missile strikes on Syria in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime; and in January 2020, when he authorized the assassination of commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Qasem Soleimani. The relish with which Trump announced the strikes against Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan on Saturday night was characteristic. “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” he enthused. “All planes are safely on their way home. . . . NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” Swift, decisive intervention, leading to peace—and at the same time restoring American deterrence: “ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT,” as he put it in a follow-up post. This is the essence of the perfect surgical strike. [continues behind paywall, but you get the gist] ***** Right at home in Nazi Germany, this one. Cock-a-hoop at getting his way, at least at the surface level (literally in the sense that the strikes impacted the surface and nothing underground), making har-har acronym jokes about Trump. I thought 'peace through strength' might have been used by the nazis, but sounds like it has a long history in imperialist america, most recently under Reagan: 'We know that peace is the condition under which mankind was meant to flourish. Yet peace does not exist of its own will. It depends on us, on our courage to build it and guard it and pass it on to future generations. George Washington's words may seem hard and cold today, but history has proven him right again and again. "To be prepared for war," he said, "is one of the most effective means of preserving peace." Well, to those who think strength provokes conflict, Will Rogers had his own answer. He said of the world heavyweight champion of his day: "I've never seen anyone insult Jack Dempsey."[16]' ...and even Starmer has gotten in on it: 'In remarks delivered regarding the Strategic Defence Review (2025), UK prime minister Keir Starmer said that the UK is moving to "warfighting readiness" in order to show potential adversaries that the country is "ready to deliver peace through strength." ' See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_through_strength I suppose not everything has to have been done by the nazis in order to be bad - they got many of their strategies by copying US and UK imperialism after all. Maybe this can be the slogan to haunt the anglo-american empire on its way round the u-bend of history? Peace to the middle east through the strength of israel; peace to Ukraine through the strength of NATO; peace to the world through the strength of the US war machine, reducing country after country to rubble and picking through the carcasses of children for anything of value to satisfy the shareholders... it's all so sickening. jeers, I |