The Machine within the Machine

I. The Peace Crisis

In the autumn of 1989 the world was threatened by something its most powerful apparatuses were not prepared for: peace. The adversary against whom they had armed, spied and planned for forty years was dissolving. Washington spoke of the peace dividend. Under President George Bush and his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the American armed forces were reduced by about a quarter, and the budgets of the intelligence services fell.

In “Die Friedfertigen” (German) we described how this peace crisis reached the factories, and how quickly it was over. There we showed seven pillars, industry, politics, intelligence services, the military, banks, media and think tanks, each doing its own work and together forming a machine that turns conflicts into revenue. This machine needs no conspiracy. It has no head.

That is right, but it is only half the story. A machine without a head explains why peace was not needed. It does not explain why it was not wanted. For that one has to look inside it for a second, smaller machine, and that one has faces.

II. The Large Machine

Lewis Mumford, who coined the term megamachine, already distinguished two parts at the pyramids: the labour machine, which builds, and the military machine, which conquers and secures. Both consist of people who need not know what the whole serves. Each does his part, and no one alone wants the result.

After 1989 the large machine found its new adversaries without looking for them. The wars in the Balkans, Iraq, Somalia, after 2001 terrorism. And finally China, made strong precisely by those who earn nothing from conflict: trading companies, banks and industrial firms that moved their production there because it was cheap. As we showed in “Where the Lever Never Was”, six in ten of the world’s new industrial robots now stand in China. The export economy thus delivered the next great adversary to the intelligence services and the arms industry, without intention and without commission.

Added to this is a cycle that the political scientist John Herz called the security dilemma as early as 1950. Whoever arms to protect himself threatens the other, and the other arms in turn. Each acts reasonably for himself, and together they all maintain the state at the edge of the abyss where the most money is made. It is the same ratchet (German) we described for wealth: it turns in one direction only.

III. The Small Machine

Within the large machine, however, there are also people who know exactly what they want. In “The Invisible Mentor” we described one of them: Fritz Kraemer, an emigrant from Germany, without a high-ranking office and without a single book, yet present in the American power apparatus across ten presidencies. He was the teacher of Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. His doctrine was that of provocative weakness: yielding provokes the adversary, only strength protects. After his retirement in 1978 he received two younger men in his apartment, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

In 1989 Kraemer was 81 years old and had no direct influence at all. He had not spoken with Kissinger since the latter’s policy of détente. But Wolfowitz sat in the Pentagon as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under Cheney. In his office, in the spring of 1992, the draft of a planning document was produced, the Defense Planning Guidance. It was written by Zalmay Khalilzad, with the involvement of Lewis Libby. In March 1992 it reached the New York Times. Its core sentence reads:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.”

This is the document of the peace crisis. Two years after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon did not commit itself to disarmament but to lasting supremacy and vigilance against every future challenger. Senator Joe Biden called it a slap in the face of the allies Germany and Japan. After the outcry the text was toned down under Cheney and Colin Powell. It did not disappear.

IV. Father and Son

How little the small machine is identical with the state is shown by the president under whom it wrote its paper. George Bush, himself head of the CIA for a year, was a cautious man. After the fall of the Wall he refrained from any gesture of triumph so as not to weaken Gorbachev. In August 1991 in Kyiv he warned Ukrainians against “suicidal nationalism”. In the same year he unilaterally withdrew most tactical nuclear weapons. He thought in terms of balance, like his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

On 11 September 1990, after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Bush spoke before Congress of a “new world order”: a world freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, more secure in the quest for peace. He did not mean pacifism. He meant an order in which the great powers act together through the United Nations against an aggressor, with Moscow rather than against Moscow. The Gulf War of 1991 was meant to demonstrate this, with a UN mandate, a broad coalition and the decision not to march on to Baghdad. The paper from the Pentagon, produced a year and a half later in the same administration, pointed in the opposite direction. The rift between balance and supremacy thus ran first through an administration and ten years later through a family.

Under his son the small machine then came to power. Cheney became Vice President; Donald Rumsfeld, who by his own testimony owed Kraemer a great deal, Secretary of Defense; Wolfowitz his deputy; Perle chairman of the Pentagon’s advisory board. The National Security Strategy of 2002 took up the ideas of 1992 again. In March 2003 American troops invaded Iraq.

The father and his people were against it. In August 2002 Scowcroft published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Don’t Attack Saddam”. The son later told the journalist Bob Woodward that his father was the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength: there was a higher father he appealed to. Whom he meant, he did not say. It seems likely that he was thinking of God. Bush had turned to evangelical faith in his late thirties and spoke openly of seeking guidance in prayer. The Palestinian politician Nabil Shaath reported in a BBC documentary in 2005 that Bush had told him in 2003 that God had charged him with ending the tyranny in Iraq. The White House denied this.

Whoever believes himself personally guided by God in deciding on war and peace can no longer be reached by contradiction. No adviser, no parliament and no father can correct him. What this certainty means when it meets power, we described in “Der kollabierte Horizont” (German) and in “Georg Schramm sah schon 2012 die Zeichen an der Wand” (German).

In his 2015 biography the father called Cheney an “iron-ass” and Rumsfeld arrogant. They had served his son badly.

Fritz Kraemer died on 8 September 2003 in Washington, barely half a year after the invasion. He lived to see the greatest triumph of his doctrine, but not its failure.

V. Lending a Hand

The small machine does not have to create the state at the edge of the abyss. It is enough for it to describe the state as larger than it is. There are documented examples. Around 1960 Washington warned of a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that did not exist. The lead lay with the Americans. In 2002 the American intelligence services attributed weapons of mass destruction to Iraq that were never found.

That is no conspiracy. An apparatus that lives on threat sees it everywhere, and whoever warns is considered responsible, whoever plays things down naive. In January 2018 what had caused an outcry in 1992 finally became official. The US National Defense Strategy declared: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” China and Russia were named. The great game of the powers was back.

VI. The Suspicion

At this point we, the authors, are not of one mind, and we disclose the disagreement.

One of us considers it possible that the peace crisis was not merely sat out but steered from the top. A lasting peace threatened the existence of the intelligence services on both sides, and common interests bind more than ideologies. Former Soviet intelligence officers claim that Donald Trump was already being cultivated by the KGB in the 1980s. And Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer whose rise in the 1990s was remarkably smooth. Why should the top chiefs of both services not have agreed that the adversary must be preserved?

The other objects: none of this is documented. The KGB chief of 1989, Vladimir Kryuchkov, led the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev and went to prison. His successor handed the Americans the plans of the listening devices in their Moscow embassy; then the KGB was dissolved. The CIA had five directors in the 1990s. An agreement carried only at the top would not have survived these changes. And a thesis that explains its lack of evidence by saying that only the top was initiated can no longer be refuted.

We agree that the result needs no conspiracy. The large machine needs the adversary, the small one wants him, and both find him.

VII. The Trim Tab

The architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller left an image that fits here. A large ship cannot simply be turned by the rudder; the water pressure is too great. That is why a small flap sits on the rudder, the trim tab. It moves the rudder, and the rudder moves the ship. Fuller had “Call me Trimtab” written on his gravestone. He meant it as encouragement, as proof that one individual in the right place can move a great deal.

Kraemer’s school is such a trim tab, only in the other direction. The large machine supplies the mass and the energy, the small one sets the direction. But therein also lies a hope. Against the inertia of millions little can be done. A trim tab, by contrast, has names, careers and doctrines, and doctrines can be refuted. When the planning paper of 1992 became public, it was withdrawn. The small machine shuns the light.

That is why it is not enough to describe structures. A structure moves nothing without the people who use it, and whoever speaks only of systems lets the actors get away nameless and blameless. That would be the variant of “one” that we described in “One Could, One Should”: a sentence in which no one is meant.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: the adversaries are not invented. Russia invaded Ukraine, and China is arming at a pace no other country matches. That is right, and we claim nothing else. We claim that after 1989 there was a moment in which other paths were open, and that there were people in Washington who deliberately closed them.

The second objection: Kraemer’s influence is overestimated. The line from him to the neoconservatives rests mainly on the reconstruction by the historian Len Colodny and on the testimony of his admirers. That must be taken seriously. But even without Kraemer the Defense Planning Guidance would remain, and it has authors with names.

The third objection: the USA slid into today’s situation; no one wanted it. For the consequences that is true. No one intended the collapsed Iraq, the “Islamic State” or a China stronger than ever before. The decisions, however, have names and dates. In 1992 the planning paper from Wolfowitz’s office. From 1994 the eastward enlargement of NATO under President Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a student of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote in “The Grand Chessboard” in 1997 that without Ukraine Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. George Kennan, the father of containment, called the enlargement a “fateful error” in the same year. In 2003 the Iraq war. In 2008 the promise of Bucharest to Ukraine and Georgia that they would become members of NATO, pushed through by Bush junior against Merkel and Sarkozy. The decisions had intentions; the consequences did not.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that the decisions after 1989 aimed at supremacy rather than balance were taken against the will of the people who had prepared them.

IX. The Faces

The large machine has no face, and therefore no one can call it to account. The small one has faces, but one must look while they can still be recognised. Kraemer is dead, Wolfowitz and Perle are old. Their doctrine lives on in think tanks, strategy papers and careers that no longer need a mentor. So the small machine gradually becomes part of the large one.

If the machine within the machine has names: who will name them before they disappear into the large one?