As Sorche Faal has observed, the Western media has rediscovered something called “the Lippman Gap”.
The University at Albany-State University of New York historical document “Imperial Evolution: Walter Lippmann And The Liberal Roots Of American Hegemony” reveals: “When Walter Lippmann became a founding editor of the New Republic in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, he began to advocate for heightened United States involvement in global affairs…Lippmann argued that the global power vacuum generated by the war presented the ideal opportunity for American values to spread to places like Eastern Europe and South America…Lippmann’s important role in America’s rise to global power becomes clear…Lippmann was a crucial ally in supporting the U.S. emergence as a contender for world power by extending democratic ideals in a non-democratic fashion, through both military intervention and economic domination”.
In 1922, this report details, Lippman released his book “Public Opinion”, which is the instructional manual for how the United States government and media can propagandize peaceful peoples into warring against each other without knowing why—and Lippman proudly proclaimed: “Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people”.
While World War II was raging in 1943, this report notes, Lippman presented to the United States government his “Shield of the Republic” war doctrine that remains in force today, otherwise known as the “Lippmann Gap”—and about which is factually documented: “The Lippmann gap refers to the imbalance between a nation’s foreign policy commitments and its available power…Foreign policy should maintain a balance between a nation’s commitments and its power, with a surplus of power in reserve…If commitments exceed power, the foreign policy becomes insolvent”.
As President Trump confronts the “Lippmann Gap” commitment nightmare fast rendering American foreign policy insolvent, this report continues, world-renowned American historian Stephen Kotkin warned this week: “There’s unlimited demand for American power, but American power can’t fulfill all its current commitments”, and the leftist Washington Post worryingly observed today: “The central challenge in American foreign policy today is that Washington’s defense commitments around the world exceed its military power…This is known as the “Lippmann gap”…The Lippmann gap pressures presidents to make trade-offs between competing foreign policy priorities…If they don’t, the gap will grow…For Trump, backing Israel to the hilt while leaving Ukraine more exposed has a clear — if brutal — political and strategic appeal”.
This so-called Gap is the same thing that traditional historians more usefully describe as Imperial Overstretch. It is a common behavior by late-stage empires that usually precedes contraction, internal division, and collapse.
The US empire is already dominated by the foreign influence of AIPAC, which has no interests in common with the American people, and whose influence has proved reliably destructive since the fatal Naturalization Act of 1965 overturned 44 years of strict immigration limits that helped the USA become a strong and mostly homogeneous empire in the aftermath of the Civil War and WWI. This pernicious foreign influence was compounded by the hubris of being the sole major power to escape serious damage in WWII with its industrial capacity not only unscathed, but significantly enhanced.
Now the USA is facing imperial overstretch due to its overcommitments abroad and the internal weakening of the country by the mass post-1965 invasion. It is unfortunate that so many Americans, real and paper, would prefer to permit the country to collapse into chaos rather than even attempt to look into the causes of the US decline and probable fall. But this is part and parcel of the usual historical process; the American Indian did not recognize the problem and join forces to oppose the European settlers until it was far too late too.