Stay in Your Own Lane

A simple concept, one phrase, a cliche really, holds a crucial key to ending unnecessary wars raging around the world and restoring the hope of survival and prosperity to the human race.

It simply states: “Stay in Your Own Lane.”

The phrase is defined by Google, that new universal superhighway to all knowledge, as meaning: never intervene unasked to meddle in the lives of other people. Indeed, one should add, never meddle in the affairs of other nations especially when their enemies or groups and individuals within them with their own motives ask you to.

The first President of the United States, George Washington, refused to get embroiled in the global wars that erupted when France tried to export its 1789 Revolution to most of the countries of Europe. He stuck to this policy even when Britain, the former colonial overlord the Americans had expelled less than two decades before, got embroiled in the conflicts too.

This Principle of Non-Intervention dominated, defined and guided US foreign policy for the next 120 years until President Woodrow Wilson led the country into World War I and quickly expanded its aims to entirely revise forever the way diplomacy and warmaking were conducted by the entire human race. Wilson’s mad vision immediately descended into strategic overextension and nightmare wherever it was applied. Within two years, in the presidential election of 1920, it was repudiated by the American people when a constructive but far more cautious internationalist, Republican Warren Harding – later falsely labeled as an isolationist – was elected by the largest popular landslide in US history to that point.

Twelve years later, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt (pictured) won the first of his four record elections by promising to commit to Harding’s same principle of “America First.” Indeed, FDR brought an end, at least for the moment, to the dark age of US classic imperialist interventions to topple and set up puppet regimes across Latin America. Through his first two presidential terms, FDR too held fast to the “stay in your own lane” principle and refused to let the United States become embroiled in the latest conflicts sweeping Europe. It took the successive unprecedented global totalitarian challenges of Nazi Germany and then the communist Soviet Union to bring American leaders to abandon their long heritage of Non-Intervention and of prospering quietly by staying in their own lane.

Instead, successive US presidents have madly sought to mess in countless other countries’ lanes around the world ever since. Today, clearly, no senior member of the Biden administration, the United States Congress or the directing leadership of NATO believes for a second in the principle of “stay in your own lane.” For this principle also identifies, isolates and opposes the daemonic addiction of counterfeit, fake moral self-righteousness that insists on opposing, hating, subverting and destroying every political system and state that does not conform to the one world fantasy of liberal imperialism, free markets and theoretical democracy (because it is anything but that in practice) as preached by the United States and its allies. This destabilizing policy of generating global chaos in the ludicrous name of a non-definable “freedom” around the world has clearly and obviously run riot in the 35 years since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union.

I saw its horrific immediate consequences travelling extensively through Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and much of northern Eurasia, central Eurasia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia during the decade following those extraordinary events. And I saw with my own eyes how corruption, disorganized crime and terrorism erupted as lethal pathologies immediately all across that vast region to be followed by years and even decades in which the resources of nor merely regions and nations, but entire continents were stolen and exploited. Then their populations were reduced to misery and despair as their governments practiced the simplistic, inept economic, social and political strategies imposed upon them by successive US administrations.

It was the self-righteous mania of Woodrow Wilson in 1918 and 1919 running riot across the entire world. An intern from the ludicrous, immensely wealthy and embarrassingly doctrinaire and ignorant Heritage Foundation in Washington DC after the 2003 US military conquest of Iraq simply downloaded the California traffic code from the Internet and imposed it on the city of Baghdad in Iraq. Like the arrogant young imaginary “geniuses” who formed Woodrow Wilson’s “Think Tank” on the ocean liner “George Washington” on his fateful trip to the Versailles peace conference after World War I, the ignorance and arrogance of these “new knights” of America’s New World Order knew no bounds. Not one of them could imagine the concept of “staying in their own lane.” On the contrary, the blessings of their “All Things Made New” fantasies must immediately be imposed on the entire world, whether the “beneficiaries” of all this wild theorizing liked it or not.

And like alcoholism, and so many psychopathologies before it, America’s liberal internationalist mania has gotten worse, not better over the years. Like centers of missionary zeal obsessed with stamping out all different religious belief systems and cultures around the world in previous eras, America’s New World Order rapidly set up countless foundations and generously funded international bodies to operate around the world.

Supposedly, these were meant to peacefully aid and foster the development of civil society especially through the creation of activist groups in the fields of human rights. They were supposed to teach the principles of free and fair, peaceful and honest elections for which, as the whole world knows, the United States today sets a shining example beyond compare. However, in practice, far too many of these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) set themselves up immediately as the judges and arbiters of what was and was not acceptable behavior of governments. In reality, they have worked ceaselessly to undermine and delegitimize and to organize centers of loud opposition to first weaken and discredit so many countries and then to bring their governments down – especially in the wave of “color” revolutions across republics of the former Soviet Union.

Yet what followed was never the democratic utopias of “freedom” and of capitalist prosperity for all promised by these legions of mad, demented loons. Instead, it was always the same old story of societies collapsing into anarchy, chaos, civil war, pillage by criminal torture gangs and international cartels and the literal enslavement of millions of people, including children and teenagers to be used for sexual abuse around the world on a scale never before seen. Yet none of these catastrophic failures in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, Iraq after Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan after US intervention, Libya after NATO bombed it apart, across the Balkans or in the chaos of sub-Saharan Africa has induced any second thoughts, let alone regret or repentance about the US New World Order ideologues who never rested until the old societies were and states were shattered and the anarchies unleashed. They all remain as passionately self-righteous, judgmental and committed to their own One True Faith as ever. No “stay in your own lane” humility for any of them.

Over the decades successive US administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, and the bipartisan wall-to-wall, lockstep consensus in one elected US Congress after another not only supported these forces: they imbibed them. It was an intellectual, political and emotional concoction far stronger and more dangerous than any alcohol. No “stay in your own lane” principle of restraint for any of them!

Today, we see the literal apocalyptic consequences: virtually the entire US Congress, all the permitted major pundits in Washington and the directing forces of Hollywood and the US news media believe this destructive, simplistic nonsense as it devastates the lives and hopes of billions of innocent people – in the United States itself as well as all over the world. Even worse, a huge section of the American people – especially its college-educated, middle class, professional, still reasonably secure, government-employed middle class – believe it passionately as well. At least half the eligible voting population of the United States appears to have drunk this so-called “Flavor Aid” (pictured) – named for the lethal concoction which American (He was from San Francisco) cult leader Jim Jones induced his 909 followers to use when they committed mass suicide in Jonestown in Guyana on November 18, 1978. The deaths at Jonestown shocked the world and still resonate across US society. But a new generation of Americans, carefully herded and brain-rinsed by their complaint mass media and lockstep, conformist and simplistic educational system, continue to mindlessly believe that their endless, increasingly bloody onslaught on the peace and stability of societies around the world is not only necessary but morally demanded. No stay in your own lane restraint and humility for any of them.

America’s leaders had a lot to learn from the wise and restrained, truly humble and humane principles of Stay in Your Own Lane. But the hour has struck. And now it is too late.