It is interesting to note Gingrich name-drops the late George Kennan, considered the intellectual force behind the so-called Cold War (another long term scam devised to enrich the death merchants their and associated industrial stockholders). Gingrich mentions Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” a response to the Soviet Union’s refusal to go prone before the World Bank and the IMF, two newly conceived institutions of the emerging neoliberal order in the late 40s.

Kennan’s telegram, also called the “X Article,” eventually shaped NSC-68 (the National Security Act), Truman’s official roll-out of the national security state and permanent war economy as devised by Paul Nitze, an oh-so profitable arrangement for the death merchants. Gingrich hankers for a newly minted NSC-68, a “compelling explanation of the Long War, the theory on how to win it, and the strategy and structures which that victory will require.”

Officially formulizing a new NSC-68 will most assuredly require a few adjustments on the part of the American people, who are naturally squeamish and reluctant when it comes to generational war, as they are the ones to pay the bill and donate the lives of their sons, daughters, mothers and fathers.

However, if we really want to know what Gingrich and the Straussian neocons have in mind, it pays to get to the bottom of Kennan’s political philosophy. For instance, consider the following Kennan quote from the days when he was the head of a State Department planning committee:

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population….We cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.

In other words, the Pentagon death machine will inflict high-tech misery and enforce bone-grinding poverty on most of the world over the next 70 or so years, and the American people “will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming” and concentrate of slaughtering official enemies, beginning with the Muslims and suicidally ending with the Chinese and Russians (who happen to have a whole lot of nukes). It will take a populace that responds like an army of automatons, but what the heck—the Straussian neocons believe they can accomplish this if they successfully whip up enough fear and mix up the requisite amount of irrational xenophobia over the next fifty or sixty years.

It is a certain recipe for cataclysmic disaster—but then Leo Strauss was a demented nihilist who warped Plato’s teachings and had Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist and philosopher of dictatorship, as a mentor, so we can expect things to turn out badly in the end, probably not a whole lot different than things turned out for the German people after their infatuation with Hitler came to a violent and bitter end.

Of course, there is one big difference—Hitler didn’t have nukes.