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Notes -
I think you are mostly right, but I think the structure of the machine you’re describing is a bit different. It’s not a linear chain coming down from the White House, and the White House isn’t the one controlling it. For foreign policy, the locus of control is the State Department and CIA (but I repeat myself) and then other entities emanate out from that locus like spokes on a wheel.
So in your hypothetical, some group deep within the State Department looks at the numbers and maps and decides that conquering Ecuador is vital to America’s geopolitical interests. Suddenly, the President starts getting alarming security briefings about Ecuadorian weapons of mass destruction and imminent Ecuadorian aggression. The media gets their marching orders and starts running two articles a day about how the Ecuadorian President might actually be Satan. The NPCs take the lead from the both the White House and media and pretty soon you have people burning Ecuadorian flags on the street and demanding war.
The second thing is that the October 7 attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza is the first major hiccup in the machine, where the gears seized up and the NPCs in the colleges and on the streets didn’t perfectly spin along with their state department orders. That might just be a one off thing. Israel-Palestine had been a culture war issue for over half a century, and people had much more baked-in preexisting opinions about it than they ever did about Ukraine or Iraq. So it was significantly harder to just beam their NPC programming right into their heads and send them off. But it could also be a sign that the control machine is just generally breaking down. I have a theory that the fervor over the Ukraine War was supposed to be a whole-of-society thing in America, not just a center left neoliberal cause celebre. It’s just that the programming ended up being rejected by large sections of the American populace. I see evidence of that and I keep meaning to make a post about it.
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