As the Latin saying goes, De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Fair enough, and for most deceased a modest effort would probably suffice to act in the spirit of this sentiment and find something decent to say. However, in the case of the recently departed Madeleine Albright, one is genuinely hard put to find even a minimum of virtue to balance the wickedness.

For all we know she may indeed be remembered as a “loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend” in her private circle, as claimed by her family when they announced her death. But outside of that circle, one suspects that few will remember her that way.

Her passing, which occurred on precisely the day which marked the 23^rd anniversary of the decision to commit one of the most infamous acts with which her name is associated, the savage and illegal bombing in 1999 of Yugoslavia, must impress everyone capable of perceiving meaning in human events as a mighty portent. Assuredly, Albright had committed in her public life other acts of malfeasance and moral turpitude which in terms of destruction and victim count may exceed the devastation which her policies inflicted on the people of Serbia and Montenegro. But ensconced in her relationship with the Serbian nation there is an important and telling detail, and it lays bare the depravity.

In the years preceding the outbreak of World War II, Madeleine Albright, known then as Jana Korbelova, and her family took refuge in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to escape from the ethnic persecution and almost certain death in a Nazi concentration camp as Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. The Korbel refugee family were amicably welcomed and generously accommodated in the Serbian resort town of Vrnjačka Banja, where Jana attended school and reportedly learned the Serbian language. Later in life, after the war, when Jana landed in America, becoming Madeleine, and ambition for personal advancement began to direct her life, not a trace of gratitude or empathy for the people who saved her life could be detected. If on some of her “diplomatic missions” the objects of her contempt rewarded her with stones, who could really blame them? Throughout the nineties, she championed the vilification of the very people who most likely shielded her from a gruesome death in Auschwitz, slanderously denouncing them as reincarnated Nazis and hailing with glee the mayhem and destruction wrought by NATO upon them. Her intemperate calumnies speak volumes about her character.

As a public figure, Albright never gave an inkling of the noble attributes which now fill the official eulogies. Her casual remark during an interview in 1996 with Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes”, that in her opinion sanctions laid on Iraq which cost the lives of half a million children (more than died in Hiroshima, Stahl reminded her) were “worth it,” was shocking beyond words. But that was just a “loving grandmother” in charge of superpower foreign policy sharing her most cherished values with a global audience.

Her academic output was rather thin, compared to her father’s, who had a successful career as a political science professor on his own merits and without agreeing to any moral compromises to get ahead after the family immigrated to America in the post-war period. One has the distinct impression that in order to get ahead Madeleine relied less on her scholarship and more on who she hung around with. In her rise to prominence she tended always to keep in lockstep with political heavyweights such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Clintons. It was a career strategy that paid off. In the topsy-turvy Beltway world, a person with her flimsy professional and moral qualifications could indeed scale unimaginable heights, as long as she toed the party line and in her diatribes publicly spouted all the right opinions. It is thus that Madeleine Albright became not just a “diplomat” representing her adopted country in the United Nations and later even Secretary of State. As allegedly “one of the world’s most respected diplomats [so goes one of establishment puff pieces dedicated to her] Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, continues to advocate for democracy and human rights across the world, while also championing the important impact international relations and educational exchanges have on the United States today,” as the fawning blurb disingenuously put it, but there is more than that. The grateful and admiring establishment, whose obsequious servant she had been, in the final stages of her career made her professor, of all things, in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Thus, the bogus diplomat, who in 1999 orchestrated multiple violations of international law by using her position to destroy and dismember a European country by using the most egregious force and violence, was put in charge of training future diplomats.

That was rather akin to appointing Dr. Mengele professor of medicine so that he could apply his accumulated professional experience to the training of future doctors.

In Orthodox teaching, for forty days after death the soul passes through a series of toll-houses where the record of sins committed during its past life is put before it by jeering demons who, of course, have it all written down. Perhaps this scenario should be modified slightly just for the passage of Madeleine Albright, nee Korbelova, so that in her descent to the netherworld she might be met at the toll-houses by the reproachful gaze of her numberless child victims, whose innocent deaths she engineered and proclaimed to be “worth it.” Naturally, the demons will still be there at the end of the journey, waiting for her arrival and for the pleasure of her company.

“Only those of us who were born under Queen Victoria,” wrote Ronald Knox, “know what it feels like to assume, without questioning, that England is permanently top nation, that foreigners do not matter, and that if worst comes to the worst, Lord Salisbury will send a gunboat.” Knox offered this trenchant observation, redolent with irony and perhaps tinged with regret, not as a policymaker or strategic thinker, but from the vantage point of a clergyman. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Monsignor Knox was the most famous and influential Catholic priest in all of Great Britain. As such, he entertained a distinct perspective on what actually qualifies as permanent and what merely offers the appearance.

While perhaps using different terms—our preference is for dispatching nuclear aircraft carriers rather than gunboats—Americans born after World War II came into adulthood imbued with precisely the same sentiment about their own country. From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we—not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians—were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history’s verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C.

If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.

Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright’s justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). 

Back then, it was Albright’s claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright’s insistence that “we see further into the future.” 

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright’s “we” napping. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington’s belated and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that wrong.

Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment’s formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing.

Yet in 2016, Trump’s critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump’s half-baked formula for Making America Great Again—building “the wall,” provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat—is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don’t help.

So the nation today finds itself in an interesting predicament. The media elites that drive the national conversation have reached the conclusion that nothing surpasses in importance Trump’s removal from office. The midterm elections that returned the Democrats to power in the House have heightened expectations of the Trump era coming to an end. This has injected into the early maneuvering for the 2020 presidential election a palpable sense of urgency. Sensing opportunity, candidates rush to join the competition. The field promises to be a crowded one.

Among progressives, the presence of women, people of color, and at least one gay person in the race suggests that something of epic importance is about to unfold. Maybe so. But here’s one thing that’s likely to be missing: any serious assessment of the costs and consequences of recent policies formulated pursuant to the insistence that the United States is, as Monsignor Knox put it, “permanently top nation.” 

The gatekeepers of the orthodoxy, united in denouncing Trump, will not permit any such assessment. So the coming campaign will no doubt be entertaining. In some respects, it may also be enlightening. But in all likelihood, it will leave untouched the basic premises of U.S. policy—the bloated military budget, the vast empire of bases, the penchant for interventionism, all backed by the absurd claims of American exceptionalism voiced by the likes of Madeleine Albright and her kindred spirits.

When Ronald Knox was born, Queen Victoria presided over an empire on which the sun never set. By the time he died during the reign of Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, that empire had vanished. Funny how quickly these things can happen.

theamericanconservative.com

Pompeo will be happy to see the people of Iran starve to achieve his ends. And those ends are purely in service of not only Israel and Saudi Arabia but the military contractors who back him and direct so much of the policy coming out of D.C.

Pompeo: Yeah, we’re going to work to do two things: that things that are sanctioned don’t happen, and things that are permitted to happen are permissible, and can in fact happen. [Speaking of food and medicine flowing unimpeded]

Well, remember, just so you remember, the leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat. They have to make a decision that they want to use their wealth to import medicine, and not use their wealth to fund Qasem Soleimani’s travels around the Middle East with – causing death and destruction. That’s the Iranian Government’s choice on how to use Iranian wealth. If they choose to squander, if the Iranian leadership chooses to spoil it, if they choose to use it in a way that doesn’t benefit the Iranian people, I’m very confident the Iranian people will take a response that tries to fix that themselves as well.

Aside from the fact that Pompeo has no idea how commerce works, this is a horrific statement. We’re going to destroy your economy and if you don’t overthrow your government you will starve.

Way to change hearts and minds, Mike.

This is his Madeleine Albright moment who famously said that 500,000 dead Iraqi children were a price worth paying because the US cut Iraq off from all trade, including basic medical supplies.

This is the legacy of our Secretaries of State. We come, we sanction, we invade, they die.

He was pressed on the fact that food and medicine commerce was not sanctioned under Obama and yet these items were curtailed. And Pompeo is stupid enough to believe that this won’t happen again under the watch of Steve Mnuchin’s treasury department.

Mike Pompeo knows that the sanctions are horrific. But he doesn’t care because you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?

Spinning the same tale of demonizing a foreign government and exhorting the people to stand up and fight for their freedom is idiotic.

It has never and will never work.

But, as a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative Utopian fantasist Pompeo speaks in the same tired rhetoric that has served as a cover for naked hatred of people he doesn’t respect. Chaos is the goal and the supposedly Christian Pompeo is the opposite of what is needed here. It makes me sad that the only voice of reason in the Trump administration on foreign policy so far was fired, Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson knew that this was not the right path but Trump is too much the deal-maker and not enough of a diplomat to see the value in building relationships versus destroying them, which Tillerson regularly argued for. If he was truly interested in a better world in central Asia, Trump would instruct Pompeo to meet with his counterpart and begin negotiations of something, anything.

But, he won’t.

He wants Iranian President Rouhani to come to him. I’m going to Insult, threaten, starve, renege, attack and steal from you, but, hey, let’s talk.

If Pompeo cared one whit about the ‘incredible people of Iran’ he wouldn’t be gleefully making it more difficult for them to build ‘incredible wealth’ and change their course organically.

The whole narrative Pompeo spins in the interview could have been written for him by Benjamin Netanyahu or King Salman himself. He paints the Saudis as as the victims in Yemen. Israel the victim in Syria.

The sad truth is that Pompeo is too ignorant to even know the history of events he’s supposed to be directing.

No one is ever to blame for anything in this world than whoever the US labels as an enemy.

And that enemy is Iran. But, Iran didn’t start the wars in Yemen and Syria, Mike. That’s on your Saudi partners and your forebears at State. A few missiles lobbed near Riyadh? Are you kidding me?

As Secretary of State of the US Pompeo is in charge of those who bomb weddings, shoot unarmed pregnant women, blockade alliance member (Qatar), stone gay people and throw them off buildings as well as dismember dissidents on foreign soil.

And he has the unmitigated gall to throw stones at Iran?

Is there blame to be thrown at Iran in how they have responded to these things? Of course.

Does that mean starving people out is the appropriate response? No.

Pompeo wants to separate the Iranian regime from the people, but he knows damn well that the path to do so that’s been chosen will see the burden of it fall disproportionately on the people not the regime.

The truth is that sanctions are a temporary form of leverage that raises costs and creates subversion. We’re seeing it all across the world and in far greater numbers than in 2012 under Obama.

And that’s the good news. As the world wakes up to the reality that the US cannot be counted on to maintain any sense of stability.

Netanyahu wants Iran and the Iranian people destroyed. Pompeo is too stupid and vane to know what he wants. He does what he’s told. As Alistair Crooke pointed out recently, Netanyahu is likely the chief architect of this regime change plan and doesn’t care if the Iranian people suffer for they are simply lesser beings than himself.

Pompeo’s statement is cheap political theatre that is unbecoming of someone charged with being the US’s chief diplomat. If Trump had any vestige of principles he would fire him on the spot.

But, the reality is this statement by Pompeo betrays the underlying truth that the people do not matter in the fight for a greater Israel and Saudi Arabia while making the world safe for US control over the Heartland of central Asia.

Governments fight and people lose.

It is an unfortunate truth that is millenia old.

It’s getting harder and harder for Pompeo and Trump to defend their positions on Israel and Saudi Arabia as their behavior becomes more erratic and shameful. And if Trump wants to get re-elected in 2020 he better start by figuring out how to extricate himself from the mess he’s gotten himself into over Iran.

Firing Mike Pompeo and putting a grown-up in charge of State would be a good start.

“Back in the 1990s, Robert Rubin, a Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, was negotiating the terms under which China would be allowed into the World Trade Organization. My sources say he was basically asking for many of the exact same things Trump wants now … But in 1998, in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton wanted a “win” (Not unlike the current president.) And Rubin wasn’t delivering, holding firm on his demands for market access and guarantees on intellectual property, etc. Clinton then took the Chinese negotiations away from Rubin and gave it to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with the instructions to get it done.

Not being a trade expert, Albright didn’t understand the underlying issues. The Chinese recognized she was playing a weak hand and held firm. To make a long story short, my sources say she effectively caved. Clinton got his “win” and we got stuck with a lousy trade deal. When Trump alleges that we got snookered in a bad trade deal, he is correct—although I wonder if he understands the history. Maybe somebody gave him the background, but it never came out in any of his speeches. That WTO access, which finally happened in 2001, let China begin capturing markets through legal means, and access US intellectual property without paying for it …

Does this make a difference now? Probably not … But it gets to the rivalry we discussed above. Is it possible for both the US and China to stay in an organization like WTO? Trump seems to doubt it, as he’s threatened to withdraw from WTO. We may someday look back at this period of a single body governing international trade as an aberration — a nice dream that was never realistic. If so, prepare for some big changes.”

This goes to the crux of one of the biggest geo-political issues facing Europe and America. Mauldin then gives us what very much the consensus view that, “despite some of his rhetoric, I don’t believe [Trump] is ideologically against trade. I think he just wants a US “win” and is flexible on what that means”. Yes, Trump quite possibly will end up doing ‘a Clinton’, but does America have a realistic alternative but to accommodate a rising China?  The world has changed since the Clinton era:  this no longer is just a matter of tussling over the terms of trade.

Xi Jinping lies at the apex of the Chinese political system. His influence now permeates at every level. He is the most powerful leader since Chairman Mao. Kevin Rudd (former PM of Australia and longtime student of China) notes, “none of this is for the faint-hearted … Xi has grown up in Chinese party politics as conducted at the highest levels. Through his father, Xi Zhongxun … he has been through a “masterclass” of not only how to survive it, but also on how to prevail within it. For these reasons, he has proven himself to be the most formidable politician of his age. He has succeeded in pre-empting, outflanking, outmanoeuvring, and then removing each of his political adversaries. The polite term for this is power consolidation. In that, he has certainly succeeded”. 

And here is the rub: the world which Xi envisions is wholly incompatible with Washington’s priorities. Xi is not only more powerful than any predecessor other than Mao, he knows it, and intends to make his mark on world history. One that equates, or even surpasses, that of Mao.

Lee Kuan Yew, who before his death in 2015, was the world’s premier China-watcher, had a pointed answer about China’s stunning trajectory over the past 40 years: “The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.” 

The year 2021, marks the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding, and Xi clearly intends that in 2021 China will showcase the achievements of its first centenary goals.  By then, China expects to be the most powerful economy in the world (it is already there – on a purchasing power parity basis), and an emerging world class power – both in political and military terms. According to Richard Haas, the President of the US Council for Foreign Relations, “[China’s] long-term ambition is to dismantle the U.S. alliance system in Asia, replacing it with a more benign (from Beijing’s perspective) regional security order in which it enjoys pride of place, and ideally a sphere of influence commensurate with its power”. (If anything, Haas may be understating things).

To achieve the first of the two centenary goals (the second concludes in 2049), China has one major economic, one economic/political strand, and one political/military strand of policy to the achievement of its goals.

Made in China 2025 is a broad industrial policy that is receiving massive state R & D funding ($232 billion in 2016), including an explicit potential dual-use integration into military innovation. Its main aim, besides improving productivity, is to make China the world’s ‘tech leader’, and for China to become 70% self-sufficient in key materials and components. This may be well-known in theory, but perhaps the move towards self-sufficiency by both China and Russia suggests something more stark. These states are moving away from the classic liberal trade model to an economic model based on autonomy, and a state-led economy (such as advocated by economists like Friedrich List, before becoming eclipsed by the prevalence of Adam Smith-ian thinking).

The second prong to policy is the famous ‘Belt and Road’ initiative linking China to Europe. The economic element however, is often deprecated in the West as ‘mere infrastructure’ – albeit on a grand scale. Its conception, rather, represents a direct swipe at the western, hyper-financialised economic model.  In a famous critical remark directed at China’s heavy reliance on western-style, debt-led growth – an anonymous author (thought to be Xi or close colleague), noted (sarcastically) the notion that big trees could be grown ‘in the air’.  Which is to say: that trees need to have roots, and to grow in the ground. Instead of the ‘virtual’, financialised ‘activity’ of the West, real economic activity stems from the real economy, with roots planted in the earth.  The ‘Belt and Road’ is just this: intended as a major catalyst to real economics.

Its political aspect, of course, is evident: It will create an immense (Remimbi) trading and influence block, and being land-based, will shift strategic power away from the western domination over sea-power to land routes over which western conventional military power is limited – just as, in the same way, it will transfer financial power away from the reserve dollar system, to the Remimbi and other currencies.

The other aspect, which has received much less notice, is how Xi has been able to mesh his objectives with those of Russia. Initially cautious towards the ‘Belt and Road’ project when Xi launched it in 2013, the Kremlin, warmed to the notion in the wake of the western coup against its interests in Ukraine, and with America’s joint project with Saudi Arabia to crash the price of oil (Saudi wanted to put pressure on Russia to abandon Assad, and the US to weaken President Putin, by weakening the rouble and government finances). 

Thus, by 2015, President Putin had pledged a linkup between Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Silk Road Economic Belt, and two years later, Putin was the main guest of honor at the 'One Belt, One Road' summit, held in Beijing.

What is interesting is how Russia has integrated Xi’s vision into its own ‘Greater Eurasia’ thinking, conceived as the core antithesis to an American-led, financialised, world order. The Kremlin, of course, well understands that in the trade and finance realm, Russia’s position in Eurasia is much weaker than that of China. (China’s economy being eight to ten times the size of that of Russia).

Russia’s crucial strengths traditionally lie in the political-military and diplomatic domains. Hence, leaving economic initiatives to China, Moscow strives for the role of the chief architect of a Eurasian political and security architecture, a concert of major Asian powers, and energy producers.

President Putin has, in a sense, found the Russian symmetry and complementarity to Xi’s ‘road and corridor’ politics (an asymmetrical Russian balance, if you like, to Xi’s raw economic strength) in its ‘One Map; Three Regions’ politics. Bruno Maçães has written:

In October 2017, Rosneft Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin took the unusual step of presenting a geopolitical report on the “ideals of Eurasian integration” to an audience in Verona, Italy. One of the maps projected on the screen during the presentation showed the supercontinent—what Russian circles call “Greater Eurasia”—as divided between three main regions. For Sechin, the crucial division is not between Europe and Asia, but between regions of energy consumption and regions of energy production. The former are organized on the western and eastern edges of the supercontinent: Europe, including Turkey, and the Asia Pacific, including India.

Between them we find three regions of energy production: Russia and the Arctic, the Caspian, and the Middle East. Interestingly, the map does not break these three regions apart, preferring to draw a delimitation line around all three. They are contiguous, thus forming a single bloc, at least from a purely geographic perspective.

The map, Maçães notes, “illustrates an important point about Russia’s new self-image. From the point of view of energy geopolitics, Europe and the Asia Pacific are perfectly equivalent, providing alternative sources of demand for energy resources … And, as you consider the three areas [which the map] delimits, it becomes apparent that two of them are already led and organized by a leading actor: Germany in the case of Europe; and China for the Asia Pacific”.

It is from this perspective, that Russia’s renewed interest and intervention in the Middle East must be understood. By consolidating all three energy-producing regions under its leadership, Russia can be a true equal to China in shaping the new Eurasian system. Its interests lie now more decisively in organizing a common political will for the core energy production region, than in recovering ‘old yearnings’ about being a part of Europe.

And ‘political will’ is Xi’s project too: Whereas once Mao’s Cultural Revolution tried to wipe out China’s ancient past and replace it with communism’s “new socialist man”, Xi has increasingly portrayed the party as the inheritor and successor to a 5,000-year-old Chinese empire brought low only by the marauding West, writes Graham Allison, author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?  Thus the Party has evoked past humiliations at the hands of Japan and the West “to create a sense of unity that had been fracturing, and to define a Chinese identity fundamentally at odds with American modernity”.

Finally, Xi has pledged to make China strong again. He believes that a military that is “able to fight and win wars” is essential to realizing every other component of China’s “rejuvenation”.  America has more military ‘structure’ than China, but Moscow has technologically better weapons – but China too is catching up in this respect with the West fast. The direct strategic military co-operation between China and Russia (China stood behind Russia militarily as well as politically) was evident in the recent US and UK infowar thrust – Skripal and chemical weapons in Syria – against Russia.  It acts as a deterrent against US military action undertaken against either state.

In Washington there are – in contrast to Beijing – multiple voices attempting to define how America should interact with China.  Trump has been the loudest, but ideologues are there too, calling for a fundamental re-set of the terms of trade, and of intellectual property rights. But the US military also are adamant that the US must remain the military hegemon in the Asia-Pacific region and that China cannot be allowed to push America out.  There is, though, rare unity in Washington – amongst ‘think-tankers’ and between the two main political parties – on one point, and one point alone: that China constitutes the ‘Number One’ threat to the American-led ‘rules-based’ global order … and should be cut down to size.

But what – amongst China’s objectives outlined above – is it that that the US thinks it can somehow ‘roll back’ and more substantially cut China ‘down to size’ – without going to war? 

Realistically, Xi may grant Trump enough minor concessions (i.e. on ownership and intellectual property issues) to enable Trump to claim a ‘win’ (i.e. to do ‘a Clinton’ again), and buy a few years of chilly economic peace, whilst the US continues to rack up trade and budget deficits. But ultimately, America will have to decide to accommodate to reality, or risk recession at best, or war at worst.

It will be fraught both economically and geo-politically, especially since those who claim to know Xi, seem to be convinced that aside from wanting to return China to being the ‘biggest player in the history of the world’, that Xi also aspires to the one who, finally, reunites China: including not just Xinjiang and Tibet on the mainland, but also Hong Kong and Taiwan. Can America culturally absorb the thought of ‘democratic’ Taiwan being militarily unified into China? Could it trade that for a North Korean solution?  It seems improbable.

As the Cold War began to conclude, van Heuven and his American supremacy colleagues, including the later US «viceroy» for Iraq, Paul «Jerry» Bremer, and various US military commanders within NATO, began to sharpen their knives for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

Rather than blame outside influences for the pressure on the Yugoslav federal system, van Heuven began the meme that would later justify NATO’s and America’s intervention in Yugoslavian civil wars. For van Heuven, it was Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic who was squarely responsible for the fracture of Yugoslavia’s federal system. This lie would persist until Milosevic’s suspicious death in 2006 while he was on trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Van Heuven was one of a number of Atlanticists, some carrying significant anti-Russian and anti-Serb ethnic and religious baggage – for example, Polish-born Zbigniew Brzezinski, Czech-born Madeleine Albright, Hungarian-born George Soros, and Berlin-born Helmut Sonnenfeldt – who wanted to «punish» countries like Serbia and Russia for bigoted reasons. In 1995, van Heuven wrote a paper for RAND titled «Rehabilitating Serbia». Van Heuven and his cheerleading comrades for NATO and the European Union saw Serbia as the Balkans’ only aggressor nation and violator of human rights. Nowhere in the vocabulary of right-wing Atlanticists like van Heuvel, Albright, and Brzezinski would be found terms like «Croatian neo-Nazi revanchism», «pan-Germanic Slovenia», or «Bosnian/Kosovar Islamo-fascism», all of which were holdovers from the Nazi pasts of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Kosovar Albania during World War II.

The speed at which Germany recognized and supported the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo from Yugoslavia is a testament to the nostalgia of reunited Germany for the war years of German domination over all of the Balkans, except for the problematic Serbs, who refused to fall completely under the realm of Adolf Hitler.

The neo-conservative Atlanticists of the outgoing administration of George H W Bush and the incoming administration of Bill Clinton decided that the destruction of Yugoslavia would send a powerful message to Moscow about what could eventually be in store for the Russian Federation. The splitting of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia failed to provide the Atlanticists with any battleground on which to take on Russia. The post-Cold War Czech president, Vaclav Havel, was a darling of the Atlanticists. Havel’s Slovak counterpart, Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the 1968 «Prague Spring», remained a committed Communist and a supporter of a loose Czech-Slovak Union. Although Dubcek was feted with the same sort of international «feel good» awards and honors that were bestowed on Havel, a compliant «poodle» for the likes of Soros and Albright, Dubcek was another story. Dubcek was determined to lead the leftist Slovak Social Democratic Party and an independent Slovakia that was not necessarily in NATO’s hip pocket, as was the case with the Czech Republic.

On September 1, 1992, Dubcek’s BMW skidded out of control on a highway near Humpolec in Czech Moravia. On November 7, 1992, Dubcek died from his injuries, which included multiple organ failure. The future socialist leader of an independent Slovakia would pose no problem for a NATO that planned to expand to the East. The attention of the Atlanticists would switch to another rigid socialist who stood in the way of NATO expansion. That person was Milosevic.

It is clear from van Heuven’s 1988 memo that the US goals for Yugoslavia would end up in a dismembered federation. The Central Intelligence Agency, through its support for Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian separatists, encouraged ethnic tensions that provoked widespread violence that ultimately led to Yugoslavia’s dismemberment. «Dismemberment» of Yugoslavia is a constant theme in van Heuven’s 1988 memo summarizing the combined «sense» of America’s various intelligence agencies.

The CIA’s biggest problem in Yugoslavia was to «de-Titoize» the federation. World War II partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito brought the disparate peoples of federal Yugoslavia with a simple slogan: «Yugoslavia: six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets, one Party». The one party was the Communist Party. Although Tito allowed the Yugoslav republics a great deal of local autonomy, the van Heuven memo pointed out that this was at the expense market forces being able to take advantage of a uniform economic policy throughout Yugoslavia. Therefore, Yugoslavia would have to be dismantled with the component republics being able to be more easily absorbed into NATO and the EU than a large unwieldy Yugoslav federation. Therefore, for the Atlanticists, Yugoslavia had to die and die quickly.

The CIA and its affiliates decided that the northern Catholic, Western, and relatively prosperous republics of Croatia and Slovenia would be the first to carve out of Yugoslavia. US weapons and mercenaries were provided to Croatia for its military standoff against the Yugoslav army. The Yugoslav army was considered in 1988 to be a major barrier to NATO’s designs for the country. But van Heuven and others believed that if Yugoslavia could be economically dealt with by more than 200 percent inflation and an unpayable foreign debt, the political disruption would adversely affect the federal Yugoslav armed forces. The Atlanticists were correct as Croatia scored a military victory over Serbia in Operation Storm of 1995, which wrested control of the self-proclaimed Serb Republic of Krajina and provided assistance to the Bosnian army in seizing control of Western Bosnia from Serb forces. Operation Storm received covert support from NATO and the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and Germany.

The Atlanticists also wanted to see the poorer Yugoslav southern and Orthodox and Muslim republics go their own way. Milosevic was demonized by the Atlanticists over his plans to reassert Serbian control over the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. The Atlanticists, in their support for irredentist Hungarian nationalism in Vojvodina and Albanian nationalism in Kosovo, knew a human rights conflagration would be ignited. While muted in Vojvodina, the resulting bloody ethnic turmoil in Kosovo ended in NATO having their reason to occupy the Albanian province and shepherd it to independence.

The Atlanticists’ propaganda machine painted Milosevic and the Serbs as dangerous «hegemonists». There was yet one more target for the NATO butchers who dismembered Yugoslavia. Montenegro was convinced that they were not, as insisted upon by post-World War I Yugoslavia, Serbs but Montenegrins, totally distinct from the Serbs. The same NATO psychological warfare operation was used to convince Macedonians that they, too, were different from Serbs and should be independent. NATO, however, never took into consideration the fact that Greece would never allow a country on its northern border with the name «Macedonia». The Atlanticists have never been known to be keen scholars of the histories of lands they intend to carve up for their own selfish purposes.

Today, Yugoslavia is a jigsaw puzzle of a once-strong, independent, and non-aligned federation. In addition to opening up southeastern Europe to full NATO incorporation, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was also designed to send a message to Russia. That message remains: if Yugoslavia could be dissected into seven independent republics, what could NATO and the Atlanticists do to the Russian Federation, spanning eleven time zones and consisting of 85 federal entities, many of which are based on ethnicity? NATO has already shown with Yugoslavia what it is capable of doing.