Imperialism – Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:53:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.16 When You Lie It’s Misinformation, When They Lie It’s Cool https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/04/09/when-you-lie-its-misinformation-when-they-lie-its-cool/ Sat, 09 Apr 2022 19:54:47 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=805245 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

The most powerful empire that has ever existed, which is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and continuously works to destroy any nation who challenges its global dominion, claims that it is in a global power struggle against “authoritarianism”.

* * *

Russia will lose the propaganda war on every front, at least in the west. It will lose every narrative dispute about alleged war crimes in the court of public opinion, whether those allegations are true or not. The US military is beatable, the US dollar is beatable, but the US propaganda machine is an unstoppable juggernaut.

* * *

Can’t believe we’ve been watching people lose their social media accounts for posting “misinformation” this whole time only for US officials to come right out and admit that they’ve been running an active disinformation campaign where they knowingly circulate lies about Russia.

A random guy says something on social media that differs from mainstream consensus? That’s misinformation; he needs to be de-platformed. The most powerful government in the world uses the most powerful media institutions in the world to circulate disinfo? That’s just fine normal stuff.

It’s actually really disturbing that US empire managers now feel comfortable just leaking the fact that they are blatantly lying to the public to win a psywar against Putin. It means they’re confident they can get the public to consciously consent to their rulers lying to them for their own good.

* * *

US officials: We are circulating disinformation in an infowar against Russia.

Me: Those US officials said they’re circulating disinformation in an infowar against Russia.

Liberals: Oh yeah right Caitlin, everything’s just a big, giant conspiracy!

* * *

Twitter consults with the US government when deciding what to censor, consults with US government-funded think tanks to determine what people see on the platform, conducts censorship in favor of US government narratives, and has the gall to label others “state-affiliated media”.

Twitter is state-affiliated media.

* * *

Don’t take life advice from unhappy people, don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create, don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want yours to be, don’t take advice on the Ukraine war from people who supported the Iraq invasion.

* * *

People tell me, “Talk to Ukrainians!”

No matter how many Ukrainians I talk to, it will still be an objective fact that the US government and western media have a well-documented history of lying about every war, and that wanting direct hot warfare between nuclear superpowers is fucking insane.

* * *

It’s amazing how many arguments I run into that essentially boil down to “Your opinion is Russian.” It’s like the word “Russian” stopped referring to a nation and its population and now refers to some sort of metaphysical quality of one’s soul, similar to the word “Satanic”.

* * *

The other day a longtime lefty follower called me a bootlicker for saying the US military should not directly attack the Russian military in Ukraine. Opposing US military interventionism and World War 3 is bootlicking now. War propaganda is turning people’s brains into soup.

* * *

The agenda to create a one world government is not some hidden conspiracy involving secret societies and shadowy figures with Jewish surnames. The US empire is openly working to unite the planet under a single power structure which effectively functions as one government.

* * *

Washington DC is the hub of the imperial political machine, Virginia is the hub of the imperial war machine, California is the hub of the imperial propaganda machine.

* * *

In the end we’re just a confused species who entered into an awkward developmental transition phase because our brains evolved too fast.

We wound up with the ability to think abstract thoughts but without the wisdom to refrain from identifying with them. With the ability to invent nuclear weapons but without the wisdom to refrain from building them. The ability to conquer our ecosystem without the wisdom to refrain from doing so. To write vast tomes of philosophy that contain not one line telling us how to feel content in our own bodies, on our own home planet. To construct entire belief systems that are utterly useless for living in harmony with what is.

I’m sure birds and whales went through awkward evolutionary transition phases as well before they turned into the graceful flyers and swimmers they are today. Their early ancestors probably looked downright ridiculous for a while. It’s just that their transitions didn’t involve giant prefrontal cortices in their skulls that make childbirth painful and could easily give rise to the end of all life on earth.

The birth of a human baby is difficult due to the size of our enormous, rapidly evolved brains relative to the more slowly evolved pelvic bone. The birth of a sane humanity will be difficult for similar reasons.

I do believe we have the ability to make the jump from this awkward transition phase to become a truly conscious species. But it looks like if we make it, it’s going to be by the skin of our omnivore teeth.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> The U.S. Empire’s Ultimate Target Is Not Russia but China https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/04/01/us-empire-ultimate-target-is-not-russia-but-china/ Fri, 01 Apr 2022 20:54:22 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=802487 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

  1. Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC
  2. Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners
  3. Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe
  4. Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem

In what history may one day view as the US empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy Number One in China. Instead, the exact opposite happened.

On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the US empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> Charade Buster… Biden Goes Off Script With Regime-Change Admission on Russia https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/28/charade-buster-biden-goes-off-script-with-regime-change-admission-on-russia/ Mon, 28 Mar 2022 19:34:27 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=799944 After Biden’s charade-busting admission it will be difficult politically to maintain US-European “unity” over such a flagrant imperial agenda.

U.S. President Joe Biden came to Europe last week riding high on European deference towards America’s leadership. Then he went to Warsaw to make a victory lap speech at the weekend which was billed as marking the high point in galvanizing European and NATO unity towards Russia.

But the climax cratered like a house of cards. As the president was boarding Air Force One to take him home, the much-vaunted transatlantic unity was in disarray from Biden’s cack-handed big moment.

It reminds one of former President Barack Obama’s cautionary words in appraising Biden. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” said Obama of his former vice president and his gaffe-prone big mouth.

Biden’s speech in Warsaw was a carefully crafted rousing one. It was of course littered with mangled words as is Biden’s rambling style, and laden with the usual banal American arrogance about leading the free world against evil dictators. Nevertheless, he also appeared to succeed in rallying the unity of the U.S. and its allies in facing down alleged Russian aggression. That unity certainly seemed remarkable with regard to NATO’s and the European Union’s response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. The Europeans have ratcheted up economic sanctions against Russia at the behest of Washington; they are buying up U.S. weapons and set to import American energy instead of Russian.

It was all going swimmingly well until the very end of the speech when Biden suddenly went off script and, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, declared: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

There it is. Regime change, according to Biden. European allies have recoiled in embarrassment over the clumsy admission. Britain, France, Germany and the European Union have all said they repudiate the objective. The distancing from Washington is not so much out of principle but rather out of the bad political look.

After weeks of an intense Western media campaign projecting the policy as supposedly defending Ukraine (and European democracy), the U.S. president was letting it be known that the real endgame is regime change in Moscow.

Just like the Biden order to pull out from Afghanistan last year, the European leaders are left looking like bystanders at a bus stop. Washington calls the shots without even the pretense of consulting its vassals.

At the end of a European tour deemed up to that point to be a stunning success for the American president owing to the fawning deference he was shown days before, and just at the very end of a set-piece address choreographed for the history books, Joe Biden blew it.

The White House immediately swung into damage-limitation mode, urgently clarifying that the president did not actually mean regime change. Biden himself denied that he was referring to regime change when he got back to the U.S. But even sycophantic news outlets admitted the difficulty in trying to spin any other literal meaning.

Biden’s knack for putting his foot in his mouth has been around for a long time during 50 years as a politician. It can’t be simply explained as a sign of senility although the recent frequency of gaffes suggests his mental acuity is waning with his 79-year-old age. During his first year-and-half as 46th president, administration aides have countless times had to clean up sloppy remarks. In one notorious clanger, he appeared to repudiate Washington’s decades-old One China Policy, saying the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the mainland.

The laugh is Biden touts himself as a “foreign policy expert” from his many years as a Senator and roving ambassador before he entered the White House, first as vice president under Obama and now as the president.

If this is American expertise, then what does incompetence look like? At a time of extremely sensitive U.S.-Russian relations, Biden has called Putin “a killer” and “war criminal”. On the weekend before his regime-change manifesto was announced, he labeled the Russian president a “butcher” and compared the Kremlin with the Third Reich.

The hypocrisy of Biden is bad enough. He has endorsed endless criminal U.S. wars and regime-change operations that have resulted in millions of deaths and whole nations destroyed. For Biden to call anyone a war criminal and butcher is too nauseating for irony.

But it is contemptible that the Ukraine conflict is reduced by Biden to simplistic caricatures in total denial of how the U.S.-led NATO alliance has largely created the confrontation with Russia.

Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among the damage-limitation squad over the weekend’s incendiary remarks. Blinken had the temerity to say: “We don’t have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else.” That’s from Blinken who helped engineer the regime-change wars in Libya and Syria while Biden was vice president.

The Ukraine conflict is only a part of a bigger picture of U.S. hostility towards Russia. Washington and its European minions have tried to portray NATO’s eastward expansion over the years as an innocent development of a defensive nature.

Moscow has repeatedly denounced NATO’s stance as aggressive and an existential threat to Russian national security. When the Kremlin proposed a security treaty at the end of last year, it was rebuffed by Washington and NATO. That inevitably led to the war in Ukraine as a defensive counter-measure by Russia.

Biden just ripped off the wrapping on the policy. In one fell swoop, he just proved what Russia has been saying. His admission of regime change against Russia is an admission of violating the UN Charter and international law. The European leaders are aghast not because they are against such criminality. Their concern is that they too are exposed as being complicit in a criminal conspiracy. They fear how their public will react to that imperial agenda. Is this what economic sanctions and resulting energy price inflation are for?

Good old Joe, screwing it up – again. Just when Uncle Sam had the Europeans corralled under supposed American leadership, the imperial agenda blows up in their face.

This also explains why the Zelensky regime in Kiev is procrastinating and avoiding political settlement of the conflict. Settlement is not in Washington’s interest. It wants the proxy war to continue because the real aim is to use Ukraine as a cat’s paw to destabilize Russia. Zelensky and Kiev can’t make the peace because that’s not what their handlers in Washington are after. Washington wants and needs permanent tensions and conflict (short of all-out war) with Russia.

After Biden’s charade-busting admission, however, it will be difficult politically to maintain US-European “unity” over such a flagrant imperial agenda.

]]> What Did We Learn from Iraq War 2.0? https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/27/what-did-we-learn-from-iraq-war-2-0/ Sun, 27 Mar 2022 17:24:49 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=799917 By Peter VAN BUREN

March 19 passed without a mention of its ghosts. The day was the 19th anniversary of Iraq War 2.0, the one about Saddam Hussein’s weapons’ of mass destruction. What have we learned over the almost two decades since?

While the actual Gotterdammerung for the new order took place just six months ago in Afghanistan, as the last American troops clambered aboard their transports, abandoning American citizens and a multi-million dollar embassy to the same fate as Saigon, Iraq is so much more the better example. The Afghan War did not begin under false pretenses as much as it began under no pretenses. Americans in 2001 would have supported carpet bombing Santa’s Workshop. Never mind we had been attacked by mostly Saudi operators, the blood letting would start in rural Afghanistan and the goal was some gumbo of revenge, stress relief, hunting down bin Laden in the wrong country, and maybe nation building, it didn’t matter.

But if Afghanistan was a pubescent teenager’s coming to the scene too quickly, Iraq was a seduction. There was no reason to invade it, so one had to be created. The Bush administration tried the generic “Saddam is pure evil” approach, a fixture of every recent American conflict. He gasses his own people (also tried later in Syria with Assad.) Saddam is looking to move on NATO ally Turkey (substitute Poland in 2022.) But none of these stuck with the American public, so a narrative was cut from whole cloth: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, WMDs, chemical and biological, soon enough nuclear. He was a madman who Had. To. Be. Stopped.

That this was completely untrue mattered not at all. The American MSM took up the story with great energy, first as stenographers for the Bush Administration fed by public statements, and then as amplifiers of the message fed by leaks from senior officials. At the same time, dissenting voices were stifled, including a number of whistleblowers who had been working inside Iraq and knew the weapons claims were a hoax. In an age before social media, the clampdown on other ideas was near total. When their true editor-in-chief George W. Bush stood up, a mix of Ben Bradley and Lou Grant, to proclaim “you were either with us or with the terrorists,” the media stifled dissent in its ranks nearly completely.

It became obvious from the initial days of the invasion there were no WMDs, but that mattered little. The WMDs were only the excuse to start the war. Once underway, the justification changed to regime change, democratization, nation building, and then as America’s own actions spawned an indigenous terrorist movement, fighting the indigenous terrorist movement. When all that devolved into open Sunni-Shia civil was in Iraq, the justification switched to stopping the civil war we had started. It was all a farce, with the media fanning the flames, rewriting its “takes” and creating new heroes (Petraeus) to replace the old heroes they had created who had failed (all the general before Petraeus.) The NYT issued a quiet mea culpa along the way and then like a couple caught having affairs who decided to stay married anyway, vowed never to speak of this again.

That mea culpa is worth a second look in light of Ukraine 2022. The Times wrote its reporting “depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate.” In other words, sources with a goal of their own are not reliable. The Times noted that information from all sources was “insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.” In other words, stenography is not good journalism. A reporter should ask questions, challenge veracity, and especially should do so as new information comes to light. The NYT also said “Articles based on dire claims tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.” The memory hole.

Those are of course Journalism 101-level errors admitted to by arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the world. It would be easier to be more generous to the NYT (and of course they are just a placeholder for all MSM who committed the same sins) if they had not gone on to purposefully repeat many of the same crimes reporting on Libya and Syria, Russiagate, the Covid crisis (“two weeks to flatten the curve”) and now, the war in Ukraine.

The big change is that while in its previous abetting of propaganda the Times, et al, took the side of the US government in supporting war, in Ukraine they are working for the Ukrainian government. Almost all of the video and imagery out of Ukraine comes from the government and those anonymous sources of 2003 have been replaced by no real sourcing at all, simply scary pictures and nameless English-speaking peasants somehow conversant in Zelensky’s own talking points.

Here’s eight seconds of a tank blowing up. Where was it shot? When? Was the explosion caused by a mine, a missile, or something internal to the tank? In most cases the media has no idea of the answers. Even if they tumble on to the basic who-what-where, the exploding tank video is devoid of context. Was that the lead tank hit, blunting the Russian advance toward a village? Or was it a Russian tank that lingered in an open field and got picked off in a lucky shot, strategically without much consequence? It is just a little jolt for the viewer. Such videos were immensely popular among terrorists in Iraq; nearly every one captured had inspirational video on his phone of a US vehicle being blown apart by a roadside IED. Now the same thing is on MSNBC for us.

Remember that stalled Russian convoy? The media stumbled on online photos of a Russian convoy some 40 miles long. Within hours those images became a story — the Russians had run out of gas just miles from Kiev, stalling their offensive. That soon led to think pieces claiming this was evidence of Russian military incompetency, corruption, and proof Ukraine would soon win. It all fit with the narrative of plucky, brave Ukrainians standing up to Putin the madman, the deranged psychopath threatening NATO and indeed democracy itself. If only the U.S. would step in an help! The whole of the American media has laid itself available to funnel the Zelensky message westward — go to war with Russia. We’re shown a photo of a destroyed building, maybe from 2016 maybe from yesterday. It soon becomes a hospital bombing by the Russians. A photo of a stationary vehicle is narrativized as the Ukrainians are capturing Russian gear. The media is once again taking whole information provided by sources with an agenda, drawing the US into this war, and reporting it uncritically and unchallenged.

Any information from the Russian side is instantly misinformation, and the pseudo-media of Twitter and Facebook not only call it fake, they make efforts to block it entirely so Americans cannot even view it long enough to make up their own minds. Pro-war journalists in America demand dissenters be investigated as foreign agents. You can’t see Facebook in Moscow and you can’t see RT in America. That’s not the equivalency a democracy should ascribe to.

As with Iraq, the goal is to present a one-sided, coordinated narrative of a complex event with the goal of dragging America into a new war. Will it work again this time?

wemeantwell.com

]]> Biden Visit Marks Abject Subjugation of European Leaders To U.S. Empire https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/25/biden-visit-marks-abject-subjugation-of-european-leaders-to-us-empire/ Fri, 25 Mar 2022 20:28:29 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=797500 It is a pathetic spectacle. European governments are prostrated before the American empire.

U.S. President Joe Biden flew to Europe this week with the presidential nuclear codes on display by his entourage. Among the fleet of presidential aircraft was the “doomsday plane” – a specially fitted-out Boeing 747 capable of withstanding nuclear radiation and serving, if-needs-be, as a “Pentagon in the sky”.

Biden attended three back-to-back emergency summits of the G7, NATO and the European Union leaders in Brussels. It was reportedly the first time an American president has ever been invited to attend such an EU leaders’ summit.

There was a palpable sense of over-the-top contrived drama regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in that country is now in its fourth week. Moscow has claimed reasons of self-defense and protection of Russian-speaking people in Donbass from a NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev.

The Western media and their governments, on the other hand, have claimed Russia’s actions are unprovoked aggression and the worst episode of barbarism since the Second World War. There is feverish Western media fears of Russia deploying chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. There are also hysterical fears of Russia next attacking Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of Europe.

Western media are portraying Biden’s visit to Europe as a replay of the supposed American defense of Europe from Nazism and Communism.

This is an incredible distortion by the Western media. The whole background of the conflict in Ukraine fomented by the U.S. and NATO over the past three decades has been scrubbed into a memory hole. So too scrubbed is the U.S. and NATO blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia whose 23rd anniversary occurred this week. The aggressive expansionism of NATO and hostility towards Russia have culminated in the present war in Ukraine. Yet Western media present this as due to alleged one-sided Russian aggression and maniacal tyranny in Moscow.

During his half-century career as a politician, Joe Biden fervently backed the U.S. and NATO war in Yugoslavia, as well as countless other criminal imperialist wars and regime-change operations. He is personally responsible for fomenting the coup regime in Kiev from 2014 onwards. The U.S. and NATO weaponization of Ukraine, including the functioning of Pentagon-sponsored biowarfare laboratories, is associated with Biden’s direct involvement in supporting the anti-Russian Kiev regime and its Nazi paramilitaries.

The irony of Biden warning about Russia using WMDs in Ukraine is sickening beyond words. The jihadist terrorists whom the US backed in Syria were responsible for atrocities with chemical weapons as provocations for NATO bombing of Syria. Biden’s son, Hunter, is implicated in funding bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine through his Pentagon-connected capital investment firm, Seneca.

And yet despite this flagrant imperial corruption and criminality, Biden was welcomed this week by European leaders who are demonstrating beyond doubt that they are nothing but an embarrassing collection of vassals.

The upshot is that Biden is selling massively more American weapons to Europe than ever before. He is sending more U.S. troops to European bases. The EU has imposed way more sanctions on Russia than the United States has, thus inflicting much more damage on European economies than the American one. Biden is to sign new deals with Europe on supplying American gas exports that are more expensive than Russian gas. The killing off of European-Russian energy trade is the crowning achievement for American imperialist interests.

Across the European Union, draconian media censorship has blacked out entirely the Russian news outlets Sputnik and RT. European citizens are being denied any alternative information or analysis. What the EU is doing is far more repressive than what the U.S. is even doing in terms of censoring media. European so-called democracy is coming out of the closet as proto-fascism.

It is a pathetic spectacle. European governments are prostrated before the American empire.

It is blatant what President Biden is asserting. A new Cold War that is reshaping Europe under American hegemony, selling weapons and expensive gas to Europe while excluding Russia from developing any normal relations with its continental neighbors. The war in Ukraine has been a long time coming because of U.S. policies facilitated by politicians like Joe Biden and Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State who led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, who died this week.

It is incredible that not one of the incumbent European Union leaders has voiced criticism or dissent from the U.S.-contrived new Cold War. Of course not. They are bought and paid for like the whores they are, while their populations suffer from poverty, militarism, and the shadow of nuclear war.

The European leaders are like quislings licking the boot of their master. Their abject subjugation is emboldening American imperial warmongering against Russia. They seem willing to let their own people suffer the consequences of U.S.-led conflict, even to the point of facilitating a Third World War in Europe.

There is a misconception that fascism in Europe was somehow a unique development in Nazi Germany. The Third Reich had many European collaborators in Poland, the Baltics, Italy, France, Spain, and other covert sources like the British establishment during the 1930s.

U.S. and Western media present Biden and the European so-called leaders as a model of democracy and righteousness. The truth is we are seeing the return to fascism in Europe under the leadership of U.S. hegemony. When Biden took up office in the White House in January 2021, he declared, “America is back”. For anyone paying attention to history and U.S. power ambitions that kind of jingoistic bragging was seen as ominous. It’s becoming more ominous from every step the U.S. takes to wind up reckless tensions with Russia and indeed China.

America is back all right, and the European vassals are on their backs, and also their fronts… because, you know, we have to be gender pluralist in our new touchy-feely fascist era.

What’s even more shameful is the European political class is acting as a doormat for American imperialism against the urgent interests of European citizens. The ultimate interest is one of having peace. That contradiction is a harbinger of massive social upheaval across Europe in revolt against their treacherous leaders.

]]> Too Late to Revive a Sane U.S. Foreign Policy? The Roots of the Monroe Doctrine Revisited https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/13/too-late-to-revive-sane-us-foreign-policy-roots-of-monroe-doctrine-revisited/ Sun, 13 Mar 2022 18:33:08 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=794951 Rather than continuing to play by the rules of those who wish all evidence to contain Russia, it was decided that a new approach was needed.

Since Russia’s decision to militarily intervene into Ukraine, a darkness that had long remained in the shadows has been brought to the surface. This darkness took the form of an intention that could no longer hide behind the veneer of “plausible deniability” or self-congratulatory devotees of a ‘liberal rules-based international order’ that has been repeatedly blared like a broken record onto the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Rather than continuing to play by the rules of those who wish all evidence to militarily contain Russia with a NATO-controlled Ballistic Missile Shield targeting Russian defenses, it was decided that a new approach was needed and the game was called out.

Was it the evidence of the bioweapons facilities in Ukraine long treated as conspiracy theory, though now admitted to having existed by Victoria Nuland as the straw that broke the camel’s back? Was it the evidence of an immanent assault led by neo-Nazi forces onto Donbass and Crimea that had been the deciding factor? Some speculate that it was Zelensky’s February 19 call for Ukraine to break the 1994 Budapest Treaty and adopt nuclear weapons.

In truth, we may never know the specific cause of Putin’s decision, but one this is sure.

A war was NOT begun on February 24 2022. The war against Russia was actually launched on February 22, 2014 when the USA finalized its regime change on the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych and began what some have termed a slow-motion Operation Barbarossa over a prolonged 8-year period with one objective in mind: The total destruction and subjugation of the Russian Federation as outlined in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard in 1997.

With the shadow creatures having been forced to the surface, it has become increasingly clear that the virtuous image projected by the western alliance is anything but peaceful, or democratic. Rather than capturing the many obvious opportunities to resolve the crisis diplomatically over the past eight years, the USA, UK, and Kiev have instead chosen only the path of sabotage, slander, and economic war via unilateral sanctions.

So what is to be done?

I honestly don’t know if today’s USA is too far gone for its better constitutional foreign policy traditions to be revived, but I do know that if this history continues to remain buried as it has for the past several generations, then any small chance to save the republic and preserve world peace will certainly be destroyed.

The Strategic Significance of 1776 on International Affairs

Although many have been fed the myth that the USA was a nation bred for global imperial ambitions at its birth, the truth is far different. Certainly, it was never a utopic bastion of liberty untainted by hypocrisy or corruption that some romantic historians have painted over years, but inversely it was never a unidimensional evil slaveocracy as cynical Critical Race Theoreticians maintain. The USA should rather be understood as an unfinished symphony of sorts, whose practical performance too often fell far short than its sound constitutional ideals.

For starters, it is important to appreciate the fact that America’s founding documents (the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and 1787 Constitution) were the first examples in history of a form of government premised on the idea that all people were made equal, endowed with inalienable rights with no mention for race, creed, gender or class. Additionally, the notion that the legitimacy of a nation’s laws arose from the consent of the governed, and mandated to support the general welfare both in the present and long into posterity, was a profound break from the previous notions of Hobbesian law of ‘might makes right’ that had governed hereditary institutions for eons.

The practical expression of these principles to foreign policy were discussed at length by President Washington who warned the young nation of avoiding the dual evils of foreign entanglements externally and party politics domestically when he asked his fellow citizens during his outgoing address of 1796:

“Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?”

President Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart featuring his right hand resting on the Constitution

During this speech, Washington explained that IF the USA were to survive, it would be due to an international policy of “extending our commercial relations, to have with them [foreign nations] as little political connection as possible.”

Some have slandered Washington’s call for reduced political enmeshment with other nations as isolationist, but he always promoted international commerce driven by mutual benefit. It was merely imperial operations, intrigue, deceit and the new age of color revolutions starting with the Jacobin Terror during Washington’s presidency which the great leader saw as an poisonous mess that would destroy the young republic if it became enmired in foreign escapades.

John Quincy Adams and the Anti-Imperial Origins of the Monroe Doctrine

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) extended these ideas further still by drafting the Monroe Doctrine during his stint as Secretary of State from 1817-1825 which he knew could only work if America ventures “not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.

President John Quincy Adams with his hand resting on a sketch of Washington

That is to say, as long as the USA focused her efforts on fixing her own problems with a focus on internal improvements, then the Monroe Doctrine would be a blessing for both herself and the international community.

John Quincy Adams also understood the danger of the growing British-run fifth column inside of the heart of the USA then centered around the Federalist Party. While serving as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Adams wrote to his mother in 1811 (just as Napoleon was preparing his Russian invasion and as Britain were on the verge of a new war against the USA):

“If that Party [the Federalist Junto of New England] are not effectually put down in Massachusetts, as completely as they already are in New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the southern and western states, the Union is gone. Instead of a nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors.” (1)

John Quincy Adams firmly understood the world historic significance of the American revolution not as a geographical phenomenon among 13 isolated British colonies, but potentially as the spark of a new paradigm for all humanity liberated from hereditary institutions. At the turn of the 19th century, there were still French, British, Spanish and Russian imperial interests which all had ambitions to gain control of the territories of the Americas forcing the Hobbesian paradigm of war and intrigue into the new world. In the mind of Adams, as all great American patriots, this had to be stopped.

During the July 4 celebrations in 1821, Adams noted that the Declaration of Independence “was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only LEGITIMATE foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people.”

Did Adams believe that “destined to cover the surface of the globe” meant that the USA was destined to become a Pax Americana subduing the weak to her hegemony? Not at all.

On January 23, 1822 Adams wrote that colonial institutions “are incompatible with the essential character of our institutions.” He also said that “great colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them, as they are now endeavoring to abolish the slave trade.”

Adams understood the importance of seeing the world as “a community of principle” where win-win cooperation based upon the self-improvement of all parts and the whole international community as more than the mere sum of parts, would constantly bring renewal and creative vitality to diplomacy. It was a top-down systemic approach to policy that saw economics, security and political affairs interwoven into one unified system. This is an integrative way of thinking that has been sorely lost in the hyper theoretical, compartmentalized mode of zero-sum thinking dominant in today’s neo-liberal think tank complex.

It was for this reason, that Adams advocated the use of Hamiltonian national banking and large-scale infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal and railways throughout his years as Secretary of State and President. IF this system were the causal force behind the growth of American interests across the continent or the world more broadly, it would not be through brute force, but rather by the uplifting of standards of living of all parties.

Adams, Lincoln and National Banking

Working with a young protégé named Abraham Lincoln, Adams fought tooth and nail against the Spanish-American War of 1846 which saw a deep abuse of his Monroe Doctrine.

Both a young Lincoln and John Quincy Adams had earlier organized to get Whig leader William Harrison (1773-1841) elected president in 1841 with a focus on reviving Hamilton’s national bank which had earlier been killed by President Andrew Jackson to great damage to the economic sovereignty of the USA itself.

Although this ugly chapter of history has been scrubbed from the popular records, the operation to kill the second National Bank in 1832 resulted in a total collapse of all public works in order to pay the national debts using a technique not that different from the IMF demands for austerity on debtor nations in our modern era. Credit was to farmers and entrepreneurs dried up, speculation ran rampant, thousands of local currencies (many counterfeit) ran rampant, and the growth of slave-picked cotton took over the production of the nation’s productivity like a cancer.

Sadly even though legislation to revive a national bank had passed both Houses of Congress and only awaited the signature of President Harrison, his mysterious death after only three months in office put an end to that dream.

The best elements of the Whig party regrouped to form the anti-slavery republican party in 1856 after the second Whig president Zachary Taylor also died of poisoning in 1851 after only 2 years in office.

Abraham Lincoln Arises

Out of this small grouping of nationalists struggling to preserve the Union, Abraham Lincoln emerged with a concise plan to revive national banking, protectionism and a security policy founded upon the Monroe Doctrine. Describing the terms of the oncoming civil war from a global strategic perspective, Lincoln debated the pro-slavery candidate Judge Stephen Douglass in 1858 saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

We all know essentials of the Civil War, but we may not appreciate the success of that conflict depending upon Lincoln’s activation of state banking via the issuance of greenbacks and 5-20 bonds that by-passed private financiers demanding usurious interest rates. These productive bonds and greenbacks also funded the execution of the war at the same time as they funded great infrastructure projects like the Trans Continental railway uniting the continent.

Lincoln found like-minded reformers in Russia whose new Czar Alexander II was intent on carving out the rot of oligarchism, serfdom and underdevelopment that had subverted Russian potential for far too long. To this end, Alexander II liberated over 25 million serfs, began sweeping anti-corruption reforms and overhauled the finances of his nation with a focus on industrial development in tandem with the United States. The czar’s decision to send a fleet of Russian naval ships to the eastern and western coasts of the USA as a message to the British and French imperialists to stay out of the war gave Lincoln a decisive edge he needed to end the secession and preserve the union.

Sadly, this victory did not play on either the national or international scale as it should have. Not only was reconstruction soon thwarted with a newly re-organized slaveocracy creating a new program of “share cropping” that pulled newly freed blacks into a new master-slave dependency, but Lincoln’s greenbacks were soon taken out of circulation under Anglophile puppet presidents. With the 1876 Specie Resumption Act, tying the U.S. dollar to a one-to-one parity with gold, internal improvements seized up, credit to industry evaporated, speculation began to run rampant once more and bank panics began to periodically wreak havoc on the nation’s stability.

With the assassinations of Lincoln, President Garfield, and Alexander II between 1865 to 1881, a mad effort to put the Constitutional genie back into the bottle as the fifth column operations within Boston and Manhattan pushed increasingly for a new imperial foreign policy modelled on the British Empire.

William McKinley Revives the American System

The last major 19th century effort to break this traitorous network took the form of President William McKinley’s emergence into the White House in 1897. Once again, a program of national planning, protective tariffs, industrial growth both at home and abroad became the characteristic shaping U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Describing his understanding of the historic current that he was stepping into, McKinley eulogized both Lincoln and Washington in 1895 saying:

“The greatest names in American history are Washington and Lincoln. One is forever associated with the independence of the States and formation of the Federal Union; the other with universal freedom and the preservation of the Union. Washington enforced the Declaration of Independence as against England; Lincoln proclaimed its fulfillment not only to a downtrodden race in America, but to all people for all time who may seek the protection of our flag. These illustrious men achieved grander results for mankind within a single century, from 1775 to 1865, than any other men ever accomplished in all the years since first the flight of time began.”

Although he was sucked into an unjust war in the Philippines by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt (the story told here), McKinley fought consistently to defend the Monroe Doctrine by giving full U.S. support to the industrial growth of North, South and Central America. Internationally, McKinley fought to keep the USA out of the carving up of China in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and worked closely with international co-thinkers like Russia’s Count Sergei Witte and France’s Gabriel Hanotaux to advance rail development and peace treaties across Eurasia. Had such programs not been sabotaged by murder, coups and regime change operations, then it is certain that the train wreck of World War One and its sequel would never have been possible.

Sadly, after McKinley was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy launched a new 20th century trend that saw the USA extending its hegemony over weak states rather than keeping out foreign imperial intrigue as Adams had envisioned.

Assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception on Sept. 6, 1901. (BY AMERICAN PAINTER T. DART WALKER, 1905/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

FDR and Wallace Attempt to Revive a Sane American Foreign Policy

Since 1901, we have seen small but significant attempts to revive Adams’ overarching security doctrine.

We saw it come alive again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program for internationalizing the New Deal across China, India, Ibero America, the Middle East, Africa and Russia. FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace laid out the terms of this international New Deal in his 1943 book “The Century of the Common Man” laid out this vision for the post-war world saying:

“The new democracy by definition abhors imperialism. But by definition also, it is internationally minded and supremely interested in raising the productivity, and therefore the standard of living, of all the peoples of the world. First comes transportation and this is followed by improved agriculture, industrialization, and rural elecrification…. As Molotov so clearly indicated, this brave, free world of the future can not be created by the United States and Russia alone. Undoubtedly China will have a strong influence on the world which will come out of the war and in exerting this influence it is quite possible that the principles of Sun Yat Sen will prove to be as significant as those of any other modern statesman.”

Sadly after FDR’s untimely death on April 12, 1945, the Anglo-American special relationship was again revived and all international New Dealers were quickly purged from all positions of influence. Despite an Orwellian age of anti-Russian hysteria then taking hold, Henry Wallace still maintained some influence in the U.S. government (although having been downgraded to Secretary of Commerce under President Harry Truman).

In the September 12, 1946 speech that got him fired, Wallace clearly laid out the two paths forward for the USA:

“Make no mistake about it—the British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war…

“… It is essential that we look abroad through our own eyes and not through the eyes of either the British Foreign Office or a pro-British or anti-Russian press…. The tougher we get, the tougher they get.

“I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the near East with the lives of American soldiers. We cannot let national oil rivalries force us into a war….”

Eisenhower to Kennedy: The Battle for the Soul of America Continued

Eisenhower made some positive moves towards this renewal by ending the Korean War and attempting his Crusade for Peace driven by U.S.-Russian cooperation and advanced scientific investments into India, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Latin America. Eisenhower’s many positive plans were sadly derailed by a growing parasite in the heart of the U.S. deep state which he addressed in his famous “military industrial complex” speech of 1960.

Kennedy’s efforts to extract the U.S. military from Vietnam, revive FDR’s New Deal spirit in the 1960s, while seeking entente with Russia was another noble effort to bring back Adams’ security doctrine, but his early death soon put an end to this orientation.

From 1963 to 2016, tiny piecemeal efforts to revive a sane security doctrine proved short-lived and were often undone by the more powerful pressures of unipolarist intrigue that sought nothing less than full Anglo-American hegemony in the form of a New World Order whose arrival was celebrated by the likes of Bush Sr and Kissinger in 1992.

‘America First’ Revives a Sane Security Doctrine

Despite his many limitations, President Trump did make an effort to restore a sane security doctrine by focusing American interests on healing from 50+ years of self-inflicted atrophy under globalized outsourcing, militarism and post-industrialism.

Despite having to contend with an embarrassingly large and independent military-intelligence industrial complex that didn’t get less powerful after Kennedy’s murder, Trump announced the terms of his international outlook in April 2019 saying:

“Between Russia, China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous.… I think it’s much better if we all got together and didn’t make these weapons … those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace.”

This call for a U.S.-Russia-China cooperative policy ran in tandem with the first phase of the U.S.-China Trade deal which went into effect in January 2020 guaranteeing $350 billion of U.S. finished goods purchased by China. None other than Soros himself suffered a public meltdown that month when he announced that the two greatest threats to his global open society were 1) Trump’s USA and 2) Xi’s China.

Of course, a pandemic derailed much of this momentum and the trade deal slowly broke apart. Despite these failures, the idea of returning the USA to an “American first” outlook by cleaning up its own internal messes, extracting CIA operations from the military, cutting the USA out of the Big Pharma-led World Health Organization, defunded regime change organizations like NED abroad and returning to a traditionally American policy of protective tariffs were all extremely important initiatives that Trump put into motion, and set a precedent which must be capitalized upon by nationalist forces from all parties wishing to save their republic from an oncoming calamity.

America’s Slide into Self-Destruction

One year into Biden’s “rules based international order”, the hope for stability and peaceful cooperation among the nations of the earth has been seriously undermined. Unlike Trump, who rightfully severed U.S. cooperation with NATO, the current neo-con heavy administration has made absorbing Ukraine and other former Soviet States into NATO a high priority going so far as to infuse private mercenary forces, and Al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters from Syria into Ukraine to fight the Russians. To this dangerous policy we have also seen billions of dollars of lethal weapons sent into a neo-Nazi infested Ukrainian military with confused untrained citizens from Ukraine being told to fight and die for a cause that even western geopoliticians admit they cannot win.

Today’s USA has committed to a full-scale policy of self-destruction both on economic and military levels promoting a war which risks escalating out of control into a thermonuclear exchange both against Russia and also China.

When looking at Russian demands for security guarantees from this standpoint and holding in mind the new form of a Eurasian Manifest Destiny emerging with Putin’s Far Eastern Vision, Polar Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is a rich irony that the spirit of John Quincy Adams’ security doctrine is alive in the world. Just not in the USA.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

(1) Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).

]]> When Did the Ukraine War Begin? https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/10/when-did-the-ukraine-war-begin/ Thu, 10 Mar 2022 20:56:59 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=792705 By Roger HARRIS

Viewing the Ukraine war as starting with the current Russian invasion leads to very different conclusions than if you consider that the starting point of this war was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine. The coup, which had elements of an authentic popular revolt, has been used by outside powers to pursue geopolitical ends.

The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.

The US imperial army

NATO, it should be understood, is an army in the service of the US empire. Viewing it simply as an alliance of nominally sovereign entities obscures that it is commanded as a tool of US foreign policy in its stated quest of world dominion; that is, “full spectrum dominance.” The “alliance” members must fully integrate their militaries under that command along with purchasing US war equipment and offering up their own citizens as troops.

After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the first cold war, instead of NATO being disbanded, the opposite occurred. There was no “peace dividend” and no honoring of the promise that NATO would not expand any further. Instead, NATO stampeded east towards the borders of the Russian Federation adding fourteen new members of former USSR republics and allies.

Even before the 2014 coup, the US’s fateful decision in 2006 to draw Ukraine into NATO posed an existential threat to Russia. By December 2021, according to “realpolitik” international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, a US-armed Ukraine had become a de facto member of NATO, crossing a redline for Russia. Mearsheimer concludes, “the west bears primary responsibility for what is happening today.”

Failure of peaceful negotiations

Speaking before the UN on March 2, the Venezuelan representative identified the breach of the Minsk Protocols, with the encouragement of the US, as the precursor of the present crisis in Ukraine.

After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the Minsk Protocols were an attempt at a peaceful settlement through “a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.” Moscow, Kyiv, and the eastern separatists were all parties to the agreements.

The Russian perception of negotiations with the western alliance in the runup to the invasion, as reported by the New York Post, was described using insensitive terminology as “like the mute with the deaf” by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on his meeting with his British counterpart. (NOTE: the NYP, even in the updated version of the article, refers to Lavrov as the “Soviet” Foreign Minister, forgetting that the USSR hasn’t been around for over 30 years.)

Following the latest round of “sweeping” US-imposed sanctions on Russia, their Foreign Ministry announced, “we have reached the line where the point of no return begins.” Such sanctions are a form of warfare as deadly as bombs.

Upsides of war for the US and the downsides for everyone else

War is a great diversion for Joe Biden, whose popularity has been slipping due to a lackluster domestic performance. The US empire has much to gain: further unifying NATO under US domination, reducing Russian economic competition in the European energy market, justifying increasing the US war budget, and facilitating sales of war material to NATO vassals.

NATO has dumped over a trillion dollars in arms and facilities into the border countries next to Russia and continues to this day to pour lethal weapons into Ukraine. The leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 recently bragged on YouTube (while other voices are censored): “We are being given so much weaponry not because as some say ‘the west is helping us,’ not because it is best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the west…because we have fun, we have fun killing.”

More than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas in warfare between ethnic Russians and Ukrainian regular military/right-wing paramilitaries in the eight years since the coup. The self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, beleaguered enclaves in the Donbas of largely ethnic Russians, seceded from Ukraine and were recognized by Russia on February 21.

The semi-governmental (over 80% US government funded) Rand Corporation’s playbook for the US and its allies says it all: “pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”

The conflict could have ruinous consequences for the Russian Federation, according to western sources and even some people who identify as left in Russia. As a bonus for the US, according to Juan S. González, the US National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, the sanctions against Russia are “by design” intended to hurt Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all targeted by Washington for regime change. And, of course, for Ukrainians of all ethnicities there is no winning in a war.

It is difficult to think what other options Russia has to defend itself. Perhaps there are some, but surely they are slim. It should be clear that the US has continually been the aggressor even if some do not agree with the Russian response. As Phyllis Bennis with the Institute for Policy Studies argues, the US provoked this war.

Severing Russia from Europe

The peaceful integration of Russia with the rest of Europe would be a great threat to the US empire. A unified or even a cordial Europe could truly herald the end of US hegemony. The long-game geopolitical goal of preventing the unification of Europe may well be the fundamental aim of US foreign policy in that continent.

What would become of “US strategic interests” if peace were to break out in Europe, and Russia would become partners with Germany, France, and Italy? A potentially more independent Europe, including Russia, would challenge the US-dominated Atlanticist project.

The extreme hostility that the US took to the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, went beyond the narrow economism of favoring US liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. Where Washington’s earlier efforts of imposing illegal unilateral economic sanctions on its NATO ally faltered, the current conflict will surely discourage any rational and cooperative economic association of Russia with its western neighbors.

The severing of Russia from the rest of Europe is a tremendous victory for the US imperial project. This is especially the case, when there were recent moves in the direction of economic, cultural, and political exchange, which have now been reversed.

Spheres of Influence and inter-imperialist rivalry

Russia shares a 1,426-mile border with Ukraine and considers that region within its security perimeter, vital to its national security. The US, which is 5,705 miles from Ukraine, considers the world its sphere of influence. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest.

The contemporary geopolitical dynamic has evolved from the one Lenin described in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was then characterized as one of inter-imperialist rivalry. This theory is not entirely adequate to understand today’s world dominated by a single superpower (with its European Union, British, and Japanese junior partners). Surely, national centers of capital continue to compete. But over-arching this competition is a militantly imposed unipolar pax Americana.

There is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

Further, even if one just understands the present situation as one of a clash of two imperialist camps, that does not preclude taking sides. Surely World War II was an inter-imperialist war, but that did not prevent socialists from opposing the Axis pole and supporting the allies. The US is ever more aggressively stirring up the pot, not only in Ukraine, but also Taiwan, Africa, and elsewhere.

Asymmetry of the Forces

The forces are asymmetrical in this contest. Russia and the US may have comparable nuclear arsenals, but Russia has no bases of any kind in North America compared to at least six nuclear and many more conventional bases for the US in Europe. The US military budget is 11.9 times the size of Russia’s, not to mention the war chests of Washington’s NATO allies. Similarly, the US economy is 12.5 times as large as Russia’s. Of the Fortune 500 top international corporations, only four are Russian compared to 122 from the US. Russia’s labor productivity is only 36% of the US’s. In terms of finance capital, the US has 11 of the world’s top 100 banks; Russia has one. Far from being a key exporter of capital, Russia is a leader in capital flight, in part owing to sanctions imposed by the US and its allies.

As analyst Stansfield Smith concludes, Russia “plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources.” Russia is a target of US-led imperialism; Ukraine is caught in the crossfire.

Hypocrisy of the “international community”

If only the outrage over the Russian invasion had some ethical grounding by what is misleadingly called the “international community,” but is in reality the US and its subalterns. Biden’s touted “rules based order” is one where the US makes the rules and the rest of the world follows its orders, in contradiction to the Charter of the UN and other recognized international law.

From Cuba, journalist Ángel Guerra Cabrera laments: “our region witnessed flagrant US violations of those principles in Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, the last three through direct invasions. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are current examples of a US policy that flatly denies its assertion, not to mention Puerto Rico.”

International law expert Alfred de Zayas reminds us that the so-called “international community seems to have accepted egregious violations of Art. 2(4) [of the UN Charter] by the US against Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela; by NATO countries against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yugoslavia; by Israel against all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians and Lebanese; by Saudi Arabia against Yemen; by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh, by Turkey against Cyprus, etc.”

How this war will end

Regardless of how one sides – or not – in the new cold war, it is instructive to understand the context of the conflict. This is especially so when views outside the dominant US narrative, such as those of Russian outlets Sputnik and RTthat hosted US intellectuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, are being silenced.

This article addressed how this war began. How it will end or even if it will end is another story. The world is spiraling into a new cold war, emanating from a region formally at peace under socialism.

Expressing a view from the standpoint of the Global South, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commented: “we do not want to be anyone’s enemy. We are not interested, nor is the world, in a new cold war…which is for sure dragging the whole world into a conflict that could put humanity in danger.” If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the end of endless war will come with end of the US imperial project that provoked this crisis.

counterpunch.org

]]> The Casualties of Empire https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/09/the-casualties-of-empire/ Wed, 09 Mar 2022 20:41:45 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=792678 Diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management are at work now that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.

By Patrick LAWRENCE

The news reports come in daily from Moscow, Kiev and the Western capitals: how many dead since Russia began its intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24,  how many injured, how many hungry or cold, how many displaced. We do not know the true count of casualties and the extent of the suffering and ought not pretend we do: This is the reality of war, each side having its version of unfolding events.

My inclination is to add the deaths in Ukraine these past two weeks to the 14,000 dead and the 1.5 million displaced since 2014, when the regime in Kiev began shelling its own citizens in the eastern provinces — this because the people of Donetsk and Lugansk rejected the U.S.­–cultivated coup that deposed their elected president. This simple math gives us a better idea of how many Ukrainians are worthy of our mourning.

As we mourn, it is time to consider the wider consequences of this conflict, for Ukrainians are not alone among its victims. Who else has suffered? What else has been damaged? This war is of a kind humanity has never before known. What are its costs?

Among paying-attention people it is increasingly plain that Washington’s intent in provoking Moscow’s intervention is, and probably has been from the first, to instigate a long-running conflict that bogs down Russian forces and leaves Ukrainians to wage an insurgency that cannot possibly succeed.

Is there another way to explain the many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel the U.S. and its European allies now pour into Ukraine? If the Ukrainians cannot win — a universally acknowledged reality — what is the purpose here?

Whether this strategy goes as Washington wants, or if Russian forces get their work done and withdraw to avoid a classic quagmire, remains to be seen. But as Dave DeCamp noted in Antiwar.com last Friday, there is no sign whatsoever that the Biden administration plans any further diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin.

The implication here should be evident. The U.S. strategy effectively requires the destruction of Ukraine in the service of America’s imperial ambitions. If this thought seems extreme, brief reference to the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria will provide all the compelling context one may need.

Brzezinski’s Plan in 1979

Jan. 1, 1987: Mujahideen in Kunar, Afghanistan. (erwinlux, Flickr, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

To an extent I find surprising given its calamitous consequences, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan in 1979 to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets remains the more or less unaltered template.

President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser saw nothing wrong with getting into bed with what became Al–Qaeda. Now it is the Nazis militias that infest Ukraine’s National Guard that the U.S. arms and trains.

If the record is anything to go by, this conflict could well destroy what remains of Ukraine as a nation. In the worst outcome, little will remain of its social fabric, its public spaces, its roads, bridges, schools, municipal institutions. This destruction has already begun.

Here is what I do not want Americans to miss: We are destroying ourselves and what hope we may have to restore ourselves to decency as we watch the regime governing us destroy another nation in our name. This destruction, too, has already begun.

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.

In January 2021, NATO published the final draft of a lengthy study it called Cognitive Warfare. Its intent is to explore the potential for manipulating minds—those of others, our own—beyond anything heretofore even attempted. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the document asserts. “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

In a subsection headed “The vulnerabilities of the human brain,” the report has this to say:

“In particular, the brain:

is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong:

is led to believe statements or messages it has already heard as true, even though these may be false;

accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to [sic] the authenticity of that evidence.“

And this, which I find especially fiendish:

“At the political and strategic level, it would be wrong to underestimate the impact of emotions…. Emotions—hope, fear, humiliation—shape the world and international relations with the echo-chamber effect of social media.“

No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Cognitive Warfare is a window onto diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.

And we have just had a taste of what it will be like as these techniques, well-grounded in cutting-edge science, are elaborated. Yet more disturbing to me than the cold prose of the report is the astonishing extent to which it proves out. Cognitive warfare, whether or not the NATO report is now the propagandists’ handbook, works, and it is working now on most Americans.

This is what I mean when I say we, too, are the victims of this war.

Last week the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was sacked for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin. The same thing then happened to Anna Netrebko. The Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its star soprano for the same reason: She preferred to say nothing about the Russian president.

There is no bottom to this. Last Friday Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator, openly called for Putin’s assassination. Michael McFaul, briefly Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and the king of nitwittery, asserts that all Russians who don’t openly protest Russia’s intervention in Ukraine are to be punished for it. In the idiotic file, the International Federation of Felines has barred imports of Russian cats.

Here is the entry on this list of preposterous assertions that got me out of my chair in a rage last Thursday: The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes—why the Belarusians, for heaven’s sake?—from the winter Paralympics that commenced the following day in Beijing. We’re now down to persecuting people whose hearts and souls are abler than their limbs?

The committee made it plain it acted in response to international pressure. I wonder whose that might be.

What Has Become of Us

U.S. military assistance arriving in Ukraine, Feb, 10. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine)

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?

It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.

“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”

That is a snippet from a book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, that a friend just sent. When our feelings get the better of us, we can no longer think or talk usefully to one another: This is the Swiss psychoanalyst’s point in simple terms.

The other day PBS Newshour ran an interview with one Artem Semenikhin, in which the small-town mayor was lionized for standing up to Russian soldiers. In the background, as the ever-alert Alan MacLeod points out, was a portrait of Stepan Bandera, the savage Russophobe, anti–Semite, and leader of Ukrainian Nazis.

What did PBS do about this careless oversight? It blurred the Bandera portrait and broadcast the interview with its Ukrainian hero. American journalism at its zenith.

It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for what has happened to our reasoning faculties — or, better put, what we have allowed to be done to them. Factual realities that lie beyond dispute, if inconvenient, are blurred out of the movie we think we’re watching.

It is the same with any genuine understanding of the Russian intervention. I have four words for what we need to read this crisis: history, chronology, context, and responsibility. Since none of these serves our cognitive warriors’ purpose, we are invited to blot them out. And once again: With dreadful fidelity to those actively manipulating our perceptions, we do so.

Context, the worst of us assert, is some idea those awful Russians came up with. We take no interest whatsoever in how the world may look from anyone else’s perspective. Who in hell, please tell me, thinks this is a good way to live?

I have rendered a pencil-sketch of a nation falling apart as it takes another one apart. A nation this far into one of Jung’s “collective possessions” cannot possibly do well. As is always the case (a thought that came to me as I studied the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s), the victimizers are victims, too.

If we are to find our way out of this funhouse, we will have to do one thing before any other: We will have to learn to speak in a clear, new language so that we can name things as they are instead of blurring them as PBS did that Bandera portrait.

And we must start with one word. Unless we can learn to call America an empire, we will stumble in the funhouse dark until it becomes so unfun we can no longer bear our own self-deceptions.

I see in here a virtue in this large, complicated moment. Between Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which I count regrettable but necessary, and the joint statement Putin made with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, we are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself against history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.

Clarity: It is always a fine thing, whatever the difficulties it brings.

consortiumnews.com

]]> Creating New Enemies https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/03/creating-new-enemies/ Thu, 03 Mar 2022 20:56:21 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=790439 American foreign policy produces dangerous alliances

By Philip GIRALDI

It should come as no surprise that many observers, from various political perspectives, are beginning to note that there is something seriously disconnected in the fumbling foreign policy of the United States. The evacuation failure in Afghanistan shattered the already waning self-confidence of the American political elite and the continuing on-again off-again negotiations that were by design intended to go nowhere with Iran and Russia provide no evidence that anyone in the White House is really focused on protecting American interests. Now we have an actual shooting war in Ukraine as a result, a conflict that might easily escalate if Washington continues to send the wrong signals to Moscow.

To cite only one example of how outside influences distort policy, in a phone call on February 9th, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett advised President Joe Biden not to enter into any non-proliferation agreement with Iran. Biden was non-committal even though it is an actual American interest to come to an agreement, but instead he indicated that as far as the US is concerned, Israel could exercise “freedom of action” when dealing with the Iranians. With that concession has ended in all probability the only possible diplomatic success that the Administration might have been able to point to.

The Biden Administration’s by default global security policy is currently reduced to what some critics have described as “encirclement and containment.” That is why an overstretched US military is being tasked with creating ever more bases worldwide in an effort to counter perceived “enemies” who often are only exercising their own national sovereignty and right to security within their own zones of influence. Ironically, when nations balk at submitting to Washington’s control, they are frequently described as “aggressors” and “anti-democratic,” the language that has most particularly been used relating to Russia. The Biden policy, such as it actually exists, appears to be a throwback to the playing field in 1991-2 when the Soviet empire collapsed. It is all about maintaining the old American dream of complete global dominance coupled with liberal interventionism, but this time around the US lacks both the resources and the national will to continue in the effort. Hopefully the White House will understand that to do nothing is better than to make empty threats.

Meanwhile, as the situation continues to erode, it is becoming more and more obvious that the twin crises that have been developing over Ukraine and Taiwan are “Made in Washington” and are somewhat inexplicable as the US does not have a compelling national interest that would justify threats to “leave on the table” military options as a possible response. The Administration has yet again responded to Russian moves by initiating devastating sanctions. But Russia also has unconventional weapons in its arsenal. It can, for starters, shift focus away from Ukraine by intervening much more actively in support of Syria and Iran in the Middle East, disrupting feeble American attempts to manage that region to benefit Israel.

According to economists, Russia has also been effectively sanction-proofing its economy and is capable of selective reverse-sanctioning of countries that support an American initiative with any enthusiasm. Such a response would likely hurt the Europeans much more than it would damage the leadership in the Kremlin. Barring Russian gas from Europe by shutting down Nord Stream 2 would, for example, permit increased sales to China and elsewhere in Asia and would inflict more pain on the Europeans than on Moscow. Shipping US supplied liquid gas to Europe would, for example, cost more than twice the going rate being offered by the Kremlin and would also be less reliable. The European NATO members are clearly nervous and not fully behind the US agenda on Ukraine, largely because there is the legitimate concern that any and possibly all options being considered by Washington could easily produce missteps that would escalate into a nuclear exchange that would be catastrophic for all parties involved.

Apart from the real immediate danger to be derived from the fighting currently taking place in Ukraine, the real long-term damage is strategic. The Joe Biden Administration has adroitly maneuvered itself into a corner while America’s two principal adversaries Russia and China have drawn closer together to form something like a defensive as well as economic relationship that will be dedicated to reducing and eventually eliminating Washington’s assumed role as the global hegemon and rules enforcer.

In a recent article in the New Yorker foreign affairs commentator Robin Wright, who might reasonably described as a “hawk,” declares the new development to be “Russia and China Unveil[ing] a Pact Against America and the West.” And she is not alone in ringing the alarm bell, with former Donald Trump National Security Council (NSC) Russia watcher Anita Hill warning that the Kremlin’s intention is to force the United States out of Europe while former NSC Ukrainian expert Alexander Vindman is advising that military force be used to deter Russia now before it is too late.

Wright provides the most serious analysis of the new developments. She argues that “Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the two most powerful autocrats, challenge the current political and military order.” She describes how, in a meeting between the two leaders before the Beijing Olympics, they cited an “agreement that also challenges the United States as a global power, NATO as a cornerstone of international security, and liberal democracy as a model for the world.” They pledged that there would be “No ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation” and a written statement that was subsequently produced declared that “Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose color revolutions, and will increase cooperation.” Wright notes that there is considerable strength behind the agreement, “As two nuclear-armed countries that span Europe and Asia, the more muscular alignment between Russia and China could be a game changer militarily and diplomatically.” One might add that China now has the world’s largest economy and Russia has a highly developed military deploying new hypersonic missiles that would give it the advantage in any conflict with NATO and the US. Both Russia and China, if attacked, would also benefit because they would be fighting close to their bases on interior lines.

And, of course, not everyone agrees that nudging the United States out of its self-proclaimed hegemonic role would be a bad thing. Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke argues that there will be perpetual state of crisis in the international order until a new system emerges from the status quo that ended the Cold War, and it would be minus the United States as the semi-official transnational rules maker and arbiter. He observes that “The crux of Russia’s complaints about its eroding security have little to do with Ukraine per se but are rooted in the Washington hawks’ obsession with Russia, and their desire to cut Putin (and Russia) down to size – an aim which has been the hallmark of US policy since the Yeltsin years. The Victoria Nuland clique could never accept Russia rising to become a significant power in Europe – possibly eclipsing the US control over Europe.”

What is happening in Europe and Asia should all come down to a very simple realization about the limits of power: America has no business in risking a nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine or with China over Taiwan. The United States has been fighting much of the world for over two decades, impoverishing itself and killing millions in avoidable wars starting with Iraq and Afghanistan. The US government is cynically exploiting memories of old Cold War enemy Russia to create a false narrative that goes something like this: “If we don’t stop them over there, they will be in New Jersey next week.” It is all nonsense. And besides, who made the US the sole arbiter of international relations? It is past time Americans started asking what kind of international order is it that lets the United States determine what other nations can and cannot do.

Worst of all, the bloodshed in Ukraine has all been unnecessary. A little real diplomacy with honest negotiators weighing up real interests could easily have come to acceptable solutions for all parties involved. It is indeed ironic that the burning desire to go to war with Russia demonstrated in the New York Times and Washington Post as well as on Capitol Hill has in fact created a real formidable enemy, tying Russia and China together in an alliance due to their frustration at dealing with a Biden Administration that never seems to know what it is doing or where it wants to go.

unz.com

]]> America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/01/america-defeats-germany-for-third-time-in-century/ Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:37:53 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=790367 By Michael HUDSON

How the MIC, OGAM and FIRE Sectors Conquered NATO

My old boss Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute in the 1970s, had a set speech that he would give at public meetings. He said that back in high school in Los Angeles, his teachers would say what most liberals were saying in the 1940s and 50s: “Wars never solved anything.” It was as if they never changed anything – and therefore shouldn’t be fought.

Herman disagreed, and made lists of all sorts of things that wars had solved in world history, or at least changed. He was right, and of course that is the aim of both sides in today’s New Cold War confrontation in Ukraine.

The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides – the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.

The active military force and aggression since 1991 has been the United States. Rejecting mutual disarmament of the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO, there was no “peace dividend.” Instead, the U.S. policy executed by the Clinton and subsequent administrations to wage a new military expansion via NATO has paid a 30-year dividend in the form of shifting the foreign policy of Western Europe and other American allies out of their domestic political sphere into their own U.S.-oriented “national security” blob (the word for special interests that must not be named). NATO has become Europe’s foreign-policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.

The recent prodding of Russia by expanding Ukrainian anti-Russian ethnic violence by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi post-2014 Maiden regime was aimed at (and has succeeded in0 forcing a showdown in response the fear by U.S. interests that they are losing their economic and political hold on their NATO allies and other Dollar Area satellites as these countries have seen their major opportunities for gain to lie in increasing trade and investment with China and Russia.

To understand just what U.S. aims and interests are threatened, it is necessary to understand U.S. politics and “the blob,” that is, the government central planning that cannot be explained by looking at ostensibly democratic politics. This is not the politics of U.S. senators and representatives representing their congressional voting districts or states.

America’s three oligarchies in control of U.S. foreign policy

It is more realistic to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the military-industrial complex, the oil and gas (and mining) complex, and the banking and real estate complex than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives do not represent their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major political campaign contributors. A Venn diagram would show that in today’s post-Citizens United world, U.S. politicians represent their campaign contributors, not voters. And these contributors fall basically into three main blocs.

Three main oligarchic groups that have bought control of the Senate and Congress to put their own policy makers in the State Department and Defense Department. First is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) – arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, have broadly diversified their factories and employment in nearly every state, and especially in the Congressional districts where key Congressional committee heads are elected. Their economic base is monopoly rent, obtained above all from their arms sales to NATO, to Near Eastern oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus. Stocks for these companies soared immediately upon news of the Russian attack, leading a two-day stock-market surge as investors recognized that war in a world of cost-plus “Pentagon capitalism” (as Seymour Melman described it) will provide a guaranteed national-security umbrella for monopoly profits for war industries. Senators and Congressional representatives from California and Washington traditionally have represented the MIC, along with the solid pro-military South. The past week’s military escalation promises soaring arms sales to NATO and other U.S. allies, enriching the actual constituents of these politicians. Germany quickly agreed to raise is arms spending to over 2% of GDP.

The second major oligarchic bloc is the rent-extracting oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM), riding America’s special tax favoritism granted to companies emptying natural resources out of the ground and putting them mostly into the atmosphere, oceans and water supply. Like the banking and real estate sector seeking to maximize economic rent and maximizing capital gains for housing and other assets,, the aim of this OGAM sector is to maximize the price of its energy and raw materials so as to maximize its natural-resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major U.S. priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline threatened to link the Western European and Russian economies more tightly together.

If oil, gas and mining operations are not situated in every U.S. voting district, at least their investors are. Senators from Texas and other Western oil-producing and mining states are the leading OGAM lobbyists, and the State Department has a heavy oil-sector influence providing a national-security umbrella for the sector’s special tax breaks. The ancillary political aim is to ignore and reject environmental drives to replace oil, gas and coal with alternative sources of energy. The Biden administration accordingly has backed the expansion of offshore drilling, supported the Canadian pipeline to the world’s dirtiest petroleum source in the Athabasca tar sands, and celebrated the revival of U.S. fracking.

The foreign-policy extension is to prevent foreign countries not leaving control of their oil, gas and mining to U.S. OGAM companies from competing in world markets with U.S. suppliers. Isolating Russia (and Iran) from Western markets will reduce the supply of oil and gas, pushing up prices and corporate profits accordingly.

The third major oligarchic group is the symbiotic Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which is the modern finance-capitalist successor to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents. With most housing in today’s world having become owner-occupied (although with sharply rising rates of absentee landlordship since the post-2008 wave of Obama Evictions), land rent is paid largely to the banking sector in the form of mortgage interest and debt amortization (on rising debt/equity ratios as bank lending inflates housing prices). About 80 percent of U.S. and British bank loans are to the real estate sector, inflating land prices to create capital gains – which are effectively tax-exempt for absentee owners.

This Wall Street-centered banking and real estate bloc is even more broadly based on a district-by-district basis than the MIC. Its New York senator from Wall Street, Chuck Schumer, heads the Senate, long supported by Delaware’s former Senator from the credit-card industry Joe Biden, and Connecticut’s senators from the insurance sector centered in that state.  Domestically, the aim of this sector is to maximize land rent and the “capital’ gains resulting from rising land rent. Internationally, the FIRE sector’s aim is to privatize foreign economies (above all to secure the privilege of credit creation in U.S. hands), so as to turn government infrastructure and public utilities into rent-seeking monopolies to provide basic services (such as health care, education, transportation, communications and information technology) at maximum prices instead of at subsidized prices to reduce the cost of living and doing business. And Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (viz. the Rockefeller-dominated Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).

The FIRE, MIC and OGAM sectors are the three rentier sectors that dominate today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. Their mutual fortunes have soared as MIC and OGAM stocks have increased. And moves to exclude Russia from the Western financial system (and partially now from SWIFT), coupled with the adverse effects of isolating European economies from Russian energy, promise to spur an inflow into dollarized financial securities

As mentioned at the outset, it is more helpful to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the complexes based on these three rentier sectors than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives are not representing their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major donors. That is why neither manufacturing nor agriculture play the dominant role in U.S. foreign policy today. The convergence of the policy aims of America’s three dominant rentier groups overwhelms the interests of labor and even of industrial capital beyond the MIC. That convergence is the defining characteristic of today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. It is basically a reversion to economic rent-seeking, which is independent of the politics of labor and industrial capital.

The dynamic that needs to be traced today is why this oligarchic blob has found its interest in prodding Russia into what Russia evidently viewed as a do-or-die stance to resist the increasingly violent attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Russian-speaking provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, along with the broader Western threats against Russia.

The rentier “blob’s” expected consequences of the New Cold War

As President Biden explained, the current U.S.-orchestrated military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”) is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S. troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers.

U.S. officials first tried to stop construction of the pipeline from being completed. Firms aiding in its construction were sanctioned, but finally Russia itself completed the pipeline. U.S. pressure then turned on the traditionally pliant German politicians, claiming that Germany and the rest of Europe faced a National Security threat from Russia turning off the gas, presumably to extract some political or economic concessions. No specific Russian demands could be thought up, and so their nature was left obscure and blob-like. Germany refused to authorize Nord Stream 2 from officially going into operation.

A major aim of today’s New Cold War is to monopolize the market for U.S. shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG). Already under Donald Trump’s administration, Angela Merkel was bullied into promising to spend $1 billion building new port facilities for U.S. tanker ships to unload natural gas for German use. The Democratic election victory in November 2020, followed by Ms. Merkel’s retirement from Germany’s political scene, led to cancellation of this port investment, leaving Germany really without much alternative to importing Russian gas to heat its homes, power its electric utilities, and to provide raw material for its fertilizer industry and hence the maintenance of its farm productivity.

So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. That looms as the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany – each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.

Higher gasoline, heating and other energy prices also will hurt U.S. consumers and those of other nations (especially Global South energy-deficit economies) and leave less of the U.S. family budget for spending on domestic goods and services. This could squeeze marginalized homeowners and investors, leading to further concentration of absentee ownership of housing and commercial property in the United States, along with buyouts of distressed real estate owners in other countries faced with soaring heating and energy costs. But that is deemed collateral damage by the post-industrial blob.

Food prices also will rise, headed by wheat. (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) This will squeeze many Near Eastern and Global South food-deficit countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.

Russian raw-materials exports may be blocked by Russia in response to the currency and SWIFT sanctions. This threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel and aluminum (the production of which consumes much electricity as its major cost – which will make that metal more expensive). If China decides to see itself as the next nation being threatened and joins Russia in a common protest against the U.S. trade and financial warfare, the Western economies are in for a serious shock.

The long-term dream of U.S. New Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its Yeltsin/Harvard Boys managerial kleptocracy, with oligarchs seeking to cash in their privatizations in Western stock markets. OGAM still dreams of buying majority control of Yukos and Gazprom. Wall Street would love to recreate a Russian stock market boom. And MIC investors at happily anticipating the prospect of selling more weapons to help bring all this about.

Russia’s intentions to benefit from America’s unintended consequences

What does Russia want? Most immediately, to remove the neo-Nazi anti-Russian core that the Maidan massacre and coup put in place in 2014. Ukraine is to be neutralized, which to Russia means basically pro-Russian, dominated by Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. The aim is to prevent Ukraine from becoming a staging ground of U.S.-orchestrated anti-Russian moves a la Chechnya and Georgia.

Russia’s longer-term aim is to pry Europe away from NATO and U.S. dominance – and in the process, create with China a new multipolar world order centered on an economically integrated Eurasia. The aim is to dissolve NATO altogether, and then to promote the broad disarmament and denuclearization policies that Russia has been pushing for. Not only will this cut back foreign purchases of U.S. arms, but it may end up leading to sanctions against future U.S. military adventurism. That would leave America with less ability to fund its military operations as de-dollarization accelerates.

Now that it should be obvious to any informed observer that (1) NATO’s purpose is aggression, not defense, and (2) there is no further territory for it to conquer from the remains of the old Soviet Union, what does Europe get out of continued membership? It is obvious that Russia never again will invade Europe. It has nothing to gain – and had nothing to gain by fighting Ukraine, except to roll back NATO’s proxy expansion into that country and the NATO-backed attacks on Novorossiya.

Will European nationalist leaders (the left is largely pro-US) ask why their countries should pay for U.S. arms that only put them in danger, pay higher prices for U.S. LNG and energy, pay more for grain and Russian-produced raw materials, all while losing the option of making export sales and profits on peaceful investment in Russia – and perhaps losing China as well?

The U.S. confiscation of Russian monetary reserves, following the recent theft of Afghanistan’s reserves (and England’s seizure of Venezuela’s gold stocks held there) threatens every country’s adherence to the Dollar Standard, and hence the dollar’s role as the vehicle for foreign-exchange savings by the world’s central banks. This will accelerate the international de-dollarization process already started by Russia and China relying on mutual holdings of each other’s currencies.

Over the longer term, Russia is likely to join China in forming an alternative to the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank. Russia’s announcement that it wants to arrest the Ukrainian Nazis and hold a war crimes trial seems to imply an alternative to the Hague court will be established following Russia’s military victory in Ukraine. Only a new international court could try war criminals extending from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership all the way up to U.S. officials responsible for crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg laws.

I expect Russia to withdraw this week. I can’t imagine that it has any intention of expending resources and lives on occupation. Its first task was to stop the attack on the Russian-speaking eastern provinces and to protect Crimea. Its second task was to wipe out the neo-Nazi military forces, capturing their leaders if possible and bringing them to trial for war crimes — and then proceeding up the ladder to their U.S. sponsors, NED etc.

It is of course possible that Europe will break away. In that case, Russia will turn toward China and its fellow SCO members. Europe will suffer severe supply chain issues, commodity-price inflation, and budget squeezes for its population and governments.

Did the American blob actually think through the consequences of NATO’s war?

It is almost black humor to look at U.S. attempts to convince China that it should join the United States in denouncing Russia’s moves into Ukraine. The most enormous unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and other countries along the Belt and Road initiative.

Russia dreamed of creating a new world order, but it was U.S. adventurism that has driven the world into an entirely new order – one that looks to be dominated by China as the default winner now that the European economy is essentially torn apart and America is left with what it has grabbed from Russia and Afghanistan, but without the ability to gain future support.

And everything that I have written above may already be obsolete as Russia and the U.S. have gone on atomic alert. My only hope is that Putin and Biden can agree that if Russia hydrogen bombs Britain and Brussels, that there will be a devil’s (not gentleman’s) agreement not to bomb each other.

With such talk I’m brought back to my discussions with Herman Kahn 50 years ago. He became quite unpopular for writing Thinking about the Unthinkable, meaning atomic war. As he was parodied in Dr. Strangelove, he did indeed say that there would indeed be survivors. But he added that for himself, he hoped to be right under the atom bomb, because it was not a world in which he wanted to survive.

counterpunch.org

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