In a U.S. media interview, Robert O’Brien repeated baseless claims that China was guilty of a “cover up” in responding to the disease. And he likened it to the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union where the authorities were also accused of concealing the initial severity of the accident.

O’Brien added: “They unleashed a virus on the world that’s destroyed trillions of dollars in American economic wealth that we’re having to spend to keep our economy alive, to keep Americans afloat during this virus.”

It is a transparent attempt to make China liable for reparations.

The politicization of the coronavirus global pandemic by the Trump administration is unprecedented. It’s not just a feckless, demagogic administration engaging in delusion, denial and China-bashing. A growing bipartisan consensus in Washington is blaming China for having responsibility for spreading a communicable disease. This is in spite of the public record on the timeline of the pandemic and the early response from China and the World Health Organization to alert the rest of the world to potential consequences.

But Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have taken the anti-China rhetoric to reckless extreme by leveling unsubstantiated claims that the Chinese government weaponized a virus to inflict damage on the U.S.

This unhinged logic is a dangerous slippery slope towards conflict. By comparing the coronavirus pandemic to Chernobyl, the Trump administration is gas-lighting the American public into viewing China as the source of their woes and all the terrible fallout from the disease. With over 100,000 dead Americans in four months – the world’s leader in this grim toll – and with 40 million American’s unemployed, the Trump administration is cynically seeking to turn public anger against China as a deflection from its own criminal incompetence.

The image of Chernobyl is a handy, if specious, mechanism by which to incite American anger even more against China.

Ironically, this gross distortion of events is willfully propagated by an American president who has made a signature cause against “fake news media”. Trump this week signed an executive order clamping down on social media platforms which he accuses, with some validity, of censoring certain viewpoints such as his claims about voter fraud using mail-in ballots.

Yet these U.S.-owned social media platforms do not “fact check” when it comes to Trump’s much more dubious and incendiary allegations against China. The president and his men have been freely vilifying China for allegedly unleashing the virus, weaponizing the pandemic and wreaking havoc and suffering across the U.S. – without any “checks” by his favored Twitter platform flagging such slanderous nonsense.

It should be disturbing too that Trump’s top National Security Advisor is so bereft of judgement and facts that he makes such an absurd comparison between the biological pandemic and an industrial accident. If this so-called security expert can be so imprudent with facts then it is appalling to consider how other important global issues, such as nuclear arms controls, will be likewise distorted and politicized for self-serving purpose.

Since Robert O’Brien took over the National Security Council from John Bolton at the end of last year it has taken on a noticeably more hawkish stance towards China in what seems to be a career-furthering choice of direction. His Neo-imperialist and “American exceptionalism” views set out in his over-rated book, While America Slept, show O’Brien to be an empty vessel intellectually and having a thoroughly propagandized mind.

Going nuclear over the pandemic is a sure sign that the Trump administration is desperate to replace rational argument with reckless rhetoric. Because it does not have a rational argument.

Wouldn’t that be terrible? Wouldn’t it be a sign of a dangerous new threat?

It would be – if you’re the kind of raging paranoid who projects his psychosis onto others. But if you’re a normal person, you’d take it as evidence that nations are capable of putting aside difference in order to focus on a mutually beneficial goal. After all, containing the disease in one country is the best way of insuring that it doesn’t hop-scotch to others such as your own. So helping others is a means of helping yourself.

Unfortunately, Trump is not part of this enlightened camp. Defunding the World Health Organization is only his latest atrocity. Instead of fighting the disease, he and his team have seemingly doing everything in their power to spread it by:

Mounting an inconsistent and ineffective containment effort that has allowed the virus to spread like wildfire at home.

Blocking aid to nations that are also hard hit.

Trying to stop countries it doesn’t like from providing assistance and blasting recipients for accepting it.

And threatening military actions that will spread the virus even more.

Even though it accounts for just 4.2 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has thirty percent of total Covid-19 cases thanks to Trump’s disastrous domestic response. That’s better than seven times the global average. But now with an assist from European allies and ultra-hawkish allies in the corporate media, his administration is trying to drag others down by promoting pro-war policies that disrupt the international effort.

Washington has thus ratcheted up economic sanctions against hard-hit Iran despite Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s heartfelt plea that the restrictions “were making it virtually impossible for us to even buy medicine and medical equipment.” Even more cruelly, it has blocked a $5-billion emergency IMF loan to help Iran fight the virus because the country’s officials “have a long history of diverting funds allocated for humanitarian goods into their own pockets and to their terrorist proxies,” as one administration officials put it.

In mid-March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien reportedly pushed a bonkers proposal for a military offensive against pro-Iranian militias in Iraq that was guaranteed to unleash chaos and turmoil. But with the Iranian leadership preoccupied with the health crisis, it was too good an opportunity to pass up even though the virus would undoubtedly spread the more than five thousand U.S. troops stationed in Iraq plus more than forty thousand others based elsewhere in the Persian Gulf.

Since those troops will likely spread the virus to friends and family once they rotate home, it’s a crystal-clear case of the U.S. shooting itself in the foot again and again.

Pompeo has also offered to lift sanctions on Venezuela if President Nicolàs Maduro agrees to step down. But now that Maduro has said no to Washington’s outrageous violation of national sovereignty, the sanctions will remain just as the coronavirus is poised to overwhelm Venezuela’s depleted healthcare system.

Then there’s the question of preventing certain countries from helping others. One, needless to say, is Cuba. After the Trump administration lashed out at fourteen countries for welcoming Cuban medical teams, the Cuban ambassador to Canada tweeted angrily in response:

“Shame on you. Instead of attacking Cuba and its committed doctors, you should be caring about the thousands of sick Americans who are suffering due to the scandalous neglect of your government and the inability of your failed health system to care for them.”

Quite right. On the other hand, administration officials didn’t have to respond when Russia sent aid to Italy. Nineteen members of the European Parliament – most of them pro-American conservatives from the former Soviet bloc – did it for them by signing a blistering letter denouncing the aid as a typical Russian trick aimed at persuading the European Union to lift anti-Russia sanction. “[A]n immense Russian disinformation campaign aim[s] to discredit the EU and to divide our Union from within by questioning our solidarity and ability to tackle this crisis together,” the MEP’s said. “Such disinformation and fake news cannot be ignored and left without an appropriate response from the EU side.”

When European nations aren’t stabbing one another in the back by refusing to share aid, they should now supposedly stab others for daring to step into the breach.

And then there’s a slew of corporate media outlets that, as usual, are trying to outdo one another to see who can more anti-Russian or anti-Chinese, whatever the consequences. The Washington Post slammed Russia for sending an Antonov-124 cargo plane to the United States loaded with medical goods and then sneered at Trump for describing the effort as “very nice.” It quoted a former U.S. Army general calling the delivery a “hoax,” an analyst at the (misnamed) Carnegie Endowment for International Peace denouncing it as “nuts,” and “an expert on disinformation” at the Wilson Center declaring that it was “mind-boggling” that Trump would accept it at all.

Foreign Policy magazine, a Washington Post spin-off, went even farther. In a feverish article entitled “Beware of Bad Samaritans,” Elisabeth Braw of Britain’s rightwing Royal United Services Institute accused both Russia and China of “using their ostensible assistance for geopolitical gains” and compared the Russian presence in Italy to “Occupied,” a hit Norwegian TV series about a Russian takeover.

Russian aid “will damage NATO in the long run,” she warned. As for China, she said, it plainly sees medical aid “as a public relations opportunity” and a means “to both sell goods and pry countries away from EU and NATO solidarity.”

That’s right: attack other countries for offering to help and then attack them again for causing international tensions to soar. Not surprisingly, China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela are among eight countries that have appealed for an end to U.S.-imposed sanctions on the grounds that they’re impeding the anti-Covid effort while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has issued an eloquent plea for a global truce.

“The most vulnerable – women and children, people with disabilities, the marginalized and the displaced – pay the highest price,” he said. “They are also at the highest risk of suffering devastating losses from COVID-19. Let’s not forget that in war-ravaged countries, health systems have collapsed. Health professionals, already few in number, have often been targeted. Refugees and others displaced by violent conflict are doubly vulnerable. The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war.”

It does – except that those in charge of U.S. foreign policy are too smart to fall for such sentimental guff about peace and international cooperation. Instead, they’re determined to beat the Russians, Cubans, and Chinese to the punch. The proper response to Covid-19, evidently is to encourage international conflicts that cause it to spread.

Trump has a point in that Bolton was clearly suggesting that North Korea get rid of its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic benefits, but it was the wrong example to pick as Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi gave up his weapons and was then ousted and brutally killed in a rebel uprising that was supported by Washington. The Bolton analogy, which may have been deliberate attempt to sabotage any rapprochement, made impossible any agreement between Kim and Trump as Kim received the message loud and clear that he might suffer the same fate.

More recently, Bolton might have been behind media leaks that scuttled Trump’s plan to meet with Taliban representatives and that also, acting on behalf of Israel, undercut a presidential suggestion that he might meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Trump summed up his disagreements with Bolton by saying that the National Security Advisor “wasn’t getting along” with other administration officials, adding that “Frankly he wanted to do things — not necessarily tougher than me. John’s known as a tough guy. He’s so tough he got us into Iraq. That’s tough. But he’s somebody that I actually had a very good relationship with, but he wasn’t getting along with people in the administration who I consider very important. And you know John wasn’t in line with what we were doing. And actually in some cases he thought it was too tough, what we were doing. Mr. Tough Guy.”

Trump’s final comment on Bolton was that “I’m sure he’ll do whatever he can do to spin it his way,” a throw-away line that could well set the stage for what comes next. Bolton has many supporters among hardliners in the GOP and the media and will no doubt be inclined to respond to the president in kind, but once the back and forth starts many other factors and relationships will come into play.

After the firing, it was widely believed that Donald Trump might have actually gotten rid of Bolton for all the right reasons, namely that as president he is disinclined to start any new wars and seeks negotiated solutions to existing conflicts, both of which concepts were no doubt regarded as anathema by the National Security Advisor. Unfortunately, that argument runs into problems where rhetoric and deeds disconnect if one considers actual actions undertaken by the president, to include the man that Trump has now named as Bolton’s replacement, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Robert O’Brien.

O’Brien might well have been ranked among the worst possible choices among the names floated in the media for the National Security Advisor position, mostly because he is almost completely lacking in actual experience related to the job. To be sure, he looks more presentable than the wild-eyed and walrus mustachioed Bolton, but Trump has repeatedly been overly deferential towards the bona fides of hardliners like O’Brien who boast of American Exceptionalism. The president will also likely appreciate that the sycophantic O’Brien’s lack of experience will mean that he will be completely deferential to the Chief Executive’s point of view at all times.

Trump’s cabinet choices have been so bad that they have led to musical chairs in nearly all senior positions. The president is to blame for having appointed Bolton, a man he disliked, though admittedly under orders from Israeli-American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, and he also did not have to elevate Mike Pompeo first as CIA Director and then as Secretary of State. There is no one around who outdoes Pompeo when it comes to avoiding diplomacy and negotiations while also threatening dire consequences for America’s “enemies.” O’Brien’s hardline credentials are largely indistinguishable from those of Pompeo and Bolton and it is widely believed that his appointment was due to advocacy by the Secretary of State, who is reportedly assembling his national security team.

And it should be observed that Trump’s claimed avoidance of war credentials are pretty thin. Far from fulfilling campaign promises to end the wars he inherited, Donald Trump has continued and even escalated those conflicts. He has withdrawn from agreements with Russia and Iran that enhanced US national security. Drone strikes under Trump have increased dramatically and have exceeded the number occurring during both of Obama’s terms, while new rules of engagement have led to a major increase in civilian casualties from US bombing directed against ISIS and the Taliban. Most recently in Afghanistan, 30 farm workers were killed in a drone strike. Trump is also doubling down on his support for the Saudi genocide against Yemen.

And the president has demonstrated that he is willing to attack countries that do not threaten the US and with which Washington is not at war. He has twice illegally bombed Syria based on phony intelligence and even when he decided at the last minute not to use force, as he did earlier this year with Iran, there was no serious evidence that he was truly seeking dialogue. He is waging “maximum pressure” economic warfare against both Iran and Venezuela, in both of which countries he has called for regime change. He has threatened Russia over Crimea and Ukraine and is in a trade war with China. Transparent regime change policies coupled with willy-nilly imposing of sanctions are destructive, hostile steps that kill people in the targeted countries and make enemies where none previously existed.

America’s new National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien recently featured in a taxpayer funded trip to Stockholm to obtain the release of rapper ASAP Rocky, who had been arrested after getting involved in a fist fight. O’Brien had orders to threaten unspecified retaliation against the Swedish government if it did not accede to White House demands. That exercise in international bullying means that O’Brien is quintessentially Trump’s kind of guy. He has written a book entitled While America Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in Crisis, calling on the United States to end any “appeasement and retreat,” and has described the nuclear agreement with Iran, in predictable neocon fashion, as a repeat of 1938, Hitler and Munich. He was Mitt Romney’s foreign policy adviser and is a Mormon, which means he basically lines up alongside the Christian Zionists when it comes to Israel.

The Israel Lobby has predictably welcomed O’Brien. Sandra Parker or Christians United for Israel (CUFI), enthused how “CUFI enjoys a close working relationship with many officials throughout the Trump Administration, and we look forward to working with Ambassador O’Brien on strengthening the US-Israel relationship, confronting the Iranian menace, and curtailing the threat posed by terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Mort Klein President of the Zionist Organization of America observed how “Mr. O’Brien is a great friend of Israel, and is now the top-ranking Mormon in the pro-Israel Trump administration. He is also best friends with ardent Zionist US Ambassador to Germany [Richard] Grenell … And you can’t be a great friend of evangelical Christian Grenell unless you support Israel.”

So, does the firing of John Bolton and replacement by Robert O’Brien mean that there will be a change of direction in US foreign policy? The answer has to be no. Trump might well be maneuvering to avoid a new war as he will be in full 2020 campaign mode and wants to avoid falling into a quagmire, but the basic belligerency of the administration and its strong tilt towards supporting feckless allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia is certain to continue.

President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint O’Brien as his fourth national security adviser to replace despised, discredited and down, plain hapless John Bolton has already generated endless megabytes of confused debate.

O’Brien we have been told, is a hardliner. No: He is a good-natured pragmatist. He is a negotiator. He will soften and improve relations with Russia and Iran. Yet he published an otherwise utterly forgettable book that was viciously hostile to the leaders of Russia and Iran.

O’Brien, we are told, wants to focus on opposing the rise of China. But he mindlessly generates hostility towards most other great nations too. He is a lawyer. But his primary career was as an officer in the US Army.

O’Brien is described as a mainstream Republican. But he was raised up and favored by John Bolton himself during his less than stellar tenure – never confirmed by the United States Senate – as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations.

In reality, all this confusion is only in the imagination of the American pundits: The history of declining empires, especially those on the brink of collapse and the remorseless laws of bureaucratic incompetence and mediocrity – memorably delineated by the late C. Northcote Parkinson in his classic text “Parkinson’s Law” – make it all too easy to understand O’Brien, resolve his apparent – but illusory – “contradictions” and predict the terminal catastrophe he is going to make of his country’s affairs.

First, O’Brien genuinely is a colorless figure. He has been in many high profile situations and been invisible in all of them. He was never the man of substance and wisdom behind the scenes. The more famous men who consulted him, like Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney in 2012 and Scott Walker in 2015 lost pathetically.

O’Brien has never shown any strong character. He has always shown all the force of personality of a damp sponge. He has passively accepted the prevailing wisdom of neoconservative, arrogant, militarist America all his life. He has never shown the slightest inclination to question any of the dominant ideas or strategies of his times. Nor is he a competent or experienced manager. He has even less experience at leading any department or running a small office than the hapless Bolton himself. And he is too old to start learning now.

The US Army produces scores of thousands of useless but apparently harmless officers like O’Brien. They tend to come primarily from the Midwest where superficial pleasantness and the ability to withstand endless decades of boredom in men’s clubs like the Kiwanis, the Toastmasters and the Shriners is the sine qua non of professional and social advancement. Alexis de Tocqueville already observed this nearly two centuries ago.

Often this superficial and bogus social ease is further lubricated and supercharged by a broad streak of blind ambition, bureaucratic backstabbing and animal cunning.

O’Brien’s decision when he left the military to take a law degree also fits this pattern of a talentless but hardworking and ambitious grind without real intellect, learning, character or vision. Getting legal or bloated academic degrees bestows on such people a veneer of intellectual depth and seriousness that in reality they are utterly incapable of.

If all this sounds too harsh, and judgmental, I recommend readers to do their due diligence and read O’Brien’s 2016 book “While America Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in Crisis”

In this mindless, complacent but unconsciously revealing screed, O’Brien expressed not just hostility but contempt towards Russia and President Vladimir Putin whom he described as a “despot.” He also gives enthusiastic support for the violent Maidan coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014. He praised Ukrainian groups that have strong ties to neo-Nazis and opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The picture throughout is of a simplistic extremist of whom John Bolton was justly proud.

O’Brien is totally ignorant of the world. His spurious reputation as a hostage negotiator amounts to a combination of legal quibbling and ability to offer tasty little concessions approved in advance by others anyway. These days, he primarily serves the bidding of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whose total dominance of US policymaking is now confirmed.

Far from being a welcome improvement on the ineffable Bolton, O’Brien – inconceivable as it may seem – is likely to be even worse.

That is because, like the lead characters of the classic Midwest American novels of Sinclair Lewis and John Updike, the one thing O’Brien can plausibly do is superficially get on with people, at least those of comparable vast limitations to himself.

That means he is going to have vastly greater influence on President Trump than the arrogant Bolton – a genius only at making himself repulsive even to many of his admirers and benefactors – ever could.

That does not mean he will drive through or champion any good, courageous or necessary policies, or recognize any dangerous ones.

But where Trump quite quickly came to recognize Bolton’s personal arrogance, wild promises and ineptitude, he is far more likely to be taken in for far longer by O’Brien, a nonentity cloaked in dignity and entirely fraudulent “thoughtfulness.”

O’Brien in conclusion is a classic example of the mediocrity that rises to the top precisely because he is a mediocrity and ruffles no feathers along the way. 140 years ago, the British comic musical geniuses Gilbert and Sullivan predicted O’Brien in “The First Lord’s Song” in “HMS Pinafore.”

“I always voted at my party’s call

“And I never thought of thinking for myself at all

“I thought so little, they rewarded me

“By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy.”

And that is how Robert O’Brien got to be National Security Adviser of the United States.

The dangerous times for the world are not over: They are about to get even worse.

Robert O’Brien is a respected authority on international relations and now replaces John Bolton as U.S. President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor. He is a neoconservative who feels that Barack Obama wasn’t nearly enough of a neocon. However, the differences between the two are a matter of degee, and not of type. O’Brien is a Republican who served in the Obama Administration as well as in the G.W. Bush Administration, and in the Trump Administration, and he represents only mainstream U.S. scholarly views about international relations. Here are some of his views, as stated in his 2016 anti-Obama book While America Slept:

The overthrow of “Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych” in 2014 Ukraine was a democratic revolution, not a bloody coup that removed the democratically elected President and which was entirely illegal. Communism was finally crushed in Ukraine, because of this “revolution,” he says. “Notwithstanding the war and punishing economic circumstances, Russia’s invasion and occupation have inflicted on them, Ukrainians are happy today. They showed the world that they remain unbowed in the face of aggression.” “Liberty and the Rule of Law are Universal Values” and the U.S. Government needs to impose them globally. Because of Obama, “China, Russia, and Iran engaged in significant arms buildups even as America drew down,” while “these nations grabbed territory in the South China sea, Eastern Europe, and across the Middle East.” Limits need to be removed from the defense budget he says, so that America can impose democracy and legality everywhere.

It’s all fantasy. For example: As a result of the February 2014 U.S. takeover of Ukraine: Ukrainians became amongst the unhappiest people on the planet, and the Government’s debt doubled, and Ukraine’s GDP plunged 50%, and the incomes of Ukrainians plunged 50%, and two regions which had been in Ukraine (Crimea and Donbass) broke away from the U.S.-imposed nazi Government that wanted the residents in those areas to be killed or else expelled into Russia.  Why were the residents impoverished while the Government’s debt doubled? Where did that money go? All of that debt-increase was borrowing in order to be able to afford the war against Donbass. O’Brien says “Ukrainians are happy today”, but, by all objective measures, they’ve not been less happy except during World War II — they disliked Hitler and Stalin even more than they disliked the 2014-installed U.S.-coup-regime.

Robert O’Brien is an even stronger believer in the statement that President Obama so often stated, that the United States is “the one indispensable nation”, which means that all others are “dispensable.” That’s the core belief of neoconservatism, and O’Brien is so extreme a believer in it as to attack Obama for having not been as extreme as he himself is.

The entire range of neoconservatism is, however, the norm in U.S.-and-allied international relations. Extreme as O’Brien is, he’s merely extremely normal for a top person in international relations, in any country that’s allied with the United States today.

To study international relations isn’t evil, but to rise to the international top in that field is evil, because the international top in this field can’t be reached unless the writer is propagandizing for the world’s leading power and is therefore an imperialist, and that’s a reliable definition of what it means to be evil in international relations.

Imperialism is ‘justifiable’ only on one basis, supremacism; and that’s the belief in might-makes-right, which is also the core belief in fascism — which is intrinsically evil. This is the reason why Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, were commonly called “fascist,” even though only in Italy was the tyrant’s political party named that with a capital “F”. The ideology is lower-case, “fascism” — this is simply the might-makes-right belief, and this ideology has existed ever since the dawn of civilization itself. Mussolini didn’t invent it, but he updated it, so as to call  it “corporationism,” and, synonymously, “fascism.” He called it that in order to enable the prior aristocratic system, feudalism, which was based upon ownership and control of land, to become ‘updated’ to “fascism,” which is based instead upon ownership and control of corporations. Now in the industrial era, ownership of shares of stock replaces ownership of acres of land, the aristocratic system which had prevailed in the pre-1600 human era, the agrarian era. And this is the modern form of feudalism: fascism. They’re just different eras of supremacism.

Another good example of a leading scholar of international relations is Harvard’s Graham Allison, whom I have previously discussed in regards to his views regarding Russia. This time, however, I shall discuss his views regarding China, and I also shall discuss his views concerning existing U.S. foreign policies relating not only to China and Russia but to the entire non-U.S. world. As you will see: he agrees with Barack Obama that “The United States is and remains the one  indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.” In other words: Allison believes that every other  nation is “dispensable.” That view is American supremacism — America’s form  of fascism. It’s also called “neoconservatism.” This is how one becomes appointed to — and he leads — Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

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On 11 December 2018, the anonymous “Zero Hedge” headlined “This is What The ‘Trade’ War With China Is Really All About”, and provided there a brilliant description of what the conflict with China is actuallyabout, and of why this conflict has now reached the stage where it inevitably will dominate geostrategy in the centuries going forward (if a resulting nuclear war won’t end everything, which would eliminate future centuries). Global warming could be permanently interrupted by nuclear winter from a major-powers nuclear war, but those are the only two reasonably credible doomsday scenarios, at present (other than an asteroid-hit against this planet, which would be far less likely): global burnout, or else WW III.

Perhaps these two possibilities are why the great poet Robert Frost wrote:

Fire and Ice

BY ROBERT FROST

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Both options — “fire” and “ice” — would be Man-made; and, in both options, the people who are leading us there are imperialists — fascists. Some of them push for global burnout; some push for WW III; some push for both.

When Frost said, “I hold with those who favor fire,” he was suggesting that he expected a World War III, which, as a nuclear mega-conflict, would actually end up freezing the planet to death, thus: “nuclear winter.” Consequently, his “fire” would produce the opposite of fire; and global burnout (which would take far longer to implement) isn’t  the “fire” that he was referring to. Global burnout would simply kill everything on the planet — there would be nothing left to burn.

Fascists aren’t concerned about either “fire” or “ice,” but only about supremacy: their conquest, and rule over the world. They are heedless of both global burnout and nuclear war — except insofar as they think that either outcome could end up placing “our side” on top — and would thus be ‘good’ in their view, because to them it would be “victory,” and “Might makes right.”

For example: Robert Scheer’s 1982 book, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War, was about the U.S. Republican Party mainstream, which is fascism, and specifically was about the Ronald Reagan and G.H.W. Bush (and very much also later described G.W. Bush’s) view, that America must build nuclear weapons in order to use them to conquer Russia — not really in order to prevent war between the U.S. and Russia. One of Scheer’s interviews in that book was with Charles Kupperman, who at that time was a national-security advisor to President Reagan, and became subsequently a vice president both at Lockheed Martin and at Boeing — the two largest sellers to the U.S. Government, meaning the top two U.S. Government contractors (basically, the two largest suppliers to the Pentagon). Here are excerpts from Scheer’s interview with Kupperman about this, when he asked (p. 131) Kupperman about whether victory in a nuclear war is possible:

Scheer: So you think it is possible to win? …

Kupperman: I think it is possible to win. [Scheer asked what that means.] It means that it is clear after the war that one side is stronger than the other side, the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side.

No definition was supplied as to what measures should apply in order to determine “that one side is stronger than the other side.” But clearly, Kupperman meant that “the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side.” He was thinking in terms of Russia’s surrendering. To a fascist, surrendering means that the surrenderer is inferior to the victor: after all, “Might makes right” is  their ‘ethic’. That’s what it means  to be  a supremacist.

Scheer asked what that victory would be like, and Kupperman said: “It would be a struggle to reconstitute the society that we have. It certainly wouldn’t be the same society [that had existed] prior to an exchange, there is no question about that. But in terms of having an organized nation, and having enough means left after the war to reconstitute itself, I think that is entirely possible.”

Nothing was asked about how that’s possible after the nuclear war, when there would be nuclear winter. Wikipedia has a good article about “Nuclear Winter”, and it not only describes that, but states:

A “nuclear summer” is a hypothesized scenario in which, after a nuclear winter caused by aerosols inserted into the atmosphere that would prevent sunlight from reaching lower levels or the surface,^[58]has abated, a greenhouse effect then occurs due to carbon dioxide released by combustion and methane released from the decay of the organic matter and methane from dead organic matter and corpses that froze during the nuclear winter.^[58][59]

Another more sequential hypothetical scenario, following the settling out of most of the aerosols in 1–3 years, the cooling effect would be overcome by a heating effect from greenhouse warming, which would raise surface temperatures rapidly by many degrees, enough to cause the death of much if not most of the life that had survived the cooling, much of which is more vulnerable to higher-than-normal temperatures than to lower-than-normal temperatures.

So: a reasonable assumption would be that people such as Kupperman understate, to the point of basically lying about, the consequences if they succeed. First, there would be the immediate deaths and then the deaths from injuries and diseases afterwards; then, there would be the starvations, the global famine; then, there would be the nuclear winter; and, then, there might be global warming “rapidly by many degrees, enough to cause the death of much if not most of the life that had survived the cooling.” And, of course, any surviving Republicans, and the many Democrats who likewise are neoconservatives-imperialists-fascists, would try to kill as many of their surviving opponents as possible, so that “the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side,” which would be victory, for the ‘winners’, of that nuclear war.

Before Robert O’Brien got the nod on September 18th, Kupperman was the temporary National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, when Kupperman’s immediate superior, John Bolton, was fired by Donald Trump, for having failed to conquer either Venezuela or Iran or Syria or Russia or China or North Korea. Perhaps Bolton and Pompeo, and the other people whom Trump had surrounded himself with, expected that Trump would go to war against all or at least one  of them (perhaps Venezuela?), in order to reassert America’s supremacy over the entire globe, but Trump refused to do that so short a time before the next U.S. Presidential election, and so they all were disappointed in him, and he was disappointed in them. On 10 September 2019, the New York Times  reported that, “the president appreciated Mr. Kupperman’s just-the-facts style compared with Mr. Bolton’s often ideologically charged delivery: If Mr. Trump had to have a national security brief concerning long-term planning, he preferred it from Mr. Kupperman as opposed to Mr. Bolton, according to a person with knowledge of that process.” And now, Trump will get his neocon advice from O’Brien.

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Graham Allison’s best-selling 2017 Destined for War says that China is destined for war with the United States because China will be stupid or recalcitrant enough to resist becoming part of the American empire. In the standard self-righteous way of aristocrats and their sycophants, he starts with the unquestionable assumption that “we” are right and “they” (whomever challenges “our” supremacy) will be so stupid or otherwise flawed as to force “us” to ‘defend ourselves’ by demonstrating ‘our’ ‘superiority’. This is similar to the barbaric views that are expressed by virtually all members of the U.S. Congress, and by all U.S. Presidents, since at least the time of Reagan — all of them similarly self-righteous and imperialistic. In fact, America’s leading national-security scientists have asserted that the U.S. Government is now so strongly neoconservative that America’s weaponry is now designed definitely with the purpose being to win a nuclear war  against Russia, instead of to prevent, or even to avoid, such a war. They have documented that, at the very top of the U.S. Government, there is more extreme supremacism than has ever existed anywhere. Never before in history has a regime — not even Hitler’s — implemented a plan to conquer the world even if its only realistic result, if the plan succeeds, would be to terminate all life on Earth. America’s supremacism — such as is advocated by Graham Allison and all U.S. Administrations since at least the time of G.W. Bush — is the one and only supreme supremacism.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, these were the views that were similarly expressed by the aristocracies and sycophants in places such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. I am not saying that those people, or ours, who hold to supremacist views, are “filth,” or “trash,” or other such supposed pejoratives. After all, there can be good filth or trash. However, there cannot be any good fascist (or “imperialist”). (Is there “good evil”? Does anyone actually think so?) I agree with FDR on that.

Succeeding in the field of foreign affairs, in Washington, DC, by repudiating American imperialism, or “neoconservatism,” is, and long has been, impossible. That town has emerged, since WW II, to become the fascist capital of the world. In this sense, the sides have become reversed, since FDR’s death.

So: the differences between Robert O’Brien, and Graham Allison, and Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and G.W. Bush, are, actually small, when it comes to international relations. They’re all fascists. They’re all normal U.S. experts on topics of international relations.

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