2023 – The Year the World Saw the U.S. Emperor as Naked… and Grotesque
December 22, 2023
Seeing the naked truth is usually the first step before we can go on to realize the truth of beauty and decency. We might hope that the world is taking that first step.
American President Joe Biden likes to talk about “inflexion points” when he is lecturing about world affairs and the supposed superiority of the United States. This year is indeed an inflexion point.
It was the year that the entire world saw the truly hideous and criminal nature of U.S. power.
Washington’s fuelling of the futile conflict in Ukraine and the despicable slaughter in Gaza is a wake-up call for the entire world. The United States stands barefaced and grotesque as the primary purveyor of war. There can be no doubt about that. For many it is shocking, scandalous and frightening.
Tragically, it seems, for the world, every year’s end is an occasion to witness and lament conflicts, wars and suffering over the preceding 12 months. Often the causes of wars and suffering are seemingly unfathomable.
However, this year seems to be unique. The year ends with a horrendous massacre in Gaza that is unprecedented and perpetrated by Israel with the full support of the United States. The scale of deliberate mass killing in Gaza makes it a genocide. The fact that this abomination is occurring at Christmas time when the world is supposed to celebrate the divine birth of Jesus Christ – the Prince of Peace – in the very place where he was born some 2,000 years ago makes the abomination all the more profane and damning.
What is particularly wretched is that the heinous destruction of children is happening in full view of the world. There is no remorse or pretence. It is full-blown premeditated murder done with cruelty and sickening impunity.
Virtually the whole world is horrified by the devastating, relentless violence and absolute violation of international law. The butchery by the Israeli regime cannot in any way be rationalized by the previous attack on Israel by Palestinian militants on October 7. Those killings by Hamas have been cynically used as a pretext for the subsequent and ongoing annihilation of Palestinian civilians.
This genocide could not happen without the crucial support of the United States for the Israeli regime. Financially, militarily and diplomatically, Washington is sponsoring the horror in Gaza as well as the Occupied West Bank.
This week saw the U.S. once again obstructing calls at the United Nations for a ceasefire and the urgent supply of humanitarian aid to more than two million people. The World Food Program has declared a catastrophic famine in the coastal enclave after more than 70 days of bombing and blockade by the Israeli regime. More than 20,000 people – mainly women and children – have been slaughtered with up to 7,000 more missing, presumably dead. Israeli troops are carrying out mass executions of terrified and traumatized human beings, according to UN rights monitors.
The United States is arming Israel to the hilt and enabling it. U.S. President Joe Biden has pointedly refused to join international demands for a ceasefire. The United Nations has voted by an overwhelming majority for a cessation of the violence. Washington has repeatedly rejected the world’s pleas because the Biden administration is obscenely amplifying Israeli lies and distortions. “Unwavering, unshakable support” is how the White House arrogantly boasts about it without a hint of shame that it is self-indicting.
Tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions have been flown to Israel to carry out “indiscriminate bombing” (Biden’s own admission). One-tonne bunker-buster bombs have been dropped deliberately on refugee camps and hospitals. And still, the Pentagon shamelessly refuses to impose any red lines on the use of its munitions.
This genocide has Israeli fingers on the triggers but it is ultimately an American-sponsored genocide. Based on Nuremberg principles, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu would be both in the dock, accompanied by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and their counterparts in Tel Aviv.
If there were previous international doubts about Washington’s systematic criminality, the whole world knows for certain now.
Significantly, too, American citizens are also repulsed by the barbarity and the fact that their government is an accomplice in a historic crime against humanity. Polls show that Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents ever, and his culpability for the genocide in Gaza is a primary reason for the widespread disgust, especially among younger Americans.
As things stand, there is a fair chance that 81-year-old incumbent Democrat will lose the presidential election in 2024 – less than 11 months away. Not that any of the Republican contenders are qualitatively better. American politics are in a crisis of chaos.
But this is not just about Biden or other individual U.S. politicians. The United States government and much of the corporate-controlled media stand full square behind Israel’s crimes. That has always been the case since the Israeli state was formed in 1948 through Washington’s skulduggery at the newly established United Nations, together with the old colonial power, Britain – the author of the infamous and treacherous Balfour Declaration that instigated Zionist dispossession of the indigenous people in the Holy Land, or what London called its Palestinian Mandate.
Decades of duplicity and dissembling as a peace broker in the Middle East have been blown away by the horrendous massacre that has culminated at the end of 2023. Israel is carrying out a Final Solution that is comparable to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The Zionist regime has cynically used the Holocaust against Jews as a cover for its genocide against Palestinians. And many decent Jews around the world, including Holocaust survivors, are rightly mortified by the depraved association exploited by the Zionist regime.
What is happening in Gaza may be seen as a shocking revelation for the world of historic proportions. It is an eye-opener of the violence and lawlessness that the U.S. emperor has been systematically engaged in since it became the dominant world power almost a century ago. Following the Second World War and the defeat of European fascism – largely by the Soviet Union – the United States has taken up the fascist mantle, albeit unspoken and disguised with pretensions claims of democratic virtue. No other nation has waged as many wars and conflicts over the past eight decades as the U.S. The death toll from American imperialism runs to tens of millions of people with victims on every continent.
The conflict that erupted in Ukraine in February 2022 is another manifestation of Washington’s imperialist machinations. That war is approaching its third year and shows no sign of ending because the U.S. continues to weaponize the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, a regime that Washington and its European NATO allies installed in 2014 through a coup d’état. The hostilities in Ukraine – the biggest in Europe since the Second World War – were fomented by the United States as a proxy war to defeat Russia. The war could have been avoided if the U.S. and its European vassals had negotiated a diplomatic solution to NATO’s expansionist threat to Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not want a war in Ukraine. Respected American commentators like John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Scott Ritter have all confirmed with extensive analysis that Washington and its European allies are primarily responsible for creating the conflict – one that has cost the lives of as many as 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and the displacement of 10 million civilians across Europe. Nearly $200 billion in Western public money has been wasted so far. Biden and the European Union want to donate another $100 billion to prolong this futile war.
America’s wars were always officially rationalized with some seeming plausible cause or mission. In the early decades of the Cold War, Washington claimed to be defending the “Free World” against Communist aggression in Korea, Vietnam, Africa and Latin America. When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1990-91 after the collapse of the Soviet Union due to its internal political problems, we then saw a spate of U.S. wars around the world against drugs, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and – most absurdly – defense of human rights.
The latest war in Ukraine is purportedly to defend democracy and sovereignty (of a Nazi Waffen SS-adulating regime in Kiev installed by the CIA!).
Nonetheless, the genocide in Gaza is the culmination, the final act. This is where all the history of U.S. crimes and fraudulence as a “noble exceptional democratic leader” finally comes unstuck.
It is an infernal climax for a global power, arguably the world’s first and last imperialist global hegemon. The whole of humanity can now see that all the American rhetoric and vanity is nothing but an ugly lie. The emperor is naked in all his crimes. The blood of children on his hands, his mouth drooling with lies. It was always so, but now universally evident.
One might ask, where do we go from here? Despite the abominable cruelty, suffering and misery, one can still hope that humanity will eventually find a way to live in peaceful coexistence. By respecting all those who abide by international law and basic moral precepts. Arguably, most of humanity is willing and capable of living in peace.
But to achieve that peace there must be no illusions and lies. There must be accountability and genuine atonement.
U.S. imperial power is damned. There’s no going back or reform. The capitalist economic system – evolved as oligarchic fascism and its two-party puppet show – driving imperialist barbarism must be called out and overturned. Biden is doomed, and Trump and so on are just more false prophets.
Seeing the naked truth is usually the first step before we can go on to realize the truth of beauty and decency. We might hope – for the sake of peace and ending much of the suffering – that the world is taking that first step.
U.S. empire’s color revolutions portend to how our government will weaponize the lumpen against anti-imperialists
RAINER SHEA ☭
DEC 22, 2023
This is the second in a series on the counterinsurgency that the movement for justice faces. Here’s the link to the first part of it.
To get a sense of how our government is going to use the lumpenproletariat in its counterinsurgency against the anti-imperialist cause, we can look at Washington’s color revolutions. As revolutionary politics gains strength within the imperial center, the state’s counterinsurgency is going to adopt more aggressive tactics. But it’s still going to try to maintain plausible deniability, and portray the lumpen counterrevolutionary terror as being detached from the government.
To do this, it’s going to use the same public relations maneuvers from destabilization efforts such as 2014’s Euromaidan. Like in those operations, the imperial state will recruit from the highly alienated element of society that Marx and Engels observed can be made into a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” The “lumpenproletariat” can easily be swayed towards assisting the feds, because it lacks proximity to the means of production and therefore an innate incentive to be loyal towards the workers. Which means the worst thing Marxists could do is dilute the proletarian character of our movement, and let it be guided by whoever from this element approaches our cadres.
Using the lumpen and the lumpen-adjacent to wage war on behalf of monopoly capital
As Bay Area Revolutionary Union’s Bruce Franklin concluded about the lumpen: “The lumpenproletariat know what it is to be on the bottom, to be mashed into the gutter by the whole weight of an imperialist structure. They share the degradation of the wretched of the whole earth. At every moment two paths are possible for them. One is to turn their hatred against other victims, against each other, against themselves. They can put on the uniform of the U.S. Marines and butcher Vietnamese peasants, they can prey on their brothers and sisters in the streets, or they can shoot their own veins full of poison. The other path is the path of their own liberation.” The imperialist institutions are capable of taking these elements which they’ve pushed to the margins, and making them into soldiers in the first wave of counter-gang anti-revolutionary violence. Then, as these elements are waging their violent campaign, the highest levels of capital will portray their actions as heroic.
The history of color revolutions shows what this narrative manipulation is going to look like. The essential story the empire’s propagandists have needed to keep up about Euromaidan is that its outcome—in which a government that upholds the ideology of Ukraine’s World War II Nazi collaborators got installed by the Obama administration—represented the will of the country’s people. To strengthen their argument for this, they point to how many of the country’s people supported the Maidan demonstrations; it wasn’t a niche protest movement, they say, so it had to have been entirely organic.
Aside from the litany of evidence that the protests received U.S. support, and that the shootings which catalyzed the transfer of government were a false flag by Washington, this argument is still misleading. Just because the Maidan protests received mass backing at a certain point, doesn’t mean Maidan represented the interests of the people; it only means the people were subjected to a fairly successful psyop. A psyop that was able to resonate due to the same poor economic conditions which were created by western capital’s looting of the post-Soviet countries.
The only way NATO’s psyop machine could convince a large proportion of Ukraine’s people to support the protests, or to support the EU deal which would make the country fully subordinate to Euro-American capital, was by appealing to their sense of discontent about how things had become. The Ukrainian masses overall aren’t able to benefit from the EU’s agenda for privatization and austerity; in fact, there’s evidence that most Ukrainians have a conscious interest in restoring socialism. Within two decades after the USSR’s fall, more than half of Ukrainians had come to view the dismantling of socialism as an overall negative, even though most of them had welcomed it at the time. As in most countries, the majority of Ukraine’s people are not fascists, so the fascists had to sell their agenda to the people under the guise of supposedly representing things the people wanted.
Like how the agents of international capital did in 1991, they weaponized the idea of hope, portraying the changes they brought as necessary for resolving society’s contradictions. Because these changes only made things infinitely worse, in the end the people would see through the deception. In the moment, though, even many of the Ukrainians who wish for a return to Soviet times were persuaded to support Euromaidan, because it looked back then like a way out of the country’s bleak political situation.
This was how the color revolution network marketed its project to instigate chaos, then install a far-right regime that would seek to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers. After their initial efforts to agitate in favor of the EU deal provoked police repression, public sympathy for their cause naturally went up. They then used this PR success as a way to escalate the protests into riots. These final waves of the siege against the government were mainly participated in by members of Ukraine’s ultranationalist parties, with Right Sector and Svoboda affiliates making up the bulk of those within the violent protests.
These fascists couldn’t have gotten in place to prevail without the assistance of the lumpen or lumpen-adjacent elements, which joined the Maidan protests under the belief that this movement would rectify their increasingly alienated situation. Students had an instrumental role in bringing the protests to success, and as Franklin wrote about students in relation to the lumpen: “As neither workers nor owners, living under coercive rules without even the illusion of having chosen the authority over them, students share some of the experience of the more clearly classless elements of society, the true lumpenproletariat. This experience has at least some effect on their consciousness. They know what it is to be considered a parasite and to live like one…the most striking phenomenon is that of the dropout, who slides directly from an existence with some superficial resemblances to the lumpenproletariat into becoming a bona fide member of that class. And during the present period, the beginning of the final collapse of imperialism, that is becoming a mass phenomenon.”
By funneling these students into an effort that was led not by any workers movement, but by the imperialists and their pro-EU compradors, the color revolution in effect made them more lumpenized. The imperialists directed the students away from their potential path of aiding the class struggle, and towards the vandal tendency within history’s reactions to the contradictions of capitalism. This is the tendency that’s based not within constructive plans for bringing society to its next developmental stage, but within destruction and personal catharsis.
Manufacturing consent for lumpen counterrevolutionary terror in the empire’s core
The sniping false flag let the coupists maintain the perception that they were simply fighting for “freedom,” and soon the White House was able to select the most anti-Russian new leadership that it could find. (Which turned out to be a leadership that would soon call to forcibly relocate the Donbass Russian speakers into “filtration camps.”) The “this is the beginning of a better era” narrative got shattered within only a few months, after the coup regime used its fascist death squads to burn pro-Russian demonstrators alive inside a building. It’s not like those kinds of realities create doubt among the partisans of the liberal order, though, so they could celebrate it as a victory for “democracy.”
A decade later, after countless revelations showing the Ukrainian government’s Nazistic nature have strengthened the case of the pro-Russian separatists, Washington has failed to fulfill the ultimate goal behind the color revolution. It’s lost to Russia not just militarily, but more importantly in the economic war. And this has ensured Russia won’t be destabilized, which means Washington will continue to be unable to subdue China. It’s because of this defeat the imperialists have experienced internationally that they’ve come to see crushing dissent within the core as more urgent than ever. Now we must do the equivalent of what the Russians have done, and win against the internal color revolution which our government aims to use against us.
As the state directs its counter-gangs to assail anti-imperialists, it’s going to need to do so in a way that doesn’t alienate the public. Which means relying on the types of counter-gangs that represent a “left” orientation, rather than a right-wing one. If the state were to use the right as its primary means for counterrevolutionary terror, this would destroy its perceived credibility, revealing its fascist nature too clearly. It needs to nurture a type of fascism that appears to be the opposite of fascism; that claims to be what we need in order to defeat fascism.
Essential for this psyop has been the redefinition of fascism in the imagination of the American left. No longer does it mean a practice in which finance capital wages war to try to protect the existing social order; according to today’s conventional left, it simply means any ideas that are socially conservative. By shifting fascism’s perceived nature from being economic to social, the narrative managers have primed the anti-imperialists from the “left” orientation to be made hostile towards many of their own allies. There are plenty of anti-imperialists who don’t share the social views which are particular to American leftism, often because they haven’t been brought up in parts of the globe where U.S. culture war issues are relevant. To label them all as fascists is to negate the possibility for a united front against fascism, which is to say a united front against the interests of international monopoly capital.
The other outcome of using this liberal definition of fascism is that one becomes willing to align with the radical liberals who assist international monopoly capital, simply because these radlibs have socially progressive views. That way, as these counter-gang footsoldiers distribute CIA-provided narcotics to impressionable organizers, mix sex with political work while never taking accountability, and counterproductively vilify every formation that seriously prioritizes anti-imperialism, their destructive activities are seen as acceptable. Because within the insular mentality that today’s conventional leftism represents, somebody is judged to be inherently more valuable simply by virtue of being on the “left.”
As federal infiltrators seek to lumpenize the movement, and replace its working class members with elements that aren’t invested in proletarian victory, this mentality is quite useful for that goal. It’s a way of thinking that encourages organizers to enable lapses in disciplinary standards, simply for the sake of maintaining a vulgar kind of “radical” aesthetic. It’s no coincidence that the elements of the U.S. socialist movement which disavow Russia’s anti-fascist military operation are the same ones which foster an environment of lax sexual discipline within their cadres. They’re willing to sacrifice the interests of actual anti-fascist struggles for the sake of appealing to the ultraviolent, hyper-individualistic anarchists who dominate most branches of what we call “Antifa.”
These elements are not compatible with the revolution, because they’re committed to advancing a reactionary agenda. And therefore they’ll react to any pushback we give them by turning against us, and trying to manipulate those among our own ranks into joining with their campaign of violent sabotage. There are elements of the lumpenproletariat which are compatible with us, but we ironically will only be able to bring them in by adopting a hard stance against the undisciplined habits which the bad-faith lumpen elements insist in practicing. Somebody who’s serious is going to be attracted to an organization that can give them food, security, and clear guidance; which is impossible if you entertain unserious people who don’t want to grow out of their selfish ways of operating. These actors are the enemies of both the workers, and those who’ve been pushed out of the proletarian realm but seek to become proletarianized.
While these vandal elements begin inflicting violence upon the state’s targets, they’ll sell this as necessary for protecting society from “fascism.” And their marketing campaign will work to an extent. This is evidenced by how the majority of the U.S. public supports actions against Trumpism, including ones with troubling anti-democratic implications. A little more than half of Americans think it’s a good thing that Colorado has banned Trump from the 2024 election ballot, even though the insurrection which this decision is predicated upon was able to escalate into a break-in because of instigation by federal infiltrators within the crowd. In the war against illiberal political forces that our government is waging, the narrative managers have to obscure the role which the federal agencies have in manipulating events to fit a certain story. Or, in the case of a target like the Uhuru org, in outright redefining the meaning of the law so that the feds can accuse dissidents of “foreign interference.”
Most Americans aren’t going to be brought towards liking Trump; nor does he deserve to be defended, beyond the false charges against him that the feds have concocted for strategic purposes. The real reason why the majority of Americans support the Colorado decision—and thereby are at risk of being persuaded by the narratives justifying the coming lumpen anti-revolutionary campaign—is because they recognize Trump as another part of the imperial system which opposes their interests. The media is avoiding discussion of the Uhuru case because unlike Trump, the indicted members of the Uhuru org represent true hope for the people. They’re a committed and effective force within the movement to defeat U.S. hegemony, and to liberate us from our capitalist dictatorship.
The gang members, drug dealers, disaffected students, and other lumpen or lumpen-aligned individuals who the state will recruit into its war against orgs like Uhuru do not represent the people. They represent a minority that has an incentive to aid the counter-gangs, as these counter-gangs provide them with an avenue for ultraviolence. (Or, in many cases, simply avenues for getting paid to do mercenary work.) The more we work to build this movement, the more people we’ll encounter who reject the scandal-mongering propaganda which the state and its counter-gangs direct against us.
There are many people within the “leftist” spaces who are compatible with the agenda of the counter-gangs, more than one would like to think. But the majority of the people lack the incentives which these leftists have to embrace sectarianism, and will be receptive to an anti-imperialist platform should we expose them to it. If we overcome the state’s attempts to destroy us, we’ll be able to provide the people with a means for advancing their interests.
Rainer's apparent attachment to libertarians is a blind spot. The 'non-government' reaction will not be heavily lumpen as the numbers of the lumpen in this country that have military capacity is marginal, this ain't Mexico or Honduras. Rather it will be that seedbed of fascism, the petty bourgeois, with working class traitors. Who do think is buying all those $500-$1000 rifles? Poor people?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Today's global conflicts – whether in Eastern Europe, West Asia, or East Asia – are spawned by a fading US hegemon desperately clinging to power.
Mohamad Hasan Sweidan
DEC 26, 2023
Photo Credit: The Cradle
“One era is ending, a new one is beginning, and the decisions that we make now will shape the future for decades to come.”
With these words, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken defined the "turning point" of the American era, the transition from one world order to another.
“In this pivotal time, America’s global leadership is not a burden. It’s a necessity to safeguard our freedom, our democracy, and our security,” Blinken said in his address to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in September.
Official US documents, including last year’s National Security Strategy, underscore Washington's conviction that waiting is a luxury it cannot afford; that it “will act decisively” to maintain its global leadership. As such, the US involvement in conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the militarization in Southeast Asia, must be seen through this lens of international dynamics.
Broadly, tensions in Africa and Asia are interconnected with the west's frenzied initiatives to maintain a dominant position and decisive role in the new multipolar order.
From Eastern Europe to West Asia
Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the US has strategically tied its support for Kyiv to the defense of the "rules-based order."
With clichéd sound bites, President Joe Biden characterized the conflict as “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
Many Atlanticist leaders echo the sentiment that unwavering support for Ukraine aims to deter Russia from challenging a world order where the west holds sway.
Most prominently, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz articulated this perspective in his Foreign Affairs article published in early 2023 titled The Global Zeitenwende, (“an epochal tectonic shift”) in which he posits that Russian President Vladimir Putin is challenging a world order where Washington is a decisive power.
Scholz emphasizes the need for collective action by those who believe in a rules-based world order, even cooperating with countries that do not embrace democratic institutions but endorse the US-led principles for global governance. That western rules-based paradigm, it should be noted, is one in which international law and the UN Charter have long been discarded in favor of power and advantage.
Today, those dueling visions are playing out in the Ukraine war: a confrontation between the west seeking to maintain its global superiority and Russia striving to disrupt this dominance. Moscow’s rationale for the war is to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia's borders, as confirmed by the western military alliance's Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
Similarly, the war in Gaza must be seen through this international lens, with Israel representing western interests in West Asia and any harm to the occupation state viewed inherently as a blow to US influence in the region.
As Washington stands at this crucial turning point, according to Blinken, the cost of a blow to Israel is deemed too high, underscoring the resolute US defense of its global influence in the devastated towns and cities of Gaza.
Neo-colonial maneuvers
There are important nuances between these two US-backed wars, however: Ukraine is seen as a tool used by Washington to achieve its interests, while Israel is considered an American interest in itself. That Biden once famously asserted that the US would need to create an Israel if it did not exist illustrates its status as a neo-colonial outpost, protecting western interests in the region.
This also explains the noticeable shift in US interest away from Eastern Europe to West Asia after the Palestinian resistance breached the occupied territories on 7 October to target military personnel and take prisoners. The deliberate shift of American attention from one war zone to the other was neatly exemplified by the Washington Post's swift removal of the ‘War in Ukraine’ tab from its homepage.
As previously mentioned by The Cradle, “Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip is best understood to be a US-backed one,” one that is being fought to safeguard US influence and interests in West Asia. However, the maneuvering room for Washington's allies is shrinking dramatically. Unlike the diverse strategic options West Asian countries explored during the Ukraine war, Gaza offers no such latitude. It is fundamentally Washington’s war, demanding collective mobilization to defend the US position.
It is also telling that the US-led multination task force, Operation Guardian of Prosperity in the Red Sea, is already facing major set-backs since its recent inception, with some members pulling out and others choosing to remain unnamed.
White House National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby had to awkwardly caveat the secrecy like this: "There are some countries that have agreed to participate and be part of the operation in the Red Sea, but they have to decide how much they want that to be public. And I'm going to leave it to them so that they can describe it somehow, because not everyone wants to be public."
For example, the role of NATO member Turkiye has transformed into that of an energy transmission station for Israel, while the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan serve as a transit bridge for goods bound for the occupation state that Yemen prevents from passing through the Red Sea.
Notably, shipments from Turkiye to Israel surged to 355 after 7 October, with many linked to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and individuals close to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including his son Buraq. Even Egypt, restricted to allowing aid trucks through the Rafah crossing, could not facilitate aid to Palestinians without US approval.
How conflict spreads
In international relations, there are two main theories that address the relationship between power and the spread of peace. The first is the hegemonic stability theory which posits that the international order is likely to remain stable when one country is the dominant global power. The proponents of this theory believe that the existence of a single hegemon deters all powers in the world and prevents them from spreading tension.
However, given the reality that the United States has dominated a conflict-ridden global order for four decades, it can be argued that the presence of the hegemon did not lead to global stability. Rather, the dominant was the major source and catalyst for spreading tension around the world. It is sufficient to look at the distribution of US bases in the world and the proliferation of military agreements signed by Washington to understand how the US consistently provokes rivals and challengers, and creates strife.
United States military presence in West Asia
The second is the balance of power theory, in which states seek to protect themselves by preventing any country from acquiring enough military power to control all other nations. If one power dominates – such as the United States – the theory predicts that weaker countries will unite in a defense alliance.
According to this theory, a balance of power between competing states or alliances raises the cost of tension for everyone and ensures stability in the world. Thus, achieving peace today requires a rise in the level of power among Washington's rivals, power which will provide the deterrence required to limit the spread of tensions around the world. Increasing the capabilities of Washington's rivals is now a key requirement for all peaceful peoples and nations. And according to the balance of power theory, uniting against Israel is the most successful way to stabilize West Asia and its environs today.
Post-unipolar realities
As the war in Gaza is unequivocally an American war, a vertical division emerges in West Asia, dividing those siding with Palestine and the Resistance Axis from those aligning with Israel and the Zionist project. Washington's allies cannot stay neutral as the US leads the battle directly.
This clarifies the positions of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt, Turkiye, and other West Asian countries choosing to align with the US at the expense of Palestinian interests.
Observing Washington's policies reveals global tensions spurred on by the pursuit of US influence. From Eastern Europe to West Asia and Southeast Asia, the US works to counter Eurasian powers Russia and China, and other influential countries, such as Iran and North Korea.
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington's unipolar moment has resulted in more wars and destruction imaginable in decades often characterized as ones marked by peace. A more stable world order necessitates the achievement of a global balance of power by weakening the US and empowering new rising powers. Thus, peace and stability in West Asia hinges on the weakening of Israel, a colonial project so intricately tied to Washington's hegemonic agenda.
In an Age of Forever Wars, American Popular Culture Has Reimagined Its Veterans as Victims Rather than Agents of Empire
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - December 30, 2023 1
[Source: henrykotula.com]
Long Forgotten Is the Role that Veteran Anti-War Activists Played in Ending the Vietnam War
In 1995, Massachusetts Governor William Weld pardoned Joseph Yandle who was then serving a life sentence for first degree murder, stating that Yandle had gone to “serve his country in Vietnam” and “returned a scarred man, and he has served a lengthy prison sentence. [23 years to that point].”
A year earlier, Mike Wallace had done a story on Yandle for 60 Minutes in which he reported that Mr. Yandle had served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine and “came home with a Bronze Star for valor, two Purple Hearts and something else, too: a heroin habit.” That Vietnam-acquired habit had allegedly led him into crime that included a string of armed robberies and cost the life of a liquor store clerk, Joseph Reppucci, in a 1972 holdup that Mr. Yandle helped a partner commit.
After the airing of the 60 Minutes story, W. G. Burkett, a Dallas businessman writing a book about veteran imposters, uncovered discrepancies in Yandle’s story and Yandle was forced to admit that, while he had served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, it was as a clerk with the Marines on Okinawa, and he did not win any combat medals.
According to Jerry Lembcke, a sociologist at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) who has just published the book The Cult of the Victim-Veteran: MAGA Fantasies in Lost-War America (New York: Routledge, 2024), Yandle’s story is significant because it exemplifies a manufactured veteran-as-victim narrative that has ominous political implications.
Jerry Lembcke [Source: holycross.edu]
During the late 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Vietnam veterans returned from the war politically radicalized and many took part in anti-war protests.
Vietnam veterans protesting against the war—a reality that has been widely forgotten, replaced by the image of the veteran as victim. [Source: legaleaglesflyordie.com]
However, a new diagnostic category was then invented—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—which pathologized veteran dissent and almost all veteran behavior.
Veterans were reimagined in American political culture as victims of the Vietnam War who had been literally spat upon and betrayed by anti-war activists.
Vietnam veterans march against the war in Washington, D.C., in April 1971. [Source: vintag.es]
In reality, the notion of veterans being spat upon was an urban legend: Lembcke’s research uncovered few if any such incidents ever took place. Additionally, Lembcke found that a large number of veterans claiming to have been suffering from PTSD had never even served on the war’s front lines. The Christian Science Monitor claimed in 1991 that 50% of Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD when only 15% saw combat.
GI Joe cartoon depicting a female hippie spitting on a soldier on his homecoming from the Vietnam War. Such a scenario never really occurred and was impossible in the way it was depicted. [Source: theworld.org]
Today, PTSD has become something of a badge of honor for veterans serving in illegal wars for which there are no battlefield heroics, especially since the U.S. military relies increasingly on automated weapon systems and drones.
The cult of the victim veteran is used by political elites to turn attention away from the horrendous human costs of America’s forever wars on subject societies and to scapegoat internal enemies for supposedly betraying the troops.
This resembles Nazi Germany, which adopted the dolchstoss myth scapegoating Jews, communists, women, liberals and pacifists for Germany’s defeat in World War I.
[Source: marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu]
Lembcke says that the invention of the psychiatric condition of shell shock in World War I—like PTSD after Vietnam—helped create the illusion that veterans were victims whose betrayal on the home front had to be avenged.
In the American context, revenge would come by fighting and winning new wars, by expunging domestic enemies, and by restoring America’s supposed cultural vitality from the World War II period—before the treasonous 1960s movements softened and “feminized” America.
Such reactionary impulses, according to Lembcke, have fueled an era of endless wars and the growth of the pseudo-fascist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Liberals have helped advance the veteran-as-victim narrative fueling revanchist policies because they have often framed criticisms of U.S. policy using the same mental health narratives as conservatives, suggesting that war harms the men and women sent to fight it.
This narrative obscures the far greater harm that U.S. wars have done to subject societies and imperialistic underpinnings of those wars, which liberals primarily support if the damage to American soldiers is not too great.
Discrediting Veteran Anti-War Voices
Lembcke is very critical of psychiatrists who supported the agenda of President Richard M. Nixon and other pro-war leaders beginning in the 1970s by adopting psychiatric labels to stigmatize non-conformist social behavior and veteran dissent.
Tricky Dick [Source: wsj.com]
At the 1972 Republican Party Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, the Nixon administration infiltrated Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) with agent provocateurs in an attempt to incite violence and make the veterans look crazy.
VVAW members protesting outside the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in 1972. [Source: floridamemory.com]
Dr. Chaim Shatan [Source: vvaw.org]
The Nixon schemers’ attempts to discredit veteran dissidents were bolstered by a New York Times op-ed by Dr. Chaim Shatan alleging that Vietnam veterans were a traumatized group and laying out the concept of PTSD.[1]
The Times had rejected Shatan’s piece 15 months earlier but found the timing opportune after months of widespread demonstrations by veterans, including ones where veterans hurled their medals at the Capitol building and admitted to being war criminals.[2]
Vietnam veteran hurling his medal at the U.S. Capitol building. Images like this were erased in popular culture and replaced with the archetype of the veteran as traumatized and psychologically damaged victim of the war, which in effect psychologized his protest if it was acknowledged at all. [Source: reddit.com]
In the late 1960s, a small group of psychiatrists had been working to formulate a new diagnostic concept that would apply to soldiers psychologically hurt by the Vietnam War, but they were dogged by the same empirical problems that had challenged the veracity of shell-shock during World War I—notably the fact that alleged “shell shock” sufferers were never exposed to exploding shells and there was no way of quantifying what soldiers were experiencing.
Dr. Peter Bourne [Source: blackwood-hodge.typepad.com]
The psychiatrist Peter Bourne had reported objective comparisons of the levels of adrenal secretions associated with stress for combat and non-combat troops in Vietnam and found no difference among helicopter MedEvac crews.[3] Bourne also found higher rates of psychiatric casualties among non-combat soldiers usually having nothing to do with the war.
Bourne’s findings point toward the social construction of PTSD, which Lembcke argues is more of a cultural and political phenomenon than a medical one.
The cult of the veteran as victim was strengthened by attempts to play up the negative health impacts of Agent Orange on servicepersons, which remain unclear, and functions as a diversion from the vast devastation inflicted by the U.S. military on Indochina.[4]
Hollywood played a key role in the myth-making by caricaturing Vietnam veterans as psychologically damaged misfits and criminal junkies when sociological research determined that Vietnam veterans achieved higher socio-economic status than their non-veteran peers and used drugs only in tiny numbers.[5]
One of the films advancing misleading stereotypes was Coming Home (1978) starring famed anti-war activist Jane Fonda, whose character is having an affair with a paraplegic veteran played by Jon Voight, which prompts her husband (played by Bruce Dern), also a Vietnam veteran, to go into a rage and commit suicide. The impression created by the film was that all veterans were damaged psychologically by the war as one of its primary legacies.
Poster for Coming Home (1978). [Source: upload.wikimedia.org]
The 1980s cult hit Rambo has a scarred veteran re-enlisting in the military to fight his own private war in Vietnam without any government constraints to free abandoned POWs so America can achieve a belated victory.
[Source: themoviedb.org]
This film has provided a metaphor for U.S. foreign policy ever since in its aim to avenge the “Vietnam Syndrome,” which was ostensibly provoked by weak-willed liberal politicians and the socio-cultural transformations bred by the 1960s movements that softened the nation’s moral fiber.
A Warped Political Culture
Analysts on the left have warned that the MAGA movement is fascist and Trump a wannabe Hitler or Mussolini.
While it is not clear that Trump has the same capabilities as those latter individuals, Lembcke’s book is significant in pointing to the deeply rooted sub-fascist themes in American political culture since the end of the Vietnam War that liberals have helped to advance as much as conservatives.
Labeling returning veterans as sufferers of PTSD may seem innocuous and well-meaning, but Lembcke spells out the real-world implications that sideswipe debate about America’s imperial role in the world.
It is part of a warped political culture that was used in the past to stigmatize and denigrate anti-war veterans and that transforms agents of empire into victims of traitorous domestic forces and a feminized culture that need to be eradicated.
1.The term PTSD wasn’t used in 1972, Shatan called it “Military Trauma.” ↑
2.After publication of Shatan’s piece, Shatan said that his phone began jumping off the wall, resulting in the organization of academic conferences and public forums followed by the formal professional adoption of PTSD by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). ↑
3.Jerry L. Lembcke, The Cult of the Victim-Veteran: MAGA Fantasies in Lost-War America (New York: Routledge, 2024), 43. ↑
4.Science historian David Zierler concluded in a 2011 study that “epidemiological studies on U.S. veterans dating back twenty years have so far been unable to establish a conclusive link between Agent Orange [a chemical herbicide sprayed in Vietnam to deprive the enemy of jungle cover] and a variety of cancers and other health maladies that some servicemen have attributed to the herbicide.” Lembcke, The Cult of the Victim-Veteran, 62; David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). ↑
5.See Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). ↑
Dunno about "used drugs only in tiny numbers". Depends if you count reefer or not. By all accounts I'm personally familiar with smoking dope was very common, using smack much less so, though a good friend eventually died of it. You could get a carton of American cigs with reefer replacing tobacco, which the Vietnamese kept, for a few bucks.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Fake Intellectuals Working For Think Tanks Funded By the Arms Industry Are Driving Support For War After War After War
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - January 2, 2024 0
[Source: prezibase.com]
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, China, and Now Iran
Afew days after the October 7 attacks in northern Israel, The Atlantic Council ran an inflammatory article on its website by Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer, entitled “It doesn’t matter whether Iran planned the Hamas attack—Tehran is still to blame.”[1]
Jonathan Panikoff [Source: atlanticcouncil.org]
The article referenced a Wall Street Journal article that claimed unfoundedly that Iran was responsible for planning the attacks, and expressed belief that even if Iran didn’t directly plan it, Iran was still responsible because it had supported Hamas in the past.
The article went on to support an aggressive military response by the U.S. and Israel that could potentially entail bombing Iran. The latter was a long-held dream of neoconservatives who have wanted to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollahs since it took over from the Shah, a U.S. and Israeli client, in a 1979 revolution.
Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War With Russia (Clarity Press, 2023) looks at the influence of think tanks like The Atlantic Council in driving gargantuan U.S. military budgets and endless wars that have no end in sight.
The Atlantic Council has been particularly hawkish with regards to Russia, helping to fuel a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine that has decimated a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and left us on the threshold of World War III.
[Source: amazon.com]
Diesen is an associate professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.
His book emphasizes the undue influence that think tank pseudo-intellectuals play because of their ubiquitous presence in the mainstream media as well as academia and because of their authorship of policy reports that often guide government policy.
Rather than being even-handed or in any way objective in their analysis, the think tank fellows follow a preordained narrative.
According to Diesen, their job is to manufacture consent for the goals of their paymasters—weapons manufacturers and oil companies who profit off of war along with foreign governments courting more U.S. military aid.
Diesen writes that “think-tanks have become a symptom of hyper-capitalism in which all aspects of society have become an appendage to the market. Even political influence is regulated by the free-market, in which think tanks are an important component.”
Glenn Diesen [Source: astanatimes.com]
Diesen notes that a brilliant achievement of propaganda has been to convince the population that propaganda is only an instrument of authoritarian states—that the U.S. is supposedly combating—and not liberal democracies.
The think tanks help condition the public to fear foreign threats and support wars of aggression under the veneer of providing independent expert analysis.
Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, has called The Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex,” while Diesen calls it “NATO’s Propaganda Wing.”
Hillary “the hawk” Clinton at 2013 Atlantic Council awards ceremony. [Source: mronline.org]
The Atlantic Council’s financial report from 2019/2020 reveals that it received over $1 million from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to Diesen. It also received major contributions from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. State Department, a Saudi oil billionaire (Bahaa Hariri), Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, Crescent Petroleum, and Burisma, an energy company owned by Ukrainian oligarchs which appointed Hunter Biden to its board along with former CIA counter-terrorism director Cofer Black.
The Atlantic Council’s close ties to the CIA were further evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon Wilson, was appointed CEO of the NED, a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the U.S. for regime change.
Source: thelibertybeacon.com]
Former CIA Director James R. Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and David Petraeus are listed on its Board, along with such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza Rice.
Over the past decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation being spread allegedly by Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who called for more aggressive intervention by the U.S. in Belarusian politics.
One of The Atlantic Council’s fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an editor at the popular online media outlet, The Daily Beast. He helps run a neo-McCarthyite website, PropOrNot that promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable, attacking independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly advancing Russian propaganda.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya [Source: tspr.org]
Michael Weiss [Source: linkedin.com]
In 2015, the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles—the same year that it presented its Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which produces Javelin missiles and many other lethal weapons.
Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin’s CEO, receiving Distinguished Leadership Award from the Atlantic Council in 2015. [Source: youtube.com]
Since the commencement of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, The Atlantic Council has doubled down on its long-standing Russophobia, calling for bombing Russia and starting World War III.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden at the 2011 Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards ceremony. [Source: grayzoneproject.com]
Last February, Matthew Kroenig, the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for consideration of the U.S. preemptive use of ’tactical’ nuclear weapons.[2] This would not only kill thousands of people directly but likely cause what scientists characterize as a “nuclear winter” by injecting so much smoke and debris into the air that it will block sunlight and cause a precipitous drop in global temperatures, affecting food production across the globe.
Triggering New Cold and Hot Wars
The Atlantic Council’s support for war with Russia is characteristic of think tanks which played a crucial role in pushing the decision to expand NATO after the Cold War.
George F. Kennan and other foreign policy experts had warned against this because NATO was perceived as a hostile military alliance by Russia and it would undermine new European security initiatives involving Russia. Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara at the time also called for a new “peace dividend” by which the U.S. would reduce its military budget and address social needs with taxpayer dollars.
George F. Kennan [Source: history.com]
The overriding imperative of the weapons industry, however, was to revitalize cold war thinking to ensure continuously high military budgets and the expansion of NATO and the think-tanks were enlisted to fulfill that end.
Diesen points out that the Brookings Institute, one of the oldest American think tanks, played an instrumental role in the Russia Gate hoax, which greatly contributed to the spread of Russophobia underlying the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
[Source: bitcoinist.com]
A primary researcher and contributor to the Steele dossier, the seminal document in Russia Gate which spread false information about Donald Trump being blackmailed because of an alleged encounter with Russian prostitutes, was an employee of the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko, who was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI.
Working under Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and renowned anti-Russian hawk, Danchenko claimed to have accrued incriminating information against Trump from a meeting with Russian-American Chamber of Commerce President Sergey Millian, who said that this meeting never actually took place.[3]
Igor Danchenko [Source: tvguidetime.com]
Fiona Hill [Source: politicalevo.com]
Sergey Millian [Source: ww2.theepochtimes.com]
The Atlantic Council was another false purveyor of Russia Gate whose revenues increased tenfold from 2006-2016 when it began demonizing Vladimir Putin and smearing politicians like Tulsi Gabbard who advocated for cooperative diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia.
Leaving out the fact that Putin revitalized Russia’s economy after the failed privatization and shock therapy initiatives of the 1990s, The Atlantic Council made people believe that Putin invaded Ukraine on a whim and would destabilize all of Europe if he was not stopped.
This kind of analysis obscures the true origins of the conflict in Ukraine and the Western role in supporting NATO expansion and a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s legally elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the outbreak of civil war.
Maidan coup in February 2014 that was supported by The Atlantic Council and other think-tanks. [Source: businessinsider.com]
The Atlantic Council continues today along with other think-tanks to whitewash Ukrainian war crimes, corruption and close ties with the far-right and neo-Nazis.
Michael McFaul, who is the former U.S. ambassador to Russia. [Source: interfax.com]
Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institute even celebrates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown on opposition politicians and media, while hypocritically framing the struggle against Russia as one of authoritarianism versus democracy.
McFaul and others have made clear that a primary U.S. foreign policy goal is to try and delink Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russia while expanding U.S. natural gas sales in Europe.
In 2019, the RAND Corporation, the think tank of the intelligence agencies, issued a report calling for threatening NATO expansion and the arming of Ukraine in order to draw Russia into a conflict that would facilitate its overextension militarily and economically and cause the Russian government to lose domestic and international support.
[Source: europeanloaded.com]
The same report advocated for intensifying the ideological and information war against Russia to weaken the legitimacy and stability of its government, and voiced support for the anti-corruption crusade of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom Diesen identifies as a British intelligence asset supportive of policies designed to weaken the Russian Federation.
The think tanks’ favorite: Alexei Navalny [Source: cnn.com]
RAND earlier had advocated for provoking civil war within Syria through covert action and informational warfare and by capitalizing on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict in order to undermine the nationalist Assad regime and draw Russia into the conflict there.
RAND also advocated for the destabilization of the Caucuses in order to cause a fissure between Russia and its traditional ally, Armenia, hence weakening Russia.
This latter goal was achieved when Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan expressed no-confidence in Russia’s ability to protect it after Azerbaijan—heavily armed by the U.S. and Israel—invaded the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Vadimir Putin shakes hands with Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. RAND advocated for trying to weaken Russian relations with its Armenian ally, which has been achieved in the face of an Azerbaijani invasion of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh. [Source: reuters.com]
RAND had also issued policy recommendations for reducing Russian influence in Moldova and undercutting Russian trade with Central Asia and promoted regime change in Belarus to destabilize a Russian ally and alter the country’s orientation westward.
Following this prescription, the NED and other U.S. agencies provoked an uprising in 2020 against Belarus’ socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was demonized in western media though he helped curb inequality and poverty considerably while resisting the rapid privatization initiatives carried out by other post-Soviet leaders.
.
Color revolution in Belarus supported by the NED—according to the RAND playbook. [Source: BBC News]
CNAS and Team Biden
One of the most influential think tanks today is the Center For a New American Security (CNAS), which received huge sums from oil companies like Chevron and BP, financial giants like Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase, and Amazon and Google from Big Tech.
CNAS’s former CEO, Victoria Nuland, was a former adviser to Dick Cheney and a key architect behind the 2014 coup in Ukraine.[4]
CNAS’ founder, Michèle Flournoy, was a board member of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy helped develop counterinsurgency policy for Afghanistan and contributed to convincing Barack Obama to invade Libya. More recently, she has advocated for an aggressive military buildup in the South China Sea to counter a rising China.
[Source: cnas.org]
Michèle Flournoy [Source: cnas.org]
When Joe Biden became president, at least 16 CNAS alumni were selected for foreign policy positions. CNAS had pushed heavily for making Kamala Harris Vice President as her foreign policy team consisted of an army of CNAS think-tankers—including Flournoy.
The appointment of CNAS alumni to prestigious positions and their lobbying influence epitomizes the so-called revolving door in which high level White House and Pentagon officials who serve corporate-military interests while in power are rewarded with lucrative paying jobs in which they continue to serve the same underlying interests.
Diesen emphasizes at the end of his book that think tanks in the modern U.S. have helped to subvert democracy and obstruct U.S. foreign policy in the interests of wealthy corporations that profit from endless wars. He sees as a solution more public disclosures about the sources of think tank funding and public pressures that could help reduce their influence.
Another more radical solution is a socialist revolution that would result in the nationalization of the weapons industry, taking profit out of war, and reorganizing research, development and production toward fulfilling human needs.
1.Panikoff is the Atlantic Council’s Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. ↑
2.In John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 42. ↑
3.The New Knowledge think-tank fabricated a story of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama state election with the intent of causing the defeat of Republican candidate Roy Moore. ↑
4.Nuland was also a fellow at the Brookings Institute. ↑
File:Army’s new AH64D Apache Longbow helicopters depart from RAF Leuchars. (Photo: Army / Wikimedia Commons)
The “Ghost Budget”: How America pays for endless war
Originally published: Just Security on January 3, 2023 by Linda J. Bilmes (more by Just Security) | (Posted Jan 12, 2024)
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Ending Perpetual War Symposium. The article derives from a chapter in Brianna Rosen, ed., Perpetual War and International Law: Legacies of the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024).
The post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were enabled by a historically unprecedented combination of budgetary procedures and financing methods. Unlike all previous U.S. wars, the post-9/11 wars were funded without higher taxes or non-war budget cuts, and through a separate budget. This set of circumstances—one that I have termed the “Ghost Budget”—enabled successive administrations to prosecute the wars with limited congressional oversight and minimal transparency and public debate. I adopted the name “Ghost Budget” because the term “ghost” appeared frequently in post-9/11 government reports in reference to funds allocated to people, places, or projects that turned out to be phantoms.
The Ghost Budget was the result of an interplay between changes in the U.S. budgetary process, a more assertive military establishment, and the conditions in global capital markets. It has had far-reaching implications for the conduct and course of the post-9/11 wars and for defense policy today.
Funding the Post-9/11 Wars
The “Ghost Budget” was the biggest budgetary anomaly in U.S. history. Prior to 9/11, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. One third of the costs of World War I and half the costs of World War II were met through higher taxes. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described paying taxes as a “patriotic duty” as he raised taxes on business, imposed a “wealth tax,” raised inheritance taxes, and expanded the number of income taxpayers to roughly 80 percent of the workforce by 1945. Wars in Korea and Vietnam largely followed a similar pattern, with President Harry Truman pledging to make the country “pay as you go” for the Korean War. War funding was also a central issue in the Vietnam War, which ended when Congress refused to appropriate money for the South Vietnamese military.
The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different. For the first time since the American Revolutionary War, war costs were covered almost entirely by debt. There were no wartime tax increases or cuts in spending. Quite the reverse: far from demanding sacrifices, President George W. Bush slashed federal taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, just as the United States invaded Iraq. President Donald Trump reduced taxes further in 2017. Overall, federal taxes declined from 18.8 percent of GDP in 2001 to 16.2 percent by the start of 2020. In the same period, outstanding federal debt held by the public rose from $3.5 trillion to $20 trillion. War spending contributed at least $2.2 trillion to this increase.
Not only was the financing strategy unprecedented, but the budgetary mechanism used to approve the vast post-9/11 wartime spending also diverged radically from the past. In all previous conflicts, the United States paid for wars as part of its regular defense appropriations (the defense “base budget”), after the initial period (1-2 years) of supplemental “emergency” funding bills. By contrast, for the entire decade from FY 2001 to FY 2011, Congress paid for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as “emergencies,” devoid of serious legislative or executive oversight.
By statute, emergency spending is defined as “unanticipated… sudden… urgent… unforeseen… and temporary” and is typically reserved for one-off crises such as floods and hurricanes. Such emergency spending measures are exempt from regular procedural rules in Congress because the intent is to disburse money quickly in situations where delay would be harmful.
Congress continued to enact “emergency supplemental” funding even as the war effort expanded. The United States sent 130,000 military personnel into Iraq in 2003 (alongside troops from more than 30 countries). By 2009, there were 187,200 U.S. “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported by a similar number of military contractors, with nearly 500 U.S. military bases set up across Iraq, but the conflict was still being paid for as an “emergency.” In FY 2012, President Obama renamed the “Global War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) but the war continued to be funded using money that—although not designated as “emergency”—was explicitly exempted from regular spending limits on other government spending programs.
How We Got Here
There were three primary drivers of the Ghost Budget: unusual economic conditions, congressional budget dysfunction, and military assertiveness.
Economic Conditions: Unlike earlier wars, the post 9/11 conflicts took place in an era of free-flowing international capital markets. That provided the U.S. Treasury with access to a deep and global pool of capital, making it easy to borrow large amounts without negatively affecting the cost. It was also a period of historically low interest rates. Real interest rates (nominal rate minus inflation) on 10-year Treasury bonds fell from 3.4% at the start of 2001 to negative (-0.4%) by early 2021–a 40-year low. Consequently, the Treasury was able to borrow trillions of dollars to pay for the wars, and simultaneously finance the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 without having any material effect on the amount of debt service being repaid through the annual budget. By FY 2017, total public debt had more than tripled, but debt service payments as a percentage of annual budget outlays had decreased to 6.6 percent, compared to 8.5 percent of federal budget outlays in FY 2002. In terms of cash outlays, this meant that the United States paid only slightly more in interest payments in FY 2017 than it had in FY 2002 ($268 billion versus $232 billion in 2018 dollars). Borrowing seemed virtually painless.
Budget Dysfunction: For several decades, the federal budget process has become increasingly dysfunctional. This breakdown may be traced to the post-Watergate budget reforms enacted in 1974, which shifted power away from the President and to the Congress. Most budget experts from both parties agree that the reforms made the budget process weaker, less predictable, less capable of reconciling competing demands, and more prone to fiscal crises. Prior to 1974, the federal government had never ceased operations for lack of funding. Since then, it has “shut down” 22 times, completely or partially. There have been only four years in which Congress passed its annual appropriations bills on time, and a series of near-defaults and other fiscal crises. In the absence of reliable budgets, Congress has enacted hundreds of short-term stopgap “continuing resolutions” to pay the bills. In this context, it was convenient for all the stakeholders to fund the wars as an“emergency” outside the regular process. The President was able to exclude war funding from his annual defense budget request to Congress, thus presenting an artificially low number for the federal budget deficit. This helped the Bush administration sustain the pretense that the wars would be short, while pursuing its political agenda of cutting taxes. Meanwhile, Congress was freed from the need to find politically painful spending cuts elsewhere to pay for the war, and the Pentagon was able to prosecute the wars without worrying about whether Congress would pass the defense appropriations bills on time.
Military Assertiveness: In 2001, the Pentagon was actively seeking to increase its budget after a decade of post-cold war budget cuts. The Afghanistan and Iraq conflict not only reversed the downward trend in military spending, but opened the floodgates to a spending bonanza due to the nature of emergency and OCO appropriations. Unlike the regular defense base budget, the wartime supplemental money was easier to secure, had few restrictions on how it could be spent, and avoided the lengthy internal Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process (PPBE) budget justification process. Consequently, the Defense Department was able to shift war funding into other categories to obtain items on its long-time “wish list” that were only tangentially (or not at all) related to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates termed this a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon.
By 2009, war spending accounted for almost one quarter of the total military budget; the Pentagon budget had grown to its highest level since the Second World War, and military spending had rebounded from 2.9% of GDP in FY 2001 to above 4% of GDP, where it remained through FY 2019. The OCO budget had evolved into a second defense budget that was largely untethered from the wars, and protected the military from congressional budget volatility.
Implications for Perpetual War
The Ghost Budget provided the ability to keep borrowing and spending in an almost unconstrained manner for more than two decades. The absence of new taxes insulated the public from the mounting cost of the wars and broke the expectation that wars would inevitably involve higher taxes. The OCO budget extended far beyond the immediate operational needs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perpetuating military actions throughout the region. As Immanuel Kant predicted in Perpetual Peace (1795), the ability to keep borrowing and spending with minimal oversight allowed the United States to keep fighting indefinitely.
The Ghost Budget also weakened the main lever through which Congress maintains control of a war, namely its control of the purse. The combination of deferred spending, weak oversight, broadening definition of war costs, and readily available supplemental funding relaxed the pressure to maintain budget discipline over military spending. Congress held fewer hearings and presidents made fewer public speeches about the war compared to previous conflicts. And the ready availability of funds for new defense programs encouraged successive administrations to see the world through a “Pentagon lens,” which views military intervention as the default foreign policy option.
The legacy of the Ghost Budget is that money is no longer a serious deterrent to war. To date, 99% of U.S. assistance to Ukraine has been funded by supplemental emergency funds—which means that this spending is in addition to the $840 billion regular defense budget. The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve another $106 billion in emergency funding for the Middle East, Ukraine, and other regions. Regardless of the merits of any particular endeavor, the use of Ghost Budgets makes it far easier to prolong the fighting at any cost.
It is not just about manufacturing capacity--in theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity--the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrinal and, as a result, procurement development is.
I spoke about it for years--some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on... air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America's defense or, rather, "offense" philosophy which doesn't work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America's mythology.
So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn't understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally "planned" VSU's "counteroffensive", the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered--it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America's REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn't work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy's subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn't have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.
It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand--these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia's General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO's military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO, and NATO, and the US, are in panic. In the end, Washington cannot do strategy, it has no real strategists--only whiteboard doctrine mongers, who will fail again to learn proper lessons, because one has to have a proper tool kit. The US doesn't have one. Good luck "containing" China.
P.S. I'll probably do podcast with my friend Colonel Vladimir Trukhan, and possibly with my other friend Colonel Oleg Shalandin fairly soon. I may also twist hands of some of my classmates--they are very humble people--to drag some of them to the podcast too. That depends, though.
While our Moscow State University was closing the course for training specialists in information and hybrid warfare (the only one in the country), the United States began a comprehensive reform of the Center for Special Methods of Warfare named after. John Kennedy, from which a separate School of Psychological Warfare will be created.
The Pentagon has begun reforming ( https://t.me/poisk_mil/7798 ) the US Army Center for Special Warfare Methods. J. Kennedy (USAJFKSWCS, also known as the Special Operations Center of Excellence).
By 2030, on the basis of existing training groups , an irregular warfare academy (IW Academy), a special forces school (SF School), a psychological warfare school (PSYWAR School), and a school for relations with civil administration (CA School) will be created.
It is noteworthy that the creation of the PSYWAR school will begin in 2025.
Our hoopoes from Moscow State University were engaged in outright sabotage, which is now being investigated by the prosecutor. I hope organizational conclusions will follow.
Rob Urie: The End of the World as We Know It
Posted on January 19, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Rob Urie describes below how what are increasingly legacy parties in the US are stoking hatred of the other side as the way to redirect well-deserved resentment away from predatory elites. The new model is even more insidious than older forms of capitalism. At least Jay Gould had to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. In our Brave New World of ever better propaganda, most can be manipulated to operate against their best interest on the cheap.
And speaking of the world, in Davos, the so-called elites are openly expressing their fear of losing control of the lower orders. For instance:
I do have one quibble with Urie’s otherwise very informative and well documented piece. The big trigger for the concerted push started by what then was a small but determined group of right-wingers, led by the likes of the Cohrs and Koch families plus the Birchers, was not very much the growning push for greater social justice but the determination to undo New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society. The Powell memo, which codified this initiative in 1971, overwhelmingly focused on their desire to change American values to be more business-friendly.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
With the Biden administration declaring the American people to be the greatest threat to the continued existence of the US, and Donald Trump proclaiming that ‘our threat is from within,’ the cynical machinations of American institutions during the Trump years are now being inflicted back onto political scapegoats of convenience. Of course, neither putative political ‘leader’ is slandering all Americans. This is a politics of social division, of blaming largely voiceless people for problems they had no part in creating in order to deflect blame for the decline of American empire and the dislocations it is causing.
To the extent that people’s politics align with who they vote for, 98% of self-described ‘Progressives’ voted for Biden in 2020 (chart below). This, as voters have been fleeing both of the duopoly / uniparty parties at moments of political failure for the last two-plus decades. Republicans fled the Republican Party when George W. Bush’s war against Iraq headed south around 2005 (graph below). Democrats fled the Democratic Party once it became clear that Barack Obama was going to save Wall Street on the public dime while leaving unemployment and foreclosures to fester.
Graph: both of the legacy political parties in the US have been losing voters for two-plus decades. Republican voters fled the party when George W. Bush’s war against Iraq headed south around 2005. Democrats began fleeing when it became clear that Barack Obama was going to save Wall Street while leaving unemployment and foreclosures to fester. In both cases, this is evidence that voters have left the duopoly / uniparty because they object to its policies, and not as a fashion statement. Source: pewresearch.org.
At present, Joe Biden is actively working to dissuade Donald Trump’s supporters from voting for him (Biden) by calling them racists and extremists. And Donald Trump is calling Mr. Biden’s supporters ‘vermin.’ Each is crafting their own sanctimonious cult of culture warriors to vote against the other candidate. This reflects a political culture where defeating the other party is close to all that matters for the zombie death cults that are what remain of the legacy parties after the voters who care about policy fled.
Think about it: in both 2005 and 2010 voters fled (graph above) their respective duopoly / uniparty parties at moments of policy failure, suggesting that they did so because of these policy failures. Moreover, fleeing Democrats could have re-registered as Republicans, and vice versa, if ‘moving right / left’ or ‘sending a message’ were their goal(s). What they did by implication was to shift their allegiance from parties to policy goals that aren’t represented by the duopoly / uniparty. Independents are the ‘none-of-the-above’ party with respect to the legacy party candidates.
Consider: with those who care about policy fleeing the legacy parties, this leaves only people who don’t care about policy, aka party loyalists, running the parties. Suddenly the logic of ‘defeating the other party’ versus winning the ability to govern makes sense. Doing so takes the focus off of policies that were crafted to benefit donors while they were sold as public policy (e.g. ACA). It also explains why party loyalists stand by their candidates no matter how many policy betrayals they encounter. Question: which class doesn’t care about public policy? That would be the beneficiaries of the current distributions of wealth and power.
Graph: despite regular protestations from the self-described ‘radical left’ in the US that its politics differ from those of self-described liberals, this distinction isn’t borne out in voting trends. With 98% of the ‘radical left’ having voted for Joe Biden in 2020, the functional distinction between it and American liberals is that the radical left was far more enthusiastic about Mr. Biden than liberals were. The explanation may be TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), but TDS is a product of CIA and FBI machinations, not analytical insight. Source: pewresearch.org.
The question then is how the US got to the point where half of the country is ready to kill the other half, and vice versa. The answer: capitalism. About a half century ago oligarchs and corporate executives decided that they had had enough of liberation politics (e.g. Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation) and they launched a form of corporatism called neoliberalism. While definitions vary, neoliberalism is capitalist imperialism as a class politics, very close in structure to Lenin’s explanation of the capitalist state found in The State and Revolution. In that exposition, the state exists to serve the interests of the rich and powerful.
Compare this to the claim that elections grant political legitimacy to the state through the will of the people. Well, the largest political party in the US— Independents, is functionally precluded from fielding candidates by the duopoly / uniparty. And the ‘right’ of Independents to vote for duopoly / uniparty candidates begs the question of why voters fled the parties if the party candidates were their choice? Moreover, why did these departures coincide with dramatic and well-publicized policy failures? The reasonable conclusion to draw is that the American electoral system is broken. It does not represent the will of the people.
Graph: the oft-stated rationale for implementing neoliberalism was to reverse the fall in the rate of profits for large, Western, corporations. In fact, what neoliberalism has accomplished has been to lower the rate of economic growth, while raising the rate of profit for large corporations. Implied in this arithmetic is that it is workers who have been squeezed. (P = profits, R = Revenues, C = Costs (including wages), and G = rate of economic growth). Let G be a proxy for P. P = (R – C)). For P to rise in step with R, C must be near constant. And voila, ‘inequality’ is the result. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
If you’re a well-trained American, you should be asking what politics could possibly have to do with economics right about now. That Joe Biden launched WWIII to ‘send a message to China’ can be interpreted as a merging of politics with economics. US based oil and gas companies wanted to sell their oil and gas to developed Europe. Russia had already built two pipelines to deliver Russian natural gas to Europe. So, the Biden administration blew up the Russian pipelines to force the Europeans to buy natural gas from US-based suppliers at a higher price.
The problem of economic decline for the majority, whereby the rate of GDP growth has slowed at the same time that connected insiders in business and politics are taking a larger portion of the economic pie for themselves, means that most people are worse off under the current political-economic order than before it was implemented. This tension led to criticism of Mr. Obama’s program to recover the wealth of the rich (the bailouts) while doing very little for everyone else. The net effect of his actions was to further shift the internal balance of power in the US toward the rich and away from the rest of us.
Graph: this overly complicated map illustrates a basic truth— that NATO (dark blue-green) has systematically surrounded the Black Sea with the apparent purpose of denying Russia access to its naval fleet in and around Sevastopol, Crimea. The missing pieces from NATO’s perspective are Georgia and Ukraine (powder blue), whose prospective memberships in NATO have been the subject of US world-domination fantasies for a couple of decades now. This is why the US coup in Ukraine in 2013 – 2014 set off alarm bells in Moscow. Were the US to control Crimea, it would control Russian access to the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea. Source: geostrategy.org.uk.
Having missed the moment during his 2020 campaign when Mr. Biden promised to launch a war against Russia while supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, these have been explained after-the-fact as responses to unexpected geopolitical emergencies. In fact, here is Democrat Adam Schiff explaining in 2019 that the purpose of US arms shipments to Ukraine was to ‘fight Russia over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here.’ The point: Biden was Barack Obama’s ‘man in Ukraine’ during and after the US-led coup against the elected government of Ukraine. He both ‘couped’ Ukraine in 2013 – 2014, and was busy making plans for war with Russia on inauguration day 2021.
There is an imperialist logic to (‘US-based’) multi-national oil and gas companies trying to cut Russia out of the oil and gas business. However, as stated by Mr. Schiff, the US was already at war with Russia on Joe Biden’s inauguration day. And that war was taking place in Eastern Ukraine, with an army built by the CIA on one side and the Russians on the other. The most straightforward explanation is that the US invaded Ukraine via the coup in 2013 – 2014, after which the CIA organized an army from existing Ukrainian militias and launched a genocidal war against ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, with the apparent goal of drawing Russia into a war.
That 98% of the self-described ‘radical left’ (chart above) in the US both voted for Biden in 2020 and subsequently promoted the CIA’s theory that the Russian move into Ukraine in February, 2022 was ‘unprovoked,’ certainly looks like a setup. While TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) serves as a partial explanation for the poor quality of that ‘left’ analysis, the CIA, via Russiagate, is uniquely responsible for TDS. In fact, given that the proportion of the ‘radical left’ that voted for Mr. Biden was much higher than the proportion of self-described liberals who did, the ‘radical left’ in the US looks a lot like a CIA psyop.
Graph: Life Expectancy at Birth, the most inclusive measure of how long people are expected to live, fell off a cliff around 2014, the very pit of the Great Recession. In fact, life expectancy has fallen so much more in the US than in similar countries abroad as to suggest that one of the greater social calamities in human history is underway in the US right now. That Democrats are worried about Trump! rather than reversing the healthcare calamity that has their name on it (Obamacare), is further evidence that voters who care about policy long ago abandoned the Democratic (and Republican) party. Source: kff.org.
As yours truly has been writing regularly over recent years, far more Americans have been dying from preventable causes than are the citizens of peer countries (graph above). In both absolute and relative terms, the scale of these ‘excess deaths,’ or the decline in life expectancy if you prefer, looks quite like a nation in full societal collapse. With the ACA (Obamacare) passed in 2010 and fully implemented in 2015, excess deaths exploded higher. While this isn’t precisely a causal argument— that the ACA caused these deaths, neither did it prevent them. And while excess deaths in the US exploded higher in 2022, health insurance executives saw their best year ever in terms of executive compensation. This has been true every year since Obamacare was implemented.
What would be considered a national emergency on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis or 9/11/2001 if it were happening to the rich doesn’t even merit a mention by the political class or the establishment media in the US. Forgotten is that Barack Obama had corrupt, revolving door, hacks like former Senator Max Baucus put a lobbyist for the health insurance industry, Liz Fowler, in charge of writing the ACA. In the neoliberal worldview, who knows how to make the healthcare system better than health insurance lobbyists? Industries were made increasingly ‘self-regulating’ over the prior five decades. That no one is looking back to see if self-regulation ‘worked’ (it didn’t) is telling.
In fact, life expectancy is a function of wealth in the US. The rich live over a decade longer than the poor. This helps explain why ‘policy’ voters have been fleeing the legacy parties for two-plus decades now. The rich— those who live the longest in current circumstances, don’t care about public healthcare because they have their own. Mr. Obama’s shift to a ‘market-based’ system (Obamacare) is based in the oligarchic / neoliberal premise that poor people need rich people to tell them what to do. And the ‘failure’ of the poor to follow the dictates of the rich absolves the rich in their own minds.
Graph: interpretation of the graph is it that changes in economic circumstances have a lagged effect on life expectancy measured in years. Using serial correlation as the metric, changes in economic circumstances take eight – ten years to show up in life expectancy data. Improving economic circumstances are correlated with rising life expectancy 8 – 10 years hence,
and declining economic conditions are correlated with declining life expectancy with the same lag. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve,
The problem, of course, isn’t the economic growth rate (graph above), but its distribution. In other words, there would be enough for everyone if a few people weren’t taking it all for themselves. The current concentration of wealth across the West is the greatest in modern history. If the share of GDP growth that has accrued to the rich over recent years (100%) had instead been equitably distributed, the drop in life expectancy in the US would have been much smaller. In the first place, poor and working people wouldn’t have been desperate to the point of self-annihilation. In the second, more people would have been able to afford healthcare. And finally, rebalancing incomes and wealth downward would have rebalanced political power downward as well.
To understand this dynamic in current political terms, Joe Biden supports the genocide in Israel for the same reason that he is oblivious to the world-historic decline in life expectancy for poor and working-class Americans. The people doing the dying are invisible to him. The gamesmanship of geopolitics that he and the ideocracy he surrounds himself with is just that, a game, to the people who see themselves as immune from the consequences of their actions. How enthusiastic toward war would US Senator Linsey Graham be if the major cities of his state (South Carolina) were in ruins and everyone important to him had been killed?
Graph: Left: an Israeli woman mocking the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza by donning Palestinian garb and blackening her teeth to simulate decay. Right: racist caricature of American Blacks by two men in blackface. The lack of self-awareness on the part of the Israelis engaged in racist mockery is evidence of how far removed they are from the consequences of their actions. The same is true of the American political leadership that found Israeli fantasies of murdered babies and mass rapes on October 7th plausible. Source: YouTube, films.com.
The irony, paradox, whatever you wish to call it, of Mr. Biden and his party publicly slandering ‘white supremacists’ in the US while publicly endorsing religious supremacists, aka Zionists, and the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza, illustrates an important truth. Israeli actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians are both conspicuously ‘white supremacist’ and Zionist. The two are inseparable given the history. The land that Zionists claim as their own was already occupied by Palestinians when the nation of Israel was created. How can a Zionist state be formed with Palestinians still occupying ‘Israeli’ land? This is the logic motivating the genocide.
The call for a Christian religious state in the US has long been a project of the American political right. It represents a direct rejection of the liberal principle of a secular state. And while the view here is that liberal principles are more marketing than substance, how would Mr. Biden’s supporters feel if he were to go about ridding the US of non-Christians? Or how about making them second class citizens and putting them into ghettoes to be surveilled, controlled, and when he feels like it, exterminated? Biden has pledged his soul to supplying Israel with the funding, weapons, and battlefield support to continue this exact program against Palestinians in Gaza.
The US is currently in social, cultural, economic, and political decline, and seems intent on taking the rest of the world down with it. Further national decline isn’t inevitable except to the extent that a major realignment of power is effectively precluded. ‘We’ had about fifteen minutes around 2008 – 2009 when the rich were a lot less rich and politicians were looking around at the carnage that Wall Street had wrought for a path forward. The rich and PMC perceived Mr. Obama’s political program to have been ‘successful’ for the very reasons that it wasn’t.
A successful program would have rebalanced power away from corporate executives, oligarchs, and their toadies in the political class to recover something like a New Deal. This would have been the ‘moderate’ path forward because it would have placed social, economic, and political stability above the neoliberal goal of making rich people richer. The MIC would no longer decide when the US goes to war. Wall Street would no longer be using public money to control the housing, food, and healthcare on which Americans are dependent. And one half of the country wouldn’t be trying to kill the other half, and vice versa.
Last, there is no slander of the (political) left contained herein. The slander relates to the American left, which now apparently includes the CIA, FBI, NSA, DNC and Joe Biden. I strongly support the work of Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff, Brian Becker, and the younger commenters who are foregoing to descriptor ‘left’ for the reasons stated above and more. ‘We’ are at a point in history when people will either engage politically or they should begin planning their own funerals. At the rate that history is accumulating, there may be no one left to bury the dead.
Michael Hudson on Russia, Iran and the Red Sea: NATO’s War Economy Collapses
Posted on January 20, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. In a new discussion with Danny Haiphong, Michael Hudson continues his analysis of why US policies aimed at hurting Russia, China, and Iran are damaging US allies, particularly Europe. That both shrinks US markets and the resource base the US has available were it to be so dumb as to act on its military escalation threat display.
By Danny Haiphong. Originally published at his YouTube channel
HAIPHONG:Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the stream. It’s Danny Haiphong, your host. As you can see, I’m joined by the renowned economist and author, Professor Michael Hudson. You can find his website in the video description. Please do hit the like button as we begin. That helps boost this stream. And, of course, you can find not only Michael’s website, but all the ways you can support this channel in the video description. How are you doing today, Michael?
HUDSON:Pretty good. It’s snowing here in New York, so I’m pretty much snowed in.
HAIPHONG:Yep. Yes, yes, it is quite bad out there today. But I am glad to have you here because there’s a lot of economic news. But you emphasize, and this channel tries to emphasize, the relationship between geopolitics and economics, geopolitical economy, as you, Radhika [Desai], and Ben Norton, and other great journalists have attempted to do.
And so I wanted to start, then, let’s talk about Ukraine first. Let’s begin there. There’s all kinds of talks about there being a quote-unquote stalemate with regard to Ukraine.
However, the realities, especially economically and on the battlefield, are a lot different. So, Michael, I’m just going to let you go on what you would like to comment on with regard to Ukraine, because the situation is not as hot in the news, but there are massive changes happening in this conflict.
HUDSON:Well, it’s the United States that’s saying that it’s a stalemate in Ukraine. What they mean is that the Ukraine counter-offenses have been utterly ineffective. Ukraine has lost the war.
And there have been almost all of the discussions that you get, for instance, on Judge Napolitano’s interviews, and the European press, the Russian press, the Chinese press, they all say, Well, the war is over. Russia can just continue to take however much it wants, but there is no point in Russia trying to take more land right now because Ukraine, or rather Mr.
Zelensky, is sending all of the Ukrainians he can find, especially the Hungarian Ukrainians, the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and the Romanian Ukrainians, in the fight to get killed.
So, maybe we can convince Russia, Don’t mop up, don’t lock in your victory. Why don’t we just say it’s a stalemate and leave things the way they are since you’re winning so strongly?
Well, obviously, Russia has already said, We’ve already given the terms for our peace. Of course, we can negotiate anytime. Our terms are simple, total surrender. We’re going to get rid of Nazism. We’re going to make sure that Ukraine will never join NATO. And we’re going to make sure that the Russian speakers and Crimea are part of Russia. So anytime you want to negotiate, meaning, say yes to our terms, we’ll be glad to. But meanwhile, we’re just going to sit here. And if you want to send more and more troops in, that’s fine.
Now, the Americans think that, okay, if Russia isn’t taking any more land, it’s a tie. But it’s really not a tie because if you read President Putin’s speeches and Foreign Secretary Lavrov’s speeches, he says, Well, Ukraine is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking about the big picture. The big picture is, for instance, that Russia on January 1st became the lead administrator of the BRICS+.
And the United States is meanwhile losing the fight all over the world. It’s losing the economic fight against Russia and China. Russia is increasing its industrial production, not only military, but in the production of aircraft, automobiles. China is growing and the United States is not. And most of all, Europe is going into a depression led by the collapse of, or I should say, the destruction of German industry as a result of the sanctions against Russia. And also the sanctions that the United States are insisting that Europe impose against China.
The United States has told Europe, you really can only trade with us and our NATO allies.
We want you to reduce your trade with China to what the head of the EU, Mr. Borrell, has said. He said, Well, you know, China, we import a lot more from you than we export. It’s got to be even. And China said, well, there are plenty of things we’d like to import from you, Europeans, such as the chip-making etching machinery for ultraviolet etching that’s made by Holland. And Borrell says, Oh, we can’t, the United States won’t let us send you, sell you anything that potentially is used in the military. And China says, well, anything that can be used economically can be military because the military is part of the economy.
So I guess we’re quite happy to agree with you and have balanced trade between China and Europe. We’ll just cut back our trade with you to maybe the $100 a year trade that you have to trade with us.
So Europe is voluntarily isolating, limiting its trade and investment to the United States, cutting off the trade with Russia. And without Russian gas and oil, you’re going to have the German, French, and Italian manufacturing industry, chemical industry, fertilizer industry, and agriculture continue to shrink.
And so the stalemate that America is talking about really means we’re shrinking our allies in Europe. We’re losing the third world. And what is happening in Ukraine, fighting to the last Ukrainian, now looks like a similar fight in the Near East, where it looks like there’s a similar stalemate, which really has been inflaming the world’s global majority and the global South into thinking that all of a sudden this is something awful. I’ll get to that later.
But the important thing is that I think the Americans have already realized that they’re going to lose the war in Ukraine. And the problem, as you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, and especially the Financial Times, is if we lose the war in Ukraine, how will Biden win the election in November? Because he’s been pushing, his whole policy is we can essentially wreck Russia. Our sanctions are going to lead to the collapse of Russian industry. The Russian people will get so upset with the war, there’s going to be a regime change. They’ll overthrow Mr. Putin and we can get another Boris Yeltsin in who is going to really wreck Russia in the way that our neoliberal advisors were able to wreck it in the 1990s.
Well, that hasn’t happened. So what’s going to happen? Well, the public relations people of the Democratic Party have got together and they’ve all decided, Okay, what we want to tell the people is, it really didn’t matter in Ukraine. It doesn’t matter because we don’t have to win in Ukraine because America can fight [with] a kind of soft power. And we have other ways of dominating the world and maintaining America number one, even though we’re de-industrializing our economy. Even though we’re the largest debtor in the world, we’re going to be able to dominate. And the new Democratic Party public relations push is what’s called “soft power”.
And in yesterday’s January 15th Financial Times, there was a long discussion. They had
a whole page by a man who had been President Clinton’s advisor, National Intelligence Council advisor Joseph Nye. For a whole page. And it was Nye who coined the term soft power. A few decades ago, when he was arguing with Paul Kennedy, who was saying that the Americans were on the decline. And he came up with this idea to say, the United States can still be able to exert influence, but not of a military type, but of financial power, regime change.
And what he said, he gave five reasons why the United States would not necessarily be eclipsed by China or by Russia or by any other countries. And it’s hilarious to look at the five reasons that the Financial Times yesterday trotted forth for why there’s not going to be any threat to the United States.
The first reason he gave was geography and friendly neighbors. Well in the last few months, especially since the fighting and Israeli attacks on Gaza have occurred, America’s lost public opinion. And even Secretary Blinken has said that the fight in Israel is creating antagonism, not only against Israel, but America has lost its moral dominance as a result of backing the genocide and opposing any criticism of Israel within the United Nations. So it’s lost foreign support. There’s a growing anti-Americanism, not only in Asia, Africa, and the global South, but in Europe.
Well, the second reason that Nye cited was domestic energy supplies. America controls oil. Not only does it produce its own oil, but it’s just been able to block the rest of the world from importing Russian oil, and it’s been able to blow up Nord Stream. And now it’s pushing Israel to essentially act as another Ukraine. It’s pushing Israel to incite Lebanon and Iran into a provocation, into a military response to the Israeli attacks that is going to enable Israel to do what a Senate majority leader, the Republican leader, has been pushing for, and what Biden is pushing for, and what the neocons have been pushing for for 20 years, war with Iran to grab the oil reserves of what were Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. And if it can control the oil reserves of the Near East and be able to block off their energy exports to all the other countries, just as it’s been able to block Russia’s oil exports to Europe, then it can control the industrialization of other countries because industry basically runs on oil and gas. Industry is energy, and without energy, you’re not going to be able to have your own industrialization independently of the United States. So the U.S. foreign policy, as we’ve talked before, I think, in our last show, for 100 years, the United States has used oil as an attempt to control the world’s economy.
Well, the third point that Nye points out is the dollar-based financial system. Well, it’s amazing that he could say that in yesterday’s Financial Times when the whole world was trying to de-dollarize. You’re getting one speech after another, not only from Russia and from China, but from the global South countries. And even in the Near East, they’re saying now that America has grabbed Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, $300 billion, all of the money that we’ve saved in our domestic monetary reserves are subject to confiscation by the United States. And they’ve already told Saudi Arabia that if they do not keep their international reserves from oil exports in the form of United States stocks and bonds, that would be treated as an act of war. So here in the Near East, you’re having Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under increasing pressure to support the Arabs being attacked by Israel, and yet they’re afraid to act because the United States is holding their dollars hostage. Well, very quickly, you’re seeing other countries move out of dollars as quickly as they can.
And finally, the fifth argument that Nye points out for why America cannot lose is demo-graphic and technological leadership. But that’s the one fatal Achilles heel of the United States economy. Its hope, its idea of technological leadership is to get monopoly power over information technology, pharmaceuticals, and other areas that it can dominate for intellec-tual property through copyrighting and through essentially suing countries that will adopt the technology that’s developed in the United States.
Prof. Hudson steps away for a minute.
HAIPHONG:That summary, Joseph Nye outlined it, and Professor Hudson broke it down, broke down the facade, or the reality behind the facade that the neocons spread. And what’s so interesting about this piece is that, I mean, Joseph Nye, I mean, he is a Carter and then
Clinton functionary, someone who served as an Undersecretary of State and Undersecretary of Defense for these administrations. And he is someone who actually has been considered less hawkish, but if we went through this article, you would see that what he is arguing with regard to soft power is actually regime change by other means.
And that regime change is heavily connected to the economic realm, as perhaps Professor Hudson outlined so eloquently. There is so many connections to be made. We have a lot of them I’m going to raise with Professor Hudson, including on Russia, Russia being now the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity terms.
Also, the China collapse theory. There’s new news. There’s recent news about China actually surpassing Japan and leading the world now in car manufacturing and how its electric vehicle production is causing so much alarm.
Prof. Hudson returns
I wanted to now ask you about a development, given all that you outlined with regard to Joseph Nye’s assessment and analysis on soft power in the US’s so-called advantages. I wanted to talk to you about this story here. Vladimir Putin was just meeting with business leaders in the Far East, and he made a claim about Russia now being the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, becoming Europe’s first economy, despite pressure from all sides.
And here’s what he said. He said, It seems that we are being strangled and pressured from every side, but still we are the largest economy in Europe. We left Germany behind and climbed into fifth in the world. China, the U.S., India, Japan and Russia. We are number one in Europe. And so there’s reports in that conversation with business leaders from the region that Russia is set to grow three percent year on year, and it’s likely to be even higher, maybe four and five percent.
Now, there’s also the news, you brought it up, but there is a huge stagnation going on in Europe. In an analysis also in Financial Times, there are 48 economists that talked about the eurozone set for weak growth this coming year. And the prediction was across these economists, zero point six percent on average, with many indicating less than that. And of course, some indicating more. But the vast majority said it was going to be less than half of one percent. So, Michael, your thoughts. How did this, how did this happen? And perhaps you can explain the economic intricacies on how this happened.
HUDSON:Well, we’ve discussed in the past how it happened. The United States, starting with President Clinton and actually with President Carter, decided to help American firms make higher profits by moving their labor force out of the United States, by trying to shift manufacturing first to Mexico, along the maquiladoras under Carter, and then under Clinton to China and Asia.
And the idea was to create increasing industrial unemployment in the United States to prevent labor’s wages from rising. And the theory that has guided the Democratic Party’s economists is, if you can cut wages, there will be higher profits and higher profits will lead to more prosperity.
Well, the reality is that you cut wages by moving your industry outside of the country, by de-industrializing. And that is still the policy that America has taken. And it has replaced industrialization with financialization to make money financially, hoping that the companies that have now moved out towards China and Asia and other countries are going to be able to have higher profits and essentially become more prosperous for the donor class to the Democratic and also the Republican parties.
But what President Putin was talking about was something much more. Russia already, along with China, have begun to produce their own airplanes. Take a look at the last week’s news, all about Boeing, yet again, having other accidents on its airplanes. Boeing used to be a technological leader in aircraft, but then it was merged with McDonnell Douglas and became a financial company. So it broke up the Boeing system of making airplanes and began to outsource to various other companies, all the little parts. And all Boeing is now is assembling diverse parts that it buys from various suppliers, very much like television sets are made. You buy different parts from different suppliers.
Well, the reason Putin is making his speech in the Near East is Russia and China are working together for an enormous industrial development to take place in eastern Siberia, which has been obviously underpopulated because of the bad weather for many centuries now, but also is now beginning to warm up. And the idea is to integrate Chinese industry and Russian industry and technology and to design entire cities that are going to be technological complexes producing all sorts of interrelated parts together, computer parts, airplanes, trains, automobiles. China is already the largest automobile exporter in the world. And so you’re going to have this whole new center of industrial growth in eastern Asia.
Well, the idea is that this is going to be a great increase in prosperity. And the way in which these cities are developing, when I first went to Russia in 1994, I stayed at the home of the professor who had designed Togliatti City, the city where they were going to begin producing automobiles designed by the Italians. And he explained how he designed the whole city together to combine the factories and production to workers’ housing, to workers’ entertainment, to workers’ health, and all of the different forms of supplying materials and parts of cars all dovetailed together. Well, he was basically an industrial engineer. And that is how Russia and China are developing the cities that they’re creating along with universities, training systems in East Asia and Siberia.
So essentially, Putin is saying to the world, if you’re a global south country or an Arab country, and you want to have your economy grow and trade more, who are you going to tie your economy to? The world is being split into two parts, the US-NATO “garden” and the rest of the world, 85% jungle. The jungle is growing. The garden isn’t growing because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money on a monopoly technology that you have.
But China and Russia are way ahead of the United States in most of the growth technologies that we’re talking about, not yet in the ultraviolet etching of computer chips, but in many areas.
So you’re having the whole shift of technological advance move away from North America and the United States, where it was ever since World War I, to Russia and China.
How is the United States going to cope with the rest of the world industrializing and not needing any contact with the United States?
President Biden keeps saying China is our enemy. Ultimately, our military says we’re going to have war with China within two or three years. We’re at war with Russia right now in the Ukraine. That’s our objective, war.
But the rest of the world, essentially, its response is not a mirror image of this, is not to say, well, we can go to war. We’re going to have Russia fighting Europe.
Just in the last few days, you had numerous American military magazines and especially European spokesmen saying, if we lose in Ukraine, Russia is going to march right through Poland and Romania, right to retake Germany. It’s going to conquer Europe, and maybe it won’t even stop in England.
Well, that’s just nonsense. The reality is that Russia and China don’t need Europe anymore.
They don’t need the United States. Whereas under the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright said, America is the unique country. It’s the necessary country.
The fact is that the rest of the world not only finds America unnecessary, but America and its NATO allies to be the major threat to their own prosperity. So they’re essentially splitting into their own world. And the BRICS group is expanding its trade relations, its investment relations, and especially its financial clearing and monetary operations to be independent of the dollar, de-dollarizing, and certainly independent of the euro, which seems to have no visible means of support right now, and going their own way.
Now, that is exactly what has led the United States to push Israel [essentially] to follow Netanyahu’s belligerence, because the United States says, We realize we’re losing power.
We know that it’s really not a stalemate. We know that we’ve lost the chance for world dominance. We may be re-elected by telling people, you know, it doesn’t really matter.
But we know that it does matter. The last chance we have to assert American power is military. And the main military prize is the Near East now, just as it was after 9-11, when Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld pressed for an invasion of Iraq to begin grabbing its soil and to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda Iraq. So now America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis. The plan is—and America is willing to fight to the last Israeli, just as it’s willing—it’s trying to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to make this final grab of the Near East in fighting Iran.
This is a crazy idea, but it seems that that’s exactly what is being planned.
General Petraeus, who lost the war in Afghanistan, has said, we’ve got to conquer Iran. That’s going to be—we can regain all the power that we’ve lost by attacking Iran. And so now it looks like President Biden is hoping to make a political comeback by saying, Well, we may not have blocked Russia and Ukraine, but at least we’ve conquered the Near East.
But the way in which it’s conquering it [somehow has] become a catalyst to make the whole global majority, the whole rest of the world, especially Africa, South America, and South Asia, to think, Wait a minute, what’s happening in Israel and Palestine today is exactly what happened to us at our beginning.
In the United States, what did the Americans do? The White people came, the Anglo-Saxons and the other Europeans, and they killed 90% of the Indians, drove them out, isolated them, put them in basically concentration camps. And then when they found out that there was oil under these concentration camps, they essentially murdered the Indians there or drove them out to grab the oil.
Same thing in Latin America. When the Spaniards came to Latin America, they grabbed the land, drew up land grants, and these land grants created latifundia, which has been the great problem of Latin America for the last five centuries, because it’s prevented Latin America from growing their own food. It’s fought against the indigenous population feeding itself to turn the land into export crops, largely under World Bank guidance for all of this.
Same thing in Africa. They say, wait a minute, what is happening in Israel is what happened to us, with the colonizing powers. This is what Germany did in Africa. It’s what the Dutch did in South Africa. It’s Germany in Namibia, the Dutch in South Africa, the English through Africa, and especially the French in its territories. All of this has occurred before.
And all of a sudden, just as Americans go to the movies and mourn more for the Westerns, they’re cheering for the Indians against the cavalry. You’re having the rest of the world cheering for the underdog because the underdog is who they were. The underdog is them today.
And this idea is turning into a feeling of, Let’s throw off all of the barriers to colonialism.
Let’s start with French Africa, which we’re throwing off the French there. We’re not going to let French banks, French mineral companies, mining companies, French oil companies simply take all of our wealth because they conquered it five centuries ago. We can identify with the—we know what the Palestinians are fighting for.
And yet, in a way, they’re also saying, well, wait a minute, look at what Israel’s doing.
Israel says, God gave us this land. We used to have it. Well, the South Americans and Africans and Asians are saying, Well, this is our land, but we never left it. We’re still on the land. And even though we’re on the land, we’re still locked up, like Israel is treating the Palestinians. We don’t have to live this way. We can decolonize.
And the whole split of the world and the turning towards the China, Russia, Iran, BRICS
access is an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion that’s occurred over the last five centuries.
HAIPHONG:You just gave an incredible summary in breaking down the interconnections of these developments, and I wanted to, given that the Near East, West Asia, is so “hot” right now.
Iran just launched numerous strikes in Erbil, in Iraq, against a Mossad headquarters, as well as other targets locating certain terrorist groups that Israel supported. There are reports now of Pakistan, also in northern Pakistan.
There also is the situation with regard to Yemen, the Red Sea crisis that is ongoing. The Ansar Allah movement has just hit an American ship. There’s constant activity there. And of course, there’s still the conflict you mentioned, the fighting going on in Gaza, the brutal attack on the people of Palestine that has been correctly labeled a genocide.
And here’s what Joseph Nye had to say, and I’ll kick it back to you, Michael. He said it with regard to U.S. soft power. In that Financial Times article, he said, The U.S., even so, can seem powerless. It has failed to convince its ally, Israel, to act with restraint in Gaza. Could it have done so in the past? It’s not clear they could have done it 20 years ago. George W.
Bush intimated in 1991 that American aid could be cut and that they may have helped to stimulate the Oslo process, but that didn’t bring about two states. Israel is not only, not the only ally that has proved quite capable of resisting the U.S., pointing to Saudi Arabia and others. For the moment, Israel is hurting its own soft power and by extension hurting American soft power.
Kick it back to you, Michael.
HUDSON:This is the big lie that America is trying to promote. The idea that, the pretense that when Blinken goes to talk to Netanyahu, he says, when you drop the next bombs and kill the next 20,000 Gaza-era Palestinians, please be gentle with them. Please obey the laws of war and stop bombing the ambulances, stop bombing the hospitals.
That’s all public relations crap. The reality is that he’s telling Netanyahu to go forward.
It’s America. All these bombs that are dropping are made in America and sent to Israel to drop. Every week, America is saying, Here is a new delivery of bombs. Go to it. Here is billions of dollars more for you to get by while you’ve drafted your working population into the army. America is pushing Israel.
Beginning 50 years ago, I used to travel to work with Netanyahu’s main Mossad and now National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad. I remember, I think I’ve mentioned before on one occasion, we were going to Japan and stopped off in San Francisco for some discussions.
An army officer came up, threw his arms around Uzi and said, you Israelis are our landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Well, that was 50 years ago.
Last week in the New York Times, I hear exactly the same phrase. Israel is our aircraft carrier. To the United States, Israel is America’s Ukraine in the Near East. It’s the United States that is pushing Israel to goad first Lebanon and then Iran into doing something that will justify a huge American attack, trying to do to Iran what Hillary Clinton did to Libya, utterly destroying it and destroying the population. In the process, grabbing its gold supply, we don’t know what’s happened to that, installing ISIS as its foreign legion in as much of Libya as possible and grabbing the Libyan oil supply.
In the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal and on TV, whenever they talk about Hamas or Hezbollah, they don’t say Hamas and Hezbollah. They say “Iran-backed Hamas”,
“Iran-backed Hezbollah”. They don’t talk about the Yemeni army, the Houthis. They say the
“Iranian-backed Houthis”. There is a huge public relations push to convince the American population that Iran is the big enemy and President Biden says again and again that Iran is the enemy. The army, Petraeus, and the neocons have said from the very beginning, Iraq and Syria are merely the dress rehearsal for where we really want to go, Iran.
Their hatred of Iran stems from the fact that they overthrew the Iranian government of Mosaddegh back in the 1950s, along with British help as usual. And they’re sure that, well, we’ve hurt you so much that we’re sure you must hate us. And since we know you hate us because of what we’ve done to you, we’ve got to attack you because we’ve made you an enemy by overthrowing your government when we grabbed your oil and put in the Shah that ran a murderous torture regime for a few decades in Iran. Well, that basically is the 7
American policy that is goading it into a war that probably will be more disastrous for the United States than the war in Ukraine was.
At least in Ukraine, all the Americans lost were Ukrainians. And I guess they had a few mercenary troops that they hired over there. But in the Near East, they’re going to lose a lot more than it was at stake in just Ukraine. They’ll probably lose Israel’s role as a landed aircraft carrier. And in fact, they’re going to lose a lot of their own floating aircraft carriers that are near there. And they’ve already lost control of the Red Sea and the oil gulf, basically, between Iran and Egypt.
And there’s also a possibility that they’ll even lose the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Because even though in the Arab Spring, the Americans pulled a “color revolution”, Arab Spring, where they replaced the hated Egyptian President Mubarak with his own protege, Sisi, who is now running it. Sisi is totally in the US pockets. And yet, the Egyptian population, needless to say, being largely Arabic, is supporting Gaza, not the United States.
Similarly, in Saudi Arabia. Here, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine were in the process of making a rapprochement, actually an alliance with Israel, along sort of the same lines that Greece had been making with Israel for a Mediterranean military force. Well, now much of the Saudi population is Palestinian. They’ve found jobs in Saudi Arabia, and they’re outraged at Saudi Arabia’s trying to sit on the fence at the same time that it has joined the BRICS.
It realizes that all of its foreign reserves are held hostage by the United States. What’s going to be more important to Saudi Arabia? Fighting to protect the Islamic population under attack, or saving its own reserves that are kept in the United States, not to help Saudi Arabia at all.
Same thing with Egypt.
The population there, between Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, these were the main American bastions in the Near East. And now it’s in dan-ger of losing them if, in the case of war, they’re under tremendous political pressure and instability.
And further to the West in Africa, you have the former French colonies also being Islamic.
You can imagine, you know, they’re breaking away not only from France and supporting the rest of Africa, Central Africa, from breaking away from France, but essentially moving into an alliance with the BRICS countries, with Russia and China.
So all of a sudden, the American decision to go to war with Russia in Ukraine after the 2015
Maidan massacre and regime change, putting in the neo-Nazis, you’re having the fighting in Israel. And those two US-sponsored attacks have had the exact opposite effect of what the United States politicians promised. Just as they promised that Russia would break up and essentially the economy would crash under the sanctions and under the force of war, they believed that Israel’s army was so strong that it was going to simply be able to wipe out Hamas.
And the big fighting—there’s not a word of this in the United States press—but the big fighting is on the West Bank. Netanyahu is saying, well, here while they’re all looking at what we’re bombing the civilians and the hospitals and the ambulances and starving Gaza, we’ve distracted the world and we can now wipe out the Arabs on the West Bank and move right into Syria on the Golan Heights. And apparently the United States has promised Israel that it can take whatever it wants of Syria, which it’s still opposing.
We don’t know what Russia is going to do in all of this. Russia, China have been completely silent in all of this. And I can understand they’re silent. China has moved naval ships into the area because it’s itself is very dependent on the Red Sea and the sea lanes to oil in Saudi Arabia.
When the United States keeps saying, threatening, oh, the Yemenis are going to bomb ships there and block the trade, that’s what they want. The United States realizes that if they can goad Yemen and Iran into blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf, this will indeed stop the oil trade. And it’s true that as Yves Smith pointed out in Naked Capitalism today, the sea lanes to Saudi Arabia were closed for many years after the 1967 war. They were closed numerous times for many months. And it’s not unthinkable that they’re closed. But that was then.
Now, if you close them, it will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that is, from the United States point of view, that will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.
So you’re having the United States basically play the only tactic that it can actually use.
It can’t use the tactic to say, We’re the growing economy and you want to trade with us, not with China and Russia, because they’re growing faster than the U.S. and Europe. They don’t really have anything to offer except the ability to disrupt foreign trade and foreign monetary and financial systems and agree to stop disrupting it if other countries will simply let the United States be the unipolar decision maker.
And I should have added the dimension before when we were talking about China and Russia and the Siberian development. The Eurasian countries have one great advantage over the United States and Europe. The United States and Europe have essentially privatized what was the whole public infrastructure system. And being privatized, they’re now natural monopolies. And they’re run in the way that, say, Thames Water is run in England. They’re run as monopolies that are under-investing and simply using a choke-hold to increase their monopoly rents, which they report as profits.
But China, Russia, Asian countries have kept the basic infrastructure—transportation, education, health care, communications—as public utilities. And they are investing, they are run by engineers, industrial engineers, not financial engineers. And they are run not only much more efficiently, but they don’t have the financial overhead and the monopoly rent overhead that plagues privatized infrastructure. So the cost of production in the non-neoliberalized world, I guess we can call it the world moving towards socialism, is so much more efficient than the neoliberal financialized West that you can see the magnetic pull of Africa and South America.
And as it happens, these are also the main raw material suppliers of the world. So if the United States and Europe don’t have raw materials, don’t produce their own oil, except what the Europeans have to pay enormous markups to American producers, you’re going to have Europe looking pretty much like post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia. The population is going to emigrate. They’re going to shrink. You’re going to have a flowering of interaction throughout all of Eurasia and Africa.
And essentially, the United States can try to stop this by triggering a new oil war in the Near East. But that’s really the last gasp. It’s very unlikely that this is going to lead Taiwan to say, Well, you know, we’re going to follow Ukraine and Israel and you can fight to the last Taiwanese, just as you’re fighting to the last Ukrainian, the last Israeli. I think that the United States is creating a turmoil that is demonstrating to the other world the need for essentially, I won’t call it an iron curtain, but for it to go its own way and for a break in economic systems.
And as President Putin has said again and again, this is a civilizational war. It’s a war to say in what direction is civilization going to go? Is it going to be towards neo-feudalism, back toward feudalism, which is the neoliberal rent-seeking 1%? Or is it going to be towards where industrial capitalism was originally evolving towards, towards socialism and towards raising living standards instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block? So that’s the choice that America is seeing in the Near East and in other countries right now.
Are you going to have a future of austerity or essentially prosperity and economic growth?
HAIPHONG:I don’t think there’s a better way to connect all of those developments, especially with regard to what’s happening in the Near East, or what some call the Middle East, or what others call West Asia. I mean, the clashes are escalating. There’s clashes even between Egypt and Israel, which is almost unheard of.
With everything that you said, you’re saying that this is not going to work at all, that the United States won’t be able to wrestle control as it is seeking in the region. How do you see this playing out? Maybe we can close on this point, given that it’s not going to work.
And if it’s not going to work, then what other options do the United States and maybe the broader collective West have? Because you’ve outlined it perfectly, this is an economic war, this is a war for economic dominance and control. So will it just crumble on its own, or will the United States and whoever it can drag along with it, you know, escalate and maneuver in a manner that we should all be aware of?
HUDSON:The United States has one dynamic more than any other country of the world, and that is rage. That is the feeling that you have in Washington now. Not only rage, but as with most rage, it’s combined with fear. The Democrats fear that they’re going to lose the election and that Donald Trump is going to come in and clean up the FBI police state and to get rid of the CIA. That’s basically what he’s pledged to do, the deep state.
So the deep state is worried that it’s going to be, not that the United States is going to be left to stagnate, but that they themselves, their control of the United States will stagnate.
And the deep state is willing to destroy the U.S. economy. The Democratic Party, since Clinton, has the objective of destroying the U.S. economy in order to benefit the control of the 1% over the 99%. And it’s willing to use military war to fight, to escalate in the Near East, to escalate in Ukraine, and to escalate, presumably, in the China Sea to somehow provoke and essentially saying, Well, we’re going to go to war. We’re going to have a grab bag because who wants to live in a world that we don’t control?
Well, just, you know, this is like what Russia said when America was threatening to atom bomb it with its withdrawal from the arms agreements. Russia said, Don’t think that we won’t fight back. Who wants to live in a world without Russia? Well, the United States government is saying, who wants to live in America that we can’t control? That the banks and the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical complex and basically the finance-monopolist sector can’t control. If we can’t control it, we’re willing to have the whole country go under. That’s really what it is. And they’re using the control of the press for any of this.
For instance, on Saturday and Sunday in Washington, there were huge demonstrations against the attacks on the Palestinians. Not a word of this in the New York Times or not a word of it on television. There’s not a word of what’s happening in the Near East or what President Putin and President Xi are saying in the news at all. It’s as if the world is already divided into a visible world, the deep state world and the invisible world, reality, of the 95% or 85%.
The fight politically towards November is, are people going to be able to really believe that the Biden administration is helping the economy instead of defending the CIA, the FBI, the national security state, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical complex, real estate, and Wall Street against the population by de-industrializing? Or has all this been a detour that’s made us poor? That’s going to be the question.
And the fact that you’re already having on social media, blocking of any criticism of Israel or the United States, you’re having a kind of control here that is a very similar control that you’re having in the Ukraine.
HAIPHONG:It really is mind blowing how quickly all of these developments have, in many senses, spiraled out of control. Even if we can look at this in years, but even in just the last few months, of course, with October 7th being another breaking point.
HUDSON:I think you should say October 2nd. That was the destruction of the attempt to destroy the mosque. It’s October 2nd that triggered all of this. It was the Israeli attack on the mosque that was intended to say, We are going to destroy the Islamic presence in Palestine so that it can be entirely non-Islamic. That was the declaration of war. So don’t be suckered into the New York Times saying it’s all October 7th.
It began the week earlier, just as in Ukraine. The Ukraine war did not begin with Russia moving to protect its population, its Russian speaking population in Donetsk and Luhansk.
It began not only with Maidan, but with the Ukrainian army shelling, bombing civilian apartment buildings and civilians in the Russian speaking territories and refusing to pay any social security or healthcare to the Russian speaking territories and banning the Russian language. Russia was the country under attack, not the attacker.
So again, you have to be very careful as when you date the beginning of this. And the Americans want to date all wars as when after it attacks and when other countries are protecting themselves. They call other countries protecting themselves an attack on the United States. Yeah.
HAIPHONG: October 7th, February 22nd, 2022. I mean, it’s a tactic. So it’s a great point that you brought up.
And maybe, Michael, we could close our conversation with China because China, you mentioned earlier in your analysis. And, you know, I believe China is the end game here. And there are a few developments. You mentioned China surpassing, in terms of car exports, car manufacturing, Japan, and becoming number one in the world. There and I’m going to pull up the articles as you speak.
There’s also the boards of the major auto manufacturers, the monopolies in a state of shock over BYD, the car manufacturer in China that has essentially taken over the world market with regard to electric vehicles. And there’s also reports that China is going to meet its 5
percent growth target. Despite the fact I’m sure you’ve seen this, Michael, there is collapse after collapse after collapse theory being bandied about in the mainstream media by the deep state. “China’s on the collapse. China’s economy is flailing. It’s declining. It’s crashing.”
So, Michael, I’m going to pull up the pieces as you go. But perhaps you can give your take, your reaction to this development and the notion of China being the end game for the neocons and the monopoly system of post-industrial capitalism, finance capitalism that you write and analyze so much about.
HUDSON:Well, there are a number of reasons why China is becoming the main car producer. This is led by the shift towards electric vehicles. And there’s one key dimension of electric vehicles.
Number one is they’re electric. You need electricity. How are you going to produce the electricity: with American oil, with Russian oil? How are you going to make it with atomic power? The other thing is once you get the electricity into the car, how are you going to get a battery to run the car and not have to keep stopping at the filling station even more often than you have to go to the bathroom?
Well, the answer is you need lithium for that. And China has been controlling most of the lithium sites. And you also need to have computerized vehicles. You need all sorts of materials that are cobalt, the rare earths that also are controlled with China. And China has gained control of most of the metallurgy, of the refining of the key metals that are needed for automobile production and for other industrial production.
So you have China as an integrated economy producing all of these. And you have the West becoming dependent on achieving these same metals. Now, let’s look at what could have happened back in 1990. Suppose there had not been a Cold War. Suppose that America actually in 1990, when the Soviet Union disbanded, America would have disbanded NAT and really had a mutual kind of growth with open, continued international trade.
Well, without the world splitting into the two parts, somehow there wouldn’t have been enough motivation for other countries to explicitly make the civilizational break from neoliberalism to socialism. There would have been a kind of social democracy in Asia, but it could have been the social democracy going the oligarchic way that it’s gone in, say, Sweden, which used to be called a great social democracy. And now it’s the most unequal country in Europe. You could have had slowly that development, but there would have been world trade and anybody could have bought the various metals, lithium, the rare earths. There would have been oil. There would have been continued trade and the whole world economy could have grown.
All of that was broken up by the American insistence that if we can’t control world trade, there won’t be world trade. If we can’t control world international finance and make the whole world use the U.S. dollar that we can print on computers and print and issue to finance all of the military spending to encircle the rest of the world with military bases, if we can’t do that, then there won’t be a world financial system because the United States believed that without the dollar, there couldn’t be de-dollarization because there was no alternative.
They’re tricked into the Margaret Thatcher type slogan. There is no alternative. And they really believe that the rest of the world could not prosper without using the dollar. They could not prosper without selling off and privatizing their public utilities and making natural monopolies that would be bought up by American buyers printing the dollars to say, we’ll print the dollars and we’ll buy your transportation system, your communication system and your factories. They couldn’t believe that there was an alternative to neoliberalism. And yet you’re seeing this. They couldn’t believe that if they simply bombed another country, that somehow the population of that country would say, Oh, we don’t want to be bombed.
We’re going to overthrow our government and support a government that supports you so that you won’t bomb our country anymore.
Instead, the effect of bombing a country when the United States does it is the same as bombing a country when any other country does it. It galvanizes the population together to oppose the country that’s bombing it and defend the country that’s under attack. So the whole image that the United States has is, there’s only one actor in the world, and that’s us. And we can smash other countries. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll upset the chessboard and just wreck the whole game.
So the United States is acting in the role of wrecker and other countries are in the role of builder. And the whole global majority is saying, What side do you want to be on, the wreckers or the builders?
And you can look at Ukraine as an example of how the United States would like Russia, China, and the Arab countries to exist. You would suspend elections once you have your guys, your president in there. You would become the most corrupt country in your region, as Ukraine has been. You will ban local languages and religions that are not Judeo-Christian.
You will essentially prevent strikes.
And you know the joke, the aristocrats. A stage group of actors talks about a family coming on and doing all sorts of horrendously devious sexual acts and incest, and it goes on and on. The producer who’s being offered this act and said, what do you call this act? And the answer is, the aristocrats.
Well, what do you call the Ukrainian act of suspending elections, banning foreign languages, assassinating critics? We call it democracy. Well, that’s hilarious. That’s indeed what America calls it. America has two models of democracy, Ukraine and Israel. Again and again in the press, it says Ukraine is the model of democracy that we want for what used to be the whole Soviet Union. And you have Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania clapping, and we want the democracy in Israel. Israel is the only democratic country in the Near East.
We want Israel to be the model for the Near East.
Well, what are they saying? That there won’t be any more Arabs in the Near East? That they’ll all be Americans with dual citizenship? This is what it’s all come to. We’re living in an Orwellian world is trying to deter people’s consciousness from realizing the reality of work and the dynamics that are at work. And how long can you convince people that they’re really not doing well just because the 1% is doing well? How can you convince the people that America is really a model leader when it’s trying to destroy the whole rest of the world instead of helping it, as at least it could pose to be doing back in 1945 when World War II ended?
You’re having really unwinding of the whole world system of the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, the whole diplomatic system of the world that was put together in 1945 is now being outmoded. And you could see the inability of the United Nations to cope with the war in the Near East, to cope with the war in Ukraine. This is the death knell of the old world. And you’re seeing a new world being created spontaneously, not ideologically, but basically spontaneously in an ad hoc fashion by China, Russia, and the 99%.
HAIPHONG:Yes. Yeah, yes, indeed, Michael. And, you know, final thoughts on the fact that given all that you said, and this reality, I mean, it’s this myth and reality, the myth, the idea, that China’s collapsing, you know, China’s economy is in decline. And yet you have not only these recent developments, but you also have these broader developments that you speak of.
So can you just give a sense, you’ve been to China, you’ve studied China’s economy very deeply. Just to close, help our audience here understand why China’s economy is able to industrialize like it is.
Europe is about to go through this probe. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, this probe of the, you know, Chinese auto manufacturing, especially around electric vehicles, because of these nefarious state subsidies. Can you talk about this, talk about China’s economy, how it works, and why Europe and the United States, of course, has been waging economic war as well, why they would resort to what seems to be counterproductive measures?
HUDSON:Well, the key to understanding the West is neoliberalism is privatization of basic needs and basic utilities. The most important public utility throughout history has always been the ability to create money and credit.
And what China has that no other country had was its central bank created the own money.
And when the government creates money through the treasury, spending money into the economy, it spends money in order to actually build things, mainly to build real estate, to house the Chinese, but also to build the high speed railroads, to provide an educational system, universities all over China, to build communications.
Other countries, such as the United States, don’t have this. Money is created, especially in the United States, by commercial banks, and they create money not to finance new construction of factories or new investment of any sorts. Banks lend money in the West against collateral that is already in place. You can go to a bank to get money to buy a building that exists, an office building, although the office building’s prices are all collapsing now. You can go and borrow money to buy a whole company. That’s what private capital does. It buys money to buy Sears. It drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and fires the [workers].
It can buy Toys R Us, drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and it’s gone. You can buy companies and loot them and essentially close them down and turn factories into gentrified buildings for the 1% of financial operatives who are doing the looting.
But banks in the West do not fund public utilities, and once you cut the taxes and force a government into deficit, you then finance the deficit by privatizing your roads, turning them into toll roads. You privatize your postal system. You privatize your health care system so that there’s not much health care anymore, as you have in England, for instance, the crisis that you’re having in English medicine and hospitals and privatization. You make the whole economy in the West look like England after Margaret Thatcher, where people who are actually wage earners can’t afford to live in London anymore. That’s for the foreign investors or the people who work in the financial sector. The wage earners have to live in suburbs to take privatized rail transportation.
In the United States, for instance, Greyhound, the bus system, was just bought out by private equity. They did exactly what Stagecoach, England’s largest bus company, did in England. They sold off the bus terminal that was in the center of the city that people would go to to catch the buses, and they sold it for gentrified real estate and told people, there’s now a parking lot we have on the outside of the city. You go and wait in the parking lot.
We hope it’s not raining or too cold or snowing, but we don’t have a terminal anymore. Well, you can just imagine this way of doing things. It turns into a race to the bottom.
Well, China, by [keeping control of] finance, really controls who is going to get the credit, and credit is really the economic planner. Neoliberalism in the West says the government shouldn’t do the planning. Wall Street should do the planning because Wall Street is what provides the credit that determines who is going to get the resources and what they’re going to do with it.
Well, Wall Street gives the credit to financial engineers that are trying to make money by increasing stock prices, increasing capital gains, and making money financially.
It’s true that China has made many billionaires. That was part of the Let 100 Flowers Grow, but now that it’s had that spontaneous growth, now it’s seen what forms work and what forms don’t work. Now it’s consolidating the economy to essentially create credit to finance tangible industrial growth, tangible infrastructure growth, tangible agricultural modernization, and general improvement of living standards.
The whole aim of the Chinese economy is growth, not looting and downsizing and a smash-up of corporate raiding. There’s no corporate raiding going on in China. There’s not going to be any financial interest that’s going to buy Huawei or the other Chinese developers. You don’t have the parasitical financial class that have become the central economic planners of the United States.
Because that’s what libertarianism is. Libertarians want a centralized economy, not run by government but run by Wall Street and the financial sector. The libertarians are essentially the advocates of what normally used to be called fascism, central planning by the wealthy financial and monopoly sector against the population at large.
You have the Republican and the Democratic Party both supporting a dismantling of government just with a different kind of rhetoric, but the same policies, the same military policies and the same anti-industrial policies. China, Russia and their now more and more BRICS countries are rejecting that whole self-defeating neo-feudal path of growth.
HAIPHONG:Well, Michael, you’ve been very generous with your time today. I really appreciate you giving this what was an incredible rundown of all the interconnections, all the developments geopolitically that have, at their base, economic roots. And so, Michael, thank you so much.
Where can people find you? I have your website in the video description.
HUDSON:My website is michael-hudson.com and there’s a Patreon list associated with that. But all my articles are on my website and the other sites that I publish on, Naked Capitalism and Counterpunch and other such sites.
HAIPHONG:Well, definitely check out his work. He has a number of books that are key reads. So, Michael, it was great to be with you. Thanks so much for joining me today and I’ll talk to you again soon.
HUDSON:Thanks for having me. We were lucky politically, but the whole world was at a turning point this week, it looks like.
Enslaved by nonprofits: How NGO’s colonize developing countries
By Kit Klarenberg (Posted Feb 03, 2024)
Originally published: MintPress News on December 12, 2023 (more by MintPress News) |
November 21 marked the 28th anniversary of the signing of the U.S.-brokered Dayton Agreement, which brought an end to the proxy war in Bosnia after three years and eight months. It is an event few celebrate—although there was much cheering in Sarajevo two days later when Stuart Seldowitz, the man who led negotiations on Washington’s side, was arrested for subjecting Muslim Americans to vile verbal abuse.
The war in Bosnia—encouraged, financed, armed, and prolonged at every step by the U.S.—tore apart a previously harmonious, inclusive and prosperous republic of Socialist Yugoslavia. In all, 100,000 died, with many more injured. Croats, Muslims, and Serbs who had considered each other friends, neighbors and relatives were thrust into a hellish cycle of violence. Once fighting ended, much of the country’s industry and infrastructure were destroyed, many communities displaced and divided, and previously non-existent ethnic and religious hostility rife.
Dayton imposed upon Bosnia a highly discriminatory constitution, the legality of significant portions of which has been successfully challenged in the European Court of Human Rights. Additionally, an overly bureaucratic political system is frequently described as the world’s most complex. The country is divided into Croat and Muslim-majority Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS). Both have their own governments and parliaments with their own powers.
Croats, Muslims, and Serbs moreover elect lawmakers to the Bosnian assembly and Sarajevo’s three presidents. For legislation to be passed nationally, they all must agree, which seldom happens. It is a system that all but guarantees recurrent deadlock and political crisis while emboldening extremists and nationalists on all three sides. Laws and regulations are rarely implemented, and the national government has never effectively served the needs of its citizens in any tangible regard.
Political inertia compelled by Dayton ultimately convinced Republika Srpska (RS) to seize policymaking power in several key areas forcibly. This has allowed RS to locally implement reforms, regulations, and legislation that couldn’t plausibly be at a national level. RS is resultantly far riper for EU membership than the country at large or its Bosnia and Herzegovina counterpart. This is ironic, given Milorad Dodik favors BRICS over Brussels.
The RS government’s latest attempt to take matters into its own hands by implementing legislation compelling foreign NGOs operating on its territory to disclose their funding sources and register as foreign agents has produced a bitter showdown with the EU and U.S. Despite ominous threats, Western bete noire President Milorad Dodik has pushed ahead undeterred, ended all cooperation with Bosnia’s American and British embassies, and openly threatened secession. Seldowitz’s monstrous spawn may not have much longer left.
RS officials argue the law is necessary due to a wholly inadequate legal framework governing the operations of NGOs in Bosnia and a widespread lack of transparency around who or what is funding these entities and their true objectives. As we shall see, these concerns are wholly legitimate and in urgent need of address. Sarajevo is a uniquely palpable demonstration of the enfeebling impact and influence of Western NGOs abroad, which offers obvious and grave lessons for developing countries everywhere.
MAKING LIBERALS BLUSH
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg shakes hands with the President of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina Borjana Kristo in Sarajevo, Nov. 20, 2023. (Photo: Armin Durgut | AP)
Sat atop Bosnia’s Byzantine Dayton-enforced political structure is the Office of the High Representative. They neither have fixed terms in office nor are nominated and elected by Bosnia’s population. Instead, they are chosen and appointed by an 11-member Peace Implementation Council Steering Board, comprised of representatives from NATO member states, the EU, Russia, and Turkey. Since the post’s 1995 creation, High Representatives have always hailed from Europe and their deputies from the U.S.
High Representatives have the unilateral ability to override Presidential vetoes, block and impose legislation, decide who can and can’t run for office, remove public officials—including judges and elected politicians—from their posts without appeal, ban anyone they wish from holding office for life, freeze their bank accounts, and somehow, even more. Veteran British politician Paddy Ashdown, who could be considered an expert on the subject, once approvingly remarked that the office wields “powers that ought to make any liberal blush.”
As the High Representative from May 2002—January 2006, he was known as “Viceroy of Bosnia.” Ashdown routinely dismissed state officials if they refused to follow a Western-sanctioned agenda in all matters, domestic and foreign, firing 58 in a single day in June 2004. That December, he defenestrated Republika Srpska’s Prime Minister and most Serb representatives in Bosnia’s national government for refusing to back future NATO membership for Sarajevo. Contemporary media reports framed these autocratic excesses as “overruling voters to save democracy.”
In many ways, Bosnia today resembles a traditional Global South colony. Accordingly, the High Representative isn’t the only foreign-appointed official with enormous power. For example, Sarajevo’s first Central Bank Governor, who under Dayton’s terms could “not be a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina or a neighboring state,” was appointed by the IMF. While locals can now fill the post, they still require Western approval. As the Wall Street Journal recorded in August 1998:
Thousands of international diplomats, human rights workers and soldiers now run this country-in-the-making as a virtual protectorate, with Americans by far the weightiest presence. Together, they write the laws, provide security, determine monetary policy and broker deals on everything from mosque construction to the colors of the national flag… A New Zealander sits as chief of the central bank. An ex-cop from Los Angeles is deputy chief of Bosnia’s international police force.”
Fast forward 25 years and little has changed. Central to the construction and maintenance of “independent” Bosnia’s colonial system were tens of thousands of NATO “peacekeepers.” In the immediate aftermath of Dayton, they frequently imposed locally despised, Western-approved “reforms” upon the population at literal gunpoint, such as shutting down Sarajevo’s “socialist” police forces and news outlets critical of NATO occupation. A nameless foreign official openly described the situation as “32,000 foreign soldiers demanding a country do what we want.”
NATO “peacekeepers” patrol the streets of Sarajevo to this day. Their “soft power” counterparts are an enormous number of Western NGOs. Dayton allocated billions of U.S. dollars for reconstruction, specifically to be delivered by foreign nonprofits. Within months, hundreds set up shop locally, and the deluge only intensified after that. Today, there are approximately 25,600 in Bosnia, Republika Srpska being home to over 7,500. How many are funded from overseas is uncertain, but it is likely almost all of them.
Foreign NGOs are active in every conceivable sphere of the Bosnian public, political and even daily life. They rebuild homes and construct new ones. They provide counseling to rape survivors and traumatized veterans. They oversee school curriculums and vocational programs. They distribute food, medicine and financial aid to senior citizens and marginalized groups. They run community bridge-building initiatives and youth summer camps. They promote religious tolerance and human rights. They do everything the Yugoslav state did, and the modern-day Bosnian government cannot.
There can be little doubt that immediately following the war, some Bosnian NGOs made an extremely valuable contribution in crucial areas. Yet, at the time, local civil society actors were deeply concerned by the sudden influx of Western organizations with no experience and little knowledge of the country’s culture, history, or situation. The perception some were primarily interested in conducting high-profile, well-remunerated, politically expedient work was widespread.
It is abundantly clear international actors bankrolling these NGOs at times didn’t comprehend what Bosnia and its population actually needed and considered throwing vast sums at the country an end in itself. In April 1998, the EU unveiled plans to establish a pro-democracy foundation in Sarajevo at some cost. Among other Bosnian NGO sponsors, Open Society Foundations expressed dismay that its proposed initiatives would replicate work already being conducted and projects already being funded by other foreign entities.
No lessons were learned from the debacle. A 2011 investigation by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) found that “despite the existence of large numbers of NGOs created specifically to help those who suffered in the Bosnian war…[they] are all too often failing to deliver meaningful long-term assistance to those who need it.” So many NGOs doing roughly the same thing means widespread service overlap, leaving citizens confused over where to access help and organizations unsure of whom they should be helping.
So much foreign cash flowing into Bosnian NGOs inevitably fosters corruption, too. Stories of aid sums being misallocated, embezzled, or awarded to organizations employing friends, relatives, and allies of state officials are common. IWPR quoted Sarajevo’s financial police chief as saying “not a single” NGO in the country was “spending budget money in a transparent way.” Of the “great many” probes his team had conducted into local NGO activities, they “spotted irregularities” on every occasion:
When we investigated the financial transactions of some of these [NGOs], we found out they made per diem payments to their staff for field trips that never took place. Money was also paid for services that were never rendered. There were cases where conferences or other big events were organized and individuals were paid large sums of money without any description of the services they were supposed to have provided.
‘FORGET ABOUT EXIT STRATEGY’
A Bosnian policeman decertified for “failing to meet UN standards” holds a banner during a protest in front of the Office of the High Representative’s Paddy Ashdown in Sarajevo, 2006. (Photo: Hidajet Delic | AP)
Collectively, these issues produce a profoundly toxic, self-perpetuating cycle. Citizens are forced to rely on foreign entities for almost everything, and in the process, they themselves do, learn to do, and can do almost nothing. It’s a milieu directly recalling the imposed dependency of historic colonial systems. To say the least, Bosnians aren’t taught how to fish—in fact, they’re often not even given fish in the first place.
Strikingly, the inevitable, debilitating upshot of flooding Bosnia with foreign overlords, organizations, and structures was widely acknowledged and angsted over by Western sources when it commenced. A February 1998 Economist editorial despaired, “the protectorate seems to know no limits,” quoting an aide of then-High Representative Carlos Westendorp, a Spaniard, saying, “We do not know what we can’t do” in Sarajevo. The publication cautioned this could mean locals “forget how to rule themselves.”
Two months later, the New York Times profiled Westendorp. The outlet observed foreign actors dominating Bosnia’s governance at every level, which “raised troubling questions about how the state will work without continued infusions of outside aid and direct international supervision.” Along the way, a senior Office advisor lamented:
We have become deeply involved in the functioning of the state… We have an unprecedented amount of control on the legislative and executive branches of government. We do not know, however, how we will exit, how we will not perpetuate Bosnia’s culture of dependency.
One needn’t be a cynic to conclude enfeebling the local population via enforced reliance on foreign NGOs was a dedicated, deliberate strategy for Sarajevo’s Western colonizers. In November of that year, a U.S. official menacingly demanded Bosnian officials achieve “much more progress on privatization” and create a permissive climate for foreign investment:
The time has come and, in fact, is overdue for the governments of Bosnia to be making the transition—and [they] should be making it rapidly—to a sustainable market economy. We are prepared to cut off projects, programs, anything to get their attention.
A man looks at the broken windows of a McDonald’s in Belgrade following a 2008 protest. (Photo: Darko Vojinovic | AP)
In other words, should Sarajevo fail to prostrate itself to Western financial interests sufficiently, its panoply of nonprofits will vanish, leaving the country with a barely functioning national government, civil society, and economy, much-reduced healthcare and welfare system, and none of the essential building blocks, specialist knowledge, or experience required to reconstruct or replace what was lost. In effect, Bosnia would revert to its immediate post-war condition.
Again, one could be forgiven for concluding the failure of Bosnia’s democratization efforts to produce anything approaching democracy is entirely by design. A high-ranking U.S. diplomat in Sarajevo once claimed he told American officials in the country and back home to “forget about exit strategy,” as there was none. “We’re not walking away from this,” he explained, as “we are the life-support system.
This perspective endures today. Western officials have repeatedly claimed the RS legislation will discourage NGOs from operating in Bosnia to the enormous detriment of its population. Similar arguments were made earlier this year when Georgia attempted to implement an identical law. Open Society Foundations, the George Soros-created and financed backer of many NGOs in Tbilisi issued a statement cautioning foreign-funded entities would flee the country in response:
This bill aims to leave defenseless the abused children and women; people with disabilities, minorities, scientists, workers, and the youth; to not provide assistance to socially vulnerable families, farmers, miners, internally displaced, homeless, illegally laid off, detained, and other people fighting for their rights; to mute the voice of the people living in the peripheries of the country that can only communicate their troubles through the independent media.
The shocking implication of this threat that NGOs would rather cease vital, potentially lifesaving work and inflict enormous societal damage than disclose their funding sources publicly was apparently lost on the Western journalists who cited the statement in their reporting on the controversy. The conundrum of why foreign NGOs are fulfilling all these functions, rather than Georgians and their government, was likewise unexplored.
Eventually, Tbilisi was convinced not to pass the law. Foreign-backed NGOs, directed by Western diplomats and foundations, staged fiery protests that threatened to turn insurrectionary before the government backed down. There is no sign of such unrest in Bosnia as yet, but Dodik’s determination can only be considered unacceptable in the U.S. empire’s Mafia racket. After all, one colonial holding stepping out of line and failing to pay its protection money on time risks encouraging similar anarchic behavior elsewhere.
NO TRANSPARENCY ALLOWED
Western officials have framed the foreign agent legislation as wanton, authoritarian thuggery on par with the draconian excesses of Russia’s own. Yet, it is abundantly clear under the foreign-dictated terms of Bosnia’s political system that getting anything done requires taking decisive action, and NGOs are a significant barrier to doing so. They also enable and encourage the very corruption the EU and U.S. claim to oppose in Sarajevo.
In the Council of Europe’s legalistic drubbing of the RS “foreign agent law,” it is repeatedly labeled undemocratic on the extraordinary basis that transparency of public institutions and organizations is not an accepted Western norm and, therefore, illegitimate and unreasonable for foreign governments to demand or legislate for. Apparently, while the law is not compatible with democracy, unelected supreme rulers appointed from overseas, the presence of tens of thousands of NATO troops with a record of belligerence, and state institutions constructed and staffed by foreigners somehow are.
Today, in many quarters, the perceived democratic credentials of states are often contingent on how many NGOs operate locally and on legislation and regulations—or lack thereof—governing their activities. Yet, Bosnia is living proof a profusion of NGOs, in particular those that are foreign-funded, is not only a poor indicator of democracy but actively hampers democratization and development. In no small part, this is because NGOs create a bureaucracy between citizens and their government, and most crucially, their ability to govern themselves.
Once that bureaucracy is created, it is enormously difficult to circumvent, let alone decisively dislodge, not least because any attempt to regulate or curtail the operations of NGOs will be met with stiff resistance by these organizations’ sponsors and swirling accusations of authoritarianism and autocracy. From the West’s perspective, this is precisely the point of compelling governments to prostrate their sovereignty and competencies to foreign entities in the first place.
