Yves here. Below Michael Hudson explains how long-standing the neocon plans to break up Iran have been (as going back to before they were called “neocons”) and why this project has been and still is seen as vital to preserving US dominance.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization. Originally published at The Democracy Collective
Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.
What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.
Around 1974 or 1975 there was much talk of creation a New International Economic Order (NIEO). I was working at the Hudson Institution with Herman Kahn on international finance and trade, and he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s northeast border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and the Turkic Azerbaijanis are others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.
Three decades later, by 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.
Fast Forward to Today
Most of the discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic reshaping the international economy has been Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January has to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China, Russia and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control. That is what the war in Iran is all about.
Trump expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos in hope of regaining the U.S. market by reaching an agreement not to trade with China and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order. This fight explains the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.
From the view of U.S. strategists, the emergence of China’s industrial socialism poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control in providing a model that other countries might seek to join to recover the national sovereignty that has been steadily eroded in recent decades.
The Biden Administration and a host of U.S. Cold Warriors frame the issue as being between democracy (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes) and autocracy (seeking national self-reliance from foreign trade and financial dependency. This way of framing the international economy views China as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination, and that attitude explains the US/NATO attack on Russia in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the US/Israeli war against Iran threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war
The motivation has nothing to do with Iran’s attempt to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony.
Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and introducing a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Syrian Wahabi terrorists.
With Iran and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control Near Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally and also as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas. Control of Near Eastern oil also means control of the vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.
The United States holds these OPEC and other foreign investments as hostages, which can be expropriated much as the United States grabbed $300 billion of Russia’s monetary savings in the West in 2022. This explains why these countries fear acting in support of the Palestinians or Iranians in today’s conflict.
But Iran is not only the key to control of the Near East and its oil and dollar holdings. Iran is the key link for China’s Belt and Road program for a New Silk Road of railway transport to the West. If the United States can block it, this interrupts the long transportation corridor that China hopes to construct.
Iran also is a key to blocking Russian development via the Caspian and access to the south. Under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank, bypassing the Suez Canal.
To the Neocons, this makes Iran a central pivot on which U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states.
I think that Trump’s warning to Tehran citizens to evacuate their city is just trying to stir up domestic panic as a prelude to the U.S. attempt to mobilize ethnic opposition and try to break up Iran into component parts. That is similar to the U.S. hopes to succeed in breaking up Russia and China into regional ethnicities. That is the U.S. strategic hope for a new international order remaining under its command.
b>Trump’s Republican Budget Plan and Its Vast Increase in Military Spending
The irony, of course, is that U.S. attempts to hold onto its fading economic empire continue to be self-defeating. The objective is to control other nations by threatening economic chaos. But it is this U.S. threat of chaos that is driving them to seek alternatives elsewhere. But an objective is not a strategy. And the plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as US/NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic is quite obviously at the expense of strategy. It is a warning to the entire world to find an escape hatch. Along with the U.S. trade and financial sanctions intended to keep other countries dependent on U.S. markets and a dollarized financial system, the attempt to impose a military empire from central Europe to the Middle East is politically self-destructive. It is making the coming split between the US unipolar world order and the Global Majority irreversible on moral grounds as well as simple self-interest.
The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome defense shows the folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy to the U.S. military-industrial complex for a similar boondoggle here. So far, only the oldest and least effective missiles have been used. The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a few days or even a week it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack. This already was demonstrated a few months ago, just as Iran showed how easily it could bomb U.S. military bases.
The ostensible US military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the bill. Congress funds it in two ways: The obvious way is by direct arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, South Korea, Europe and Asian countries to buy U.S. arms. This shows the extent to which the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in ostensible government debt (much of it self-financed by the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).
America’s 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) is not applicable to this situation, unless the government is willing to spell out what the Iranian “threat” is really all about: preventing any other country from acting independently of U.S. self-proclaimed interests. And under Article 51 of the UN Charte,r a member state may not make an attack on another country unless attacked by that country or preventing an imminent attack by that country. Even then, the United States would have to receive Security Council authorization. This obviously would be blocked. If the United States proceeds without such authorization, Trump and his advisors will be as guilty as Netanyahu of perpetrating a war crime.
The problem, of course, is that the United Nations is now seen to have become toothless and irrelevant as a world organization able to implement international law. Breaking free of the U.S. unipolar order requires a full spectrum of alternative international organizations independent of the United States, NATO and other client allies.
Could it be as simple as a distraction from the big “L” the US is about to put up on the board in Ukraine?
It seems that this war is a gift to Russia, at least in the short term. Nobody is paying attention to Zelensky anymore. Russia is starting to look serious, taking out a huge oil refinery according to the Military Summary Channel. They’re also dropping bridges in the remaining part of the Donbass that Ukraine controls.
Ukraine may collapse over the summer. What better way to distract Americans from being losers, yet again, than starting another war somewhere else?
No, Israel was saying they.the US needed to attack Iran by sometime in June at the latest due to the snapback provisions in the JCPOA. They formally expire in October but due to procedural requirements., the latest the process could be triggered and conclude before the expiration would be in June.
Of course, this is yet another pretext but it appears to have stuck.
Thanks. Could another pretext be the debt ceiling? Wolf Street has an article up that states that
:
“The US debt has been stuck at the “debt ceiling” of $36.2 trillion since January.”
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/06/20/who-held-or-bought-the-huge-us-government-debt-even-as-the-fed-shed-treasury-securities-in-q1-shedding-light-on-this-iffy-situation/
I’m thinking that Pentagon coffers are running low:
+ We have heard zilch about more aid for Ukraine.
+ DoD is on a CR, though some supplementary funds might have been passed (I lost track of this.)
And finally, the Chinese are still withholding rare earths for weapons systems:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-china-trade-truce-leaves-military-use-rare-earth-issue-unresolved-sources-say-2025-06-15/
(Trump lied … quelle surprise!)
Wolf Street is hyperbole. There is definitely a credit problem but I think it naturally self modulates and appears as inflation. That inflation will be unpleasant but I think a lot of global forces will chip in to prevent sudden disaster.
So there is a plan but it’s an insane plan. And sounds like it would also be happening if Biden had been safely re-elected. If the above is true then we the American public, who have been completely left in the dark, will at least know where we stand. Presumably this very Deep State will be happy to sacrifice Americans just as Z is happy to shed the youth of Ukraine and Bibi is more worried about his son’s wedding plans than his public cowering in shelters.
It would also explain all the preemptive and extreme attacks on protestors with claims of “antisemitism.” Trump and minions knew what they had planned and what was coming. If it is true.
Of course no plan by military dimwits survives first contact with the enemy. We are already seeing that. Bombs create enemies, not submission.
A admirably succinct — even masterly — summary from Hudson.
Carolinan: So there is a plan but it’s an insane plan.
You may consider it insane. Yet it was in place since 1945 and worked for most of that period till now. And that’s because it was based on very basic geopolitical reality — the world is driven by little else but this reality, in fact.
Prior to 1945, for instance, the same resource control strategy informed British policy from the point when Admiral and First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher first switched the Royal Navy over to oil, till the WWII period, when the Allies reduced the Nazi war effort to having to synthesize petroleum for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe via the Fischer-Tropsch process. Indeed, in the first place Hitler’s greenlighting of Operation Barbarossa was substantially driven by the need for the Nazi Imperium that he intended to build to have access to Russia’s energy resources, away from Anglo-Saxon control.
Likewise, too, the U.S. oil embargo of Japan wasn’t just a factor but the reason for Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack, as by mid-1941 Japan was heavily dependent on imported oil, with over 90% of its supply coming from the US, which imposed its embargo when Japan expanded its military presence in French Indochina after having already invaded China.
Similarly now, too, the Ukraine war — the use of Ukraine as a proxy to destabilize Russia — has as its aim returning the situation regarding US and Western access to Russia’s resources to the one that existed during the failed-state Yeltsin era of the 1990s. If you cast your mind back, pre-2003 Putin was ‘Our Man,’ certified by both CIA and MI6, and George W. Bush as “A man we can do business with.” Then in 2003 Putin arrested oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky just as Khodorkovsky was about to sell 20 percent of Russia oil resources — privatized during the 1990s by US-sponsored ‘reformers’ — off to Western control, preventing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky#Criminal_charges_and_incarceration
It was precisely at that point that Putin suddenly became the Big Bad and regime change in Russia was declared imperative.
In the same way, also, China’s currently control of rare earths-type resources means that over the coming months and years it has the potential to meter out exports of those to the US so as slowly strangulate the US military-industrial-complex efforts to build new ships, planes, missiles. This is all just the way the world works.
Carolinian: And sounds like it would also be happening if Biden had been safely re-elected … If the above is true then we the American public, who have been completely left in the dark
Come on. If the American public wilfully chose to be that ignorant and to believe the obviously stupid propaganda — granted, it’s shoveled down their throats from grade school onwards — then it would be stupid for the TPTB to try to educate them and simpler to do it the way elites have always done it.
Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
With each day that passes the US looks more like 1940 Japan.
The Great Game, early edition–The Charge of the Light Brigade. They made a poem about it.
And I say insane because it relies on that elusive thing called military intelligence. In fact the whole scheme sounds like something cooked up in the fever swamps of the Pentagon and CIA. Cut to Vietnam and tell me how that worked out.For sure public opposition played a big role then and it will this time too.
But I’m still not convinced that Trump will do it. They want him and his presidency to be the sacrificial goat. He may decline.
That’s a really dark assessment of how the world works, and yet I find it hard to disagree with your assessment. Yet, from a societal perspective, this is insanity — as Einstein defined it, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — all the same. How much death and destruction do TPTB have to inflict on society before they change course? If history has rendered a judgement, they appear to have an unlimited capacity for death and destruction, until that death and destruction comes for them.
I do disagree with your willful ignorance assessment. You greatly underestimate the power of mass propaganda on a population deprived of good education, accurate and trustworthy information, an absence of good choices, and therefore little ability to make an impact. The public has not willfully chosen to be ignorant. They have been made ignorant. And it takes a tremendous amount of effort, as well as a tremendous amount of moral courage to look at the great disregard for the many that lies in the minds of far too many in positions of power, to undo that ignorance.
That is a very powerful last paragraph.
Thank you.
Granted —
“There is a silent and undocumented resistance movement in every large institution. It is made up of people who secretly act on behalf of mankind, in cunning disregard of their orders, and often at the expense of their material interests. This is why unmaintained bridges are still standing and why good teachers still exist in the poorest school districts. This is why state and corporate crimes are revealed by those who risk harsh punishment.
“Nothing can fully extinguish the human desire to do right.”
Still, the only place I saw it much on the ground during the decades I lived in the US was in African-American churches.
That last paragraph is a very important issue. Hoodwinked masses fed an endless supply of confusion and obfuscation.
I think it was not only Putin’s ouster of Khodorovsky from Yukos but his less than full-throated support for Bush’s Iraq adventure that turned Vlad into a persona non grata. Satraps are not allowed to display any independence or thwart the interests of Western capital in any significant way. The strongmen and dictators put in place by Western intelligence agencies are not supposed to be fostering “national sovereignty”, because “we” are bribing them with easily diverted “foreign aid” or just direct payments to their Swiss bank accounts. And with that as their job situation, taking action to benefit their countries and their people just becomes unthinkable. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Left Godot: I think it was not only Putin’s ouster of Khodorovsky from Yukos but his less than full-throated support for Bush’s Iraq adventure that turned Vlad into a persona non grata.
True. 2003 was indeed the Bush II administration’s “you’re wuth us or agin’ us” turn, and Tony Blair’s behavior in the UK attests to the accuracy of your description of expected satrap behavior (down to the ‘suiciding’ of David Kelly, a British weapons expert who didn’t tow the line, though one suspects that was more the doing of Sir Richard Dearlove, then-MI6 chief and longtime member of the Henry Jackson Society.)
Still, in the interests of not imposing on folks’ patience with an even longer comment and staying on the point: it’s about the resource control, primarily.
The realists were right, unfortunately…but I constantly bounce between the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau and the neorealism of John Mearsheimer. The problem is that those in charge are always trying to find ways to ensure that they stay in power no matter what the cost in terms of foreign relations or the citizenry of their own nations. Voting does nothing when the people making these decisions are unelected officials that remain in place regardless of who is president at the moment. You can hypothetically vote out a president, but the deep state nomenklatura that make our real foreign policy and economic decisions would just find another presidental candidate who is willing to play neocon ball. They would never allow somebody to directly challenge the MIC or its associated institutions.
I am almost sure that when a president takes office he gets “the talk” and if he doesn’t go along with the bipartisan neocon/neoliberal consensus he would either get removed or even assassinated.
Where I think many strains of realism are sadly right is that this is not a unique phenomenon in history or the US. If and when the US finishes its polybian collapse into its tyranny phase, the same thing will happen with the next powerful state/empire a half-century or so later.
We have seen this exact same pattern keep happening all throughout history, the only thing that differs is the names of nations. The fact that this has been the state of humanity since the dawn of civilization means that it seems to stem from something innate in humans as a species, much like the lethal raiding/dominance hierarchies of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee.
Hepativore: The fact that this has been the state of humanity since the dawn of civilization means that it seems to stem from something innate in humans as a species
[1] ‘Since the dawn of civilization’ is the operative phrase there.
That a minority of human individuals with psychopathic, predatory traits seeks power over others is well known. That this minority has throughout recorded human history constituted the ruling class of most human societies has been a truth tacitly recognized but publicly repressed by our species.
[2] Yet we Homo sapiens did not live this way for most of our species’ existence, based on the evidence that’s recently emerged from the realm of archaeogenetics —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeogenetics#Human_archaeology
[3] Likewise, chimpanzee behavior does not constitute a guide to what’s necessarily innate within human behavior. Bonobos are as close, for instance. Homo sapiens possesses ingenuity, and capabilities for communication and organization, that exceed those of chimpanzees or, as far as we know, any other species on the planet
[4] Nevertheless, arguably the most extensive use our species has made of its ingenuity, and capabilities for communication and organization, has been to obey orders to engage in two planet-wide wars during the 20th century. Over seventy million military personnel became mobilized during World War One and more than forty million died, while in World War Two more than one hundred and twenty-seven million were mobilized, and fifty to eighty-five million died
What was that about? Simple species-wide insanity? No. Simple species-wide insanity would be incapable of the organizational feats required to fight wars on that scale. And, again, the evidence is that we did not live like this for most of human existence. So what changed?
I suggest the answer is [1].
Or there’s a scheduled screening of the Zapruder film, and when the lights come up one of the spooks in mirror shades smiles and says: “Any questions, Mr. President?”
Something that should be considered: If and when the US Empire collapses or near collapses living standards in the US will decline substantially as the Dollar collapses and inflation rises. The American people have never been told that their way of living comes at great cost to the Other. Instead, Americans can live large because we are smarter and work harder than others. We deserve it!!! That’s what we are all told just as soon as we come out of our mother’s womb.
Looking at the map and the Suez canal route: if that would be dropped by the Asian trade, what would then happen to Northafrican/African interests? Will they lose revenues and therefore pro-war or are they just sail-by-countries in this context? Egypt will lose a large chunk of rheir 9BnUSD Suez canal revenues but what about the other states between Egypt and Gibraltar?
Libya and Algeria have significant oil reserves while Egypt has smaller reserves.
Nicely done. Thanks.
an aside: The neocons seem to have a large US political role in the Eastern Europe and ME stuff. I’m reminded Irving Kristol was dubbed ‘the godfather of neoconservatism’. He got his real start writing in Commentary magazine beginning the same year the CIA was officially launched under the National Security Act. And… so what of this coincidence. From Wiki:
Kristol was affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He wrote in Commentary magazine from 1947 to 1952 under the editor Elliot E. Cohen (not to be confused with Eliot A. Cohen, a current Commentary contributor). With Stephen Spender, he was co-founder of and contributor to the British-based Encounter from 1953 to 1958; editor of The Reporter from 1959 to 1960. He also was the executive vice-president of the publishing house Basic Books from 1961 to 1969, the Henry Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University from 1969 to 1987, and co-founder and co-editor (first with Daniel Bell and then Nathan Glazer) of The Public Interest from 1965 to 2002. He was the founder and publisher of The National Interest from 1985 to 2002. Following Ramparts’ publication of information showing Central Intelligence Agency funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was widely reported elsewhere, Kristol left in the late 1960s and became affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.[10]
The above is prologue to my question: Are the neocons the political mouthpiece of the CIA? It’s an interesting question, imo. Maybe everyone except me knows the answer to this question.
I don’t think so, there are Realists as well.
I would say Leo Strauss is the father of the so-called neoconservative movement. A different flavor of warmongering imperialists. For example, Henry K. and Zbig B. were Realists, yet they were also warmongering imperialists.
Scoop Jackson, the senator from Boeing. Of course there are many moving parts to the MIC.
BTW should we assume this is the same Herman Kahn who inspired characters in Fail-Safe and Strangelove?
https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/fail-safe-50th-anniversary-sidney-lumets-nuclear-war-movie-is-better-than-dr-strangelove.html
Yes, same guy, who said, “The living will envy the dead,” in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War .
Though Strangelove is a portmanteau figure also based, besides Kahn, on John von Neumann when he was in his phase of being in a wheelchair dying of brain cancer from radiation exposure incurred while working on bombs, as well as von Braun and his German rocket scientists.
I disagree with that article. Kubrick’s was absolutely the correct approach to the subject of nuclear deterrence: it’s logical and it’s quite insane
We need a name for all these realists. C. Wright Mills once coined the term Crackpot Realism. Here is an article about that.
” On Crackpot Realism: An Homage to C. Wright Mills ”
https://www.independent.org/article/2003/02/18/on-crackpot-realism-an-homage-to-c-wright-mills/
About C. Wright Mills . . . https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._Wright_Mills
Jerry Brown recently wrote mini-article in New York Review of Books called: ” Washington’s Crackpot Realism ”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/24/washingtons-crackpot-realism-jerry-brown/
Vacationing in Iceland, we just woke up to the news.
In 1980 Barry Goldwater explained at our Rotary meeting that a potential WW3 would be ignited at the Strait of Hormuz.
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
As always, thank you Yves for posting such brilliant material.
After I read Walt and Mearsheimer’s white paper on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (before it was published in book form) I believed that Israel and The Lobby had captured US foreign policy. Listening to ex-Congress members like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney who were anti-Israel, I continued to believe more that The Lobby and Israel were calling the shots on US foreign policy.
However, after reading Ali Abunimah (Electronic Intifada) and speaking to him on a call-in radio program about 15 years ago, I began to change my opinion. Then I heard Michael Hudson interviewed and he spoke on the topic (I can’t recall exactly, but shortly after). I started to put Israel into the long-term historical context.
I now agree with Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff and others who have pointed out that Israel is a settler-colonial “garrison state” of the empire. A proxy “attack dog” with nuclear weapons pointed at the heads of the countries of West Asia.
As George Galloway says: the British had no right to give away land that did not belong to them. Much debate on this has ensued. In short: Israel serves long-term UK and US foreign policy, as prof. Hudson and others have explained. The British created Israel to serve their interests, not out of any concern for Jewish holocaust survivors. The British treated the local Palestinians very badly, well before Israel existed.
The UK and US enjoy “splendid isolation”, while Israel does the dirty work and is now getting hammered. They can fight to the last Ukrainian and until the last Israeli flees or gets killed. The US can hide behind Israel to deflect criticism, but I think the world knows that it us US (and UK) policy.
Diana Johnstone wrote some articles on subject months ago, and she subscribes more to the Mearshemier, Allison Weir view that it is all The Lobby and Israel. She critiqued an article by Michael Hudson, and she used my comments (on Consortium News) criticizing her position to write another article. Her counterarguments were not compelling at all IMO. It would take a book-lengthy tome to fully detail the entire context though.
In short, the explanation here makes the most sense and is by far the most compelling.
So Netanyahu is Israel’s Zelinsky, ready to see his country destroyed to serve U.S. Cold War interests. I thought of saying as a parallel, “fighting to the last Israeli,” but he hopes that it will be the Americans who do the fighting.
Wasn’t thaf basically what Zelensky was gunning for, though? I doubt anyone seriously expected Ukraine, limited only to mostly to its own people to man its army, had a chance to win, espwcially after Russians started on their strategy of destroying the manpower.
Zelensky was gunning for internal economical collapse of Russia, because of unprecedent sanctions. Russian economy is in tatters, Ruble is rubble, and all that jazz. That should have lead to “regime change” and some Yeltsin 2.0 or balkanization (preferably both, like with “Russians of the Balkans”).
I wonder if Zelensky had any idea what he was getting into when he decided to run for office? I’m trying to imagine his lifestyle, state of mind, and the things that likely happened to put him in his position today… what a movie…
Vogue should do a cover now, I’d read that…
I think they are fundamentally different. The religious eschatology, the centuries old roots to finance, the importance of that community in the Western financial capitol.
I live in a part of the world with a lot of long established Ukrainian immigrants. They are a different animal altogether and I feel were seen as a LOT more expendable.
Imagine if the Israeli death toll matched the Ukrainian death toll.
Yours is essentially the position Larry Wilkerson has been taking for the last few months. The visible facts support it.
We’re not dealing with an attack dog, or a tail wagging the dog. The state of Israel is the suzerain of the US, and most of the EU. The vassals pay tribute in weapons, money, and favors, but their armed forces are as we now see also subject to levy when their overlord requires them.
I have no idea how this state of affairs came to be. But it is obvious for all to see. Israel rules the US like the British used to rule India. Probably only an Indian historian can give insight. The public was not given the memo about any of this
I’m not sure this is a question of “American” interests driving “Israeli” interests or vice versa. There is a transnational class of people whose interests are served by Empire, and the US, the UK, and Israel are just the most obvious imperial outposts. The imperial elite don’t care about the United States other than its ability to act as a military enforcer for them and a printing press for their continued money accumulation. If ¾ of the American population died tomorrow, they would not care in the least. In a sense, we’re an occupied country, but we can’t point at a map and find the occupying nation that rules over us, because it’s spread among several locations and is really a class apart, not a physical geography.
The Middle East military actions justified as in “America’s Interest” should list the American groups that have it in their interest.
Is it the Military-industrial-complex, is it the 0.1%?
Is it the media that promotes wars in movies, television and print/on-line?
All the effort to quash dissent in the universities, media and politics could indicate that the current beneficiaries of USA policies are nervous, having realized the non-elite in the USA are questioning that these geopolitical actions truly are in the non-elites’ interest.
What exactly has the USA gained in its mid-east efforts?
Is it to convince the Saudis to trade valuable-energy dense oil for USA Treasury Securities on a ledger?
The USA has hollowed out its industrial base, has a decaying infrastructure, an unhealthy and sometimes despairing population, and is leading the world into a climate disaster.
These are American Interests that merit attention, and a new military action in the Middle East seems unlikely to help.
Could our political class be indicating it is abysmally (intentionally?) poor in selecting what is sold as a beneficial American interest?
Maybe the USA’s leadership doesn’t care about the lower classes who pay the bills, financially and sometimes in death and injury.
The vast majority in the lower classes don’t figure in the “American Interest” calculation.
Alex Krainer’s recent chats with Nima on Dialogue Works have been highly illuminating on this point. At least to me.
He is very firmly of the opinion that it is the British that are guiding this whole thing. MI6 and the City of London being the current representatives of a British Empire that has never quite gone away.
When you read about the arrangements the French had in the African ex colonies (including a special currency that trade in their resources had to be conducted in, controlled by Paris) it is easy to see that the old European Empires never ended like I used to think they had.
So it is all about ‘Regime Change’ after all !!
And breaking up Iran into manageable statelets (Yinon Plan)…
The seemingly perpetual geopolitical goal of American oil state domination, given that much of the USA’s oil is buried under Arab deserts, is quite probably not even the main goal in direct US military involvement in Iranian adventurism, barely a month after the Iran – China rail link opened. It hardly seems coincidental.
I cannot see the reported Pakistani nomination of 47 for the Nobel Peace prize surviving a US Iranian bombing campaign, but he’ll just have to bite that bullet. Pakistan and Iran have many more shared interests.
The largest positive for the USA, especially given 47’s antipathy towards China,would be the medium term disruption to the foreign infrastructure investment and soft power gains China has made across Asia and into Africa in their BRI initiative – as Michael states, 47s aim is to:-
” lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China, Russia and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control”.
Almost everything else is a side benefit.
But it won’t succeed, just as previous US interventions have persistently failed in Asia.
“The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a few days or even a week it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack.”
Simplicius argues that Iran is producing 300 ballistic missiles per month (with current launches sustainable), but once Israel runs out of interceptors, drones (in the thousands per month) also will have a high penetration and success rate. They can also be delivered from Russia and China. Once Israel is out of interceptors, so is the US and its bases.
Overall, the article does a great job of laying out the forever war strategy, and elsewhere, Michael Hudson has argued that China’s rise (and Russia’s return) is providing a closing (few years) window to finish the plan, arguing that the US-Iran direct war is inevitable.
Once Israel is out of interceptors, the thousands (Russia allegedly bought 6000 of them a year after their introduction by Iran) of Iranian Shahed drones will have a field day disassembling Israel’s war fighting capacity.
Although I don’t think Iran is looking to Gazafying Israel at the moment.
I note recent commentary about proposals to Balkanise Iran once the neocons’ ‘regime change’ policy is implemented. Again, there are echoes of past British policy in this. Prior to WW2 (which led to a temporary identification of British, US and Soviet interests – and the concomitant abdication of Reza Shah and the Tripartite Treaty of 1941) there had been British plans to establish a potential autonomous breakaway state in southern Iran, using the Bakhtiari and Qashqai tribes, which would be under British influence. This would then protect the southern oilfields, notably Abadan, and allow them to remain under the direction of the AIOC. Although the British – under Edmund Ironside (later CIGS) – had effectively underwritten Reza Khan’s coup which overthrew the Qajars in 1921 (allowing him to become shah), they had been highly disconcerted by his cancellation of the D’Arcy Concession in 1932, and powerful individuals within the oil sector, notably John Cadman of the AIOC, had promoted schemes for such ‘autonomy’. British paranoia about Soviet penetration of Iran had also amplified the apparent ‘need’ for such a scheme – the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 having been denounced by the Soviets in 1918, and the UK being then seen as the USSR’s chief enemy.
So Carlson’s questioning the hapless Cruz about the ethnic composition of Iran was perhaps inadvertently shrewd. There may be a desire on the part of certain Western (specifically US and Israeli) policymakers to seek to foment disaffection amongst minorities within Iran – notably on the peripheries of the country – against the Persian core, in order to disassemble the country, keep it in a state of perpetual unrest after the fashion of Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., so as to maintain or even extend US/Israeli paramountcy in the wider region. In this way, such designs are a rinse and repeat of British projects of a century ago. Just as British plans for the Balkanisation of Iran in the inter-war era were a sign of increasing geostrategic weakness, so any neocon designs might be a sign of accelerating US decline. It is perhaps therefore a paradox that strategies designed to extend the term of US imperium beyond its natural shelf life by crude and coercive means may wind up shortening the life of that imperium. That ought to have been the lesson of the Suez fiasco, which was another conspiracy involving Israel. Alas, it appears that the lessons of Suez have still not been learnt by the West.
When you combine greed with power you get what we have now. The colonialists have power and they were/are greedy and so they simply take what they want to feather their nests. The Europeans live much larger than they should if the resources they use were limited to what is available on the Continent. Instead, they established colonies around the world to siphon off wealth and divert to themselves. The US does the same thing for the same reasons. They do it because they can. There is nothing complicated about it. Until those being exploited develop enough power of their own to prevent being exploited the taking will continue.
Over to you Australia
https://declassifiedaus.org/2024/08/19/pine-gap-readies-for-u-s-nuclear-war/
Well within range of a type 094 with its JL-2 missiles….7,200 km. This is probably to detect Sarmats going over the South Pole but I don’t think one Sarmat is on duty in its silo yet. They don’t trust the quick boost phase yet and the war is getting in the way of finishing the silos and S550 defence system.
Australia is defenceless as far as air defence goes and look at crudeoilpeak.info to see that we will totally depend on Malaysia crude imports to our two remaining oil refineries if the oil straights are closed. Don’t get me started on our inability to convoy absolutely basic needs in time of war. If Middle Eastern LNG tankers are stopped as well electricity prices here will double again because our captured gov. denies us domestic gas reservation in the service of the Empire.
Trump has unleashed his performative B2 strikes against three Iranian nuclear sites. In his email yesterday Michael Tracey pointed out that this was Trump’s signature promise since he switched parties in 2011 and started play-acting as a Republican at the ripe old age of 65. Hopefully this is simply another of his one-off publicity stunts.
Yes, it’s about dominating oil for the neo-cons, but for El Caudillo it’s nothing more than compensating for maternal abandonment and his lifelong homosexual panic. Big thanks to the Democrat cabal for eviscerating the political process in order to cling to their pathetic sinecures.
We in America are about to learn the difference between isolationism and isolation…
Why the pandemic ?
What if:
‘The virus was never the point.
The infrastructure was always the point.’
‘[….] we should understand COVID-19 not as a health crisis that happened to enable
certain policies, but as an Infrastructure Development Project that required a health
crisis for implementation.’
‘[….] in less that three years, systems of control that would have taken decades to
implement through normal democratic processes were installed globally with
enthusiastic public support.’
‘0ur governance systems have evolved to exploit crises so efficiently that the distinction
between genuine emergency and manufactured opportunity has become irrelevant.’
From: https://escapekey.substack.com/p/the-gain-of-function-distraction
Indeed, the USA is shooting itself in the food yet again, it’s hard to understand the overall plan. I agree with all that has been said, but I’d summarize it slightly differently. The goals are probably: 1) distraction; 2) keeping the flames of war going, now that Ukraine’s are almost extinguished (so keep the MIC and all of its tentacles growing, authoritarianism growing, social welfare shrinking); 3) and keep weakening Iran to: attempt an impossible regime change & stop Eurasian integration and ascension.
Regime change is impossible, Iran isn’t Syria. However, I think there’s an important factor overlooked in the comments. Western news keep saying Israel is hitting Iran’s missile stockpiles and factories. This is very important. Iran can’t fall because Russia and China understand very well what it means for them, so it won’t happen, even though they’ve been wisely quieter than one would expect. But it’s not trivial at all that Israel keeps hitting Iran’s top officials and military capacity. If, following Lebanon’s guidelines, they kill Khamenei, the country will be thrown into turmoil and regime change for more secular factions will seem very tempting, even though it won’t happen. But it’s the carrot Western analysts might be chasing or dangling to others. If Iran can’t keep its missile factories and stockpiles it’s serious and commands attention. Also if it doesn’t hit Israel’s military complex harder with the missiles before they are blown by Israel.
This is all extremely sad for all populations and I can’t even imagine the degree of radicalism ushered by Khamenei’s death along with civilian bombing from Israel and the US. Would Iran come closer to the radicalism of the Taliban or the Houthis? The only thing that seems certain to me is that now Iran will have a nuclear weapon in at most a few years time
Surely in just a short time, this condition will become the opposite of what it is now.