Netanyahu is doing just what the US wants. The dream of Netanyahu is the dream of the US neo-cons: war with Iran. If you can conquer Iran, you close up everything between Israel and Iran. You take up Syria, Iraq; you move into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Michael Hudson, October 12, 2024 (lightly edited)
I concluded my last post but one – US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 1 – by asking, in the context of escalating tensions between Israel and Iran:
- How high are the stakes for the US empire and its beachhead in the middle east?
- To what extent do the secular goals of a US Empire fighting its own decline align with the messianic vision of Ben-Gvr, Smotrich and Netanyahu?
- How high are the stakes for Iran, China and Russia?
This post addresses the first question at whistle-stop speed. All that needs to be said has been said already, at length and with evidence, in other posts. Here I seek only to draw together the threads.
The end of WW2 saw the USA take over the reins as the latest and almost certainly the last lead nation in 500 years of Western supremacy. With Allied victory in the bag, and America about to emerge as “leader of the free world”, a new global order was drawn up at Bretton Woods in July 1944 with a gold-backed US dollar its reserve currency.
The price tags for war in Korea then Indochina led Nixon in 1972-3 to decouple dollar from gold. Though seen at the time as (a) temporary and (b) humiliating, the benefits soon became clear as US military bases ringed the planet – at said planet’s expense – and France’s Valery Giscard d’Eistang spoke for the West at large in complaining of America’s “exorbitant privilege”.
That privilege, boosting a fiat dollar whatever the state of the US economy, was augmented by the OPEC crises of the early seventies, or rather by their resolution. A House of Saud with zero legitimacy would be protected from its subjects in exchange for an infidel US military presence in the KSA, and allowed to hike oil prices in exchange for the stuff trading in ‘petrodollars’.
At the same time Washington took over from London and Paris as primary backer of an Israel which, as I will keep saying, serves as:
… an outpost for imperialism in an oil rich region all the more significant for standing between the West and a Eurasia perceived as a threat by five centuries of European colonial strategists, and some half century of US imperialists. Israel has a very special role in dividing the Middle East but some aspects are common to all colonial and neo-colonial rule of the global south.
The Reagan-Thatcher transformation in the eighties, of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and to lesser extent of Western capitalism at large, did two things not apparent at the time. One, it oversaw the export, accelerating through the nineties, of manufacturing to the cheaper labour pools and ‘business-friendly’ regimes of the global south. (This being a definition of modern imperialism: export of capital; repatriation of profits.)
Two, the attendant financialising allowed rentier capital to buy the West’s governments and establish de facto creditor oligarchies:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Chris Hedges (abridged)
No one has grasped the significance of that financialising more clearly than the Chicago based political economist, debt specialist and Sinophile, Michael Hudson. And nothing has exposed its crippling flaws more starkly than the proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine. But I’m ahead of myself …
The 1990 fall of the USSR emboldened US ‘Neocons’ whose roots lay in Vietnam’s “betrayal” by Washington liberals. With Russia on its knees (Boris Yeltsin and IMF having let Chicago School disaster capitalism ravage its industrial base) and China yet to show its hand in the long game it was playing, Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz crafted the Project for a New American Century as Madeleine Albright claimed indispensable nation status, Karl Rove that “we are an empire; we make our own reality”.
The world was incontestably the unipolar fiefdom of America inc.
Then there’s 9/11. Whatever the truth of that – and I ate my share of humble pie – it greenlit the War on Terror within the West to fast track a Patriot Act (and non US equivalents) while making free with such rule-of-law fundamentals as habeas corpus. And outside the West? As it had in Afghanistan, 9/11 legitimated – as did the WMD lie and risible notion of Saddam in bed with Al Qaeda – what Nuremburg called “the supreme crime” of waging an aggressive war which laid Iraq to waste, fuelled a sectarian bloodbath and added to the lexicon of Orwellian euphemism the term, enhanced interrogation.
After Saddam came Gadaffi, as Libya was liberated from the tyranny of being Africa’s wealthiest nation, with free healthcare for all and literacy rates higher than the West’s, to become a failed state ruled by warlords. Slaves were sold openly on the quayside in Tripoli, the chief export was Salafist terror, and for good measure Libya was now a hub for sub-Saharans desperate to reach Italy or Greece. But, hey, a pan-African vision of oil trading in gold-backed dinars was as dead as its knife-sodomised champion, and somebody was over the moon about that!
Then it was Syria’s turn. With an “Arab Spring” in full flow, and the average Westerner clueless, it was child’s play to paint jihadists armed by the West and Riyadh, while Israeli medics tended their wounded, as freedom fighters. Few were listening when France’s former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, anticipated Wesley Clark’s revelations …
In the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was to be part of a five-year plan against seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.
Brigadier-General Wesley K. Clark speaking to Democracy Now, June 14, 2020
… with a bombshell of his own.
Syria was for me transformative, the single most important motivator of this site. By now even I, a slow learner, had cottoned on. But what saved Damascus was not steel city scribblings, nor a public still sold on Assad the Younger as the new “New Hitler”. What saved Damascus was the aerial intervention of Russia, now stronger with Yeltsin gone and Putin at the helm to (a) read the US game plan as revealed to Wesley Clark and Roland Dumas, (b) forestall any reignition of terror in Chechnya and the ‘Stans’ when Syria’s ‘rebels’ went home, and (c) safeguard Russia’s then sole overseas military base in Tartus.
(That and the ground presence of Hezbollah, like Russia invited by Syria’s elected government – behind which even those who at Daraa had demanded greater freedom now rallied. Indeed, many now attacked Bashar for being too soft – “the old man would never have stood for it!” – on the foreign jihadists who’d hijacked their show.)
Thwarted, the Neocons have yet to forgive Vladimir Putin. Then came the culmination of two decades of baiting the bear on her southwest border, and eight years of civil war in Ukraine, with the Kremlin’s recognition of Donbas and Luhansk autonomy on February 22, 2022 – and the special military operation two days later.
Like the genocide it backs in Palestine, the first ever to be electronically disseminated, its recklessly provoked war in the Ukraine has exposed the West as never before. Where the world beyond that routinely presented to Westerners as “the international community” …
… has seen a 21st century re-enactment of its own blood-soaked subjugation, in Ukraine it sees the limits to Western power when facing a peer adversary. Those limits, military and economic, coexist with the unstoppable – except by Armageddon – rise of a united Eurasia to make real a 500 year nightmare for Western geostrategists. Where Gaza has stripped the West of every last shred of moral legitimacy, Ukraine, BRICS and China Rising – all aided by deindustrialisation for the overnight enrichment of rentiers – are now calling time on its right to appropriate the lion’s share of the earth’s resources.
Europe, after Ukraine the prime loser of the proxy war its treacherous leaders so avidly waged, will be divided and irrelevant for as long as you, I and our children draw breath. And it would take years, and extraordinary levels of crisis, for a chastened USA to change course; decades more to implement structural change on the scale needed to forge an economy capable, with both dollar and military supremacy things of the past, of standing on its own two feet.
So unless minds less sociopathically unhinged than those currently on the loose in Washington can somehow prevail, the temptation to go for broke – in the Iran-Israel stand-off as in Ukraine and China Seas – will likely win out. Since the US has lost, as did Israel on October 1, its former dominance at all rungs of the escalatory ladder bar the top one, the signs are not good.
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Coming next: my other two questions:
- To what extent do the secular goals of a US Empire fighting its own decline align with the messianic vision of Ben-Gvr, Smotrich and Netanyahu?
- How high are the stakes for Iran, China and Russia?
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