In response to my post of March 21 – Why are America’s rulers allowing this? – American writer and scholar Ed Curtin emailed to say:
Trump is not an anomaly except with his mouth, which is planned. He is carrying out orders. That is his job. US troops (officially) will soon be in Iran. The US imperial ruling forces that run the country believe in the long run they will win.
I had and still have much to learn about the extent of empire evil but the dirty war on Syria, and its attendant propaganda blitz, opened my eyes to the basics.
Syria was for me transformative, almost single-handedly inspiring this site. By now even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of bringing ‘democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington.
US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2
Long before I launched this site, in November 2015, I was furiously emailing everyone with the misfortune to be in my contacts file – left leaning liberals and a few academic Marxists 1 – to insist that history offers no precedent for an empire in decline gracefully accepting the fact.
How likely is it, then, that those who truly rule the US empire would leave the task of securing its future capacity for global plunder to a vainglorious buffoon like Donald Trump – or for that matter a Benjamin Netanyahu? While most commentators, including sources I take seriously – here’s one example – say Trump’s blockade is absurdly self defeating, Brian Berletic begs to differ. At root of his case, made in under ten minutes, are that (a) the war on Iran is in reality a war on China; (b) for the plutocrats who run a US self sufficient in energy and with thousands of miles of moat on either shore, chaos on global markets and misery for adversary and ‘ally’ alike is a price they – as opposed to whatever expendable figurehead has temporary residence in the White House – are prepared to let us pay. 2
That’s a truth whose enormity takes time, even after the evidence for it has been accepted, to fully land. One whose implications few are ready, intellectually or emotionally, to let in. 3
* * *
- Another and much smaller constituency is the ‘Hard Left’. It suffers IMO from a different ailment. It knows the US empire is life negating and will stop at nothing, certainly not the destruction of foe or ‘friend’, to maintain global hegemony. But many – not all – of the revolutionary Left’s splintered sects are equally condemnatory of an Assad or Gaddafi, and more importantly a Putin or Xi, on the ground that only the international working class can save us. Me, I see humanity’s best hope, slim though it may be, in China rising:
The far left’s refusal to distinguish on the one hand China’s state-monitored industrial capitalism, its big banks firmly outside the private sector; on the other the usurping of state control by the West’s oligarchs, leads it to dismiss China as a progressive force. Rather, crying plague on China and the West both, it embraces (or pays lip service to) a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in all the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This, moreover, in a West whose export of industry has eroded the very socialising conditions – an exploitation experienced en masse in the huge dark Satanic mills of Marx’s day – which led him to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into socialism.
What is to be done?
- Writing today on a new military pact, announced yesterday, between Indonesia and the US, Andrew Korybko adds de facto weight to Brian Berletic’s case. As one prone to bursts of wishful thinking myself, I take heed of these words:
So many were duped by Alt-Media charlatans over the years into thinking that this economic-financial group [BRICS] is also a security bloc when it never was, still isn’t, nor ever will be one …
… The purpose [of the US-Indonesia Pact] appears to be obtaining the ability to blockade the Strait of Malacca to Chinese ships in the event of a crisis just like it’s now blockading the Strait of Hormuz to ships that almost all go back and forth between China and Iran.
“In the event of a crisis …” Here’s where Andrew reveals the limits of his understanding. The US empire, its managers, media spinmeisters and ‘collective West’ vassals like the UK are past masters at engineering such ‘crises’.
- Hours after posting this I see that Caitlin Johnstone, writing tomorrow because she’s in Melbourne and my 16:20 is her 01:20 next day, has this to say:
I don’t mind admitting I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran. I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.
I hope the empire falls. I hope the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled. I hope humanity is able to pry the steering wheel from the fingers of the ghouls who currently rule our world, so that we can create a healthy planet and a harmonious future together.
Thanks Phil. This makes horrible, vile, evil, disgusting, psychopathic sense. I have also heard that the bombing of Iran’s transport infrastructure is to disrupt the rail and land transport that China is developing for oil in order China is less dependent upon more vulnerable sea routes. It seems to me that Americans can see the insanity of the lone individual, in this case Trump, but it is much harder to see the systemic evil abuse of power globally that the US has been involved in ever since I can remember. Even some of my favourite commentators like Jeffrey Sachs points to the psychopathic madness of Trump and his henchmen rather than seeing the evil goes much deeper. Yet is it an inevitability that the rise of individualism and personal freedom leads to a profound dislocation from our mutual interdependence with ‘other’? Leading inexorably into a psychopathy that denies our collective responsibilities for each other – including animals, plants and the Earth itself. I don’t know. But it’s heartbreaking.
Yes! Though a pipeline – a more ambitious project than the rail and road links of the New Silk Road arm of Belt & Road – could not only bypass the Malacca and Hormuz choke points, but allow oil transits in comparable volumes at comparable costs. On a brighter note Beijing’s awareness of its Achilles heel adds urgency to its pursuit of renewable energy, in which it leads the world – but also makes that world more dangerous given empire determination to stop the rise of China before it becomes independent of fossil fuels. (For energy I mean. We’ve no way of feeding 8 billion people without soil fertilisers derived from hydrocarbons.)
I too have a soft spot for Professor Sachs, a man of good heart and brain, even as I note his balking at going the full shilling on the root of all this darkness being empire refusal to let go of unipolarity.
Homo sapiens sapiens is a social but individuated animal. We must produce and daily reproduce the material conditions of existence and, ill equipped to do so alone, enter into social relations for that purpose. Our systems of law, morality and etiquette are imperfect ways of managing the tensions, between ‘me’ and ‘we’, attendant on this stubborn truth. Under capitalism, especially in its advanced, rentier driven imperialist forms, the ‘me’ aspect is emphasised to a degree no previous society ever attempted.
Yes again, utterly. Apologies for going into lecturer mode with my reply, Anne. I think you know all this but it’s worth setting out and I grabbed the opportunity!
You need never apologise to me Phil. You have opened my eyes to so much I am forever grateful. As I hope you know I have deep respect for your brilliant mind. I have more an instinctive feeling intelligence but interestingly it leads us to the same place.
(:-)
I thnk that one thing that the world-minus perhaps Trump’s inner circle- has learned is that the US Navy can only impose a blockade on countries which go along withthe idea that its ships cannot be sunk. There is a reason why the US has most of its fleet 1000km away from Iran in the Indian Ocean- its ships are sitting ducks for missiles. An Aircraft carrier versus a hypersonic missile is no contest.
As to the Straits of Malacca China is a much more powerful factor in every sense in that part of the world than the United States is. Malaysia would not help a blockade there and neither, I suspect, would Indonesia.
As to US ‘self sufficiency’ in oil it isn’t a simple as that- there are hydro carbons and there are hydrocarbons- not least because if the US stops supplying (at exorbitant rates) Europe, Europe is going to have to take a close look at the map and see that it is destined to return to Eurasia.
Brian might well be right- the idiots in Washington, drunk on a century of refined hubris and by no means confined to the Trump circle, almost certainly think that they can win a war ith China. They almost cetainly believe too that China is full of people in barefeet pulling rickshaws with a life expectancy of less than thirty.
It is just a matter of months before Taiwan and the People’s Republic unite again. And South Korea is wobbling. As a matter of fact Australia can’t keep on living in the 1940s either.
In a word if the US goes to war with China it will lose, very badly.
Maybe that is what the tune for today is about!
Tunes for the day come and go. bevin refers to the current instantiation, Bob Dylan’s Hard rain’s a-gonna fall, written in the shadow of the Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962 and one of four anti war songs – alongside Masters of War, Blowin’ in the Wind, and Talkin’ WW3 Blues – on his second album, Freewheeling. He went on to make many albums as good, but none that surpassed it.
Brian Berletic’s argument does not seem that far away from that of Richard Medhurst:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nt1CgQsgpI
The only significant difference seems to be that of scale – with Berletic’s focus on a US war targeting China and Russia whilst Medhurst’s argument suggests that the US approach is actually to wage war against the entire world.
The kind of energy blockade presented by both arguments, even if only partly effective, will as a matter of deliberate intent on the part of the US oligarchy, result in mass starvation. And not only in the developing world. On Sunday I saw the first ‘gas station’ with a blank space where the diesel price should have been (the Esso garage at the bottom of St Phillips Road where the tram begins the steep climb up to the University). That may be a harbinger of things to come – where even if you can obtain the fertiliser, getting the fuel for the diesel trucks delivering everything to markets may also be problematic.
‘Who will rid of this turbulent Zealot Class?’
Ah – Henry II on Thomas Beckett. As for that garage at Neepsend, bottom of Sheffield’s St Phillips Road, I too use it as a marker of How Bad Things Is – though I’m too
tight-fistedcanny with money ever to fill up there!Yorkshiremen are just Scotsmen with every ounce of generosity squeezed out of us.
The supermarket pumps are usually the cheapest. The most expensive being the motorway service stations.
Just over a week ago Morrison’s in Ecclesfield had no unleaded on the day I called and a few days later Sainsbury’s at Meadowhall only had super unleaded. At present this seems to be sporadic but will likely become a more regular new normal feature the longer this nonsense is permitted by the rest (majority) of the world to continue without permanently putting down the rabid dogs of the Western Oligarch class and its useless third equivalent of Douglas Adams’s telephone sanitisers.
Aircraft fuel is also worth watching. On the present trajectory there is every likelihood of either cancelled holiday flights this summer or massive surcharges on flights.
A friend in Beeston, Nottingham – where supermarket prices are typically a few pence lower than Sheffield’s – told me she filled up the other day with diesel at £1.84 a litre. That’s a mere 50 pence higher than when I last filled my Berlingo, which I only use for rubber tramps – my last one weeks ago – in Beeston for £1.34 a litre.
I seldom fly these days. My days of spending three or four weeks twice a year in India or Vietnam are probably over, alas …
Oil Spot and futures have disconnected with futures down across the board today. The S&P is pushing all time highs with only a mild bump in the TNX index. As a trader I can say within my small sample of market activity I’ve never seen behavior like this before. I would feel more comfortable if a meaningful correction were in progress. My take away is that both the average and institutional money has likewise disconnected from reality and lives within the construct of MSM. This pains my heart!
Phil, great and important work but may I suggest more tales of your travels?
C
Here’s one from Jaipur, India, ten years ago, C – Photography and the Holy Quran …
A moral that the current tale of life might learn. Well chosen!
C
(:-)
Greetings Phil, yes t`would seem that not only Craig Murray, but also Brian Berletic appear to have seen through the smoke & mirrors that double as American Foreign Policy.
I have to admit, that their arguments do get my nod, even with the likes of Nima, Pepe & Co. all being of the opinion that America has no plan……
Time will tell I suppose.
BTW. Reading the other comments, I can only say that most German motorists would be very happy to have prices below €2,00 for Diesel or Petrol. I have seen prices here in the North of German of €2,48 a Litre for Diesel….. Anyway, stay safe. Cheers Billy
Americans are incandescent at ‘gasoline’ approaching $5 a gallon. I just did the sums. It equates to 82 pence per litre. What we have to remember though is that wages are negotiated on the basis of cost of living indices – in Marxist terms the value of labour – so those same Americans have every cause to feel injured, Billy.
Your point taken though. Three months hence we may all look back at those halcyon days when you could buy ten litres of petrol and still have change from a fifty pound note!
Nothing like optimism.
A pessimist might observe that in three months hence we may all look back at those halcyon days when you could actually buy ten litres of fuel.
Four Yorkshiremen, anyone?