US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2

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 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, 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, its reserve currency a gold-backed US dollar.

Bretton Woods, fusing the “demand side” thinking of John Maynard Keynes with America-first capitalism, saw – in marked contrast to the slump after WW1 and Napoleonic Wars – decades of boom in the Western world, with close to full employment and welfare infrastructure to this day not fully dismantled or privatised. The workers of the West had been bought off, said much of the Left, with crumbs from the imperial table.

But within three decades cracks were showing, while the costs of war in Indochina forced the Nixon Shock of 1971-3, a set of measures leading to a decoupling of 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 created high demand for a fiat dollar whatever the state of the US economy, and 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 value to the US-led West of both Israel and Saudi Arabia as regional gendarmes could only increase with the 1979 fall of its man in Iran.

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 – FIRE – of the home economies allowed rentier  capital to take over Western 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 political economist, debt specialist and Sinophile, Michael Hudson. And nothing has exposed its flaws more starkly than the proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine. But I’m ahead of myself …

The 1991 dissolution of the USSR emboldened US ‘Neocons’ united in anger at east coast liberal “betrayal” over Vietnam. With Russia on its knees (Boris Yeltsin and the 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 now 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 aggressive war. One which in this case laid Iraq to waste, fuelled a sectarian bloodbath and added to the lexicon of Orwellian euphemism the term, enhanced interrogation.

After Saddam came Gaddafi, as Libya was liberated from the tyranny of being Africa’s richest 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 someone was dancing on the graves of both:

Now it was Syria’s turn. With ‘Arab Spring’ in full bloom, 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, 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. But what saved Syria was not steel city scribblings, nor a Western public still sold on Assad the Younger as the new “New Hitler”. What saved Syria was the aerial intervention of a revitalised Russia with Putin at the helm to (a) read the US game plan as told to Wesley Clark and Roland Dumas, (b) forestall a revival of terror in Chechnya and the ‘Stans’ when Syria’s ‘rebels’ finally went home, and (c) safeguard one of Russia’s few overseas military bases 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 head-choppers moderate Islamists who’d hijacked the Daraa protests.)

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, a first for being livestreamed, the West’s recklessly provoked war in the Ukraine has exposed it as never before. Where the world not depicted here  …

… has seen in Gaza a 21st century re-enactment of its own blood-soaked subjugation a century or three earlier, in Ukraine it sees too the limits to Western power when facing a peer adversary. Those limits, military and industrial, 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 – generously aided by deindustrialisation for the enrichment of rentiers – have revoked its licence 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 marginalised – having forfeited prosperous relations with Eurasia – for the rest of this century at least. 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 dollar and military supremacy things of the past, of standing on its own two feet.

I began by asking: how high are the stakes for the US empire and its beachhead in the middle east?  By all means correct me if I’m wrong but I think the picture I just set out speaks for itself. 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 be too great. Since the US has lost, as did Israel on October 1, its former dominance at all rungs of the escalation 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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