Road to WW3. Part 3: capturing minds

Long before I set up this site in 2015, it had become clear to me that the greatest threat to world peace is the US empire.

The White House aide [thought to be Karl Rove] said guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community’“, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality  [but] that’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”. 

US journalist Ron Suskind, 2004. Emphasis added.

People are like, “Oh yeah right Caitlin, it’s ALWAYS America’s fault. You’re always blaming the US for every conflict, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it.” It’s a lot like saying, “Okay sure we’re trapped in a room with a tiger, and sure we keep getting eaten, and yes your leg is missing and you’ve got a large bite out of your torso, but you can’t blame ALL of that on the tiger. It’s not fair. Some of it might be Steve’s fault. Steve’s kind of a jerk.”

Caitlin Johnstone, 2023

Neither Caitlin, married to a US citizen, nor I are anti-American per se. ¹ Just anti capitalism in the US-led form it now takes in the West; a rentier-driven neoliberalism which allowed creditor oligarchies to capture government, offshored real wealth creation to the global south, and left finance capital – now dominant over industrial capital – dependent on US projection of power across the planet via military and dollar supremacy, yes, but also by winning while still youthful the hearts and minds of future leaders not only in semi-colonies like Egypt and the Philippines, but in the imperial hub we call the collective West.

My ten second definition of modern imperialism, as opposed to the direct rule of colonialism, is the north-south export of monopoly capital; south-north repatriation of profits. Much flows from this arrangement, though south-north repatriation of profits is an overarching reality not always reflected in every imperialised state. ² Take Egypt. Bankrolled by the USA, its job, like Jordan’s, is not to supply the West with rare earths, its investors with surplus values extracted in the mills and sweatshops of Bangladesh. Its job is to do whatever Washington says, especially in relation to an Israel whose own job, as argued here and here, is to keep an oil rich and geo-strategically vital Middle East divided in ways which, touched on in part 1 and to be further explored in part 4, reach far beyond the region to synchronise war in Ukraine with US meddling in Caucasus and Central Asia – not least by weaponising the Islamist terror Washington so piously deplores – as preludes to the end goal of containing China, its “win-win” approach to mutual prosperity seen as a threat to the hegemon’s licence to ‘create its own reality’ by way of a zero sum philosophy reducible to “we win, you lose”. ³

Long sentence, big words. But let’s for now forget Philippines or Egypt or Bangladesh. What of US capture of governments in the West? ⁴ I’ve taken of late to widening the definition of a term, comprador – by tradition reserved for those elites within an imperialised country who abet its exploitation – to include elites within the empire hub itself. Other terms being quisling, vassal  and – since I share with George Galloway a relish for the pejoratively archaic – poltroon. All are accurate as far as they go – and all are blunt instruments which sacrifice explanatory depth for emotional satisfaction.

Hold that thought. Like others, I’ve long argued that after the millions slain, maimed or bereft – and after Ukraine’s loss, needless but now inevitable, ⁵ of territorial integrity – the main victim of America’s proxy war on Russia …

Merely the most graphic refutation of the “Putin’s war” thesis. For a fuller account see A Ukraine timeline.

… is Europe. On February 11 2022, eleven days before Moscow recognised Donetsk and Luhansk independence – and thirteen before Russian forces entered those oblasts, where civil war with all attendant atrocities had raged for eight years, unheeded by Western hearts now directed to bleed for Ukraine – CounterPunch ran a Michael Hudson piece, America’s Real Adversaries are Its European and Other Allies. It began:

The Iron Curtain of the ’40s and ‘50s was ostensibly to isolate Russia from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration. Today’s sanctions are aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other allies from opening up more trade and investment with  Russia and China. The aim is not to isolate Russia and China but to hold these allies within the US economic orbit. Allies are to forego the benefits of cheap Russian gas and Chinese products, buying higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms.

The sanctions U.S. diplomats insist their allies impose are aimed ostensibly at deterring military build up. But such a build up cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have far more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the question is whether Europe will find advantage in replacing US exports with Russian and Chinese supplies, and in the associated mutual economic linkages.

What worries US diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains to be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb, why NATO? Why such heavy purchases of U.S. military hardware by America’s affluent allies? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why must foreign countries sacrifice their own trade interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

These are the concerns that have prompted French Prime Minister [sic] Macron to call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and break with the pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia. Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by going without Russian gas.

Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for US strategists is its absence. The world is at a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary. That cost makes it uneconomic for Russia to retaliate against NATO adventurism prodding at its western border trying to incite a military response. It’s just not worth taking over Ukraine.

America’s pressure on its allies threatens to drive them out of the US orbit. For 75 years they had little practical alternative but that is now changing. America no longer has the monetary power and seemingly chronic trade and balance-of-payments surplus that enabled it to draw up the world’s trade and investment rules in 1944-45. The threat to US dominance is that China, Russia and Mackinder’s Eurasian World Island heartland are offering better trade and investment opportunities than are available from the US with its increasingly desperate demand for sacrifices from NATO and other allies.

The most glaring example is the U.S. drive to block Germany from authorizing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to obtain Russian gas for the coming cold weather. Merkel agreed with Trump to spend $1 billion building a new LNG port to become more dependent on highly priced U.S. LNG. (The plan was cancelled after the U.S. and German elections changed both leaders.) But Germany has no other way of heating many of its houses and office buildings (or supplying its fertilizer companies) than with Russian gas.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing! There’s much that Hudson – a man I hold in highest regard but, like others including me, prone to wishful thinking – got wrong. Not through misunderstanding the true nature of Europe’s relationship with Washington, but by overestimating the intellectual independence of European leaders, hence their capacity to break free of the mental straitjacket of Atlanticism. The extent of his error has been spectacularly confirmed, apropos Nordstream, by Berlin’s prioritising of DC agendas over the interests of Germany.

Sikorski, a Polish MEP, is husband to US Neocon Anne Applebaum

More generally, Professor Hudson’s optimism has proved wide of the mark in several ways:

• Russia did invade – I won’t quibble over invasion v SMO – though Hudson’s wider point stands: that for Russia “it’s just not worth taking over Ukraine”. (I’ve written before ⁶ on the propaganda imperative of portraying the war as “Putin’s land grab”, and on how that lie spilled over into Western military underestimations of Russia, confusing as they did a war of attrition with one of territorial loss and gain.)
• Gaullist pushback against US hegemony in Europe, even in France itself, is now reduced to occasional posturing – heeded by no one outside the Elysee, and in all likelihood by few within it – from M. Macron. If it makes us feel better we can pile on the put-downs – Little Napoleon etc – till the cows come home but the key takeaway is or should be the Jesuit grip of Atlanticism on the hearts and minds of Europe’s great and good.
• On September 26 2022, 227 days after CounterPunch ran the piece and 214 after Russia launched her SMO, Germany meekly accepted the sabotage of NordStream. I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining in detail why the perpetrator, directly or by proxy, had to be Uncle Sam. The circumstantial evidence – means + motive + opportunity + assurances by Biden and Nuland that the pipelines would be destroyed in the event of the Russian invasion Washington had spent decades provoking – is damning in the eyes of all but the career-focused coincidence theorists of Western corporate media. ⁷ For a more detailed charge-sheet try Seymour Hersh, he who half a century ago broke the My Lai story.

Nordstream is shorthand for the wider subordination of Europe’s interests to America’s. (Or to be precise, to those of an oligarchy which, behind a fig leaf of democracy, rules the land of the free.) We now see European leaders, avowedly centre left, slash welfare provision already cut to the bone even as rising inflation erodes living standards. We see them crush pushback, as in Starmer’s return of the Labour Party – and Baerbock’s of Germany’s Green Party – to ruling class control, even as they pursue neoliberal fiscal and monetary policies disastrous for what remains of industry. In the same breath they hail Trump as “daddy”, and abase themselves ⁸ in the face of his edict that NATO member states raise arms-spend, to the delight of Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin shareholders, from 2% to 5% of GDP.

How is this possible? In a footnote to a post earlier this month, Richard Murphy on neoliberal academia, I quoted for the third or fourth time these words from Canadian economist and anti-imperialist, Radhika Desai. Asked why Europe’s leaders act so manifestly against the interests of their people and economies, she replied:

The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.

Commenting on that post and endorsing Radhika’s analysis, one Phil Adams supplied a link to a recent piece by Nel Bonilla. Its title, Elite Capture & European Self-Destruction: The Hidden Architecture of Transatlantic Hegemony, was followed by the kicker: From Nord Stream’s sabotage to NATO’s 5% arms push: Inside the Networks Fueling Transatlantic Madness.

Though it homes in on Germany, in the face of stiff competition the most egregious case, it’s an indispensable read for all who wish to explore in greater depth the argument opened up here; viz, that while Europe’s Atlanticists from Baerbock to Starmer, Macron to VDL, are objectively – facts being stubborn things – ‘compradors and quislings’, that’s not how they see it. So how do  they see it? And what roads – other than the one drily noted by Upton Sinclair ⁹ – brought them to such self-serving delusionality?

… the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. Far more banal and effective, it also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions; in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.

Weighing in at 7,000 words, hence my saving it for the weekend, Nel’s piece begins:

Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, dictated the 1924 “ambitious young Mexicans” memo. You know the line: open our universities to their élite, drench them in American values, and they’ll govern Mexico for us: better, cheaper, and without a single Marine. The method rings depressingly true today.

One hundred years after Lansing spelled out the blueprint, Germany has become its most perfected specimen. When Olaf Scholz’s cabinet greenlit the destruction of Nord Stream 2, an act of economic self-sabotage with no plausible strategic benefit for Germany, and Merz, now Chancellor, pledged never to use it again, they were betraying Germany. At the same time, they were fulfilling a biographical destiny forged out of their limited horizons, manufactured in Ivy League seminars, Pentagon workshops, and the velvet-lined chambers of the Atlantik-Brücke.

This is the story of an elite cohort trained to regard Atlanticism as synonymous with “Western civilization” itself. The costs: collapsing industrial output, energy poverty, and the specter of conscription, are borne by everyone else …

Two days after I read it, I was alerted by Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research to an interview of Ms Bonilla on Pascal Lottez’s Neutrality Studies channel. As the title – Washington’s cognitive war on Europe – suggests, their 57 minute dialogue covers much the same ground.

I’ll be revisiting some of these issues when I return, later in this series, to the broader theme of how a US incapable this side of deranged self-annihilation – which can’t, alas, be ruled out – of defeating the two most powerful of its designated adversaries by direct military attack, seeks to isolate them by ‘soft power’ capture of their neighbours’ information spaces.

In the meanwhile, why don’t y’all have yourselves a real fine weekend?

* * *

1. How can I forget on the one hand that America gave us Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller, outstanding cinema, and at least three major music forms; on the other that over forty million of its citizens live in poverty and by that fact have, in common with all Americans outside the 1%, no material stake in the empire? Not that this alone has ever stopped turkeys voting for Xmas. People like me hope against hope that the lateness of the hour on so many counts might change that.
2. As Stephen Gowans points out in Israel: a beachhead:

   The purpose of dominating another country is to secure opportunities for big business to accumulate wealth. The dominated country may provide direct opportunities for that, or be a stepping stone to opportunities in a third country, without offering opportunities of its own. Such a country may become the target of an imperialist power because favorably placed. Perhaps it bounds important shipping lanes and is prized as a naval base from which the flow of goods can be protected from rival imperialisms that might choke off the flow. Or perhaps the aim is to position military power at a shipping choke point. Or maybe the territory is close to enticing targets that could be absorbed through military coercion. Maybe the dominated country is close to another imperialism and attractive for encircling it. There are scores of reasons an imperialist power might dominate a country offering no direct benefit, but all are traceable to a perceived economic advantage for the dominating country’s major investors.

3. The distinction drawn here, ‘win-win’ versus zero sum, is critical. The interests of most in the West, Americans included, are best served by US elites adapting to loss of hegemony by negotiating mutually beneficial advantage in a multipolar world. They have chosen not to do that, and the consequent risks to humanity should terrify us all.
4. The focus here is on Europe, and more specifically Germany, but the question applies no less to Canada, the Antipodes, Japan and South Korea. Why for instance have successive Australian governments sabotaged their most important trade relationship?

   Canberra, revealing its vassal status by acting against the interests of its citizens to please Washington, has bloodied its own nose in economic warfare with Beijing.

5. Had Boris Johnson, a serial liar known for walking away with a swagger and a carefree whistle from the disasters he creates, not urged Kiev to walk away from Istanbul peace talks just weeks into the war – adamant that a better peace could be won by fighting on – Ukraine could have emerged intact. Forty months on, given her own losses, bad faith on the West’s part and, last but hardly least, realities on the ground, Russia insists on a buffer between her southwest border and a rump Ukraine.
6. In a footnote to a post sixteen months ago, Russia and the art of war, I wrote:
   

   There are two likely explanations for the West’s poor military showing in Ukraine. One is that America’s military industrial complex prioritises profits. (Russia’s is largely state owned and in all cases state directed.) Add in the gravy train momentum of revolving door and pork barrel politics. Upshot? One, fancy weaponry at eye-watering costs which wows arms fairs but proves too clever by half in protracted battle. Two, no “surge capacity” – since capitalism abhors “slack” – caused the West to run out of materiel when, even if the will were there (it isn’t) the issue would take months or years to fix and still would not narrow the gap since Russia will also step up production. The other explanation is that not since WW2 had a Western power faced a peer foe. Accustomed to defeating inferior forces by “shock and awe”, NATO advisors to Ukraine failed to understand the kind of war Russia was fighting. Compounding both through devastating losses of men and materiel have been Zelensky’s politically driven decisions to hold onto Donbas towns, like Bhakmut and Avdivka, whose ethnic Russian populations had seen Azov style atrocity and would welcome Russian forces as friends here to stay. As we know, Bhakmut and Avdivka “fell” anyway.

7. The “career-focused coincidence theorists of Western corporate media”, recall, dutifully relayed the thesis, until it collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, that Putin – too dim to see that if Moscow wished for reasons unfathomable to deprive Europe of cheap gas, and Russia of the profits thereof, it need only switch off the tap – ordered those ecocidal bangs in the Baltic. (And not just anywhere in that heavily patrolled NATO lake but close to its narrowing exit into the North Sea, right under the noses of Germany to the south, Denmark to the north.) That preposterous accusation showed that (a) the charge of “conspiracy theory” stands or falls on whether or not it serves Uncle Sam, (b) until they can no longer be offered with a straight face, Western media including ‘quality’ sections will dutifully relay those that do serve Uncle Sam, and (c) Western audiences have been so reared on Russophobia as to give “legs” to evil-Putin accusations a smart ten year old could see through – right up to the point where they do collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.
8. See UK Defence Secretary John Healy’s cringeworthy toadying to US counterpart Pete Hegseth, 15:58 to 17:10 of this Brian Berletic podcast. (Such sycophancy, given European Atlanticism’s unconcealed rooting for Kamala last year, speaks to more than grovelling atonement dressed as realpolitik. As we now see in Ukraine, where Trump’s coming up against the brick wall reality that Putin will entertain no “deal” that compromises Russia’s security has made “Biden’s war” now his, the Donald is far more the continuity frontman than either his admirers or detractors believed. Were we not raised cradle to grave on power-servingly idealist as opposed to truth-servingly materialist readings of history – i.e. trained to look past what our leaders say, and home in on what they do – this and a good deal else would be self evident.)
9. “It’s hard to get a man to see a truth his salary depends on him not seeing.”