March 9, 2025 © Photo: Public domain

There are still some good people in the corridors of power we can appeal to and, if we can leverage them, then maybe, just maybe, the Chinese will finally do the right thing and oppose these ongoing genocides.

Since I last wrote about NATO’s ongoing genocide of the Alawites in mid January, their plight has deteriorated to one of absolute desperation. There are open culls of entire Alawite villages, female students and men in their 90s are being systematically executed, Christians are also being slaughtered and thousands of civilians have fled into Russia’s air force and naval bases in hopes of being spared this latest Holocaust.

Not only must we oppose this, but we must oppose those European fat cats, who rubber stamp genocides like this. Though these include senior British, French and German collaborators like the notorious Annalena Baerbock, who flocked to Damascus to wish their puppet, Jolani, happy hunting, a special shout out goes to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who collaborate with Jolani’s moderate rebels, who previously beheaded Lebanese soldiers they took hostage.

Make no mistake about it. Once NATO’s proxies hack their way through Syria, Lebanon will be next in line literally for the chopping block. The situation in Lebanon is that their economy is totally in the toilet, with the lira trading at 90,000 to the Yankee dollar, down from its long term average of 1500 to the dollar. As in Syria itself, starvation is prevalent and the Lebanese are in no doubt that the worst lies ahead. Though Hezbollah are keeping their heads down as they dig in and make preparations for their own last stand, they can be under no illusion that the same ultimate fate the Alawites are now enduring awaits them.

Khazuk خازوق

To NATO’s Syrian regime, all minorities are fair game. Google words like Khazuk خازوق and these links here and here will show you the horrors of the Ottomans. The Ottomans were such medieval barbarians that the Syrians almost kissed the feet of the French when they replaced the Turks, following the division of spoils at the end of the Great War.

And, though the Druze led the rebellion against the French and were very prominent leaders in the Syrian Arab Army, NATO’s current head hacking proxies have worked hard to prise them away from their motherland, with Israel guaranteeing their security if they surrender to them in the south and NATO’s Jumblatt mob trying to wean them away to the west of Damascus. Add to that that the Kurds and Turks are ethnically cleansing northern Syria as part of their own land grabbing scams and Syria is on the rack.

This process of national dismemberment is made far easier by the dire economic situation of both Syria and Lebanon, with the latter being kept afloat by some $6.7 billion in remittances family members send home to Beirut every year. As these remittances now constitute 30.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Lebanon, which represents the third highest in the world, behind Tonga (41 percent of GDP), and Tajikistan (39 percent), NATO and their local Israeli enforcers have Lebanon rightly on the ropes and, Hezbollah perhaps apart, there are few forces on the horizon that will slow their pending apocalypse.

Assad rises from the political ashes

NATO media echo chambers, such as this Irish state media site, have blamed the current Alawite genocide on their victims or, as they put it, the head hackers are trying “to crush a nascent insurgency by fighters from Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect” with Jolani saying.”We will continue to pursue the remnants of the fallen regime… We will bring them to a fair court, and we will continue to restrict weapons to the state, and no loose weapons will remain in Syria.”

Fair court, my royal, proletarian arse. The reality is Alawites, Kurds, Christians and other meddlesome minorities are being lynched and shot out of hand, and helicopters are firing into Alawite homes just for the hell of it. Latakia students Hazar Issa, Nour Issa, Zaina Jadeed, Shinda Kashko and Ahmad Haydar are just some of the many innocent students shot out of hand in the last few days by these jihadist savages. Maronite Tony Boutros and his son, Fadi, are just two of the most recent Christians these liberators dispatched. Sheikh Shaiban Mansour was a 90 year old Alawite they murdered and mutilated and, to give you a feel of the sort of Syrians Baerbock and her equally depraved sort get off on, here is a video of an Alawite winemaker being executed, and his body desecrated by Jolani’s finest, Baerbock’s buddies.

In trying to get at the root of the loathing Baerbock and her buddies have for Alawites and those, like Asma Assad, married to them, we must never leave Western fools and knaves out of our frame. Though we all recall this glowing Vogue review of Asma Assad, here is its author literally swallowing her own words and thereby showing what a contemptible swamp creature she and all journalists like her are. As regards Asma Assad splurging out on clothes, just as well no one told this pretend journalist that Gulf State princesses commute on private jets to Italy to get their feet measured for the custom made shoes these plastic Cindarellas while away their time buying by the truck full.

Then there is [Dr Hafez Assad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez_Bashar_al-Assad#:~:text=Hafez%20Bashar%20al-Assad%20\(Arabic,regime%20on%208%20December%202024.), Asma’s son, who was ridiculed for not winning the various maths competitions he entered when he was a schoolboy. Not only do I know Irish maths geniuses who got nowhere in those competitions because of how the United States and other heavy hitters load the dice but, given that Dr Assad is galaxies ahead of any of his critics in the maths stakes, the old adage that one should only write about what one knows holds true in this case. But hey, if the Assads’ critics wrote about what they know about, they would have nothing at all to write about for the story, if such it was, was not about Hafez’ prowess (or lack thereof) in maths but as a vehicle to have a pop at the Assads and the Alawites and to thereby help the head hackers rid the world of them.

And, as for Bashar al-Assad, what about him? Not only was Jolani’s original war cry to send Alawites to the grave, but the Uyghur shock troops he has pouring into Latakia to finish off the Alawites are screaming about revenge for battles that happened all of 1,500 years ago. Baerbock’s heroes are not mine but then, unlike her, I was never a fan of Nazi Germany’s Einsatzgruppen.

Russia, Mother Russia

Although the immediate Assad family are now residents of the Russian Federation, there is little beyond giving them bed and board that Russia can do. Not only is Russia bogged down resisting another German-backed genocide on its very doorstep, but any serious intervention by Russia outside of using its platform in the United Nations to stop the genocide would not end well. I say that, because Russia’s original intervention in this NATO proxy war caused the United States to change the facts on the ground by levelling Raqqa and its own proxy ISIS forces garrisoned there along with it, so that the heroic Syrian Arab Army, with the Russian Air Force in the van, might not liberate it.

Israel, the United States and their cronies have dark plans not only for the Alawites but for all of Syria and Lebanon and heaven help those, like the Alawites and the Armenians who get in the way. Russia, sadly, cannot be the saviour of the world. That is the job of Jesus.

Qatar and the Palestinians

Qatar’s role was to bankroll the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, not to fund any Syrian economic recovery. Sure, they throw the Syrians the odd plane full of cheap aid but that is it. Best for the Gulf State despots to have the Syrians desperate than to have them making subversive waves.

As for Hamas, who fought against the Syrian Arab Army on behalf of their Qatari paymasters, what is there to say, except if they had brains, they might be dangerous? Their situation is as bad as that of the Alawites and the Jolani regime, which has surrendered most of southern Syria and the Druze areas to Israel without even throwing a cabbage at them, are as much enemies of the Palestinians as are the most fanatical Israelis. There was never any plan, and was never meant to be any plan beyond overthrowing the secular Syrian Arab Republic and that Hamas could not see that shows brains are not their strong suit. That the head hackers of Dera are swarming northwards to massacre Alawites even as the Israelis occupy Dera show what a waste of political space these Uyghur, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Albanian “new Syrians” are.

And, perhaps the Chinese too. Chinese Uyghur militant Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, also known as Zahid and the commander of the separatist Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) invasion forces in Syria, is now a brigadier-general in Jolani’s ramshackle army, and Mawlan Tarsoun Abdussamad and Abdulsalam Yasin Ahmad, two other notorious Uyghur head hackers, are colonels. Though China labels TIP a terrorist organisation responsible for plots to attack overseas Chinese targets, there is more hope of the Alawites defeating TIP than there is of the Chinese, who are big on statements but AWOL on actions.

The Turks meanwhile, financed by the Qataris, have sent a further 3,500 of their mercenaries into the Syrian coast, with the objective of seizing its ports, stealing its resources and slaughtering Alawites, Armenians and the various other minority groups that get up their noses.

The end result of all is that Israel will succeed in dividing and conquering Syria and being in a very good position to finish off the Shias of Lebanon, before moving on to Iraq, Yemen and Iran.

Civilisation’s Last Stand

Next month should see me writing an article timed for Thursday 24th April, the 110th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. When I spoke at a function in Damascus University to mark the 100th anniversary of that unspeakable crime, I said that, of all the speakers who had gathered in Yerevan to commemorate it, only Russian President Putin had the right to be there, because, of all Europe’s countries, only Russia had come to the aid of the Armenians.

I had spent that morning in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp watching the young mothers with their babies wince as Jolani’s mortars landed amongst us and the women in the bread queues nearby. Though Jolani has other targets for the moment I, for one, do not forget the Palestinian children they beheaded in Aleppo, just like I do not forget so many others.

Still, remembrance is not enough. I am still collecting money here for distressed Syrians and I am working with Syrian lawyers and similar people of good will to collate, collect and disseminate information indicting Jolani. Just as with the Armenians, this will be a long and, perhaps, fruitless journey. But, leaving aside that it is better to be a fool on the side of the persecuted Armenians and Alawites than it is to be a bought and bribed genius on the side of Baerbock and her head hacking buddies, there are still some good people in the corridors of power in America and in central Europe we can appeal to and, if we can leverage them, then maybe, just maybe, the Chinese will finally do the right thing and oppose these ongoing genocides. There is, after all, a first time for everything.

Former number 2 of Daesh and current self-proclaimed president of Syria Ahmad al-Shareh said on March 9: “We must preserve national unity, civil peace as much as possible, and, God willing, we will be able to live together in this country as much as possible.”

The new regime increased the humiliations of the Alawites (Nuçairïs). They are fired from their jobs without being paid. In the street, the jihadists arrest them, and force them to bray like donkeys, or bark like dogs, before beating them in public. In three days, one to three thousand of them were murdered in pogroms, first on the Mediterranean coast, then throughout the country.

Thousands of Alawites took refuge in the Russian military bases in Tartus and Hmeimim where they were welcomed.

With all the jihadists currently grouped on the coast and in Damascus, the rest of Syria is free of fighters. The Turkish army took advantage of this to attack the cities of the north.

☞ Takfiri groups (i.e. those who seek to designate and kill heretics), which had been expelled in Idlib during the war against the Syrian Arab Republic, have returned to “useful Syria”. They were able to pass the roadblocks of the forces of the new government without any problem until they reached the coast and massacred the “heretics”. The Syrian population gave up its arms when President Bashar al-Assad fell. It is therefore defenseless in front of the army and the current security forces that are made up of former jihadists, generally Turkish-speaking, often Chechens, Uzbeks or Tajiks, supervised by Turkish officers.

Historically, massacres of Alawites have always been followed by massacres of Christians.

☞ The Alawite community was formed in the ninth century around Muḥammad ben Nuṣayr al-Namīrī.

It considers Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law, to be God, and Jesus and Muhammad to be his prophets. However, according to René Dussaud, who was curator of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum and private secretary to Anatole France, this community did not arise from nothing. It is said to have been constituted during antiquity, to have converted to Christianity, then to Islam, without abandoning its previous faith, such as the belief in reincarnation. It is this French theory that Israeli researchers have explored and developed.

The Alawites do not worship in public. They refer to three reference books: their Fatihat al-Kitab (catechism), the Gospels (not the Bible) and the Qur’an. For them, only the principles present in each of these three books should be considered revealed.

They were enslaved over the centuries before they were recognized as Muslims by Ayatollah Khomeini and considered equal.

Today, culturally, it is the religious group closest to Europeans, particularly in terms of women’s rights.

☞ The Assad family is Alawite. Presidents Hafez and Bashar el Assad often chose their advisers from among their close friends, i.e. from this community, but not senior civil servants who were systematically appointed with due respect for a community balance. Alawites enlisted massively in the armies, a poorly paid and dangerous profession, which other communities neglected.

☞ Ahmed el-Shareh, arguing that it was an insurrection orchestrated by General Ghiath Dalla, Maher al-Assad’s former right-hand man (now exiled in Iraq with several thousand of his men), presents these pogroms as political revenge, which makes no sense, as this community has never linked its fate to that of the Assads. This lie makes it possible to hide the resumption of the religious war that has swept across the Middle East since the Anglo-Saxons relied on the political branch of the Muslim Brotherhood to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan (recall that in Germany, the Nazis ransacked Jewish businesses and killed many of them during “Kristallnacht” while claiming to avenge the murder of a diplomat with no connection to their victims).

Last month, General Ghiath Dalla founded Awli el-Bas (Islamic Resistance Front in Syria), a militia close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He is in no way the representative of the Alawite community, but of the fallen regime. He managed to mobilize many supporters of a secular and egalitarian state and to successfully attack several police stations and jihadist barracks.

☞ How can we not wonder about the considerable quantity of weapons and ammunition that the takfirists have today? Similarly, how can we ignore the fact that Daesh is reconstituting its forces on the Syrian-Iraqi border?

It was in the kitsch decor of his Mar-a-Lago residence that Donald Trump convinced allied central bankers and finance ministers that he was going to make them pay the United States’ debts

De-dollarization, that is, using the dollar only at the national level of the United States and no longer in international trade, is the sea serpent of finance. However, following the unilateral coercive measures that the United States imposed on its allies, first against Iran, then against Russia (measures wrongly described as "sanctions" by Atlantic propaganda), Russia created a Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS), China the Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and the European Union the European Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX). As a result, the use of the dollar has declined by about a quarter in international trade.

However, the US public debt has now reached the astronomical sum of 34,000 billion dollars, of which only a third is held by foreign investors, according to Forbes [1]. If some of the US creditors, mainly China and Saudi Arabia, were to ask for repayment, a gigantic economic crisis would occur as in 1929.

Many economists regularly warn of this prospect. However, according to Jon Hartley of the Hoover Institution, central banks have not reduced the share of the dollar in their foreign exchange reserves since the war in Ukraine. However, on February 20, a videoconference by analyst Jim Bianco, taken up by the Bloomberg agency [2], rekindled concerns. According to this analyst, the Trump administration is following a plan, the "Mar-a-Lago Agreement". It intends to radically restructure the US debt burden by reorganizing world trade through tariffs, devaluing the dollar and, ultimately, reducing the cost of borrowing, all with the aim of putting US industry on an equal footing with its competitors in the rest of the world.

The idea of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” refers to an article by Stephen Miran of the Manhattan Institute [3]; Miran was appointed by President Trump to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and he himself, Donald Trump, gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22 that seems to go in this direction.

The expression “Mar-a-Lago Accord” refers to the “Plaza Accord” when, in 1985, the United States implemented a policy of weakening its currency in order to boost its exports. In practice, the financial mechanisms having been poorly controlled, the US economy restarted by causing a very serious recession in Japan.

On January 21 and 22, Donald Trump had gathered the central bankers and finance ministers of the G7 in his Mar-a-Lago residence. He is said to have welcomed them by telling them: "No one will leave this room until we have found an agreement on the dollar." [4]. The agreement in question would therefore have been approved by the allies.

The main idea would be for the US Treasury to issue government bonds that do not pay interest (what are called "zero coupons") and that would not mature for a century (that is, could not be exchanged for cash for 100 years). Washington would therefore have to force its allies to convert their debts into "zero coupons".

If we accept this analysis, we must reinterpret various actions of President Trump, in terms of customs duties or the creation of a sovereign wealth fund. They no longer seem as erratic as the international press describes them, but on the contrary very logical.

We must therefore consider that Donald Trump is trying to manage the possible economic collapse of Joe Biden’s "American empire" as Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to manage that of Leonid Brezhnev’s "Soviet empire".

I am all the more attentive to this hypothesis because, in my opinion, the coup of September 11, 2001 had no other goal than to postpone the foreseeable collapse of the “American empire”. The last two decades have been only a reprieve that, far from solving the problem, have only made it much more complex.

Let us recall: in 1989, the Russian Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, decided to reduce state spending. He abruptly stopped aid to the USSR’s allies and gave everyone their freedom. Simultaneously, the East Germans toppled the Berlin Wall, while the Poles elected members of Solidarity to the Diet and the Senate. This is the end of the imperialism of the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev who, in 1968, had imposed on all the allies of the USSR to adopt, defend and preserve the economic model of Moscow.

This is probably what we are witnessing today: Donald Trump, President of the United States, is dissolving the “American empire” as he had tried to undo it in 2017 [5]. On July 28, 2017, he had reorganized the National Security Council by liquidating the permanent seats of the director of the CIA and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was followed by three weeks of war in Washington and, ultimately, the resignation of the National Security Advisor, General Michael T. Flynn. The latter, who has disappeared from the radar, is in fact still active today and organizes meetings at Mar-a-Lago for opponents of the allied countries.

This time, cautiously, President Trump is lulling his public opinion to sleep by evoking the annexation of the entire North American continental shelf, from Greenland to the Panama Canal, while liquidating the war in Ukraine and the European Union.

If my hypothesis is correct, we must not believe a word of the threats of annexation of new territories, such as Canada, and not imagine that the United States is withdrawing militarily from Europe to confront China, but admit that it is militarily abandoning its European allies. We see that it is abandoning Germany and relying on Poland to organize Central Europe, even if it means letting Warsaw annex Eastern Galicia (currently Ukrainian). Similarly, we must prepare to see the United States abandon its Middle Eastern allies, with the exception of Israel. Indeed, it has just resumed arms deliveries to Tel Aviv and begun secret talks with Iran via Moscow. They let Saudi Arabia and Turkey divide up the Arab world.

The competition between Paris and London to take the lead in European defense should therefore not be understood as opposition to peace in Ukraine. Neither the French nor the British armies have the possibility of replacing Washington’s military support. It is rather a question of determining the role that the two capitals will subsequently play on the continent. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, hopes to develop his defense concept around the French strike force, while Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, intends to take advantage of the situation. The former is aware that the European Union, around Germany, is disintegrating and that President Trump prefers the "Three Seas Initiative", around Poland. He could therefore reawaken the Weimar Triangle (Germany/France/Poland) to maintain some room for maneuver. While, from the same analysis and taking into account the disappearance of NATO, the second will ensure that Germany is kept as far away from Russia as possible, thus continuing his country’s foreign policy for a century and a half. Note that if the European allies, the Chinese and the Saudis should consider it a scam to exchange their debts for “zero coupons”, Russia should on the contrary support the United States in this maneuver. Indeed, during the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia went through a decade of recession and unrest, but today it needs the United States to avoid finding itself face to face with China.

Thierry Meyssan

[1] «Why Trump’s ‘Mar-A-Lago Accord’ Would Financially Matter To You», Erik Sherman, Forbes, February 23, 2025.

[2] «"Mar-a-Lago Accord" chatter is geting Wall Street attention» and «Jim Bianco on What a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" could mean for the economy», Tracy Alloway & Joe Wiesenthal,Bloomberg, February 20 and 25, 2025.

[3] «A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System», Stephen Miran, Hudson Bay Capital, November 2025.

[4] «Et Donald Trump fit entrer Mar-a-Lago dans la légende du dollar», Nessim Aït-Kacimi, Les Échos, 25 février 2025.

[5] « Donald Trump dissout l’organisation de l’impérialisme états-unien », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 30 janvier 2017.

We were searching for a site in the northern Bekaa valley recently bombed by Israel. Hadi knew near which village it was located but, as we drove between large expanses of fertile, well-cultivated fields, it was plain his information was vague.

We pulled up at a garage to ask the way. Lebanon has not gone the way of Western economies in making consumers perform the very service for which they are paying, and in Lebanese service stations they still have attendants. A scruffily dressed old man sat on the front step of a dilapidated and very basic kiosk constructed of concrete blocks. He came over to the driver’s window.

First Hadi ordered fuel, and the old man filled the car, washed the windscreen and took payment. His hair was white and his beard short, but not from the obsessively neat trimming that is universal in Beirut. When he returned with change, Hadi asked him if he knew where to find the bomb site.

The old man replied with questions. I did not understand the Arabic, but from the body language there was a marked shift in the interaction between the two, from the man serving Hadi to the man interrogating Hadi. He lost his shuffle, notably straightened his back and stood taller.

They were talking through the driver’s window, and with a very definite movement the man moved forward and rested his forearm on the sill, intruding his head into the vehicle assertively. He looked at me with searching eyes, and looked at Niels sitting in the back seat with his camera equipment. His questioning of Hadi became terse.

I looked into his eyes. He had the distinct, piercing gaze that I used to note in the special forces officers I occasionally came across in my Foreign Office career. He then walked away from the car, took out his phone and made a call.

After a while he handed the phone to Hadi, who looked both serious and worried. Hadi listened, handed the phone back to the attendant, said goodbye and thank you, and reversed out of the garage. Hadi told us we were not permitted to go to the bomb site.

We had just encountered Hezbollah. The important thing to understand in this encounter is that it is not that the man was an undercover Hezbollah operative posing as a garage attendant. He was a garage attendant who was a Hezbollah operative.

Hezbollah is not an organisation comparable to the IRA, in which a relatively small number of members operated within the context of a community in which they enjoyed very large sympathy. Hezbollah operates in a community in which almost everybody is an activist and pretty well every adult is prepared to pick up a gun or an RPG and knows how to use it.

This is a key to understanding how Hezbollah became the only military force that has ever been able to defeat the IDF in pitched ground warfare. In this respect, Hezbollah’s crucial advantage compared to Hamas is that it has had practical access to weapons deliveries to build its arsenal, whereas Hamas has been greatly constricted by Israel’s control of goods entering Gaza.

Ending the weapons supply to Hezbollah has been a key US/Israeli strategic objective this last year, and they have in large part achieved it. I shall return to that.

On a personal level, this encounter with the garage attendant was fairly typical of my interactions with Hezbollah in my four months in Lebanon. They had detained me in a rather frightening manner on first encounter, and in general treated me with a suspicion which is understandable given my British diplomatic background.

I saw literally thousands of buildings in Lebanon that Israel had destroyed. The most haunting part of the entire experience was the frequent event of finding the clothing and toys of small children among the rubble: I still have bad dreams about it.

However this was the second of the two occasions when we were able to identify that Israel had struck an actual Hezbollah military installation, rather than a civilian building. Both times Hezbollah prevented me from going to see. In terms of maintaining the security of the military site, this strikes me as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Having been denied access to that particular bomb site, we drove on into the village and met with some locals Hadi knew. In this small village there had been over 70 Israeli bombings, 8 of them since the ceasefire.

They took me to one large house which had been completely destroyed, a pile of rubble spread over a large area. Twelve members of the same family had been killed in this house, seven of them children. The head of the family had left in late afternoon to go to the butcher’s to buy dinner, when his home and family was destroyed behind him.

The explosion was so enormous that the body of one of the children was found in the neighbouring orchard of olive trees, clean across the road, about seventy yards away. Many of the olive trees had been shredded and debris from the house was strewn across the field and beyond.

The next house was not greatly damaged, but there a father and his two daughters were killed by the shock wave as they sat on their terrace drinking coffee.

There are so many important points to make about Hezbollah, but let me start with these three.

The first is that support for Hezbollah among their own Shia communities in Lebanon is extremely strong. They are far more than a military organisation. They are Lebanon’s largest legitimate political party.

At the 2022 election Hezbollah received 19.9% of the vote, and their close ally the Amal Movement received another 10.5%. The party with the second highest vote behind Hezbollah, the neo-fascist Lebanese Forces, received 11.6% of the vote.

[The Lebanese Forces political party should not be confused with the Lebanese Armed Forces, with which it has no connection. The Lebanese Armed Forces remain under effective US control and fired not a shot against the Israeli invasion and occupation. But like so much in Lebanon, the situation should not be simplified and the majority of the rank and file of the LAF are Shia Muslims sympathetic to Hezbollah, and a large majority of the rank and file of any denomination would be happy to fight the Israelis were they ever allowed to do so.]

Under Lebanon’s extraordinary constitution, Lebanese Forces with 11.6% received 19 seats in parliament while Hezbollah with 19.9% received 15 seats. Of which again more later.

But when it comes to political legitimacy, it is worth noting that the combined Hezbollah/Amal vote percentage is equal to the Labour Party percentage at the last General Election in the UK. There is no argument that Hezbollah are not a legitimate democratic political force.

The second point is that it is absolutely wrong to see Lebanon in purely sectarian terms. Hezbollah has supporters and allies across all religions in Lebanon and, in a country where politics is officially and constitutionally organised on religious lines (a “confessional” constitution), there are minor parties of all religions aligned with Hezbollah, of which several had ministers until appointment of the new Cabinet last month (of which again, more later).

Perhaps a quarter of those at the funeral for Nasrallah were not Shia Muslims.

The third point is that Hezbollah is much more than a political party with a military wing. In a country in which central government has all but collapsed (Lebanon has no income tax), Hezbollah provides hospitals, schools, banking, pensions and welfare benefits.

When Niels and I witnessed refugee returns to evacuated areas following the “ceasefire”, a very substantial percentage of the population were waving Hezbollah flags or Lebanese flags, with some waving both. Hezbollah is an integral part of Lebanese society, entirely born within the country out of the resistance to Israel’s 1982 occupation, and is in no sense alien or anti-Lebanese.

The elephant in the room is that in the UK and other Western states, this highly complex social and political movement is designated as a terrorist organisation in its entirety. Ironically, the justification for this given in Westminster in 2019 was that Hezbollah was destabilising the Middle East and prolonging the conflict in Syria – where the very Western powers that proscribed Hezbollah have just assisted another proscribed terrorist group into power.

The truth is that terrorist proscription by the NATO powers of organisations in the Middle East is simply a tool for taking whatever decisions are expedient at that moment to promote the interests of apartheid Israel. The “terrorist acts” of Hezbollah that led to proscription of the entire organisation in 2019 consisted of fighting ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra in Syria.

We all suffer from the temptation of assuming that others share our prejudices. I assume that like me, many in the West find it difficult to empathise with Hezbollah because of its Islamic philosophy and – I know this is petty – appearance.

Hassan Nasrallah was the most important and steadfast leader of resistance to the mass murderous Zionist project of the last forty years. He was also, by all accounts, a hugely charismatic figure to Arabic speakers. But his very appearance made it easy for him to be represented to Western audiences as an alienating, even evil, character, due to the state-promoted Islamophobia in the Western world which has been universally projected in the media this last quarter century.

But here honesty is required. I myself do not like to see political leaders with a religious function and am simply against theocratic rule. I am entirely in favour of freedom of religion, but utterly opposed to religion ruling any state.

There is an element of smoke and mirrors here. In the glorious mosaic of Lebanon, Hezbollah exist jumbled with those of other sects and religions, and in practice rub along very well.

Nasrallah spoke like all committed Islamists of his desire to seeing a united Muslim rule over Muslim lands, with the state under firmly religious leadership and Sharia law. But in practice Hezbollah are highly tolerant.

In those large areas of Lebanon where they both have physical military control and dominate the elected local authority, Hezbollah do not ban the sale of alcohol by the Christian minority or enforce hair covering, even on Muslims.

This is an area where my prejudices were disabused. I did not expect to find this.

All this caused me some difficulty in Lebanon. I was frequently asked whether I supported Hezbollah. As I was spending much of my time in those areas attacked by Israel – which largely are the Hezbollah areas – in general the question came from Hezbollah supporters.

I would always reply that I supported absolutely the right of occupied people to conduct armed resistance, and the duty to do everything possible to prevent genocide. Both are established principles of international law. But I did not support Hezbollah per se, and would not vote for it were I Lebanese, because it is an openly Islamist organisation and I am opposed to theocratic rule and religious legal codes.

Being in Lebanon did however allow me to overcome some of the gulf of my cultural understanding. The practice of calling those killed by Israel “martyrs” and frequently referring to them as such in conversation, is alien to a Western ear where the word has largely outdated religious connotations.

When you live amongst a community where everybody has friends or relatives who have been killed in the decades-long aggression of Israel, the revering of the fallen as martyrs, and their omnipresence in everyday thought, starts to make much more sense.

Similarly to Western eyes the widespread display of large images of the “martyrs” is peculiar. These are along every roadside and atop every ruin. There are always posters at the site where the person was killed, and frequently dozens of other posters of that individual at sites of importance to them.

I overcame my incomprehension of this practice by thinking of it in reference to my own culture, that these were posters of people put up to mark where they fought and died to defend their wee bit hill and glen. In those terms it made sense to me.

I am extremely conscious that religious faith has played a very positive role in both Palestine and South Lebanon in enabling people to endure the unendurable and to maintain Resistance against impossible odds. But it is not possible to ignore the fact that there remain substantial differences between my world view and an Islamist world view.

This has been brought into urgent focus by the attitude of many Sunni Muslims to the overthrow of Assad in Syria. In my world view, this has been a disaster for the Palestinians. It has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged the flow of arms and other resources to Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ most important ally. And it has enabled the Greater Israel project to expand substantially into Syria.

Try now to imagine that you are a Sunni Muslim scholar who believes that only by becoming Sunni Muslim can people obey God. You believe that the benefit to mankind of bringing Sunni Muslim rule to most of Syria outweighs the loss of part of Syria to Israel. You believe that Palestinian martyrs killed by Israel are going immediately to Heaven anyway, so in spiritual terms there is no real loss to the “martyrs”.

That really is the position of many of the leaders of the Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Muslim religious community. Just like there are a great many shades of Christian, there are a great many shades of Islam and there are many Muslims, including Sunni Muslims, who would not share that viewpoint. But to a religious Islamist it makes perfect sense.

I cannot find it again because it was deep in replies on a thread, but I had a very interesting exchange with a Muslim intellectual on Twitter on precisely this topic. He accused me of “orientalism” for denigrating an Eastern spiritual viewpoint in favour of a Western secularist narrative, in seeing the installation of HTS as a reverse for Palestine. He pointed out that Hamas, a fellow Sunni Islamist movement, had welcomed the triumph of HTS.

The exchange was welcome for its honesty and intellectual acuity. I said I did not believe Edward Said would have welcomed the accompanying expansion of Israel into Syria or cutting off of supplies to Hezbollah. He called in a nephew of Said to bolster his view that my viewpoint is orientalist.

I have thought about this deeply; I do not think my viewpoint can fairly be described as orientalist. The truth is that all mainstream Western thought would have entirely concurred with the view that the expansion of rule by a particular religious sect was more important than associated temporal reverses that did not affect the faith of the people: but Western thought was exactly that 500 years ago.

I do not see my view as orientalist. I see it as anti-medievalist.

The fall of the Assad regime was deeply desired by western neoliberals and Zionists in order to replace it with a western democratic model, and they are desperately pretending that is what they have got in al-Jolani. As atrocities against Shia, Alaouites and Christians in Syria mount, the one thing that cannot be disputed is that al-Jolani is steadfastly Zionist, as he allows Israel daily to occupy more of Syria and destroy more of its infrastructure, without a single shot fired in response.

There is no doubt that the position of the Resistance to an expansionist apartheid Israeli colonial project has worsened considerably since my arrival in Lebanon in October. While Israel could not progress a ground offensive, the almost total absence of any air defences for Lebanon meant it could murder and destroy with impunity from the air.

Israel embarked on a campaign of devastation of purely civilian areas by aerial bombardment. Of that I am an eye witness. I can say from personal inspection that the claims that the tens of thousands of homes destroyed had any military use are a massive lie.

With no defence against a relentless bombing campaign, and with most of their leadership eliminated, Hezbollah were obliged to accede to a suicidally unbalanced “ceasefire agreement”. It is plain on the actual face of the agreement that only one side will cease fire.

All Lebanese groups are to cease fire without qualification whereas Israel is only to cease “offensive” operations. Israel of course claims all its attacks as defensive. This is absolute nonsense, but despite over 500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, killing hundreds of people, Israel has not been held accountable because Hezbollah acceded to a ceasefire guaranteed by a “Mechanism” which is chaired by a United States General.

I think my discussion on this point with the UN Spokesman in Lebanon was extremely important, especially where he explicitly states that the Ceasefire Agreement was drafted by the USA. This link takes you to the key point in the interview.

The members of the “Mechanism” overseeing the ceasefire are the United States, France, Israel (sic), and the Lebanese government of General Aoun, a total US puppet.

Furthermore while the Ceasefire Agreement provides for a zone south of the Litani river from which Hezbollah must remove its weapons, it also calls for Hezbollah disarmament throughout the whole of Lebanon, which the Israelis and Americans have used to justify numerous continuing Israeli strikes in the Bekaa Valley, the Syrian border and even Beirut.

Hezbollah are not a formal party to the Agreement but it was sanctioned by them before signature. Personally I find it difficult to imagine that Nasrallah would ever have accepted such a position.

At the same time, Hezbollah’s domestic political position has been also greatly weakened. They were obliged to accept effectively the US imposition of General Aoun as President, which they had been resisting for over two years. They also then found themselves accepting his nomination of the openly anti-Hezbollah Nawaf Salam as Prime Minister.

I referred earlier to Lebanon’s “confessional” constitutional arrangements, and said I would give more detail. The President must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite.

But it does not stop there. The governing agreement specifies the division of ministerial positions too. Not only between Sunni, Shia and Christian, but to include several other groupings, of which the best known is Druze and there are others, particularly various specific sects of Christianity.

Hezbollah has operated through the Amal movement in providing the Shiite ministers, but it is a key fact that it has always had important allies among Christian anti-Israeli occupation factions who have filled important ministerial posts.

The loss of Hezbollah power within Lebanon is to be found within the detail of all these ministries. In claiming to appoint a “technocratic”, apolitical administration, Aoun and Salam have in fact excluded most of Hezbollah’s support.

It is in practice almost impossible to find a Shiite in Lebanon who is not pro-Hezbollah, but Aoun and Salam have certainly done their best. More pertinently, they have almost totally excluded Hezbollah and anti-Zionist sympathisers from the ministerial representation of Sunni and the assorted minority and smaller Christian groups, while simultaneously boosting the de facto influence of the fascist Lebanese Forces sympathisers.

Hezbollah has not been this politically weak in the Lebanese institutions for 20 years, which is why the show of mass popular support at Nasrallah’s funeral was so important to them. However, given Lebanon’s electoral system with its deliberate Christian bias, piling up popular support is of little use to Hezbollah electorally. There are Christian MPs in parliament elected with under 500 votes, while Hezbollah could put on another 100,000 votes without significantly increasing their representation.

Crucially the “Ministerial statement” of the aims of the new government excluded resistance to Israel as an objective – a key change – and specified the state’s monopoly on carrying arms, a reference to the full disarmament of Hezbollah.

Finally, of course, Hezbollah’s archenemies, HTS, are now in power in Damascus. Hezbollah fought off repeated Al Qaeda/Al Nusra/ISIS attempts to invade Lebanon and also intervened against these forces within Syria. Al-Jolani coming to power represents a major disruption to Hezbollah’s supply lines from Iran.

The US and Israel are attempting to turn up this pressure by frequent aerial attacks on border crossings from Syria and on Hezbollah individuals within Lebanon. Recently they took the additional measure of banning pilgrimage flights to and from Iran, which greatly angered the Shia community and was aimed at cutting off a route for physical supplies of cash.

What is uncertain is what secret accommodations General Aoun may have reached with Hezbollah, over whether their physical disarmament throughout Lebanon under SCR 1701 and the Ceasefire Agreement is a genuine process or a show. Politically, Aoun and Salam have strongly planted their banner for real disarmament of Hezbollah.

What appears beyond dispute is that the Israelis receive a continued flow of intelligence from Lebanese sources on Hezbollah personnel movements and sites, and the US-sanctioned intense Israeli bombing campaign shows no sign of abating.

We can add to this sad fact that Israel was able to use the Ceasefire Agreement to occupy parts of Southern Lebanon which Hezbollah had successfully defended during the war, and that Israel has destroyed by demolition thousands of homes and other civilian buildings under cover of the ceasefire to add to those destroyed during the war.

Indeed Israel demolishes more buildings in Southern Lebanon every day still, and has now destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Lebanon in total. As I predicted, Israel is building 5 permanent military outposts in Southern Lebanon and has made plain it has no intention of leaving.

The US puppet government in Beirut, like the US puppet government in Damascus, plainly has no intention of any realistic action against de facto Israeli annexation of its land. While Hezbollah has signalled a reversion to past tactics of guerilla warfare, I have serious doubts about both its current capacity, both political and military.

Of the enduring heroism of the people of South Lebanon I have no doubt, and I also have no doubt that as Israel is maintaining an illegal occupation, their legal right of armed resistance in unimpeachable.

It is however foolish not to acknowledge that with Israel expanding into Lebanon and Syria, with US puppet regimes in Syria and Damascus, with genocide about to restart in Gaza and spreading into the West Bank, and with an apparently crazed level of open Zionist support from Trump that is in fact only more honest than the pro-Genocide positions of the large majority of Western governments, the current position looks bleak indeed.

The only grounds for hope is that I cannot imagine that the people of the region are going to tolerate Israeli collaborationist regimes in Damascus, Beirut and Ramallah much longer. Indeed with slight variations you might say the same of the entire Arab world.

I hope you will forgive this being a very personal post as I try to make sense of my experiences and assimilate much new knowledge into my view of the world.

I went to Lebanon knowing literally nobody in the country, and with an introduction to just one person who helped us through immigration, but whose assistance thereafter did not work out. I did so accompanied by Niels as cinematographer, despite my never really having worked in video before, and my not being very accomplished at it. On top of which we had no financial resources except for our crowdfunding, which was not going well.

I now realise just how deeply ignorant I was about Lebanon before arriving.

The truth is, I wanted to go to Gaza but could find no way to get in. I had then had applied to Israel for the required permission from COGAT to enter the West Bank, but had been refused. So Lebanon was the one place under Israeli aggression where I could actually hope to get in to document and report on Israeli atrocities.

This venture was also born out of a rather desperate feeling that I must try to do something. I had been involved in the genesis of the ICJ case and in international campaigning for Palestine, but felt so helpless watching murdered children in Gaza every day on social media, that I felt compelled to do more.

With war against the Israeli invaders raging in Lebanon, I admit I also had a compulsion to share at least some of the danger of those putting their lives at stake. In truth, I felt something of a fraud to be writing about it from home if I was not prepared to experience it.

Well, at times Lebanon really was dangerous for us, but I am extremely proud of what Niels and I achieved. The six mini-documentaries reached millions of people and I think genuinely informed the Western public. I think the interview with the UN was extremely revealing and important and wish I had been able to get a rather wider audience for it. On top of which we produced numerous shorter video pieces, written articles and interviews with alternative media outlets across the globe, as well as doing a lot of Arab mainstream media.

In the end we had to leave because it proved simply not possible to meet the substantial costs of the venture by individual subscriptions and donations, and I ran out of money. It was a bold experiment in being able to do the kind of real, on-the-ground journalism that legacy media has abandoned, but to continue would require more fundraising ability or organisational ability than I possess.

There is no doubt that we suffered – and still suffer – massive social media suppression, and this limitation of reach is what crippled fundraising efforts. Essentially we were asking the same people for donations again and again, which is both impractical and, I admit, I found personally difficult and undignified.

So I shall continue reporting from my base in Scotland, travelling the world as occasion demands. My knowledge has been hugely expanded by my time in Beirut. I will now largely revert to written rather than video format. The struggle for justice goes on, and my commitment to it remains.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (photo from 2018).

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have officially begun negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Whatever the territorial solutions, they will not resolve the entire dispute. It will probably persist beyond peace.

Three problems overlap:

1) NATO’s expansion to the East and the Brzeziński Doctrine

When the East Germans themselves tore down the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989), the West, taken by surprise, negotiated the end of the two Germanys. Throughout 1990 the question arose whether German reunification would mean that East Germany, by joining West Germany, would enter NATO or not.

When the Atlantic Alliance Treaty was signed in 1949, it did not protect certain territories of certain signatories. For example, the French territories in the Pacific (Réunion, Mayotte, Wallis and Futuna, Polynesia and New Caledonia) were not covered. It would therefore have been possible that, in a unified Germany, NATO would not have been allowed to deploy in East Germany.

This issue is very important for the Central and Eastern European states that were attacked by Germany during the Second World War. In the eyes of their populations, seeing sophisticated weapons being installed on their borders was worrying. Even more so for Russia, whose immense borders (6,600 kilometres) are indefensible.

At the Malta Summit (2-3 December 1989) between the US and Russian Presidents, George Bush (the father) and Mikhail Gorbachev, the US argued that it had not intervened to bring down the Berlin Wall and that it had no intention of intervening against the USSR at that time [1].

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that "the changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification must not lead to an ’attack on Soviet security interests’". Consequently, NATO should rule out an ’expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. a rapprochement with the Soviet borders’"

The three occupying powers of Germany, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, therefore made repeated commitments not to expand NATO towards the East. The Moscow Treaty (12 September 1990) assumed that a reunified Germany would not claim territory from Poland (Oder-Neisse line), and that no NATO bases would be present in East Germany [2].

At a joint press conference in 1995 at the White House, President Boris Yeltsin described the meeting they had just had as "disastrous", provoking laughter from President Bill Clinton. It is indeed better to laugh than to cry.

However, the Russians were informed that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was touring the capitals to prepare the NATO membership of former Warsaw Pact states. President Boris Yeltsin therefore harangued his counterpart, Bill Clinton, at the Budapest summit (5 December 1994) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He declared: "Our attitude towards NATO’s enlargement plans, and in particular the possibility of infrastructure progress to the East, remains and will remain invariably negative. Arguments such as: enlargement is not directed against any state and is a step towards the creation of a unified Europe, do not stand up to criticism. This is a decision whose consequences will determine the European configuration for years to come. It may lead to a slide towards the deterioration of trust between Russia and the Western countries. […] NATO was created at the time of the Cold War. Today, not without difficulty, it is seeking its place in the new Europe. It is important that this approach does not create two zones of demarcation, but on the contrary, that it consolidates European unity. This objective, for us, is contradictory to NATO’s expansion plans. Why sow the seeds of distrust? After all, we are no longer enemies; we are all partners now. The year 1995 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Half a century later, we are increasingly aware of the true significance of the Great Victory and the need for historic reconciliation in Europe. There must no longer be adversaries, winners and losers. For the first time in its history, our continent has a real chance of finding unity. To miss it is to forget the lessons of the past and to call into question the future itself. Bill Clinton replied: "NATO will not automatically exclude any nation from membership. […] At the same time, no external country will be allowed to veto expansion.” [3].

At this summit, three memoranda were signed, including one with independent Ukraine. In exchange for its denuclearization, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States committed to refraining from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

However, during the Yugoslav wars, Germany intervened, as a member of NATO. It trained Kosovar fighters on the basis of the Incirlik Alliance (Türkiye), then deployed its men there.

However, at the NATO summit in Madrid (8 and 9 July 1997), the heads of state and government of the Alliance announced that they were preparing for the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In addition, they are also considering that of Slovenia and Romania.

Aware that it cannot prevent sovereign states from entering into alliances, but worried about the consequences for its own security of what is being prepared, Russia intervened in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at the Istanbul summit (18 and 19 November 1999). It had a declaration adopted establishing the principle of free membership of any sovereign state in the alliance of its choice and that of not taking measures for its security to the detriment of that of its neighbours.

However, in 2014, the United States organised a colour revolution in Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected president (who wanted to keep his country halfway between the United States and Russia) and installing a neo-Nazi regime that was publicly aggressive against Russia.

In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, Finland, and in 2024, Sweden. All promises have been broken.

To understand how we got to this point, we also need to know what the United States was thinking.

In 1997, former security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzeziński, published The Grand Chessboard. In it, he discusses “geopolitics” in the original sense, that is, not the influence of geographical data on international politics, but a plan for world domination.

According to him, the United States can remain the world’s leading power by allying itself with the Europeans and isolating Russia. Now retired, this democrat offers the Straussians a strategy to keep Russia in check, without however proving them right. Indeed, he supports cooperation with the European Union, while the Straussians wish on the contrary to slow its development (Wolfowitz doctrine). In any case, Brzeziński would become an advisor to President Barack Obama.

Monument in Lviv to the glory of the criminal against Humanity Stepan Bandera

2) Nazification of Ukraine

At the beginning of the special operation of the Russian army in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin declared that his first goal was to denazify the country. The West then pretended to ignore the problem. They accused Russia of exaggerating some marginal facts although they had been observed on a large scale for a decade.

This is because the two rival US geopoliticians, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzeziński, had formed an alliance with the “integral nationalists” (i.e. with the disciples of the philosopher Dmytro Dontsov and the militia leader Stepan Bandera) [4], at a conference organized by the latter in Washington in 2000. It was on this alliance that the Department of Defense had bet, in 2001, when it outsourced its research into biological warfare to Ukraine, under the authority of Antony Fauci, then Health Advisor to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was also on this alliance that the State Department had bet, in 2014, with the Euromaidan color revolution.

The two Ukrainian Jewish presidents, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky, allowed memorials to be built throughout their country paying tribute to Nazi collaborators, particularly in Galicia. They allowed Dmytro Dontsov’s ideology to become the historical reference. For example, today, the Ukrainian population attributes the great famine of 1932-1933, which caused between 2.5 and 5 million deaths, to an imaginary desire of Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians; a founding myth that does not stand up to historical analysis [5], in fact, this famine affected many other regions of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is on the basis of this lie that Kyiv managed to make its population believe that the Russian army wanted to invade Ukraine. Today, several dozen countries, including France [6] and Germany [7], have adopted, by overwhelming majorities, laws or resolutions to validate this propaganda.

Nazification is more complex than we think: with NATO’s involvement in this proxy war, the Centuria Order, that is to say the secret society of Ukrainian integral nationalists, has penetrated the Alliance forces. In France, it is already present in the Gendarmerie (which, by the way, has never made public its report on the Boutcha massacre).

The contemporary West wrongly perceives the Nazis as criminals who primarily massacred Jews. This is absolutely false. Their main enemies were the Slavs. During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered many people, first by shooting and then, from 1942, in camps. The Slavic civilian victims of Nazi racial ideology were more numerous than the Jewish victims (about 6 million if we add the people killed by shooting and those killed in the camps). Moreover, since some victims were both Slavic and Jewish, they are included in both assessments. After the massacres of 1940 and 1941, approximately 18 million people from all backgrounds were interned in concentration camps, of whom 11 million in total were murdered (1,100,000 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp alone) [8]..

The Soviet Union, which was torn apart during the Bolshevik revolution, did not reunite until 1941 when Joseph Stalin formed an alliance with the Orthodox Church and put an end to the massacres and political internments (the "gulags") to fight against the Nazi invasion. The victory against racial ideology founded today’s Russia. The Russian people see themselves as the slayers of racism.

3) Russia’s rejection from Europe

The third bone of contention between the West and Russia arose not before, but during the Ukrainian war. The West adopted various measures against what symbolized Russia. Of course, unilateral coercive measures (abusively called “sanctions”) were taken at the government level, but discriminatory measures were also taken at the citizen level. Many restaurants were banned for Russians in the United States or Russian shows were canceled in Europe.

Symbolically, we accepted the idea that Russia is not European, but Asian (which it also partially is). We rethought the Cold War dichotomy, opposing the free world (capitalist and believer) to the totalitarian specter (socialist and atheist), into an opposition between Western values (individualist) and those of Asia (communitarian).

Behind this shift, racial ideologies are resurfacing. I noted three years ago that the New York Times’ 1619 Project and President Joe Biden’s woke rhetoric were in reality, perhaps unwittingly, a reverse reformulation of racism [9]. I note that today President Donald Trump shares the same analysis as me and has systematically revoked all of his predecessor’s woke innovations. But the damage is done: last month, Westerners reacted to the appearance of the Chinese DeepSeek by denying that Asians could have invented, and not copied, such software. Some government agencies have even banned it from their employees in what is nothing other than a denunciation of the “yellow peril.”

Should Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the author of "War and Peace", be censored as Ukraine does, where his books are burned because he was Russian?

4) Conclusion

Current negotiations focus on what is directly palpable by public opinion: borders. However, the most important thing is elsewhere. To live together, we need not to threaten the security of others and to recognize them as our equals. This is much more difficult and does not only involve our governments.

From a Russian point of view, the intellectual origin of the three problems examined above lies in the Anglo-Saxon refusal of international law [10]. Indeed, during the Second World War, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at the Atlantic Summit that after their common victory, they would impose their law on the rest of the world. It was only under pressure from the USSR and France that they accepted the UN statutes, but they continued to flout them, forcing Russia to boycott the organization when they refused the People’s Republic of China the right to sit on it. The glaring example of Western duplicity is given by the State of Israel, which tramples on a hundred resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and opinions of the International Court of Justice. This is why, on December 17, 2021, when the war in Ukraine was looming, Moscow proposed to Washington [11] to prevent it by signing a bilateral treaty providing guarantees for peace [12]. The idea of this text was, nothing more, nothing less, that the United States renounce the "rules-based world" and fall in line with international law. This right, imagined by the Russians and the French just before the First World War, consists solely of keeping one’s word in the eyes of public opinion.

I have referenced Arnold Toynbee, an encyclopedic historian a few times in interviews, most recently in this discussion with James Delingpole.

There is a misunderstanding, usually divided along political party lines, about the United States and other nominally sovereign independent countries of the world. Typically the “leftists” call them “democracies”, while the conservatives in the US counter this with “we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy”. Other groups decry the corporate form of the US government. I think trying to pinpoint the ill invariably misses the point, as any state will undergo all of these forms before a given civilization ends.

According to Toynbee, a “universal state” is the last phase of a society before extinction. This doesn’t mean people go extinct: they don’t disappear as a group, however they may be reduced in numbers. We are talking about the concept of a “state” in this case. As Toynbee describes, universal states typically last a century or two, and all eventually disappear, but all proclaim that they are eternal right up to the point of their demise. The chapters I am quoting from primarily deal with Rome as a universal state, but draw comparisons and reference from many others - Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese. Toynbee postulates that the imperial Rome (but not its earlier versions, i.e., royal, magisterial and republican) became the universal state for the disintegrating Hellenic (Greek) world. Reproduced below without commentary. I hope the quotes from ~2000 years ago ring a bell…

One World Government is a desperate last-ditch “Indian summer” attempt at staving off the collapse and disintegration of the existing world order. IMO, it has no chance of coming to fruition now.

Objectively, no universal state has ever been literally universal in the sense of having covered the entire surface of the globe; but in a significant subjective sense these states have indeed been universal, for they have looked and felt worldwide to the people living under their regime. The Romans and the Chinese […] thought of their respective empires as embracing all the peoples in the world that were of any account…

[…]

Universal states are, let us remind ourselves, essentially negative institutions. In the first place, they arise after, and not before the breakdown of civilizations to which they bring political unity. They are not summers but Indian summers, masking autumn and presaging winter. […] There is, however, an element of ambiguity in them, for, while universal states are thus symptoms of social disintegration, they are at the same time attempts to check this disintegration and defy it.

[Universal states invariably position themselves and are perceived by contemporaries as immortal and divine.]

[After it’s establishment after the battle of Actium in 31 BC], the secret of Roman imperial government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing city-states with a fringe of autonomous principalities in the regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration - which even at the end of the Hellenic time of troubles, was still publicly regarded as an honorable and covetable load - was to be left resting on the shoulders of these responsible self-governing local authorities; the imperial government was to confine itself to the twofold task of keeping the local communities in harmony with one another and protecting them against attacks from the outer barbarians; and for these limited imperial activities, a slender military framework and a light political superstructure were all that was required. This fundamental policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we look again at the Roman Empire as it emerged from a spell of two centuries of Roman Peace, we shall find that its administrative structure had in fact been transformed as a result of innovations that were reluctant and piecemeal, but were far-reaching in their cumulative effect because they were all in the same direction.

By end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-80), the last of the client principalities had been gleichgeschaltet [uniformized, often in a forced or totalitarian manner] with the provinces, and, more significant still, the provinces themselves had become organs of direct administration instead of remaining mere frameworks for local groups of self-administering city-states. […] in the course of … two centuries, however, the human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of the local administrative talent on which it had been accustomed to rely, found itself constrained not only to replace the client-princes with imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states in the hands of ‘city-managers’ who were appointed by the imperial authorities instead of being elected (as the city-state magistrates were) by the local notables, and who were indirectly responsible to the Emperor himself. […] while the self-complacent local magistrates and town councilors of the once self-governing city-states have been degraded into becoming unwilling instruments of the central exchequer for extracting ruinously heavy taxes from the local notables…

[…]

Another cause of the persistence of the belief in the immortality of the universal states is the impressiveness of the institution itself, as distinct from the prestige of the successive rulers who are its living incarnation.

[…]

Appian of Alexandria (AD 90-160) [a Greek who became a Roman propagandist, wrote] in the preface to his Studies in Roman History,

“the [Roman] state has reached its highest point of organization and the public revenue its highest figure, while as long and stable peace has raised the whole world to a level of secure prosperity. A few more subject nations have been added by the emperors to those already under the Roman dominion, and others which have revolted have been reduced to obedience; but, since the Romans already posses the choicest portions of the land and water surface of the globe, they are wise enough to aim at retaining what they hold rather than extending their Empire to infinity over the poverty-stricken and unremunerative territories of uncivilized nations. I myself have seen representatives of such nations attending at Rome on diplomatic missions and offering to become her subjects, and the Emperor refusing to accept the allegiance of peoples who would be of no value to his government. There are other nations innumerable whose kings the Romans appoint themselves, since they feel no necessity to incorporate them in their Empire. There are also certain subject nations to whom they make grants from their treasury, because they are too proud to repudiate them in spite their being a financial burden. They have garrisoned the frontiers of their Empire with a ring of powerful armies, and keep guard over this vast extent of land and sea as easily as if it were a modest farm”.

In the view of Appian and Aelius Aristeides [AD 117-181], the Roman Empire was eternal:

“…just as the sum total of things is eternal, because there is no room, outside it, for its components to fly apart, and there are no extraneous bodies that can collide with it and disintegrate it with a mighty blow.”

In these lines of the Roman poet Lucretius [BC 90-50], his teacher Democritus’s [BC 460] argument looks as impregnable as the Roman limes [borders] itself:

“Nor is there any force that can modify the sum of things. There is no space outside into which any kind of matter can escape out of the totality. Nor is there any space outside from which some new force can arise, break in, transform the whole nature of things, and deflect its motions.”

A universal state has indeed as little to fear from outer barbarians as the Universe has from stray star cluster that are ex hypothesi non-existent; yet the argument is a fallacy nevertheless, for, as we have seen in an earlier context, ‘things rot through evils native to their selves’ [Menander, BC 342-292, fragment 540]. In physical Nature there are elements whose atoms disintegrate by spontaneous radioactivity without requiring any bombardment from extraneous particles; and in human social life, universal states ‘are betray’d by what is false within’ [George Meredith] into revealing, for those who have eyes to see through their specious appearance of impregnability, that, so far from being immortal, these are spontaneously fissile polities.

However long the life of a universal state maybe drawn out, it always proves to have been the last phase of a society before its extinction. Its goal is the achievement of immortality, but the attempt to secure immortality in this world is a vain effort, whether blind or deliberate, to thwart the economy of Nature.

There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr\u2019s The twenty years\u2019 crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.

Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say \u201Cresponsibility\u201D it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:

The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).

Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.

The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. \u201COur enemies are little worms\u201D, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.

In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable\u2014whether domestically or internationally\u2014the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept \u201Csome give or take\u201D as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (\u2018balance of power\u201D) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.

Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)

Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. \u201CJust as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers\u201D (p. 82).

Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.

As this brief description makes clear similarities with today\u2019s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the \u201CNew World Order\u201D produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors\u2019 policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia\u2019s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn\u2019t want to, accept more.

The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin\u2019s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.

Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.

There’s an old saying, “Fool around and find out.” On November 19, Ukraine fired six US-made missiles at a target located on Russian soil. On November 20, Ukraine fired up to a dozen British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles against a target on Russian soil. On November 21, Russia fired a new intermediate-range missile against a target of Ukrainian soil.

Ukraine and its American and British allies fooled around.

And now they have found out: if you attack Mother Russia, you will pay a heavy price.

In the early morning hours of November 21, Russia launched a missile which struck the Yuzmash factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk. Hours after this missile, which was fired from the Russian missile test range in Kapustin Yar, struck its target, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian television, where he announced that the missile fired by Russia, which both the media and western intelligence had classified as an experimental modification of the RS-26 missile, which had been mothballed by Russia in 2017, was, in fact, a completely new weapon known as the “Oreshnik,” which in Russian means “hazelnut.” Putin noted that the missile was still in its testing phase, and that the combat launch against Ukraine was part of the test, which was, in his words, “successful.”

Russian President Putin announces the launching of the Oreshnik missile in a live television address

Putin declared that the missile, which flew to its target at more than ten times the speed of sound, was invincible. “Modern air defense systems that exist in the world, and anti-missile defenses created by the Americans in Europe, can’t intercept such missiles,” Putin said.

Putin said the Oreshnik was developed in response to the planned deployment by the United States of the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, itself an intermediate-range missile. The Oreshnik was designed to “mirror” US and NATO capabilities.

The next day, November 22, Putin met with the Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, Sergey Karakayev, where it was announced that the Oreshnik missile would immediately enter serial production. According to General Karakayev, the Oreshnik, when deployed, could strike any target in Europe without fear of being intercepted. According to Karakayev, the Oreshnik missile system expanded the combat capabilities of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces to destroy various types of targets in accordance with their assigned tasks, both in non-nuclear and nuclear warheads. The high operational readiness of the system, Karakayev said, allows for retargeting and destroying any designated target in the shortest possible time.

Scott will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 215 of _Ask The Inspector

“Missiles will speak for themselves”

The circumstances which led Russia to fire, what can only be described as a strategic weapons system against Ukraine, unfolded over the course of the past three months. On September 6, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to Ramstein, Germany, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pressed upon Lloyd the importance of the US granting Ukraine permission to use the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile on targets located inside the pre-2014 borders of Russia (these weapons had been previously used by Ukraine against territory claimed by Russia, but which is considered under dispute—Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk). Zelensky also made the case for US concurrence regarding similar permissions to be granted regarding the British-made Storm Shadow cruise missile.

Ukraine was in possession of these weapons and had made use of them against the Russian territories in dispute. Other than garnering a few headlines, these weapons had virtually zero discernable impact on the battlefield, where Russian forces were prevailing in battle against stubborn Ukrainian defenders.

Secretary Austin listened while Zelensky made his case for the greenlight to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow against Russian targets. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine but also on Russian territory so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” Zelensky argued, adding that, “We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”

Austin rejected the Ukrainian President’s request, noting that no single military weapon would be decisive in the ongoing fighting between Ukraine and Russia, emphasizing that the use of US and British weapons to attack targets inside Russia would only increase the chances for escalating the conflict, bringing a nuclear-armed Russia into direct combat against NATO forces.

On September 11, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, traveled to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where Zelensky once again pressured both men regarding permission to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow on targets inside Russia. Both men demurred, leaving the matter for a meeting scheduled between US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, on Friday, September 13.

The next day, September 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the press in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he addressed the question of the potential use by Ukraine of US- and British-made weapons. “This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

President Biden took heed of the Russian President’s words, and despite being pressured by Prime Minister Starmer to greenlight the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow by Ukraine, opted to continue the US policy of prohibiting such actions.

And there things stood, until November 18, when President Biden, responding to reports that North Korea had dispatched thousands of troops to Russia to join in the fighting against Ukrainian forces, reversed course, allowing US-provided intelligence to be converted into data used to guide both the ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to their targets. These targets had been provided by Zelensky to the US back in September, when the Ukrainian President visited Biden at the White House. Zelensky had made striking these targets with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles a key part of his so-called “victory plan.”

After the approval had been given by the US, Zelensky spoke to the press. “Today, there is a lot of talk in the media about us receiving a permit for respective actions,” he said. “Hits are not made with words. Such things don’t need announcements. Missiles will speak for themselves.”

The next day, November 19, Ukraine fired six ATACMS against targets near the Russian city of Bryansk. The day after—November 20—Ukraine fired Storm Shadow missiles against a Russian command post in the Kursk province of Russia.

The Ukrainian missiles had spoken.

The Russian response

Shortly after the Storm Shadow attacks on Kursk occurred, Ukrainian social media accounts began reporting that Ukrainian intelligence had determined that the Russians were preparing an RS-26 Rubezh missile for launch against Ukrain[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
e. These reports suggested that the intelligence came from US-provided warnings, including imagery, as well as intercepted radio communications from the Kapustin Yar missile test facility, located east of the Russian city of Astrakhan.

Test launch of an RS-26 missile

The RS-26 was a missile that, depending on its payload configuration, could either be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM, meaning it could reach ranges of over 5,500 kilometers) or an intermediate-range missile (IRBM, meaning it could fly between 1,000 and 3,000 kilometers). Given that the missile was developed and tested from 2012-2016, this meant the RS-26 would either be declared as an ICBM and be counted as part of the New Start Treaty, or as an IRBM, and as such be prohibited by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty had been in force since July 1988 and had successfully mandated the elimination of an entire category of nuclear-armed weapons deemed to be among the most destabilizing in the world.

In 2017, the Russian government decided to halt the further development of the RS-26 given the complexities brought on by the competing arms control restrictions.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF Treaty. The US immediately began testing intermediate-range cruise missiles and announced its intention to develop a new family of hypersonic intermediate range missiles known as Dark Eagle.

Despite this provocation, the Russian government announced a unilateral moratorium of producing and deploying IRBMs, declaring that this moratorium would remain in place until the US or NATO deployed an IRBM on European soil.

In September 2023, the US deployed a new containerized missile launch system capable of firing the Tomahawk cruise missile to Denmark as part of a NATO training exercise. The US withdrew the launcher from Denmark upon conclusion of the training.

In late June 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would resume production of intermediate-range missiles, citing the US deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Denmark. “We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said.

At that time the western media speculated about the mothballed RS-26 being brought back into production.

When Ukraine announced that it had detected an RS-26 being prepared for launch on November 20, many observers (including me) accepted this possibility, given the June announcement by President Putin and the associated speculation. As such, when on the night on November 21, the Ukrainians announced that an RS-26 missile had been launched from Kapustin Yar against a missile production facility in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, these reports were taken at face value.

As it turned out, we were all wrong.

Ukrainian intelligence, after examining missile debris from the attack, seems to support this assertion. Whereas the RS-26 was a derivative of the SS-27M ICBM, making use of its first and second stages, the Orezhnik, according to the Ukrainians, made use of the first and second stages of the new “Kedr” (Cedar) ICBM, which is in the early stages of development. Moreover, the weapons delivery system appears to be taken from the newly developed Yars-M, which uses independent post-boost vehicles, or IPBVs, known in Russian as blok individualnogo razvedeniya (BIR), instead of traditional multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs.

In the classic weapons configuration for a modern Russian missile, the final stage of the missile, also known as the post-boost vehicle (PBV or bus), contains all the MIRVs. Once the missile exits the earth’s atmosphere, the PBV detaches from the missile body, and then independently maneuvers, releasing each warhead at the required point for it to reach its intended target. Since the MIRVs are all attached to the same PBV, the warheads are released over targets that are on a relatively linear path, limiting the area that can be targeted.

A missile using an IPBV configuration, however, can release each reentry vehicle at the same time, allowing each warhead to follow an independent trajectory to its target. This allows for greater flexibility and accuracy.

The Oreshnik was designed to carry between four and six IPBVs. The one used against Dnipropetrovsk was a six IPBV-capable system. Each war head in turn contained six separate submunitions, consisting of metal slugs forged from exotic alloys that enabled them to maintain their form during the extreme heat generated by hypersonic re-entry speeds. These slugs are not explosive; rather they use the combined effects of the kinetic impact at high speed and the extreme heat absorbed by the exotic alloy to destroy their intended target on impact.

Oreshnik missile impact on the Dnipropetrovsk military industrial complex

The military industrial target struck by the Oreshnik was hit by six independent warheads, each containing six submunitions. In all, the Dnipropetrovsk facility was struck be 36 separate munitions, inflicting devastating damage, including to underground production facilities used by Ukraine and its NATO allies to produce short- and intermediate-range missiles.

These facilities were destroyed.

The Russians had spoken as well.

Back to the future

If history is the judge, the Oreshnik will likely mirror in terms of operational concept a Soviet-era missile, the Skorost, which was developed beginning in 1982 to counter the planned deployment by the United States of the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missile to West Germany. The Skorost was, like the Oreshnik, an amalgam of technologies from missiles under development at the time, including an advanced version of the SS-20 IRBM, the yet-to-be deployed SS-25 ICBM, and the still under development SS-27. The result was a road-mobile two-stage missile which could carry either a conventional or nuclear payload that used a six-axle transporter-erector-launcher, or TEL (both the RS-26 and the Oreshnik likewise use a six-axle TEL).

In 1984, as the Skorost neared completion, the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces conducted exercises where SS-20 units practiced the tactics that would be used by the Skorost equipped forces. A total of three regiments of Skorost missiles were planned to be formed, comprising a total of 36 launchers and over 100 missiles. Bases for these units were constructed in 1985.

The Skorost missile and launcher

The Skorost was never deployed; production stopped in March 1987 as the Soviet Union prepared for the realities of the INF Treaty, which would have banned the Skorost system.

The history of the Skorost is important because the operational requirements for the system—to mirror the Pershing II missiles and quickly strike them in time of war—is the same mission given to the Oreshnik missile, with the Dark Eagle replacing the Pershing II.

But the Oreshnik can also strike other targets, including logistic facilities, command and control facilities, air defense facilities (indeed, the Russians just put the new Mk. 41 Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile defense facility that was activated on Polish soil on the Oreshnik’s target list).

In short, the Oreshnik is a game-changer in every way. In his November 21 remarks, Putin chided the United States, noting that the decision by President Trump in 2019 to withdraw from the INF Treaty was foolish, made even more so by the looming deployment of the Oreshnik missile, which would have been banned under the treaty.

On November 22, Putin announced that the Oreshnik was to enter serial production. He also noted that the Russians already had a significant stockpile of Oreshnik missiles that would enable Russia to respond to any new provocations by Ukraine and its western allies, thereby dismissing the assessments of western intelligence which held that, as an experimental system, the Russians did not have the ability to repeat attacks such as the one that took place on November 21.

As a conventionally armed weapon, the Oreshnik provides Russia with the means to strike strategic targets without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. This means that if Russia were to decide to strike NATO targets because of any future Ukrainian provocation (or a direct provocation by NATO), it can do so without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Ready for a nuclear exchange

Complicating an already complicated situation is the fact that while the US and NATO try to wrestle with the re-emergence of a Russian intermediate-range missile threat that mirrors that of the SS-20, the appearance of which in the 1970’s threw the Americans and their European allies into a state of panic, Russia has, in response to the very actions which prompted the reemergence of INF weapons in Europe, issued a new nuclear doctrine which lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

The original nuclear deterrence doctrine was published by Russia in 2020. In September 2024, responding to the debate taking place within the US and NATO about authorizing Ukraine to use US- and British-made missiles to attack targets on Russian soil, President Putin instructed his national security council to propose revisions to the 2020 doctrine based upon new realities.

The revamped document was signed into law by Putin on November 19, the same day that Ukraine fired six US-made ATACMS missiles against targets on Russian soil.

After announcing the adoption of the new nuclear doctrine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov was asked by reporters if a Ukrainian attack on Russia using ATACMS missiles could potentially trigger a nuclear response. Peskov noted that the doctrine’s provision allows the use of nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike that raises critical threats for Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Peskov also noted that the doctrine’s new language holds that an attack by any country supported by a nuclear power would constitute a joint aggression against Russia that triggers the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in response.

Shortly after the new Russian doctrine was made public, Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using ATACMS missiles.

The next day Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using Storm Shadow missiles.

Under Russia’s new nuclear doctrine, these attacks could trigger a Russian nuclear response.

The new Russian nuclear doctrine emphasizes that nuclear weapons are “a means of deterrence,” and that their use by Russia would only be as an “extreme and compelled measure.” Russia, the doctrine states, “takes all necessary efforts to reduce the nuclear threat and prevent aggravation of interstate relations that could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones.”

Nuclear deterrence, the doctrine declares, is aimed at safeguarding the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state,” deterring a potential aggressor, or “in case of a military conflict, preventing an escalation of hostilities and stopping them on conditions acceptable for the Russian Federation.”

Russia has decided not to invoke its nuclear doctrine at this juncture, opting instead to inject the operational use of the new Oreshnik missile as an intermediate non-nuclear deterrence measure.

The issue at this juncture is whether the United States and its allies are cognizant of the danger their precipitous actions in authorizing Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil have caused.

The answer, unfortunately, appears to be “probably not.”

Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan

Exhibit A in this regard are comments made by Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, the Director of Plans and Policy at the J5 (Strategy, Plans and Policy) for US Strategic Command, the unified combatant command responsible for deterring strategic attack (i.e., nuclear war) through a safe, secure, effective, and credible global combat capability and, when directed, to be ready to prevail in conflict. On November 20, Admiral Buchanan was the keynote speaker at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues conference in Washington, DC, where he drew upon his experience as the person responsible for turning presidential guidance into preparing and executing the nuclear war plans of the United States.

The host of the event drew upon Admiral Buchanan’s résumé when introducing him to the crowd, a tact which, on the surface, projected a sense of confidence in the nuclear warfighting establishment of the United States. The host also noted that it was fortuitous that Admiral Thomas would be speaking a day after Russia announced its new nuclear doctrine.

But when Admiral Buchanan began talking, such perceptions were quickly swept away by the reality that those responsible for the planning and implementation of America’s nuclear war doctrine were utterly clueless about what it is they are being called upon to do.

When speaking about America’s plans for nuclear war, Admiral Buchanan stated that “our plans are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to, and we are in a study of sufficiency,” noting that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.” He went on to articulate that this study “is underway now and will work well into the next administration, and we look forward to continuing that work and articulating how the future program could help provide the President additional options should he need them.”

In short, America’s nuclear war plans are nonsensical, which is apt, given the nonsensical reality of nuclear war.

Admiral Buchanan’s remarks are shaped by his world view which, in the case of Russia, is influenced by a NATO-centric interpretation of Russian actions and intent that is divorced from reality. “President Putin,” Admiral Buchanan declared, “has demonstrated a growing willingness to employ nuclear rhetoric to coerce the United States and our NATO allies to accept his attempt to change borders and rewrite history. This week, notwithstanding, was another one of those efforts.”

Putin, Buchanan continued, “has validated and updated his doctrine such that Russia has revised it to include the provision that nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear states would be considered if the state that supported it was supported by a nuclear state. This has serious implications for Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Left unsaid was the fact that the current crisis over Ukraine is linked to a NATO strategy that sought to expand NATO’s boundaries up to the border of Russia despite assurances having been made that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Likewise, Buchanan was mute on the stated objective of the administration of President Biden to use the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war designed to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.

Seen in this light, Russia’s nuclear doctrine goes from being a tool of intimidation, as articulated by Admiral Buchanan, to a tool of deterrence—mirroring the stated intent of America’s nuclear posture, but with much more clarity and purpose.

Admiral Buchanan did couch his comments by declaring from the start that, when it comes to nuclear war, “there is no winning here. Nobody wins. You know, the US is signed up to that language. Nuclear war cannot be won, must never be fought, et cetera.”

When asked about the concept of “winning” a nuclear war, Buchanan replied that “it’s certainly complex, because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that’s a place we’d like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don’t want to have an exchange, right?”

Right.

It would have been best if he had just stopped here. But Admiral Buchanan continued.

“I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it’s terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we're largely viewed as the world leader. And do we lead the world in an area where we’ve considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we’d have to have sufficient capability. We’d have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn’t expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.”

Two things emerge from this statement. First is the notion that the United States believes it can fight and win a nuclear “exchange” with Russia.

Second is the idea that the United States can win a nuclear war with Russia while retaining enough strategic nuclear capacity to deter the rest of the world from engaging in a nuclear war after the nuclear war with Russia is done.

To “win” a nuclear war with Russia implies the United States has a war-winning plan.

Admiral Buchanan is the person in charge of preparing these plans. He has stated that these plans “are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to,” but this clearly is not the case—the United States has failed to deter Russia from issuing a new nuclear war doctrine and from employing in combat for the first time in history a strategic nuclear capable ballistic missile.

His plans have failed.

And he admits that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.”

Meaning we have no adequate plan for the future.

But we do have a plan.

One that is intended to produce a “victory” in a nuclear war Buchanan admits cannot be won and should never be fought.

One that will allow the United States to retain sufficient nuclear weapons in its arsenal to continue to “be a world leader” by sustaining its doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

A doctrine which, if the United States ever does engage in a “nuclear exchange” with Russia, would have failed.

There is only one scenario in which the United States could imagine a nuclear “exchange” with Russia which allows it to retain a meaningful nuclear weapons arsenal capable of continued deterrence.

And that scenario involves a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces designed to eliminate most of Russia’s nuclear weapons.

Such an attack can only be carried out by the Trident missiles carried aboard the Ohio-class submarines of the United States Navy.

Hold that thought.

Russia is on record as saying that the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles by Ukraine on targets inside Russia is enough to trigger the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation under its new nuclear doctrine.

At the time of this writing, the United States and Great Britain are in discussions with Ukraine about the possibility of authorizing new attacks on Russia using the ATACMS and Storm Shadow.

France just authorized Ukraine to use the French-made SCALP missile (a cousin to the Storm Shadow) against targets inside Russia.

And there are reports that the United States Navy has just announced that it is increasing the operational readiness status of its deployed Ohio-class submarines.

It is high time for everyone, from every walk of life, to understand the path we are currently on. Left unchecked, events are propelling us down a highway to hell that leads to only one destination—a nuclear Armageddon that everyone agrees can’t be won, and yet the United States is, at this very moment, preparing to “win.”

A nuclear “exchange” with Russia, even if the United States were able to execute a surprise preemptive nuclear strike, would result in the destruction of dozens of American cities and the deaths of more than a hundred million Americans.

And this is if we “win.”

And we know that we can’t “win” a nuclear war.

And yet we are actively preparing to fight one.

This insanity must stop.

Now.

The United States just held an election where the winning candidate, President-elect Donald Trump, campaigned on a platform which sought to end the war in Ukraine and avoid a nuclear war with Russia.

And yet the administration of President Joe Biden has embarked on a policy direction which seeks to expand the conflict in Ukraine and is bringing the United States to the very brink of a nuclear war with Russia.

This is a direct affront to the notion of American democracy.

By ignoring the stated will of the people of the United States as manifested through their votes in an election where the very issue of war and peace were front and center in the campaign, is an affront to democracy.

We the people of the United States must not allow this insane rush to war to continue.

We must put the Biden administration on notice that we are opposed to any expansion of the conflict in Ukraine which brings with it the possibility of escalation that leads to a nuclear war with Russia.

And we must implore the incoming Trump administration to speak out in opposition to this mad rush toward nuclear annihilation by restating publicly its position of the war in Ukraine and nuclear war with Russia—that the war must end now, and that there can be no nuclear war with Russia triggered by the war in Ukraine.

We need to say “no” to nuclear war.

I am working with other like-minded people to hold a rally in Washington, DC on the weekend of December 7-8 to say no to nuclear war.

I am encouraging American[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
s from all walks of life, all political persuasions, all social classes, to join and lend their voices to this cause.

Watch this space for more information about this rally.

All our lives depend on it.

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

I’ve written a number of times now about the unreality with which the West habitually approaches the continuing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost clinical dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and its actions. Yet as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces move forward everywhere, there is no real sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and every probability that it will learn nothing, and continue to live in its constructed alternative reality until it is dragged out forcibly.

True, some daring leading-edge thinkers in the West are starting to wonder about the need for negotiations, even if they are on the West’s terms. They have begun to accept that perhaps some of Ukraine’s 1991 territory will have to be considered lost, if only in the short term. Perhaps, they muse, there will be a Korean-style DMZ in place, guaranteed by neutral troops, until such time as Ukraine can be rebuilt to take the offensive again. And then they look at the map of Russian advances, and they look at the size and power of the two armies, and they look at the size and readiness of NATO forces and they fall into despair.

But actually, no: scrub that last sentence. They don’t look, and if they did, they wouldn’t really be able to understand what they were seeing anyway. The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes real life factors. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. Why that is so, and what its consequences are, is the subject of first part of this essay, and then because these subjects are inherently complex, I go on to set out how to understand them as straightforwardly as possible.

We’ll start with some practical considerations of political sociology and psychology. The first is that politics is the classic example of the Sunk Costs phenomenon in action. The longer you continue with a course of action, no matter how stupid, the less willing you are to change it. Changing it will be interpreted as acknowledging error, and acknowledging error is the first stage in losing power. In this case the old defence (“personally I always had doubts…”) is just not going to wash, give the gratuitously psychopathic terms in which western leaders have expressed themselves about Russia.

The second is the absence of any articulated alternative. (“So, Prime Minister, what do you think we should do instead then?) The very fact of not understanding the dynamics of a crisis means that you are helpless to propose a sensible solution to it. It’s better to stay with a sinking ship in the hope of rescue than to jump blindly into the water. Maybe a miracle will happen.

The third is to do with group dynamics, in this case the dynamics of nations. In a situation of fear and uncertainty like the present, solidarity comes to be seen as an end in itself, and nobody wants to be accused of “weakening the West” or “strengthening Russia.” If you have to be wrong, best be wrong in the company of as many others as possible. There are enormous disincentives to being the first to suggest that maybe things are looking pretty bleak, and in any event what are you going to propose instead? The chances of thirty-odd nations being able to agree on a different approach to the present one are effectively zero, not helped by the fact that the United States, which might otherwise give a lead, is politically paralysed until perhaps the spring of next year.

The fourth is to do with isolation and groupthink. Everybody in your own government, everybody you speak to in other governments, every journalist and pundit that you come across says the same thing: Putin can’t win, Russia is taking massive casualties, we must rebuild Ukraine, Putin is scared of NATO blah blah. Everywhere you turn, you get the same messages, and your staff write the same messages for you to deliver to others. How could you not wind up assuming all this is true?

These are what we might call Permanently Operating Factors in politics, common to any crisis. But there are also a number of special factors operating in this particular crisis which seem obvious to me, but which I haven’t seen much discussion of. So let’s look at a few.

To begin with, the current generation of western politicians is especially incapable of understanding and managing high-level crises of any kind. The modern western political class—the Party as I call it—resembles more and more the ruling party in a one-party state. That is to say, the skills that lead to success are those of advancement in the Party apparatus itself: climbing the greasy pole and backstabbing rivals. Even managing a purely national crisis—as we saw during Brexit, or as we are seeing now in France and Germany—is actually beyond their abilities, except perhaps the ability to turn a crisis to their own personal political advantage. The result is that they are utterly overwhelmed by the Ukraine crisis, which is of a scale and a type that occurs perhaps once every couple of generations. The fact that it’s also a multilateral crisis means that it ideally requires advanced skills of political management just to ensure that things don’t fall apart, and they don’t even have those. In turn, the ever-increasing reliance on “advisers” linked to the personal fortunes of the politician concerned means both that professional advice is increasingly excluded, and also that professional advisers are often selected and promoted because they are willing to give the advice that politicians want.

So far, so generic. But we are also confronted here with a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites are completely ignorant of how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. During the Cold War, governments were forced to confront security issues regularly: often, they were also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West glared at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation never very far away. None of that is true now. NATO summits still happen of course, but until recently they have been concerned with peacekeeping deployments, counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new members and partnership initiatives. No fundamental security decisions of any kind have been needed in the political lifetime of any current head of a NATO (or EU) country, until now.

This is the more unfortunate because a security crisis is a highly complex thing, and involves a whole series of levels from the political down to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is just about impossible to manage multilaterally: the only remotely comparable example I can think off is the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when a much smaller NATO effectively stopped working after the first week, and came quite close to breaking down completely.

I’ve pointed out before that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, and no real operational plan. It just has a series of ad hoc initiatives, glued together by vague aspirations unrelated to real life, and by the hope that something will turn up. In turn, this is because no individual NATO nation is in a better state: our current western political leadership has never had to develop these skills. But it’s actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed these skills, they cannot actually understand what the Russians are doing and how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of Chess or Go trying to work out who is winning.

Now, western leaders are not themselves expected to be military experts. It’s common to sneer at Defence Ministers with no military background, but this is to misunderstand how defence works in a democracy, and for that matter how a democracy itself works. Let me put on my lecturer’s hat for a moment, and explain that.

Governments have policies at different levels. One of those policies will be a national security policy, which in turn is the basis for more detailed policies in subordinate areas: in this case, defence. Conventionally, these policies are managed by Ministries, headed by political figures or appointees, who have advisers, and in most cases operational organisations to turn policy into actual activity on the ground. In the case of the Education Ministry, the operational units are schools and universities. In the case of the Defence Ministry, they are the armed forces and the specialist defence establishments. You would no more expect a defence minister to be a former soldier than you would an education minister to be a former teacher or, for that matter, a transport minister to be a former train driver. The responsibility of a Minister is to make and apply policy within the larger government strategic framework, and to manage the budget and programme of their area.

So it’s the responsibility of the political leadership—normally including the head of state or government—to say what the strategic purpose of any military operation actually is, and to set out  a situation (the “end-state”) where this purpose will have been realised. If this is not done, military planning and operations are pointless, no matter how good your forces and how destructive your weaponry is, because you won’t actually know what you are trying to do, and so you won’t’ be able to tell whether you’ve done it. This, not lack of military knowledge, is the fundamental problem of western political leaderships today. Indeed, it would be better to call them “managerships,” because they have no aspiration to lead. They are just MBA-trained fiddlers and bodgers, for who the concept of a strategic goal in the true sense of the term is basically meaningless. Instead of actual strategic objectives, they have slogans and fantasy outcomes. It is, after all, obvious that the strategic objectives government sets have to be actually realisable, or there is no point in pursuing them. They must also be clear enough that they can be passed to the military for the military to make an operational plan to deliver the “end-state.” And in addition, the political leadership has to set out constraints and requirements within which the military have to work. Because western leaders and their advisers do not know how to do this, they cannot understand what the Russians are doing, either.

After that, of course, you need a politico-military layer that is capable of doing operational planning, and so answering a series of questions like: what military outcomes will deliver the political end-state? how do we get there? what forces will we need? how should they be structured and equipped? how do we cope with political imperatives and limitations? Whilst these questions are generic, and it can be argued that they apply even to peacekeeping operations, they obviously apply with more and more force as operations become larger and more demanding.

And this is the essential problem. The war in Ukraine involves forces which are an order of magnitude larger than those sent on operations by any western nation since 1945. Indeed, it can be argued that the only time that forces of comparable size have been deployed in Europe is between 1915 and 1918, and again in 1944-45. European armies certainly studied these campaigns at one time, but with the passing of time they became historical examples, not things to learn applicable lessons from. And the planning from about 1950 to 1990 was for a short, defensive war which would probably go nuclear. It’s questionable whether there is actually anything at all in recent western military history that would help today’s commanders really understand what they are seeing.

Nor do they have the recent professional experience. It’s become fashionable also to sneer at western military commanders, but in many ways that’s unfair. In peacetime, the role of senior military leaders is only partially to prepare for war. There are also a thousand other issues to do with budgets, programmes, personnel questions, contracts, the future size and shape of the military, and many others. Senior military figures need of be capable of understanding all these issues and dealing with political leaders, diplomats, civil servants and their opposite numbers in other governments, as well as with parliament and the media. It is obvious that in peacetime you are not going to select a Chief of the Army just for putative war-fighting skills, if that person is an abrasive individual who is always arguing with the Minister.

This is why it is almost universally the case that military commanders are replaced wholesale at the start of a war. Some commanders may turn out to be natural war-fighters and others will not. Widespread personnel changes are therefore common because the task is very different: we have seen this with the Russian Army since 2022. Likewise, a peacetime army as a whole takes time to adjust to being a war-fighting one. The problem western experts have is that they are watching this process from a distance, without going through it themselves. Armies that still only know peacetime modes of operation are trying to understand the activities of armies that have completely transitioned to war-fighting.

Finally, western military specialists are limited by their own experiences. Imagine you are the Chief of Operations in a medium-sized western country. You joined the military in the 1990s, when the last senior officers who had known the Cold War were retiring. Your actual experience has been on peacekeeping operations and a couple of deployments in Afghanistan. The largest unit you have ever commanded on operations is a Battalion (say 5-600 personnel) and the last time you actually came under fire, you were a Company commander. How can you be reasonably expected to grasp the mechanics and complexities of manoeuvring armies hundreds of thousands strong, along lines of contact hundreds of kilometres long, and understand what the commanders involved are doing, and how they think? You will unconsciously focus on the things you can understand, at the scale that you can understand them. You will inevitably concentrate on the detail—some tanks destroyed here, a new variant of artillery deployed there—rather than the big picture.

All this seems to me to explain several things, including the curiously episodic nature of Ukrainian initiatives. Some of these were clearly suggested by the West, others by a political class in Ukraine which is highly westernised and thinks in western terms. (Ironically, the Army is probably more realistic and more able to grasp the wider picture.) But there has been very little sense of any long-term strategy, or even thinking. Take the attacks on the bridge to Crimea, for example. What were they supposed to achieve exactly? Now replies like “sending a message to Putin” or “complicating Russian logistics” or “improving morale at home” are not allowed. What I would want to know is, what is expected to follow, in concrete terms?  What are the tangible results of this “message” supposed to be? Can you guarantee that it will be understood? Have you gamed out possible Russian reactions and what will you do then? Supposing, again, that you complicate Russian logistics? What will be the direct result, and how easy will it be for the Russians to get round the problem. (Answer, fairly.)

Western political and military leaders have no answer to these questions, because they have no strategy, and do not really understand what a strategy is. What they have is a consistent habit of coming up with clever, publicity-generating ideas that are disconnected from each other, but all sound good at the time. Broadly, they reflect the following “logic.”

• do something that humiliates Russia.

• miracle happens.

• change of government in Moscow and end of war.

And I’m not exaggerating. This is all the “strategic planning” that the West is capable of, and all it ever has been capable of. I’ve stressed before the necessity of separating aspirations from strategy. For a good twenty years, important constituent parts of western governments have had the aspiration of removing Putin from power, and somehow creating a “pro-western” government in Moscow. From time to time they have come up with disconnected initiatives—sanctions, for example—which they believed might move events in that direction. But mostly it’s just hope, manured with the belief that no “anti-western” leader can ever be representative of his or her people, and so will not last very long anyway. But this approach ignores the most fundamental issues of strategy: what is the clearly-defined end-state you are seeking, how precisely will you achieve it and is it, in fact, achievable? Because if you can’t answer those questions, then any amount of “strategic” planning is pointless. As regards the last question, any military expert will tell you that although the military can create the conditions for political developments to take place, they can’t make them happen. The actual relationship between the two is very complex. Recall that in 1918, the German Army, badly hurt by the Allies’ attrition strategy, was in full retreat but still on Allied soil, and that the Allied armies advancing from the Balkans were still well outside German territory. What ended the War earlier than expected was a nervous breakdown in the German High Command.

And the West cannot answer those questions. The end-state is vaguely defined as “Putin gone,” the mechanism is “pressure” of an ill-defined nature, and the idea that a “pro-western” government will emerge is just an article of faith. So even if a “strategy” could somehow be constructed from these fragments, it would stand no chance of working. Thus the essentially reactive nature of western actions. I’ve talked before about the Boyd Cycle, of Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. Whoever can go round this circle faster, and “get inside” the Boyd Cycle of the enemy, controls the development of the battle, or the crisis. This is essentially what the Russians (who understand such things) have been doing since the start of the crisis, well before 2022.

Conversely, the West, confusing vague aspirations with an actual strategy, has not understood what the Russians are trying to do, and has treated every Russian setback, or presumed setback, as a step on the road to victory without looking at the bigger picture. Take one simple example. From the beginning of the war, the Russian strategy was to bring about specified political changes in Ukraine by degrading and destroying Ukrainian forces, and so removing Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian political demands. Once the West became involved, this strategy, whilst the same overall, was nuanced to include the destruction of western-supplied equipment and, to a degree, western-trained units. (Though the latter without the former were not so much of a threat.) Two things followed from this.

The first was that the reduction of Ukrainian fighting capability on terms favourable to the Russians was independent of the larger ebb and flow of battle. Destroying stored equipment was if anything better than destroying that equipment in combat. Destroying stored ammunition was better than destroying it once it was deployed in units. Now generally, defenders in a military conflict have fewer casualties than attackers. If your objective is to destroy your enemy’s fighting power, especially if you know that it will be difficult and expensive for them to replace it, then it makes more sense to let the enemy attack you, where they will lose more resources than you. If you have a functioning defence industry and ample reserves of manpower and equipment, this is unarguably the best strategy, and was practised by the Russians in 2022-23. But the West seems incapable of understanding this, and massively over-interpreted Russian strategic withdrawals as crushing defeats which would soon “bring Putin down.”

The second is that, to the extent that Russia has territorial objectives, it is better to degrade Ukrainian forces to the point where they cannot defend territory and have to withdraw either preemptively or after a cursory defence, than it is to stage deliberate attacks to seize territory. The Russians have a whole series of technologies which enable them to attrit Ukrainian forcers from a position a long way behind the contact line. They can thus progressively destroy the Ukrainian ability to hold ground without needing to risk their own troops and equipment in direct attacks. Over the last few months, we have seen that this stage has effectively been reached, and that the Russians are advancing quite quickly in certain key areas. But the West, which is obsessed with the control of terrain as an index of success, cannot understand this, having forgotten how the War in the West ended in 1918, when Allied territorial gains were still quite modest.

To be fair (assuming that one wants to be fair), these issues are very complex: not more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational companies, but not any less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counter-intuitive concepts. The western Liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its search for instant gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning and careful implementation. In retaliation, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and war-mongering. When Liberalism was constrained by other religious or political forces all this was less obvious, but with the emancipation of Liberalism from all controls over the last generation, and its dominance of political and intellectual life, western societies have now pretty much lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. It is striking, indeed, that most western military personnel are still recruited from the more conservative and traditional elements of society where Liberalism has made less of an impact, and not from Liberal urban elites.

Since the nineteenth century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, the Liberal mind has oscillated between dislike and disdain for the military in normal times, and panicked demands for their use in periods of crisis, or when Liberal norms need to be enforced somewhere. The spread of the Liberal mindset to countries like France, which has historically been proud of its military, has produced a European political and media class largely unable to understand military issues. American Liberals, so far as I can see, themselves oscillate between fear of the military and endless citation of the warnings by Eisenhower’s speechwriter about the Military-Industrial Complex, and demands for the use of the military to enforce their norms. (Eisenhower’s remarks were, of course, a cliché of the time: there was nothing original in them.)

The result is a decision-taking and influencing class that has no real idea about strategy and conflict at all, and just repeats words and phrases it has heard somewhere, as magical incantations. One minute “F16s” (whatever they are precisely) will save the day, the next, “deep strikes” are going to bring Putin down.

So for example, it is impossible for a society brought up on just-in-time delivery and impulse purchases on Amazon to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the attrition war the Russians are fighting. If you look at a map and try to understand it (I know!) you can see the the Ukrainian forces are fighting at the end of very long supply lines, especially for western equipment and ammunition, whereas the Russians are only a few hundred kilometres, at most, from their borders. The fuel consumption of heavy armoured vehicles is measured in gallons per mile, and even if they can be delivered to the area of operations by train or transporter (which has its own problems) they consume frightening amounts of fuel, all of which has to be brought, dangerously and expensively, into the operational area. They also break down, require new tracks and new engines and an endless supply of ammunition, all of which has to be brought forward. So Leopard tanks are not just teleported into the battle area, and when they are damaged they have to be sent back to Poland for repairs. And just about every aspect of military operations requires electrical power: yes, even drone operations.

The Russians of course know this, and have been targeting power generation and distribution systems, bridges and railway junctions, ammunition and logistic storage sites and troop concentrations and training areas. But they are not capturing large amounts of territory with daring armoured thrusts, so the Ukrainians must be winning, mustn’t they? Yet tanks without fuel or ammunition, or whose engines have broken down, are useless, and once Ukrainian forces are operationally isolated from their supply lines it’s only a question of time before they lose their combat capability and have to surrender or make a run for it. This is what appears to be happening now around Kursk. And if you are fighting an attrition war, and your stocks and replenishment capabilities are greater than your enemy’s, you want your enemy to use up those stocks as quickly as possible. So why not send, for example, large numbers of cheap drones that can be replaced, to soak up large numbers of defensive missiles that can’t? But this is too much for most alleged western experts to wrap their neurones around.

Of course the logic applies both ways. It defies belief that anyone with a functioning brain-cell would ever have thought that the Russians planned to “occupy Ukraine,” let alone in a matter of days. Insofar as the idea had anything real behind it at all, it was a folk memory of the rapid advance of US forces to Baghdad in 2003, against no opposition and with complete air supremacy. A simple practical example: a NATO Mechanised Division (in the days when NATO had them), advancing against no opposition, would take up some 200km of road, and take several days just to organise, leave, arrive and deploy into combat formations. And that’s just one Division. The idea of doing this against a battle-hardened Army two to three times the size of the attacking force, and beating them in a few days at that, is beyond ridiculous. Again, look at the map. And while you are at it, think about the current hysterical cries that “Putin wants to invade NATO.” Everything I’ve said about the difficulty of NATO going Eastward applies to the Russians going Westwards, should they be insane enough to consider the idea.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Russians chose Kursk as a jumping-off point, then it’s about 2000 kilometres to Berlin, which is the first remotely plausible objective I can think of. (Oh, they would have to go to Poland to get there.) Just to give you an idea, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Group of Forces in Germany was about 350,000 strong, supplemented by recalled reservists in an emergency. They would have attacked NATO forces in Germany, but they were only the first echelon, and were expected to be wiped out. Two more echelons would therefore follow them. The total distance needing to be travelled was a couple of hundred kilometres. As far as we know, subduing and occupying Western Europe alone would have required perhaps a million men in combat units, never mind the western flanks and countries like Turkey. This was in the context of an existential struggle, probably involving nuclear weapons, which a victorious Russia would take a generation to recover from. We are a little way from that at the moment.

I think that what we are seeing, as well as culpable deliberate ignorance, is the beginning of a gnawing realisation that NATO is not strong but weak, that NATO equipment is mediocre, that talk of “escalation” is meaningless in the absence of something to escalate with, and that if the Russians felt so inclined they could do a lot of damage to the West. But even there, western pundits are stuck in narratives of armoured warfare and territorial conquest. The Russians don’t need to do that, of course. With their missile technology, which the West has consistently ignored and downplayed, they can make a mess of any city in the western world, and no western state is in a position to respond. Of course the Russians, who understand these things, realise that they don’t need to actually use these missiles: the psychological leverage they have from just possessing them will do quite nicely. Ironically, I think the Ukrainians do understand these things, better than their supposed NATO mentors. Their Soviet heritage and the large Army they retained gave them an awareness of how large-scale operations are conducted at the political and strategic levels even if, since then, they have been got at by NATO

The French historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch, who fought in the Battle of France in 1940, wrote a book about it, only published posthumously, after the war, called L’Étrange défaite, or The Strange Defeat, in which he tried to explain what had happened. His central conclusion was that the failure was intellectual, organisational and political: the Germans employed a more modern style of war that the French were not expecting and could not cope with. Time has nuanced that conclusion: the German tactics were certainly innovative, involving fast-moving, deep penetration armoured units and close cooperation with aircraft, but they were also extremely risky and required a lot of luck to pull off successfully. But Bloch was right that the Germans had developed a style of warfare, dictated by the need to avoid long wars, to which there was no counter at the time, and which posed unexpected and, for a period insoluble, problems for the defender.

There’s something about the dazed incomprehension of the French political and military class and the people themselves, in the summer of 1940 that seems very relevant today. The defeat of the West—not yet even recognised as such—is at once intellectual, organisational and political. The ruling classes of the West seem to have no idea at all what has happened to them and why, nor what is likely to follow.

Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: US Next President Faces IMPOSSIBLE ODDS: Middle East & Ukraine
Dialogue Works • 1:19:25 •

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is Thursday, October 31st, and we’re having Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff with us to talk about the legacy of the Biden administration for the next president of the United States. And let’s start with Richard. How do you find right now [the] two important conflicts, one in Ukraine and the other one in the Middle East? We know that the next president of the United States should confront these two difficulties. And on the other hand, we’re going to talk about tariffs as well. But when it comes to these two conflicts, what’s your take on that?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think like a number of what I would think of as the most important issues facing this country, the two candidates have little or nothing to say. So, as far as I can tell, there is a slight difference in the sense that there is speculation that Mr. Trump is not so eager to be persistent about Ukraine, and rather more eager to be persistent about Israel and bashing China.

On the other hand, the Democrats seem to think that their success lies in doing what the Republicans do, just not so quickly, not so harshly, but otherwise to take their cue. Therefore, I don’t think it’s going to make all that much difference on these two issues. What exactly happens when you add the social forces that are behind all of this, they will be more important in shaping what the president, whoever it is, does, than anything they say, in general, and anything they say during a campaign, in particular, when, kind of, they say whatever their polls suggest, will get them more votes.

So this is like so much about our elections. This is a theater. I like to call it the theater of democracy, because it’s a substitute for the real thing, which they do not want. Let me put this another way. In my view, what we are experiencing, what we are living through, the three of us plus everybody else on this planet, is the decline of the American Empire. And it takes a variety of forms, foreign and domestic, but I think in the end, the Ukraine War is a kind of gesture, a kind of shadow boxing, in which the United States is trying to convince itself, its allies and as much of the world as possible that it’s the global dominant power that it used to be.

And unfortunately, it is demonstrating exactly the opposite, although they don’t want to face it yet. They can’t allow it to be discussed. And so the two candidates say nothing like that; do not admit it, do not deal with it, do not suggest ways that the United States can rationally deal with the decline of its own empire. They are engaged in a combination of denial and desperate pretense.

And basically, I think that’s largely what’s going on in Israel as well. Israel is trying to hold on to an impossible situation, and the only country that gives it any significant support is the United States, because it has a vague notion that Israel will be its local leader in that part of the world, the Middle East, and is hoping to hold on to the fantasy that that’s actually possible. And it isn’t, in my judgment. I think that’s hopeless. But the desperation is causing a lot of people to die, and having the effect of mobilizing the alliances of Russia and China, of both of them and India, and of BRICS as a challenge to the West. It is accelerating what it was designed to stop. And they don’t see that either, so it’s full-speed ahead doing all of these things.

Now, I could be wrong, of course, but if you ask how I see all of this, that’s the framework within which I see it. You have two political parties who agree on all of the most important things: that Capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread; that there is no alternative that needs to be discussed; there is no option; and that the maintenance of Capitalism equals the celebration of Freedom and Democracy; and that everything the United States does in the world, it does to expand the realm of Freedom and Democracy against the evil alternatives that beset this Project.

They used to be called Socialism and Communism, and now they’re called Authoritarianism, but it’s the same game. It’s even got the same players that barely changed their uniforms, so we can all recognize who you mean. And the hypocrisy of it all is right on display, as it always was, and it’s overwhelmed by propaganda, and the two political parties do their part by being utterly silent on all of it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think Richard and I have been making this point through all of your shows, and I think that a lot of the American voters are in agreement. Certainly they’re in agreement that both presidential candidates are just front men for the deep state, or whatever you want to call it, Wall Street, and their financial backers. And the result of people finally catching on is that what’s coming up next Tuesday is a typical American election: Who are you going to vote against? The question is always the same: Who’s worst? And all that the Harris lady can say is, well, I’m not Trump. And Trump can say, well, I’m not Harris. And the Trump haters are going to vote Democratic, and voters who are disgusted with Biden and Harris are going to vote for Trump. But voters against Biden – two big wars – are going to try to vote for Jill Stein. And I’m sure when it’s all over, they’re going to find the margin of Trump’s victory over Harris (certainly in the swing states) is going to be less than the large, the Jill Stein/third party vote. And the Democrats are going to say, “Oh, we would have won if it wouldn’t have been a third party.” That’s the one thing we can never have in the United States. We have to make it even harder for there to be any real choice of a third party in the United States. There must be no alternative.

And the issue is all going to be personified – that Richard just described as the underlying forces. I think the Democrats are going to lose because Harris has come out as the war party candidate. And I guess you could say the election is going to be which war party, which war do you think is more important?

Harris is defending Ukraine, Trump is defending Israel, but basically the Democrats are the war party. And I think that’s what’s going to defeat her in Michigan, in Minnesota, and other key states, her war party stance. Yesterday in the magazine, The National Interest, General Hodges, (one of the big generals in the U.S.) and another national security general, gave a plea to American voters: You must vote for Kamala Harris, because otherwise Russia is going to march right through to recapture East Germany on its way to the Atlantic. We must stop Russia. This election is over… Wanna stop Russia, or not?

Whereas for Trump, he’s saying this election is over… You want to stop Chinese economic domination of the U.S. economy, or not?

In other words, pick your enemy. It’s the enemy that is defining the candidate because neither candidate has anything positive to offer the people. So all you can do is play on everybody’s resentment against the economy, and try to channel that resentment toward the opposite party. So it’s a purely negative kind of election. There’s no longer an election over what kind of parties you do want.

And I think as Jill Stein said on your show a few months ago, Nima, that she agrees with what Harris is saying, and what the left wing of the Democratic Party, such as AOC, is saying. A vote for Jill Stein, against the war, is a vote for Donald Trump.

And we’re okay with that because I don’t think there can really be any progress beyond the dilemma that Richard is talking about, as long as the Democrats are really in power to sort of pretend to be the alternative to the Republicans.

And I think that if this election ends the way I expect it to, and the Democrats will lose not only the Presidency, but the Congress and the Senate as well, that will mean that it’s not possible for them to win an election again without somehow moving away from their right-wing basis.

There have been some polls that the newspapers don’t talk about, and that is that Bernie Sanders was the most popular politician within the Democratic Party. Suppose that there would have been presidential primaries, like every other party has had for the last hundred years. Suppose people had earlier said, you know, Biden is really senile, we can’t let him run again. We’ve got to let the voters choose who an alternative will be. Harris could not have won a single state, just like in 2016. Bernie Sanders would have won. The Democrats said, we know that’s going to happen. We would rather lose with Harris than win with Bernie. Just as in 2016, they would rather lose with Hillary than win with Bernie. So that shows the rottenness of the choice that’s put before the American people. Because the election is not going to be about the problems of American militarism and the empire and the domination of Wall Street that Richard and I’ve been talking about on your show for the last few months.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Do you want to add something, Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, I want to throw an idea out for you and for Michael to play with. And I’ll be blunt, so I won’t be able to develop the nuances of this. A very short time ago the head of Apple, Mr. Cook, went on a trip to China. He’s made many trips to China but more than one this year, but he recently made one. And it was crystal clear by the very warm reception he got, and by his own very enthusiastic, positive commentary on China, that – and here comes the jump – that there are sections of America’s most important, biggest businesses that do not want a war with China. They do not want this conflict. They have become the giant successes they have been because of what China enabled them to do. They know it. They don’t want to lose that. There is nothing to substitute for what they get out of China which, to be blunt, is cheap labor and the biggest expanding market on earth. To give those up is to risk their entire business operation.

Okay, now at some point – especially were Mr. Trump to win – these people are going to possibly begin to think like Michael just spoke. They’re going to say, These two parties are a disaster. They are involving us in one dead-end war, or conflict, after another. And while it may be good for the Military Industrial Complex, we are after all a bigger section of this economy than they are: we, the high tech industries; we, all the rest of the economy, other than the Military Industrial Complex.

At which point an immense conflict breaks out in the ranks of capitalists: Those who want to cut a deal with China and the BRICS work out how we live and let live with one another on this planet; who don’t want war and who don’t want nuclear war and who don’t want Jake Sullivan-type people playing around that problem – versus the Military Industrial Complex and those who are won over by them.

It will be a split, bitter conflict over which way American foreign policy goes. It will be decided in Congress. And so each of those two wings will begin to appeal to the public for mass support to their two different programs: go the way we are, sabre-rattling down the road, or go in the alternative direction: work out a deal with Russia, China, the Arab world, and so on – at the expense of the West, including Israel, Western Europe, and so on, no question.

Do we do that, or do we – and pardon my humor – have a capitalist – peace movement alliance which actually wins? Why? Because the peace movement can be the most popular base, and that wing of the capitalists will fund the creation of that base into a voting majority. If I’m right, that’s the next step of American political life which will burst on the scene because of the crazy things that are going to happen next in Ukraine and in the Middle East. No matter who wins, that will force the thing I’ve just described – which will either happen, or it won’t. But it is a possible scenario that has come into my mind, as I watch the lunacy.

And just one last thing. I know you mentioned we might discuss it. But if Mr. Trump has to carry through the notion of putting tariffs on everything (which is what he said he is going to do), with the uptick in inflation… (I don’t know if you saw it in today’s data, the inflation is back) but that’s nothing compared to what would happen if you actually did that tariff-stupidity.

And I also begin to think that the United States is beginning to recognize what somebody ought to call the Hegelian Moment of American Politics. And here it is: The culmination of the Cold War and the years since, that aimed to isolate Socialism, isolate Russia, isolate China, is reaching its peak, which takes the form of the isolation of the United States.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, if you isolate everybody else, and you end up fighting them altogether, and you’re isolated – that’s exactly right. So this is a new kind of isolationism. In the past the isolationists were always against the war. Today, you’re saying…

RICHARD WOLFF: the opposite…

MICHAEL HUDSON: …the isolationists have led the war.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, because the war is a self-delusional gesture. It’s the person who is losing the battle who, well, I’ll give you an example from the Ukrainian war. The Ukrainians are losing, and they take their best troops and invade an unimportant corner of Russia. I mean, that’s pure symbolic gesture. That can’t work, and it is now coming to its pathetic end, as anybody who paid attention would have presumed it would. That’s an act of desperation, as would be sending missiles into the heart of Russia – which Mr Zelensky wants to do. He’s desperate, which I understand – that he’s desperate. And these are the behaviors of a desperate character, but they’re not to be taken seriously on their face value. He calls it a Victory Plan. That’s hysterical! A what?! You have no plans at all, let alone… your plan is how to get out of that country in time, when the troops arrive. That’s the only plan left for you.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, do you want to add something?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, why on earth would Zelensky have invaded the Khursk area. The answer is, it’s all about the narrative. He didn’t invade to win the war. He invaded because he thought that that would convince – somehow – the egotistical, narcissistic American cold warriors that this enables a narrative to be said: Ukraine has fought back. Russia invaded us. We’re going to invade it. There’d better be a peace, and if there is a peace, there’ll have to be a ceasefire and Russia cannot continue to mop up, and continue the plan that Putin has announced of de-nazifying Ukraine and protecting itself against NATO.

So it’s the fight over the narrative and nobody… on this show, Richard and I naturally are saying, what is in the capitalist interest? What is in America’s interest? What is in foreign countries’ interest? And there are people who are not interested in America’s interest. They’re interested in their own interests. And to distract people’s attention from the American national interest – if there is an American election – they have to have a different narrative, a narrative in which they’re protecting the weak Democratic Ukrainians against the Authoritarian Russian invaders who are not going to stop at Ukraine, but are just going to continue to march West over the rest of Europe.

Somehow there’s a belief of the American cold warriors that they can create a narrative that will convince people to somehow find the fight between Good and Evil – as seen depicted by the CIA and the American military – more important and certainly confuse people [about] what the real world’s fight between Good and Evil, between Civilization and Barbarism, is. And I think the ideas that Richard and I have said on your show is that the new force of Civilization that is taking place – in isolation from the West – is the global majority in the BRICS. And Barbarism is the attack on the BRICS – the U.S.-NATO attacks – trying to preserve this defunct American power that is only predatory, not productive; only extractive, not productive, not leaving living standards; only polarizing, not democratizing. So I think that this is the military wars that are going on: wars between two narratives, and what is good and what is evil, what is black and what is white.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard and Michael, when it comes to these two conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine, we want to see what’s the difference between the Democratic Party and Republican Party. Donald Trump, in his recent interviews, he was just talking, I’m going to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine in 24 hours, as he put it out. And in the Middle East, he said, I’m not interested in a direct conflict, in a direct war with Iran. J.D. Vance, in his latest interview, he mentioned the same thing, that Israelis are trying to drag us into a war with Iran, but we are not interested in going to war with Iran.

This is one side of the story. On the other hand, Donald Trump is talking about Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, these people are going to be in his administration, if he wins. Here is what Mike Pompeo said on Fox News, specifically about the conflict in Ukraine. He says, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

[NEWS CLIP BEGINS]

MIKE POMPEO: I don’t know what he’s talking about. I do know that we were able to deter Vladimir Putin from doing precisely what he did, invade Europe. He’s killed innocent Ukrainian civilians. That didn’t happen on our watch. Putin takes a fifth of Ukraine under President Obama – not an inch while I was Secretary of State – and then goes at it again, as soon as we leave. So I’m convinced we could have convinced Vladimir Putin not to have done this. Putting it back in the box is going to require real American seriousness, real American leadership, the preparedness to help the Ukrainians do the things that they need to do…

[NEWS CLIP ENDS]

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, put him back in the box. It seems that they can do whatever they just desire to do. Richard, jump in, please.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, you know, this has deep roots in the United States. Very deep roots. Going back to our start as a colony, the Puritans, this way of thinking: that the world is to be captured by a great struggle between Good and Evil. This obliterates all the complicated relationships that make things happen. It reduces it. And they know that. They know that. But we don’t, we don’t tell our people what the issues are. We don’t explain. We have no history of it. We barely do it in the university with the tiny minority of people that even bother to go to the university, and the tiny minority of them who actually read and listen to what goes on. I spent my life in the university. I did the best I could, but I’m not crazy. I know what my students did and didn’t do.

And I learned what holds them back from learning. I’ll give you an example. There’s this need to demonize the enemy. Everything is about Mr. Putin. I got news for you. Like any other leader, he is very much shaped by the situation he’s in. He’s not some free actor, somebody like a devil, in the notion of God versus the Devil, somebody who has no constraints. Obviously, God, if he is all-powerful, should have gotten rid of the Devil. But he couldn’t. I guess something happened that made the Devil survive the God. And we know the stories. We can learn them when we’re little. And so we have these great actors who are acting out their intrinsic social role, but there’s no analysis of why they do what they do. So, everybody is free to define the devilishness.

So, for Mr. Pompeo – he’s not original in this, by the way, he’s not original in anything else either – he has picked up the story that Mr. Putin wants to march to the ocean. That’s right! Instead of Ukraine, he’d like to have a rebellion of the French and the British and the Germans and the Italians and the Scandinavians, altogether! He can try to, he can barely control Ukraine. What a joke that he could control the others, who are better armed, better equipped than the Ukrainians ever were! I mean, this is so silly that it works, and it works because it touches the good and the bad, the good and the bad. And when people reason like that, it never stops. That’s why Mr. Pompeo can then seamlessly go from the Bad Putin and the Good Us, to the Bad Us and the Good Us: the Bad Democrats and the Good Republicans. (We’re God. The Democrats are Junior Devil. That’s why they made a deal with the Senior Devil and…) This is childish! This is reading the comic book instead of reading the book about which the comic book was written. This is a childish substitute for real politics.

That’s why clowns like Pompeo… and Nikki Haley?? I mean, please, help us! There’s nothing there. Nothing. There’s a thing, you’re in the air… which way is the political wind blowing among the mass media… and takes her cue. And I don’t mean to pick on her. She’s no worse, or no better, than Mr. Pompeo. This is a game inside the United States: You paint your enemy as the Devil, for MAGA supporters…I don’t know… Kamala Harris, or the others, they’re devils. They talk like that! They’re at least honest enough. They talk like that.

And for the Democrats, you hear that Mr. Trump and all of his people are immense dangers to Democracy. Look at the language. That’s why you don’t hear much about this or that program. What’s the point? You can’t have an anti-capitalist program because then the media will destroy you in ten minutes. So you fasten on other issues where you’re allowed to say something, like abortion, or gun control, or immigration. And you pick that, and then what do you do? You picture your enemy as a devil. So the people who don’t agree with you on immigration are evil people abetting the invasion of the… that’s the way they talk!

But listen. As with any therapy, what we’re doing is we’re trying to understand what’s behind the language. There’s no point in dismissing the language. The language is our clue. The clue here is that you allowed yourself – and you had the luxury in the United States, by the very distance from Europe in the beginning, by the importance of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean separating you – to cultivate a notion that you really are in God’s Chosen Country. That’s part of why there’s a vibration with Israel. They too think they’re God’s Chosen People and they’re in the Chosen Country, and the Chosen Book – the Bible – said it was their real estate, not all other people’s real [estate]… What is going on here?

And so you’ve had this way of thinking, and now the chickens are coming home to roost because this way of thinking – We are the Exception, you know, American Exceptionalism, God created us – our politicians have to be talking to God all the time. Politicians in European countries don’t do that. If they stood up and said, I’m talking to God, there’d be a paddy wagon come to pick them up and take them to the sanatorium! Nobody wants to hear this and these are countries that have the same Christian religions that you have here. But you can’t do it here because everything is infused, and now that the dénouement – the chickens coming home to roost – you’re killing yourself, you’re destroying yourself, by turning that language onto one another.

And now we are a country split, in which each side thinks it’s God versus the Devil. And they’re going to destroy each other. The Soviet Union didn’t disappear because another country overwhelmed it. The Soviet Union imploded. That should worry people as the politics of America becomes unlivable. Are we headed down that way? That’s a conversation we ought to have, but of course, we won’t. Each side will see the Devil in the other – not in the relationships – because if you understood that this is a language game, you’d have to ask the question, why are we playing the game? But the people that we’re talking about (Harris, Trump and all the others), they are so into that game, they can’t see it as a game.

The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein understood, and wrote reams of material, about the games: “Language is a game.” And that metaphor is really helpful because you can then, maybe, take a step back and ask yourself, why are these language games so powerful? Or, to use Michael’s language, why is this narrative the one that’s embraced by people? That’s the first step to getting out of this hole, is to understand that you’re in a hole. Just like going to Alcoholics Anonymous, they require you to say, “I’m an alcoholic.” You have to begin recognizing where you are if you’re ever going to get out of there.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What does it mean to be a devil? It really means the Other. You mentioned the roots in American settlement itself. The Other, at that time, were the Native Americans. What did you do? You wanted to put them on reservations. So, I think the strategists – the neo-cons and the militarists at the top of the planning pyramid in the United States – may not take themselves as good and evil. That’s just to tell the religious sector of the voters. What they think of as the Other: the people who do not submit to us; the people who want to maintain their own autonomy. Just as you wanted to put the Native Americans on reservations, America’s policy is, in words that you almost said literally, put Russia back on the reservation. Isolate it. Put China on a reservation. When you put everybody on a reservation, you have a situation pretty much like when you put many of the Native Americans on reservations.

All of a sudden, they found that oil was under these reservations. All of a sudden, you found that they were very rich. What do you do with that? Well, all of a sudden, you want to grab them. I think the Koch brothers made almost (I’m told) all of their money stealing oil from the Native American reservations. They were about to be exposed by the government when President Clinton had the affair with his assistant, and her dress. So the deal was: Okay, we won’t impeach Clinton, get rid of him, if you don’t move against the Koch brothers. That was a turning point, certainly, in American politics.

Well, America has isolated almost all of the global majority. As we said earlier, we put it on a reservation; they find that they have oil; that enables them to be independent. They’ve also found that they’re immune from many of the Western laws, from the rules-based order, and can make their own international law and order. And I guess for the American reservations, we can have gambling casinos and clean up with the frustration of the Americans. I think the higher planners, who are really behind making this aggressive policy that you talked about, think the only thing that we can do is prevent [it]. This is a war against anyone who is trying to maintain independence from the American Unipolar World Order. Of course, that means everybody’s the enemy. Well, they’re not going to say this is their strategy to the American voters. They’re just going to say, this is good versus evil; us versus the foreigners.

And all of a sudden, what has catalyzed the recognition of (certainly) the global majority is exactly what’s happening in Israel; the fact that they say, God gave us this land and we must exterminate everybody, all the enemies: they’re all Amalek. And it’s a war for the Destiny of Civilization. And all of a sudden, the rest of the countries of the world saying, well, when the Americans are coming in and have the National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored regime change, and color revolutions, they’re going to try to get one of us to die “to the last Ukrainian,” to die to the last Georgian. (If they could have been able to overthrow the Georgian government – yet again – they would like Georgia to fight to the last Georgian against Russia. Who, which of the BRICS, can they pick on next to fight to the last of their citizenry against? America cannot fight militarily. It has to somehow convince one of its designated opponents to fight among themselves. This is the kind of crazy [lockstep] in diplomacy that we’re in.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let’s add, just to take Michael’s point another step, to make sure people get it. The whole world is watching what Israel is doing in Gaza. Okay? Now, what Americans have to understand is what’s going through the minds of all of those people around the world. The United States is funding and arming what the Israelis are doing, in order to hold on to its influence – through Israel – in that part of the world. Everyone is wondering, will there be another country, a neighbor of mine, another Latin country, another Middle Eastern country, another Asian or South Asian country, another African country, that will be chosen by the United States to play that role over there? Will they be armed, and are we dealing here with the risk of this happening to us?

And they’re terrified by it. And they’re worried that the United States is, in its empire decline, going to reach out. If the BRICS keeps picking up more and more Muslim countries – it’s got most of them – if it’s going to pick up the remaining Muslim countries – and the United States is identified everywhere as the enemy of the Muslim countries – will the United States pick one of them, make that its ally, and have that be “the Israel” of another place?

And that is becoming part of the mentality of the United States, which is looking for those countries; was very upset when Niger, a small country in the middle of Africa, basically said, You have to leave, Americans… and brought in the Russians. Okay, this is for them a terrible sign of where things can go.

Like the election in Georgia, or a hundred other elections, or movements, or problems… And those countries are worried now, not only that this might happen, but the Israelis are showing them how far the United States is willing to go to protect its “friend” in the area. Whoa. That’s a little different from Ukraine. That’s another issue. Similar, but this is going into an area with a bunch of different countries, making one your bosom buddy and then enabling it to become dominant. Wow. Wow. And are there people in many countries who would like to play that role for the United States? You bet! Is that already happening? I would guess so.

And what that does to everybody else is to begin to do the worst nightmare of the United States, which is that the world decides that there is one Number One rogue country, and it’s the US. Not North Korea. They’re not endangered by North Korea. They’re endangered by the United States. And at that point, where are they going to go as there’s a burgeoning conflict between the United States, or the G7, on the one hand, and the BRICS?

You’re watching in slow motion the decline of an empire. When the Roman Empire collapsed, for a hundred years, the conversation in Rome was about “the Barbarians,” the language, I believe, Michael used a few minutes ago. You viewed the people moving in on the empire, the Frankish people (in what we call France now), the Gaulish people (another part of France), and so on. They weren’t barbarian, but they were for the Romans, because they were the manifestation of the decline of an empire that couldn’t stop the decline. We all read those books about the end of Rome. They are wonderful insights into what’s happening here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. You two mentioned that the situation in Middle East is far more complicated. Here is what the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia recently said about the conflict in Gaza, in the West Bank, and Israel.

[ALEKHBARIYA NEWS CLIP BEGINS]

FAISAL BIN FARHAN AL SAUD: The normalization with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not just a risk, it’s off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood. But I would say more than that, I would say that it’s not just the issue of normalization with the kingdom that is at risk. I would say that the security of the region as a whole is at risk, if we do not address the rights of the Palestinians, if we do not find their way to a pathway that leads us to a Palestinian state, because that’s the only way we can ensure that we can focus on the future, that we can focus on co-operation, that we can focus on integration.

So I would hope that the leadership of Israel sees that it is not just the right thing to do, it is not just the moral thing to do, it’s not just the just thing to do to give the Palestinians their rights and their state, it is also in the security and strategic interest of Israel to do so. And that’s, I think, up to them to decide.

[ALEKHBARIYA NEWS CLIP ENDS]

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Do you see any sort of understanding in terms of, because when we talk about Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, we know how close they are to the United States right now. How do you find the way that he’s talking about the conflict in the Middle East, Michael? Do you think that it’s possible?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Ten years, or maybe thirty years, or 75 years too late. There is no way there can be a Palestinian state alongside Israel anymore. The way that Israel has structured the whole region is a prison camp. How can a state have its own authority, the power?

The only way you can have a Palestinian state is for Netanyahu to kill all the Palestinians, except maybe 200, and it will put these 200 on a reservation and call that the Palestinian state. There is no way in which Palestinians and Israelis can live because the Israelis say the Palestinians are not human beings. We have to make Israel for the human beings only. We can’t have non-human beings – or the barbarians – anywhere around us. This is a fight for the death for them. Certainly Pompeo says, “Yes, we’re all for that because when the fight is for the death, Jesus will come and he will take all his true followers up to heaven.” Pompeo is this religious nut, on top of all of his craziness. So I don’t think there’s any hope for a Palestinian state anymore. The question is, what are you going to do with the Israeli Zionists who live in Israel? How are you going to get them out of Palestine? They cannot live in Palestine if there is to be a Palestinian state, or if there are going to be any living Palestinians left. Where are you going to put the Zionists? Where can they go in the world?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, the way I read his statement is the way I read what Saudi Arabia does in the world. And for me, it is a wonderful case. They are hedging their bets. First of all, Saudi Arabia is in the BRICS. So, we know that the United States is not encouraging anyone to become a member of the BRICS; it is encouraging everybody not to do so. Okay. I’m sure… I don’t know, but I’m sure that they encourage the Saudis not to do that.

Well, that didn’t work. The Saudis went ahead and did it. Every country’s leadership is now assessing what has to change in their foreign policy to take into account that the global economy is now split between a larger and a smaller group of nations. And I mean larger and smaller in terms of total wealth, or total output (GDP, or whatever you want to use). All right? The BRICS is now the larger of the two. It wasn’t before. The two lines crossed in 2020 and the gap between them is getting wider, each passing day. And that means if you’re a company, where you source your inputs has to be re-thought because you’re going to criss-cross this new global situation. If not directly, then indirectly, which can be just as devastating. You have to re-consider where your exports are going to go. You’re going to have to re-consider your credit situation. You’re going to have to consider who to insure with, what banks to use, how to split your accounts, so that you’re not maybe too much in one or the… Everybody is shifting, and in that shifting, the West loses what it had before and the BRICS gain relative to – more or less, and maybe some exceptions. And the Saudis are busy doing that. And there’s a dance here. And the dance is, don’t make the adjustment too quick because the United States might then do to you what is happening to Palestine, or Lebanon, or Syria, or Libya (or fill in the blank). So you can’t go too quick, but you better not not go either because that’s very dangerous, and becoming more dangerous with every step.

Yesterday, the United States announced more sanctions, a whole new bunch of sanctions, on companies and countries that are allowing other companies to function there because those companies also sometimes do business with Russia. Okay. Most of the countries on earth are doing business with Russia, and more of them will be in the years ahead. They’re facing sanctions. The United States ironically keeps forcing decisions that are going to go against them. So there’s a dynamic here that feeds on itself, and that cannot help the United States.

That’s why the word “rogue” nation, because the rest of the world is slowly coming to an awareness that out of its own desperation at being a declining empire, which is always hard for the empire that’s in decline… (It was terribly difficult for the British. It was terribly difficult for the Dutch before them. The French didn’t go quietly; you know, they’re still trying to hold on to bits of their empire. So it’s very hard.) But what the world is observing is that the American empire – partly because it was a global empire, more than anybody else, even the British, had achieved (the United States has those 700 bases around the world), it really was a global empire. Because that makes it that much harder, the United States, busy with its defensive gestures, is actually making the problem worse.

If I could pick a dangerous metaphor: If you’ve ever taught swimming, one of the lessons you teach a swimmer is if you’re having trouble swimming, don’t flail your arms around because it’ll make it worse for you; it’ll make it harder for someone to save you. Don’t do that. Someone ought to tell the United States, that’s what you’re doing. You’re going to go down faster, further because of your refusal to deal with what your situation actually is, and the desperate ways you’re holding on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: You mentioned the Roman Empire before, as it declined. There are a number of differences. Many of the Romans kept leaving the empire to join the barbarians because they thought the barbarians were more civilized. I can imagine American engineers, German engineers, others emigrating to Russia, China, the BRICS countries, where they want to do that. That’s one similarity. But also many of the Germans began to become the Roman empires. There were fights among rival Roman empires and they would hire the Germans as their troops, and the Germans ended up as the Popes.

The equivalent there would be if America expanded to China and Asia and the BRICS, if there was some kind of reciprocal investment here, that somehow the BRICS would invest in the United States, which is what the United States is trying to get Taiwan and other countries to do. I don’t see that happening because there’s so much of a hatred against the barbarians here that really didn’t exist in Rome. By about the fourth century, you had Roman philosophers saying, well, the barbarians have many qualities that are more civilized than are in our own country: They have a more balanced economy. They have mutual aid. They don’t have the kind of financial oligarchy. The Romans began to idealize an original society where people were equal and mutually supportive. Today we’d call that Communism. They began to try to develop that and that became, in a way, Christianity. But as that developed, the center of the Roman Empire moved northwards. It moved northward to Milan; then it moved up into the Germanic tribes. Finally, it moved to the new Rome – Constantinople. The whole center changed. I don’t know where the American Empire could somehow move its center to, certainly not Europe because part of the real fight against BRICS began with the fight of America against Europe – against Germany, and against any potential European industrial rival. Those parallels to Rome can’t exist: America has sort of boxed itself in. It can’t immigrate to, at least as a government, to foreign countries. If America were like Rome developing Christianity, it would develop Socialism.

As you put it at the beginning of the show, if politicians represented actual voters, of course, it would be good for the economy. Then this would become an ideal that would lead to a universal world. It will, I think you said earlier, there’s going to be a real crisis first. What you’re describing as a positive potential outcome will be triggered by the absolute disaster that’s going to be caused either by the Warmonger Harris, or by Trump and his tariff disasters and his economic libertarian disasters for the United States. It will somehow lead, you’d think, the large corporations to say, we’re boxed in here. We can’t go to the British countries because of the sanctions that have been spurred by this nationalist fervor against the Other. There’s nothing we can do except to create a new society. This, I guess, would be America’s version of Christianity. And, of course, that was poisoned soon enough, by the fifth century, by St. Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria (that completely destroyed the Christian feeling that came out of Rome), but that revulsion against inequality spread throughout the Near East. It spread to Persia. It spread to other Near Eastern countries. It was absorbed by Islam, that came up. So we’re going to see some kind of a transplantation of what was America into other parts of the world, but it’s almost impossible to see how this will occur right now, except beginning with a trickle of emigration of people who cannot live in today’s version of Rome, abroad.

But then it will lead, you’d think, to some powerful groups acting in their own self-interest, and at least the American power elite – not quite like the Roman Landlord Creditor class, trying to indebt the whole other country and impoverish it and lead to feudalism. And that’s really the question: Is the American economic model going to lead to neo-feudalism, or is it going to lead to something better that would actually be, in principle, the same kind of rules of civilization that the BRICS countries are trying to create?

RICHARD WOLFF: I think the very nature of this conversation is telling you: we are more evidence of a declining empire. We are beginning to grow up around for either historical models, or theoretical extensions of things we see now, to begin to imagine where this can all go. And that’s already a sign that people are looking.

There’s an enormous revulsion here in the United States against the level of inequality that we have. One of the reasons neither presidential candidate goes near there is because it is so dangerous. The tiny minority at the top are prepared and willing to spend a lot of money to keep that conversation bottled up, not public, not pervasive. They are very interested in not having that conversation go because they are so isolated at the top of the pyramid, with all that wealth. I mean, if you have $200 billion and most people, you know, living paycheck to paycheck, you’ve got a problem. You need to keep the lid on the ideologies of your people. You need to control the politics. Otherwise, the sheer numbers will overwhelm you. And I suspect we’re going to see all kinds of movements against the inequality, questioning the system in all kinds of ways, including a resuscitation of the old Marxian and socialist… That’s going to come back, as it has in the past. You know, the comment that that’s all behind us is silly. That deserves the same answer that the Mark Twain gave when he read his own obituary in the Hartford Courant. He wrote the letter to the editor saying, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. You know, the same is true for all of these other ideas. You know, the worker co-op is not a new idea. It’s been around for thousands of years, but it is already having a renaissance in part because there is a concrete example, visible all over the place, of people who are getting together in an enterprise to produce a good or a service and not organizing it in the capitalist way – with an owner operator at the top and a mass of dependent servants (excuse me, employees) below. That’s being a problem now. And there are alternatives being groped around to see whether they might fit. But I think everything starts with understanding that we’re doing that.

If you ask that question, then you don’t have a war in the Ukraine. You don’t. You work things out. You take into account the security needs Russia says it has, the security needs Ukraine says they have, and work something out. That could have, and should have, been done. It had been done for years before. It could continue. We can work that out. And the same is true in the Middle East. I understand what Michael is saying. And I think the Israelis have made horrible mistakes in now creating a population: Whatever its animosity was before, can you imagine with me what the feelings of the Palestinian people must now be after a year of that kind of bombardment? I mean, it is beyond. So I understand why Michael can’t possibly imagine how these two people could live together, given what has happened now. And remember, every time the Israelis had a war with the Palestinians, they explained and justified the violence they used on the grounds that they had to do something that would prevent worse violence. Well, it didn’t work. We have that worse violence, much worse violence. And to say now it has to be done to prevent worse violence? You can’t do that anymore. You’ve run out of that one. That one’s dead. So you’ve got to come up with something else. The Israelis will have to face that one way or another.

And there are enormous divisions inside Israel. So it’s not as though there’s all unanimity about what they’re doing. It’s a very particular government. I understand the people have supported their government doing that, and there is no way around that. But there are also big splits and differences that also should be kept in mind in terms of what the future may bring.

But to go back to the way you opened today’s show, Nima, look at how many of the issues we’ve brought up, you, Michael, and me. And even if you don’t agree with all of them, of course not… but these are the issues that could have been, and should have been, raised as this country at this moment in its history chooses its leadership. What do you say about a country that can’t talk about, that we have one president who says I’ll end that war in a week? That’s not serious. That’s childish junk. What is that? That doesn’t solve anything. You’re not going to deal with, you know, even if you thought you could do it, the whole of European politics has been turned on its head by this war in Ukraine! The leadership, the center-right leadership of Europe, is committed to fighting in Ukraine. It will be looking totally ridiculous if Mr. Trump ends this war. And what’s going to happen then? The Left is already preparing to make this point in France, and they’re already the biggest party there. And, I’m talking, a Left that is old, well-organized, knows how to function, theoretically sophisticated, present throughout the society; and I could go on talking about the German, or the Italian, or even the British.

So you’re not in a position. You may think you are, “Mr. Trump-I’ll-end-the-war.” You can’t do that. It’s not available to you. The implications of this war will play themselves out. And you’ll be even less able than you might have been to shape it because you don’t even talk about it. You don’t even allow your society to engage in a discussion that might come up with some new ideas, that might come up with an idea, a plan for how to do it. We’re just three people. I really believe in democracy with a small d. I want more people involved in these conversations. And then we’ll get better answers, if we do that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: You’ve made a very funny comment, Richard. Suppose, indeed, that Donald Trump could make an agreement to say, well, the whole Ukraine war has been a mistake. Look, we’ve lost. Russia has absolutely wiped out most of the Ukrainians, not only population, but also society, and so let’s arrange some kind of peace. It was all a mistake.

Well, where does this leave Germany and the rest of Europe? This mistake for them is not reversible. A few weeks ago, Volkswagen said, we’re no longer really a viable company in the way that we’ve operated in the past. For the first time we’re going to cut back employment, we’re going to cut back sales. We’re not able to compete in electric cars with China, so unless we put huge tariffs on China, which will reverberate throughout the German economy, you know, we’re going under. The German industrialists, the small medium-sized firms, the “Mittelstand” German firms, they’re going out of business. And once the firm is out of business, it can’t be remade. If Volkswagen goes out of business, it can’t be remade. Putin has said that if any missile made by the German Rheinmetall firm ends up in Russia, Russia will not hesitate to bomb the Rheinmetall factory. So there are all of these.

America has created irreversibilities for Europe, while maintaining its own freedom of action. For instance, the grabbing of the Russian 300 billion foreign exchange, that was Europe grabbing it. Hardly any was in the United States, for the first time. Europe has cut its ties with all of these countries. We’ve talked about just America versus these countries, but Europe has been collateral damage in all of this. And I think you’re right. You’d think the hope would be the French Left, and Sarah Wagenknecht’s left-wing party that split off from Die Linke in Germany. But so far, it’s the nationalistic parties, not exactly the pro-Labor parties, that have been grabbing power in Europe. Any party that calls itself “socialist” is usually the far Right, whether it’s the British Labor Party, or Macron’s Party in France, or the other. So we’ve created a mess that looks almost inextricable.

How can you extricate yourself? I can’t figure out. And it is not foreseeable right now. It’s a quandary. A problem has a solution, but a quandary doesn’t have a solution. What is going to happen?

RICHARD WOLFF: I know we’re running out of time, but I would add that it isn’t surprising. I mean, since the Second World War, we’ve had this Cold War, or the legacy of the Cold War, that has systematically demonized the Left: The Communists are the great danger, the Socialists are fellow travelers of the Communists and therefore more or less equally dangerous, and on. So when the great consensus of the center Right – center Left begins to dissolve, when you don’t have yet another American election with a Democrat like George Bush and a Republican like Bill Clinton, but you have something odd, weird and different like Trump, it’s going to be from the right.

The people who are going to break this mold, this consensus that is now so stale, the people who have the idea, this is unbearable, are going to come from the right because that’s what we have, as a society, cultivated all this time. We expunged the Left, the Left were impossible. So the first breakthrough will be on the right. I think that’s not surprising. The Left will now have to understand that the time has come when you’re going to have to do on the left something like what the extreme Right has done on their side. And the middle, the middle, as the great British [Irish] Yeats said, doesn’t exist anymore. The middle is vanishing. The middle class we all know has been eviscerated. Now the middle perspective of politics is also on the way out. What you have is a vast mass, eighty or more percent of the people who feel cheated, who feel hurt. I could add to the story that Michael told about Volkswagen, the detail (which is no detail) that the largest union in Germany is striking Volkswagen. And that’s a bitter strike that’s going to (and I urge you to take a look at the Boeing workers who used to be very docile, who have been on strike and who have now rejected, by overwhelming majority, two of the contracts offered to them). Boeing is a member of that Military Industrial Complex big, big time. They can’t manage their problems.

By the way, the Chinese are producing lots of military aircraft. That too is going to become a serious problem for the United States. I think the Left, ironically, agreed to Kamala Harris. And here I’m talking about Bernie. They agreed because they saw what was happening on the right as a great threat. And they’re right, it is. But the answer to it should have been Bernie, not Kamala Harris. They should have understood that they need dramatic, powerful images of change. When Mr. Trump gets up and says to the suffering American working class, I’m going to protect you from the immigrants, and from the Chinese, that’s a ‘good,’ big image. In terms of economics, it’s silly. It’s a joke. It’s not serious. It’s fake. Well, who cares? What we need is Bernie to stand up and say, we don’t need billionaires. In ten minutes, we can pick 2,000 billionaires and announce to them there’s a wealth tax. Anyone over $10 billion, that’s it. You don’t have it anymore. It’s over. Comparable things like that would have given the people a chance to say, wait a minute. I am willing to desert the conventional parties. Like recent polls show, Americans are interested in third party, but Bernie would have then given them something on the left, comparable to “I’ll protect you from the immigrants:” I’ll protect you by taking the money from the billionaires, which they’re all jealous about anyway. I can do that and I can make a new deal. Here’s what it’ll look like. Everybody will have a job, as a right. That’s the drama that would have overwhelmed Mr. Trump.

Instead, she did the usual, left-of-center: I’ll do this. I’ll help working people there. Those are genuine, but they’re small, they’re old. They’re precisely the kinds of things that Democrats have always done, which is why they’ve never changed the basic trajectory of inequality in this society. But they didn’t understand it. They were hesitant. If Kamala Harris loses, it may be a very important time to make that point.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this is the problem that I mentioned at the very beginning, when I said the Democratic Party’s role is to prevent the Left and to co-opt the Left. Two days ago, Bernie gave a whole attack on the American working class, an attack on the pacifists, saying you must support Kamala Harris. AOC, his popular follower, gave an attack on the working class, an attack on American Labor, an attack on the pacifists. You must support AOC. You must support the war in Ukraine. The function of the Democratic Party is quicksand that just absorbs these people, pretending to be weirdly alternative to the right wing. They will take the people who would like to be on the left like Bernie was when he joined the Trotskyists in 1962, and just sort of absorbed them and made a deal. They told Bernie, we will put you on some committees. You can do all the talking you want. You simply cannot act. We want you to talk. The more you talk, people will think that somehow the Democratic Party has a potential. By absorbing you, we were crushing the potential. People are now disgusted with you, Bernie. They’re disgusted with AOC. They’re disgusted with you supporting the war. They’re disgusted with you supporting Wall Street and supporting the Democratic Party through Harris and her right-wing, not center-left, party with a left-wing rhetoric, to prevent any Left from developing in the United States. So, in a way, the function of the Democratic Party is to sterilize the Left.

I think with the message that Jill Stein was given – she’s not only anti-war, she’s against the pretense that there is a two-party state, that there is an alternative, and that the Democratic Party is different from the Republicans in any way except for its trickster rhetoric.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Just to share with you, here is an article in Gallup that shows 63% of Americans are in favor of a third party in the United States, and that shows everything. But it’s not there, for the time being. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you very much, and I’m very glad to be part of this. I learn, and I appreciate it very much.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we’re redefining the quandary in a way that nobody else is really talking about.

RICHARD WOLFF: That’s our job.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Image by GreenCardShow from Pixabay

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is October 9th and we’re having Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff talk about what’s going on in the Middle East. Richard and Michael, let me show you an article that shows the spending of the United States on the conflict in the Middle East helping Israel. It’s almost $22.76 billion. And in this graph, you’re witnessing that in 2024, if you look at this graph, it’s $17.9 billion. And directly to Israel and the rest would be the conflicts that the United States went to the Red Sea to help Israel and other operations in that region. And here is what Matt Miller said to the press when he was asked about this helping, this aid that goes to Israel.

SAID ARIKAT: Taxpayers paid for almost $23 billion in the last year alone – that’s almost $3000 for each and every Israeli. So we have absolutely no leverage, no pressure – you cannot tell them do this or not do this?

MATT MILLER: So, we made very clear to the government of Israel what we believe are the best outcomes along a number of different vectors in the region. But as you’ve heard me say before, they are ultimately a sovereign country and have to make their own decisions.

SAID ARIKAT: Yes, but I understand a sovereign country that received from American taxpayers $22 billion dollars.

MATT MILLER: Well first of all, that number is not correct, it conflates a number of different things. It’s not correct. I don’t have the exact number, but I know the number you are referring to.

MATT LEE: So what does the U.S. government think that it has given Israel since October 7th?

MATT MILLER: So we give them $3.3 billion a year and there was additional money that was appropriated in the supplemental. The reason it’s hard to answer that question definitively is…

MATT LEE: Like you don’t want to. That’s why it’s hard to answer.

MATT MILLER: No, there are different ways of looking at it.

MATT LEE: I know there are. I’ve been through all of this.

MATT MILLER: There’s money that is appropriated, there is money that is allocated and then not actually delivered for years to come.

MATT LEE: Look, there are private educational organizations that have come up with estimates. This building, at least, which is in charge of arms transfers – at least, many of them – hasn’t seen fit to come up with an update since July of last year.

MATT MILLER: Yeah, I just don’t have the update, I’m just telling you that number, you can look at that number and see how it conflates a number of things, including direct U.S. military spending to combat the Houthis attacking international shipping, which is included in that number, which is obviously not either.

MATT LEE: It can’t be that difficult to separate what has been given to them post- October 7th in terms of things that were not approved before then under the MOU. Stuff that went to them specifically for the Gaza operation, and now Lebanon.

MATT MILLER: So it depends how you look at it – is it the amount that’s been allocated to them, is it the amount that’s been delivered to them, is it the amount that is gonna be delivered …

MATT LEE: I’ll take any of them now.

MATT MILLER: No, but that’s the point is when you ask the question it’s a difficult one – I don’t have the numbers here at my fingertips, obviously. I’m just pointing out that the number that Said referred to …

MATT LEE: Someone’s got to have the number some place?

SAID ARIKAT: The numbers were Brown University’s numbers, not mine. But, you know, it doesn’t matter what the actual figure is, we give them a lot of money, we give them a great deal of leverage, you know, we give them obviously a great deal of political coverage in the U.N. and many other places and so on. And to suggest that this huge and lengthy partnership really does not exact any kind of leverage with the Israelis – don’t you question that?

MATT MILLER: That’s not what I said. The thing that I said is that we’re a sovereign country with our interests, they’re a sovereign country with their interests.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Richard, he’s saying that he doesn’t answer the question. He says that Israel is a sovereign country. What’s your answer to that question?

RICHARD WOLFF: Iraq was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Afghanistan was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Vietnam was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. It didn’t give a damn whether that was a sovereign country or not. It didn’t respect its sovereignty for one second.

It just – as part of the war in Ukraine – seized $300 billion worth of Russian gold. Its sovereignty meant absolutely nothing. Come on. The answer to talk about sovereignty is a transparent fakery, as is all the mumbo jumbo about how to estimate the numbers. The question was about leverage, if you provide a lot of money.

The question was clear and it had nothing to do with quarrels about estimating the amount of money. This is a government that wants the freedom to do in the Middle East what it has always done, namely operate a colonial regime without telling the people of the United States anything other than fairy tales about respect for different religions, and the importance of Jerusalem, and other nonsense that future spokespersons at the State Department will no doubt repeat in the same mumbo jumbo style of Mr. Miller that we just saw.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, if Israel were a sovereign country, it would no longer be an American ally because the whole war that the United States is fighting, not only in the Near East, but also in Ukraine, is a war against sovereignty. That’s what this whole world war between the U.S. and NATO countries against the global majority – China, Russia and other BRICS countries – it’s a war to make a unipolar U.S. control to prevent the whole rest of the world being sovereign.

So the whole issue of sovereignty is silly – and obviously if you look at where the armaments of Israel are coming from – quite apart from money. These are American bombs being dropped on Gaza and on Lebanon. These are American ships that are supporting it. It is American money that’s also supporting it. And that doesn’t even account for the Israel bonds by non-governmental authorities. So the whole idea of sovereignty is irrelevant. You can look at this war against sovereignty, and especially against sovereignty – as Richard just mentioned – of Iraq and Libya, to use Israel as an American satellite to prevent the Near East from becoming sovereign, in control, not only of its own oil, but in control of the export money that it makes from this oil.

RICHARD WOLFF: Also, just an additional word. The United Nations allows Palestine to have a seat – I don’t remember exactly what the status is – but they have a seat to participate in at least some degree, and at least a large part of the world would assign “sovereignty” to the Palestinians based on all of the historic notions of what sovereignty entails. Clearly the United States does not respect the sovereignty of the Palestinians. So, once again, this use of the notion of sovereignty is extraordinarily selective. My goodness!

I mean, for me, the most impressive thing about the little clip you showed us was the fact that we live in a society where a collection of, what I assume to be, perfectly reasonable intelligent journalists sit there and ask such questions and don’t quarrel about the absurd refusal to answer. And they don’t quarrel about the absurd invocation of sovereignty. But they allow the conversation to absorb many minutes of quarreling about the details of the statistics.

Both Michael and I are economists. We work with statistics all the time. If you do, you know that they are loosely constructed numbers that have a million qualifications about them. And that if you don’t know the details of how they are gathered and how they are assembled and how they are edited, you really can do virtually anything with them.

You know, there’s an old statement among statisticians: “The statistics don’t lie, but the statisticians surely do.” Because they pick and choose which ones to gather, which ones to assimilate, which ones to edit.

This is childish manipulation, and the thing that most impresses me is that the journalists, they are complicit with this mumbo jumbo theatric. And they oughtn’t to be. They ought to have a bit more of a spine, a bit more of that part of the journalistic tradition which says, “ask the hard questions that these politicians are trained to evade and avoid.”

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard’s talking about the sovereignty of journalism. And I think we talked before about what John Kerry said at the World Economic Forum. He said, “Our first amendment stands as a major block to our ability to be able to hammer disinformation out of existence.”

Sovereignty for journalism is what WikiLeaks did, which is why its leader was imprisoned for so many years. We don’t have sovereignty of the Press anymore than nations have sovereignty, and you could look at the whole part of the American Cold War attempt to prevent other nations from having political sovereignty as the attempt to make sure that the U.S. has unique unipolar sole sovereignty over the narrative. Is the Middle East War, the Israeli War, all about the captives that were made October 7th, a year ago? I think there are now a few dozen. Or is it about the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Not a word about the Palestinians captive in Israeli jails.

Again, the narrative is all from a very strange perspective. It’s like the famous Hiroshige painting, a big tree in the foreground and the city far away in the background, the little tree in the foreground has priority over everything else. That’s the news that we get from the Near East, Ukraine and the rest of the world. Not sovereignty.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, can I ask a question? The main question right now in terms of what’s going on in the Middle East is the way that Netanyahu is behaving right now. And when you look at his behavior, what is Israel’s endgame under Netanyahu? How can we define that?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I must say with all regret and sadness, I will tell you what I have concluded watching all of this over the last, particularly this last, year. And I conclude by referring to a saying that has been raised by Israeli leaders, at least as far back as David Ben-Gurion.

And that is to say that the whole story can be summed up by saying that “the Jewish people, a people without land, were finally given a land without people.”

That’s a quote, I didn’t make that up. That’s a quotation repeated many times: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, from the river to the sea, a people without land – i.e. Jewish people – were given a land without people. Notice the little move there, the move at the end to suggest that people were given something that no other people already had, even though everybody who’s taken five minutes to look at the history of that part of the world knows that it has been densely populated for thousands of years by a whole host of people.

So the reality was, it wasn’t empty. It’s a little bit like what I discovered when I was just beginning as a college teacher and I had occasion to talk about the early period of the American economy, when we were still a colony.

And I discovered that a significant percentage of my students understood the Europeans who came here to have discovered a land without people, which they then proceeded to inhabit, moving from the East Coast across, until they finally reached the Pacific Ocean in the West.

When I reminded them, well, it wasn’t empty, then yes, they remembered from their western movies that there were these “savages” who were around somewhere, but who became quickly disposed of.

Well, if you know the history, it took centuries before you could herd those native people that you didn’t kill into the reservations they still occupy in significant numbers across the United States. Okay, the Israeli story seems to me to be summarized and carried forward by Mr. Netanyahu as exactly what I said. They want to establish that the area we now call Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are a land that had no people and is therefore now to be settled by a growing Jewish population. And the job of the Palestinians is to choose one of the following three options: leave or die.

Those are the options, and the Israelis become the agents of leaving or dying, and they’re trying both. And they’ll rely on either one of them to solve the problem, to fulfill the idea that it is a land without people that can now be settled by the people who don’t have enough land.

By the way, this notion of “land hunger” is a replication of what the Nazis called Lebensraum: room to live. The Nazis moved east in Europe to get it; the Israelis move west to get it. But that’s what this has become, and it will take a radical change of the mentality of the Israelis to change it.

Last point: when you’re an aggressor, and you’re also a settler-colonialism, which is what this is, nothing is more common than justify what you are doing on the grounds that you must do it, because the savages – that’s the people that are already there – are intent on doing that to you. And it doesn’t matter whether they are or not, you must tell that story because it justifies what you are doing. And I’ll illustrate it with a story, and excuse me if I told you this story before, but near where the University of Massachusetts is located is a town called Deerfield, Massachusetts. And it has an old part, which is the colonial houses that were built there back in the 17th and 18th century. And they have redone these houses to look in the way that they did in Colonial America. So it’s become a tourist attraction. It’s known as “Old Deerfield.”

And if you go there, as I have done, and you walk through the old village, and you look at the reconstructed housing, you will notice in front of each of them a plaque. And if you read the plaque, which tourists do, it says things like, here was the Jones family or the Smith family, and they came in 1702 and blah, blah, blah, and then on the night of the 14th of April, the savages attacked them. And I remember the first time I saw this. I said to myself, without thinking much, “what a remarkable thing – the Europeans come from thousands of miles away, they take the land, they take the coast, they fish the water, they attack the local people, they push them off the land. And they refer to them as the savages. What an amazing move! It’s the Europeans who were savage, who had the guns to be savage with. But you need to call them savages because what you are doing is so savage, it has to be justified as self-defense against savages. And so you call the other what you are. In psychology, this is so common, it’s called projection. And every psychological practitioner knows about it and tries to treat it.

But in our political discussion of Israel and the Palestinians, we all pretend we know nothing about any of that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard has just explained is what really was meant by a land without a people. What are people? They are humans. And the Israeli leadership, again and again, has said that the Palestinians are not human: they are sub-humans.That is exactly what the Ukrainians are saying about the Slavic people. The Slavic people are not humans; the Islamic populations are not human. In both cases, they are called sub-human and a different species. And this kind of thinking goes way back to the United States at the late 19th century. The U.S. leaders thought of America as creating a new civilization. And that new civilization, somehow in the 1930s they began to absorb Nazism. And it was as if the new countries with their ethnicity were evolutionary, biological, new species. And the Americans were a new species.

The Israelis are claiming to be a new species, exterminating the sub-humans, so that there won’t be inter-marriage, like there was between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago. That treatment is exactly what was the feeling in the United States that I experienced in the 1960s. The Catholic Church sent me to New Mexico to discuss how to raise up the Indian tribes. There was an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who began talking about the “Indian problem.” And I jumped up and said to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “the Indian problem is the problem that they are Indians.” And that’s how the Israelis and the Ukrainians think about everybody who’s not them. When we’re talking about a political group of settlers – or in America, of Empire builders – claiming to be a new species, cleaning out the biology of these inferior races. This is Nazism. And that’s really what the fight is all about.

That’s why we’re now in a civilizational fight between the NATO-U.S.-West and its allies of like-thinking people who treat their adversaries as sub-humans. Or, as Biden says, it’s Democracy against Autocracy. The Autocracy are considered to be sub-humans, a different civilization, and all this somehow has genetically become a new species. And what the rest of civilization – the global majority – is trying to say, is “No, we’re all humans.” Americans have said, like I said, “No, you’re not humans.” That’s basically the position in this Cold War II.

RICHARD WOLFF: You see it also in this very sad tendency: I cringe when I watch a video clip of the President of the United States, in this case, Mr. Biden, referring to the leader of the People’s Republic of China as a thug. What are you doing? What kind of childish behavior is this? Mr. Putin doesn’t refer to Mr. Biden as a thug. He doesn’t do that. One doesn’t do. You don’t see too many leaders, even in private – let alone in a public interview – doing such things. What is this demonization of the – here we go – it’s “they’re all savages?”

So if you disagree with the United States, if your idea of a European security architecture, which is what they’re actually trying to figure out, how are we going to be secure each in our national boundary without threatening one another? That’s what they mean by a “security architecture.”

How are we going to work that out? Russia has to feel secure. Ukraine has to feel secure. They have to be able to function. Okay, that’s a problem. We will have disagreements. We won’t see it the same way. We’ll have to make some compromise. But, suddenly: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are the good and the noble and the vanilla, and they are the terrible evil empire.’ What is this? This is not just a quibble about words. Behind these words lies what Michael was just talking about. This notion that, really, this is a war of good against evil and in the name of the good, you can do what?

Palestinians who know something about the Christian Bible like to remind us about all the times in the Old Testament especially, when there are all these discussions about God telling people to slay this group and kill all of them and murder the children and … whoa. There you have already the beginnings of a justification.

Yes, yes, I know the Bible is full of other contradictory sentiments about loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek and all the rest of it. But if you cherry pick, you can become the exponent of “I’m good, they’re evil, I am called to get rid of them” – literally. There’s a quote from an Israeli defense force person in the press recently explaining to a reporter how good he feels when he’s asked about bombing mosques and hospitals. He looks at the guy and he says, “But we’re winning, we’re winning.” Wow. He’s winning. He’s not asking what he’s winning – he’s just winning.

And that’s the struggle of good and evil when you think like that. In the name of that stuff, we have 5,000 years of slaughter and we’ll have more if we don’t outgrow it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, here comes the question that how we can -with the situation that you’re having in Ukraine together with what’s going on right now in the Middle East and in my opinion, if Donald Trump wins, we’re going to have a big fight between the United States and China.

How can we make peace affordable for each and every player in this political arena or national political arena? Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: The only way to solve the problem in Ukraine is by war. You can’t have peace without war.

Some people say that war doesn’t settle problems, but sometimes the only way of settling a problem such as the U.S. and NATO and Ukraine trying to attack Russia is by war. And that’s why you mentioned the costs of this war before, at the beginning.

I think that the whole idea of what’s happening in the Ukraine is the American planners said, “Look at what really broke the Soviet Union’s power – it was the war in Afghanistan. It drained Russia. They had to spend all of their economic surplus on the military and send their population to fight in Afghanistan. Finally, this created such austerity and poverty and impoverishment that the leaders of the Soviet Union themselves decided it didn’t work.” They somehow expect that if the war in Ukraine is supposed to go on as long as it can, not to be settled, but just to continue to drain Russia until its economic surplus is spent on fighting the war and the population says, I guess, what the Russians were saying in the 1980s: “We want to have blue jeans like the Americans have. We want a consumer society and we can’t because it’s a military society.”

So the American idea in Ukraine is to spend as much as it takes from our side to keep the war going as long as possible and outspend Russia until the discontent in Russia reaches a degree where you can bring in a new Russian Yeltsin [unclear]. Well, Putin is also strategizing and said, well, he is not in any hurry to just march in and end the war quickly in Ukraine by marching to the deeper and beyond. He’s willing to go slow because there’s something that he says that is beyond the short-term cost of the military budget.

And that is the longer the war in Ukraine takes, the more it’s breaking up Europe. You’ve seen the last three German elections where the anti-war parties beat the Christian Democrats and the social Democrats. You’ve seen last week’s election in Austria. Again, the anti-war party won and as we noted before, the anti-war parties today are on the right, not the left. But we’re seeing the idea of the real costs both from the American vantage point and the global majority’s (the BRICS) vantage point- the cost is going to be how is all of this going to end up? What is the structure of the world economy to be? And the fight in Israel and Ukraine is just a sideline, a particular chapter, venue, in this much broader war. And the real way of looking at the cost is, “Who is going to support what countries?” Will the cost of the Ukraine war essentially, as Putin believes, end up dividing Europe, breaking up the European Union and paving the way for – in 30 years, I think Putin said – for there to finally be a restoration of the German and the European linkage with Russia and the global majority by which time in his hope, the whole world will be under a unipolar rule of law. That’s how to think of the costs that we’re undertaking now and what the war is all about.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let me come at this from a slightly different perspective that might be of interest to folks. Capitalism as a system has built into its structure an imperative to grow. Every capitalist understands that unless they can expand their business and thereby get their hands on bigger profits, they run the risk of being competed out of existence by somebody who can and will do that. And so they all have to grow. And we know that this has become internalized by the political leaders of all capitalist countries.

I’ll use the example that they teach in elementary school: If an economy is like a pie, and different people and different groups have different pieces, if you grow the pie, everybody’s piece can get bigger and we will all be happy.

If you don’t grow the pie, then a growth in some requires a diminution in the others and then we will be at each other’s throats. Very old idea, been around for centuries.

And in capitalism, that idea, together with the way capitalism works, means that countries with employers and employees and enterprises that produce and compete in markets have a drive to grow. That’s why it’s a national emergency if the statistics show the GDP isn’t growing fast enough. Oh my god, alarm, alarm.

Okay, now let’s stop and take a step back. For ecological reasons and climate change reasons, we now know we’ve got to stop growing – it’s threatening our survival. The people of the world have already figured it out because the birth rate of our planet is now zero. We’re not growing anymore. The United States, Asia. Only in Africa is there a net positive birth rate, and it’s shrinking there too. Okay, now we have a problem that a long-repressed part of the world, the global south, wants to have its standard of living be where it should have been two centuries ago. They’re not waiting anymore. So they are demanding a bigger piece of the pie. This, of course, threatens the United States because it can’t grow the way it wants to because it now has a serious competitor. China and the BRICS is already a richer entity than the United States and the G7. Okay, here’s then a solution. We question – don’t everybody yell – we question capitalism. Why don’t we change to a system that doesn’t have a built-in imperative to grow, because it’s killing us? It’s killing us ecologically, but it’s also killing us because the genuine and deserved demand of the global south for a place in the sun to raise their families, have an education, be decently cared for, medically and so on, is not going to be stopped – with or without a world war. All right, so let’s accommodate: Give them a bigger piece and rearrange – in the way that socialists have always advocated – to a much less unequal distribution of the resources of the world. That way we can stop growing, thereby meet our ecological danger and do away with the competition that threatens a war between a rising standard of living in the global south and a resharing that the rest of us here in the global north will have to undergo. But we do so because it saves our planet, and it saves us from war, and that’s worth it.

That’s a plan, but it requires the taboo be broken. Employer-employee is not the only way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services. It’s the capitalist way. It was what we got when we got rid of the lords and serfs, and masters and slaves – we replaced it with employers and employees. But we can do better than that and we are at a point where we have to. And so the issue of a socialism beyond capitalism comes right back on the agenda. It never really left, it just needs a little goosing from those of us who see it to make it become, again, what we’re all talking about and struggling to figure out how to achieve.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard described is occurring on a number of planes. He talks about the drive of capitalism is to grow. Well, that’s certainly the dynamic of industrial capitalism, but somehow that hasn’t been the drive of the United States recently. Richard, how do you grow by out competing your rivals? You cut costs, you make things cheaper, or less expensively, and better. But the United States has been losing its race. It’s true. Last month the US GDP is going to grow and next month it’s going to really grow because the hurricanes hit South Carolina and now they’re going to hit Florida. That’s going to be a big jump in GDP. It’s not going to increase America’s dominance or competitiveness.

The American idea of growing today – I think certainly the neo-con idea, the Democratic and Republican idea – isn’t the kind of growth Richard is talking about capitalism. It’s a purely exploitative growth: America can only grow by arranging the international economic order in a way that siphons off the real growth in other countries – China, Russia, the global south – and taking their economic surplus and transferring it to itself.

This is not a growth of part of the production sector of the economy. It’s a growth of the circulation sector of the economy. Marx drew those two distinctions – production, circulation, which is part of the distribution. The American growth has been parasitic. The NATO-U.S. unity is like a parasite on the body of the global majority and they call that growth for the United States in Europe, but it’s parasitism. All of that, as Richard just said, we’re facing the overhead of global warming. How do you prevent it? Well, China has taken the lead according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in cutting way back carbon emissions, way back coal, and by taking the lead and creating solar power and atomic power. The U.S. position is to oppose the importation of Chinese solar panels because that’s not their philosophy. The oil lobbyists are now backing both political parties in the United States to make sure that any agreements – like the Paris Agreement that America signed – will not be followed in practice.

You have the United States and Europe pushing the growth and pollution. You have the green party in Germany saying that coal is the fuel of the future. It’s coal and cutting down the forests. It’s not oil, it’s not gas, it’s not power. It’s simply that. And you achieve this global fix-up by war.

Somehow the anti-war party is supposed to be a key precondition catalyst for all of this environmental change. You’re having this bizarre conflation of ideas in the U.S.- NATO, as opposed to the rest of the world, just as Richard has pointed out.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, do you want to add something?

RICHARD WOLFF: No, no.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Right now, Michael, in your opinion, when it comes to the Biden administration, it seems that they’re trying to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. But in your opinion, why are they not successful? Why are they not successful in their attempts to put pressure on Netanyahu?

Last time we talked here, you said that the United States is running the show. Richard, I want you to comment on this as well. I had some sort of division between the analysts like you and Richard and other analysts. Some of you are believing that the United States is running the show in the Middle East and the other ones are thinking that the Israeli lobby in the United States is running the show. Who’s running the show with these endless wars?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we talked last week about this very topic. Netanyahu is doing just what the United States wants. The dream of Netanyahu is the same dream of the US neo-cons: war with Iran. Because if you can conquer Iran, then you just close up everything between Israel and Iran. You take up Syria, Iraq; you move down into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. You take over the whole Near East.

Obviously, Netanyahu is doing what the United States wants, because the United States is giving it the bombs every week to drop, giving it the money every month so that it can continue.

So what we’re seeing is a good cop-bad cop pretending. The United States doesn’t want to be blamed by the whole-world abhorrence for what is happening in Israel. So it pretends to say, “That’s not us; we want to be the good guys; we told him to be gentle when he dropped his bombs and not kill anybody.” But he’s killing people. And we keep giving him bombs and telling him to be gentle with it. Well, what can we do? We don’t have control – he’s a “sovereign country” as you played at the beginning. So all of this is just a charade.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I would argue very similarly. I don’t see this great struggle between the two as anything more than poorly staged theater that is not. Yeah, maybe for some people around the world, it’ll be convenient to believe that they can hold on. But I would look at it in a long-term strategic way, as follows: For many, many years now – for basically the post World War two period – this has worked very well, this alliance between the United States and Israel, for them. It has allowed Israel to go from a poor, largely agricultural backwater to an important modern economic power; to grow its population far beyond what it could have internally by itself. And it has allowed the United States to have – right in the middle of the Middle East – its own special agent dependent on it, loyal to it. I don’t want to go over all of the murky ways that Israel played strange intermediation roles when it came to the survival of apartheid in South Africa; when it came to the funding of the Iran Contras Central America. The hands of Israeli operatives are present in many of those – they were a loyal service. They operate a very good intelligence system in the Middle East, as the killings of Nasrallah and others have shown us. They’re probably better than what the United States could do, so that’s a service they can provide, that the United States either couldn’t or doesn’t want to be caught doing. So it’s all the Israelis who get the bad rep.

But here’s perhaps the most important: The Israeli economy is dead, it’s finished. It will take a long, long time to recover from what it is doing. An enormous portion of its adult manpower is busy in the military. They’re not working at their factories or their offices, or anywhere else.

Large numbers of people have left the country – that’s not reported on, but I know it to be the case – etc, etc. That Israel is going to be dependent on help from the United States economically, enormously, in the years ahead. So the United States has a proven, reliable agent who will need them in the future, and is therefore not in a position to deny the United States anything that it suggests it wants. I don’t see the United States having no leverage, as that journalist did.

The United States has plenty of leverage, and the reason it’s not using the leverage is there’s no reason to. Or let me put it differently: Where they’re using the leverage, we don’t know about it. Because they don’t want us to, and the Israelis dare not reveal the leverage if the Americans don’t want it, for all the reasons I’ve just given.

If there were no Israel, the United States would look for an alternative agent in the Middle East. And whoever you might imagine could play that role, they’ve decided that such an agent, if there is one, would be less reliable, less pliable, that you would operate less leverage than the one you have.

Does the AIPAC and the other domestic supporters of Israel inside the United States have influence? Sure they do. Professor Mearsheimer and his colleagues have demonstrated that for many years with countless studies. But I don’t think that would be enough, anywhere near enough, to explain what’s going on.

This is an alliance which has served the interests of those who run Israel and those who run the United States. And that’s why they preserve it. It’s not to have nothing to do with leverage. They have leverage. That’s why they preserve it. And the only thing holding back the Israelis, when they disagree with the United States, is the fact that they know that that leverage is there. They’re not going to take that chance. The biggest problem for the Israelis is the very large portion of Jews in the United States who do not support Netanyahu, who do not support the policies now.

And the way they handle that is to focus their foreign policy, not on the Jews in the United States, who are in the main, unreachable by that. But instead to go after the fundamentalist Christians, to build up the idea that Jesus is coming back, and that in order for him to come back, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, has to be in the hands of the Jews. The Bible says that somewhere. They fasten on that. And so that’s where the Israeli government has its film festivals and its exchanges and its tourism. I mean, that’s all dead. They’ve not earned any money on tourism for the last year, and none is likely to have happened. But those are Christians that are going over there hosted by the Jews in a very careful campaign, so that they get the support they need for Mr. Biden to do what he wants to do.

This is an agreed plan by both of them to maximize the freedom they have to do what they are doing. And the people who want to drive a wedge between the two of them, unless you have something very powerful, that’s not going to happen. There’s too much that pulls them together. You’re certainly not going to shame them by saying that “Mr. Biden doesn’t want you to invade…” and you invade it anyway. As Michael correctly says, this is a theater. This is a theater – that is how they manage the deal that they have.
It is like a good cop-bad cop deal, or any kind of deal where the two sides include in their deal the pretense they both contribute to, that that deal isn’t going on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I agree with what Richard said.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, recently we had finally – just to finalize this session – recently we had Emmanuel Macron finally saying something against war. And he said that we have to control the arms and aid going to Israel in order to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. And after that Netanyahu responded to him, “Shame on you” and “How you can say that,” and all of that.

How do you see the situation in the European Union changing toward Israel, or we are still having the same old policy toward Israel and its attitude?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me speak a little bit to Emmanuel Macron and I’ll quote the American filmmaker Michael Moore who last night when asked about the election made the following sentence: “Donald Trump is toast.” That was Michael Moore’s statement. He did correctly predict that Trump would win in 2016, so people should be careful before they dismiss what Michael Moore has to say. I make no prediction so I’m not doing that. Mr. Macaroon, as my French family refers to him, as President Macaroon. He is, in other words, a cookie.

He is toast – there is no question – he is political toast. He was never a serious politician. He proved that before he became president and just in case anyone missed it, he proved it again while he was president. He had the distinction of being a sitting president when earlier this year the national elections in France, divided among the three major parties, and his party – the party of the sitting president – came in third out of three. That’s his achievement. Goodbye, Mr. Macron. But he is desperate. Everything he does is guided by the last minute desperation of someone who has no base. He is hated by the old conservatives. He is hated by the socialist party of which he was once both a member and a minister. The man was minister of education, if I’m remembering correctly, in the last socialist government.

He’s hated by all of them because he is such a flip-flopper, finger-in-the-wind to see which way the politics wind is blowing. So now he has his last desperate effort. He’s going to appeal largely to the people on the political right – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of reasons – and the people that are on the left – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of different reasons – and try somehow to attract them. But they already hate him. They do not trust him. There is no reason. I would like to remind you that less than a year ago Mr. Macron was the leading European politician advocating for European troops to land in Ukraine and fight alongside the Ukrainians against the Russians, prompting Mr. Putin to make one of his statements, that “if other leaders in the West were thinking along these lines, he wanted to make it crystal clear that this would be an attack on Russia which Russia would respond to with any and all means at its disposal.” You’d have to be dead not to understand what he was saying. Now, this man wants to stop killing people in the Middle East. It’s not serious, and to the chagrin, not just of Mr. Macron, but of all French people, no one is taking him seriously.

And in that he was helped, because Mr. Netanyahu not only chastised him for saying these things, but went on to say – and I didn’t make this up, I’m virtually quoting Mr. Netanyahu – that “on the side of Israel is civilization, and on the other side is barbarism.” Well that’s our conversation a few minutes ago. There we have it again: “Savages and the good people.” And Mr. Macron – in the mind of Mr. Netanyahu – just crossed over the bridge from the good guys to the bad guys, and next we’ll be hearing him referred to as “a thug.”

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What can I add to that? Richard’s described the situation perfectly. All I can do is paraphrase and that’s not much of a discussion.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much for being with us today, both of you, and hope we can keep these talks and great pleasure as always talking with both of you. See you soon. Thank you.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Same here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Bye bye.

Image by hosny salah from Pixabay

Donald Trump and the impossible destination of Globalism (revisited)

Back in 2016 a month before Donald Trump was elected for the first time, I wrote a piece that I'm revisiting here. So much of what I said then still applies that I encourage you to read that piece. My thinking was heavily informed by a lecture by the now late French philosopher Bruno Latour entitled "Why Gaia is not the Globe."

Latour made the case that Trump's perplexing popularity could be traced to his ability to give voice to the anger and fear generated by the effects of Globalism. In fact, Latour noticed that the anger and fear were actually widespread and reflected in Great Britain's exit from European Union and the many right-wing movements in European countries that now are all too familiar eight years later.

I am capitalizing Globalism because it really is an ideology and not the "inevitable" reality that so many of us think it is. In fact, as Latour explains, it is an impossible destination. First, let me lay out a definition of Globalism by quoting from my 2016 piece:

With the discovery and then exploitation of fossil fuels on an ever growing scale, societies everywhere were faced with figuring out how to govern a world with ever increasing energy surpluses. Those surpluses made so many new things possible and in doing so led to rapid social and technological change.

We tried laissez-faire capitalism, communism, fascism, democratic socialism and finally globalism which I'll define as the management of worldwide economic activity and growth by large multi-national corporations which have no particular allegiance to any one country or people. Our belief has been that this arrangement is the most rational and efficient. Therefore, trade deals which bring down barriers both to international trade and to the movement of capital and technology across borders are believed to encourage global economic growth. That growth supposedly will ultimately lift the world's poor into the middle class and enrich everyone else while doing it.

Latour explains the binary trap we have laid for ourselves as a global society. We believe we can move forward toward a future of global economic growth and integration OR we can go backwards to a past of antiquated morals and technological stagnation.

But we already know that climate change, resource depletion, toxic pollution and species loss will prevent us from arriving at the endpoint implied by Globalism. As Latour puts it, the ever-expanding globe of our imagination will not actually fit into the thin layer of life where we live called the biosphere. In short, Globalism cannot be scaled up forever and, in fact, has already exceeded the limits of the biosphere. To continue our journey there is ecological suicide.

What we need to find then is another destination that neither situates us in an unrecoverable past nor forces us into an impossible-to-survive future. The binary trap keeps us locked into a framework with no good answers. As Latour says, we are like people on an airplane whose destination has disappeared and whose city of origin no longer exists. We must first realize this is our predicament, and then find a place to set down. But, to date, "we are extremely poor in inventing futures," he says. It would help, however, if we all starting looking for that third place.

Latour explains the anxiety of those not prospering under the continued movement toward Globalism. They seek protection in the form of work that supports them and their families, a stable community, and a stable identity as parent, spouse, provider and/or nurturer that anchors them in their community. But, the land of the "globe" in Globalism has striped away their protection by sending jobs abroad, damaging their small and rural communities through a loss of people and key institutions (closed schools and hospitals), and a loss of identity—under pressure of jobs losses and retrenchment at significantly lower wages and newfangled notions of gender roles and power—that can be painful, humiliating, confusing and stressful not just to men but also to some women.

The third destination that we are seeking will have to address these needs in order to be satisfying to these disaffected people.

There is also an epistemological disturbance in Globalism that is extremely disorienting. In the past, the lived experience was also largely regarded as reality. In the modernist world of Globalism, our lived experience is discounted and real is determined by "objective" science. In short, if our lived experience runs counter to the ideology of Globalism (often conflated with "objective" reality), we are told that we are ignorant, backward and unscientific, and need to get with the modernist program (even if we think that program is a corruption of our values).

The third destination needs to heal the rift between notions of reality and lived experience.

Latour does not offer a description of this third destination, but rather invites us to think about it and create it. He does not think the backlash against Globalism is actually doing the hard work of creating that alternate destination. But the backlash should not be dismissed as a mere desire to go back to the past. This backlash is actually an incipient recognition that Globalism as a destination is no longer either desirable or possible. What comes next is the political struggle of our age. To respond to that struggle with a reaffirmation of a destination that is impossible is of no use to human society and a failure of imagination.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Mike Benz delivered this lecture at Hillsdale College reviewing the origin and structure of the "intelligence state," often referred to as "the blob."

Timestamps:
1:19: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare
11:20: NSC 10/2 and the Plausible Deniability Doctrine
15:08: Diplomacy Thru Duplicity
16:04: Smith-Mundt Act, The CIA Media Empire
19:40: The Department of Dirty Tricks
20:36: The CIA As Servant Of The State…

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024

Selected transcript:

MIKE BENZ: The "intelligence state" is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong -- that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state, but there is something beyond it that I think, beginning with, helps elucidate.

...

We'll sort of speed-run the essential history all the way up to the present, but we're going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of "Year Zero" of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government. Instead of learning what you'd find in an ordinary history book, we're going to start with a document that I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare."

Did you know that George Kennan, in 1948, wrote this memo called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"?

George Kennan is known as a godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this "long telegram" and was the chief strategist of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But before all that, when all of this was getting started, he penned this top-secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years. It was declassified in 2005, and I think it helps elucidate the story as we're going to proceed here. We're going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare" was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election-rigging event. That was on April 18, 1948, and this memo was written just 12 days after that.

The particular focus was what had just happened in Italy. Italy was having its first democratic election after World War II, and it posited a U.S.-backed candidate on one side and a Russia-backed candidate on the other. When the rules-based international order was being established in 1948, we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council. The very first memo, which I have on screen here, emphasizes how important it is for the U.S. to control the political affairs of Italy. You'll see National Security Council Memo 1-1 is titled "The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy."

Kennan wrote, "Italy is obviously the key point. If the Communists win there, our whole position would probably be undermined."

What happened in this case was that in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to focus on gathering and analyzing intelligence. But because of the key importance perceived by the U.S. State Department to influence the Italian election, the CIA developed a makeshift, ad hoc, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the U.S.-preferred candidate. I have some statistics here and a little bit of context because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme.

About $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money was spent to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off-the-books sources of funding to finance it. Bags of money were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, campaign expenses, posters, and pamphlets. We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Newly created CIA proprietary media organizations like Voice of America Radio and Radio Free Europe set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.

The reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created six weeks after this memo was penned—also by George Kennan—but to help understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations. This means that when the U.S. government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches they were working with are no longer simply churches—they are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities; they become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer independent; it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, and organized criminal mafias do as well.

The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, together with our War Department (as it was called at the time), was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini. They served as a sort of guerilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. We had that network established. It was unseemly but seen as necessary in a time of war, but it was maintained in times of peace for political warfare. Suddenly, organized crime becomes not a criminal offense but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft. To drive that point home, Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, "Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."

Why was all this necessary? Well, in the eyes of the U.S. State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it. They assessed that 60% of the vote would have gone to the Communists -- but for CIA intervention.
I urge you throughout this to remember that when you hear "Communist" or "fascist" in the historical data points we’re going to go over, understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. Every time you see "Communism," as much as we abhor that with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the "blob" (as we’ll come to discuss) is domestic populism. This is actually the language they use.

When you hear them say "the Communists would have won," today they use the exact same language to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates.

...

This is from George Kennan, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy. George Kennan, the State Department, and the White House were so overwhelmed with delight about the world of possibility if we could simply scale the Italian operation.

But the problem was, it was very much against everything this country had stood for, for a century and a half before that. I'm going to read some of the highlighted items here. You’ll see the phrase "political warfare" dots this in a very deliberate way: organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques.

George Kennan says here, "We have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war." You’ll see he actually crossed out part of the draft because, again, this is a top-secret memo that was written in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says, "We’re hamstrung by this basic difference between peace and war, by our public’s yearnings." Then that’s crossed out, and it says, "by a national tendency to seek a political cure-all and a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations."

Basically, he is saying, "Listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this. They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war." World War II is over; it just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century.

You’ll see here references to the Italian elections, right? We had just engaged in the Italian elections 12 days prior. This political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’ll come back to that because, as we’ll see, the shape of the intelligence state extends far beyond intelligence—it’s really a tool of statecraft.

Here is an interesting and telling vision from this CIA godfather. It says, "We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations as we did at the time of the Italian elections." He’s saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it in every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, where there might be a need to protect U.S. national interests, trade interests, financial interests, or security interests. We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from cultural influencers to the media, to the churches, to the charities, to organized crime networks—even if we don’t use it, just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble if an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a U.S. national interest agenda.

I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and go through the history of this. Less than two months after George Kennan wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," saying, "Since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it." Less than two months after that, George Kennan sponsored the very act that would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our country works.

This was National Security Council Memo 10/2. Now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council (NSC) is called the "interagency." It coordinates with the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA -- everyone -- so that they are all working in a complementary fashion. It's in the White House and provides executive oversight of everything.

You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.

What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community -- this burgeoning, newly created CIA -- and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I'm going to read it, "All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them."

This is from 1948: "All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons." So, effectively, you are cast out of Eden. If you eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you. Their job is to lie to you. If they get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these covert links, and they could say it was not an officially sanctioned U.S. government operation -- something went rogue, someone wasn’t authorized, someone took it into their own hands.

I’m going to read this analysis that I think is a useful summary: "Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which was created the year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government."

We’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations. But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s and 1950s to be able to take over the world through diplomacy and duplicity.

The problem with diplomacy through duplicity is that plausible deniability is the core doctrine that governs the interagency, which controls all major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests. Because you lie to the outside world, you also need to lie to your own citizens to prevent the outside from finding out.

While the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies, not just abroad but at home.

...

In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, "Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don't build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth."

Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans."

For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. "Mammoth" is not a big enough word. After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.

So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we're about to meet. But even right out of the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced.

...

One essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there is a key distinction between the American homeland and the American Empire. We live in the American homeland, but the American Empire is everywhere else.

Today, even though all the major U.S.-domiciled corporations get the lion's share of their markets, revenues, and supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth, we, as a country, pale in comparison to the globe. The issue arises when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first—they run up against the empire managers, and therefore against this blob apparatus, and, by extension, the intelligence state.

In this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire operation is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license. It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department in all things.

...

What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.

Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960. By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people's movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.

The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.

Huge CIA operations were reported in the U.S. against anti-war forces. The CIA was bribing the National Association of Students and launched something called Operation Chaos, which was designed to permanently shape the composition of the Democratic Party by purging the popular populist leftist faction. Does that sound familiar? The intelligence state isn’t targeting George Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain—it is targeting one faction of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.

The next image I have here on screen is COINTELPRO. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The "COINTEL" refers to counterintelligence, which is basically when the FBI deals with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. I’ll get to that a little more in a second.

Now, the first thing that forced the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and ultimately culminated in what was called the Church Committee hearings. Also, there was the Pike Committee. On the left here is Frank Church. He was the Democratic senator who spearheaded those hearings. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight, no accountability—no one was saying, "Hey, let me look at that." There was no gang of eight. It was only with the Church Committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to allow a select handful of members of the House to conduct oversight. It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same on the Senate side.

This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous "heart attack gun," which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.

On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.

At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. On the left is a memo from the Church Committee hearing notes on the CIA's use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations. The center picture is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a giant network of CIA-funded and directed cultural and media institutions, primarily in Europe but extending globally. The CIA co-opted thought leaders in leading magazines, musicians, poets, and even hosted musical events to attract people in dozens of countries, aligning them with the U.S. State Department agenda.

Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.

Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the "Halloween Massacre," where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.

Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today's premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.

Fast forward to 2016, and I’ll wrap this up. As our NGO sphere, university centers, media organizations, union groups, and cultural groups developed a "favors for favors" relationship—this "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" dynamic—they would get grants from the State Department, USAID, or the National Science Foundation in exchange for cooperation. What we are up against is this network, this blob, this congealed structure where the intelligence state serves the public-facing functions of government. The CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and for the Pentagon on national security grounds.

When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.

Maybe I’ll close with a Sopranos reference. Tony Soprano runs a mafia outfit in New Jersey, and he has these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable dirty work so that the FBI can’t trace it back to him. There’s a character, Furio, who is the muscle, breaking into people’s homes, beating them up, and undermining their "democracy." If you are in that home and it’s your democracy being destroyed, your friends and family being arrested, you might say, "Oh, the CIA did that." But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.

Suzuki Muneo.

Suzuki Muneo is straight-talking, a man’s man. He has spent his career in the Diet in Tokyo and has rubbed elbows with–and rubbed the wrong way–just about every powerful person in Japanese politics over the past forty years. The two descriptions are mutually reinforcing. Suzuki uses power; he doesn’t worship it. He remains as much an outsider now–a Hokkaido patriot in the political maze of Nagatacho–as when he entered the political road in 1983.

Suzuki is unpopular now, as ever, because he refuses to follow the political herd on, above all, the question of Russia. Suzuki, whose home island is Russia’s backyard neighbor, maintains close ties with Russia. This brings benefits to Suzuki’s constituents, but it also wins him few friends in the Japanese political world, or in the media.

In this, our second long interview with Suzuki (first interview here), we ask him about his most recent visit to Russia, and about the future of Japan. Suzuki sees many possibilities for Japan with Russia, but laments that there is no one in power now who can turn those possibilities into reality.

Interview and text by Jason Morgan and Kenji Yoshida.

Kenji Yoshida and Jason Morgan (K&J): How was your visit to Russia?

Suzuki Muneo (SM): It’s been ten months since my last visit to Russia in October of 2023. Moscow is peaceful and orderly. The people of Moscow are out until late at night, strolling through the city. Restaurants are filled with customers. Department stores and other shops are fully stocked with goods. There is plenty of fruit for sale. Plenty of fish and meat.

Not far from this unhurried Moscow scene a war is unfolding, but one would never know it from inside the city. In this, I felt the strength and stability of Russia.

K&J: The West repeatedly imposes sanctions on other countries. In the case of Russia, the West imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and tried to destroy the ruble. Those sanctions, though, appear to have had the opposite effect.

SM: Russia initiated its special military operation in February of 2022. In May of that year, President Biden imposed sanctions on Russia. Biden said that sanctions would lead Russia to give up within two months. Was President Biden correct in this pronouncement?

It’s been nearly two and a half years since then. In 2023, Russia’s economy exhibited a growth rate of 3.6%. The growth rate for this year is forecast to be 5%. Russia is the world’s biggest energy superpower. It was underestimated by the West, but it has proven to be a strong country. The West, including the G7 countries, made a mistaken assessment of Russia in this regard. Responsibility for this misreading falls heavily also on NATO.

The special military operation started February 24, 2022. In March [of 2022], Ukraine came forward with a peace proposal. On April 15, 2022, Russia was prepared to sign Ukraine’s peace proposal. However, it was Ukraine that then withdrew the proposal. The backdrop to this, we are told, is that then-UK prime minister Boris Johnson interjected himself into the proceedings and pressured Ukraine not to sign any peace deal with Russia.

I think this was a terrible mistake. The United States was apparently also involved. In the Ukraine situation, too, the tendency of the Anglo-Saxons to use force to get their way proved to be a mistake. The war could have been over. An armistice was within reach. But England and America sent everything in the opposite direction.

K&J: For more than a hundred years, the Anglo-Saxons have been using force of arms to impose their will on the world. They seem to believe that they are qualified to rule in this way. It’s arrogant.

SM: In the Ukraine war, Russia seems to have understood the nature of Anglo-Saxon power and decided to have a showdown with the UK-American way of rule. Looking at Russia’s recent alliance with North Korea and also its collaboration with China, India, and other countries, it seems as though Russia is trying, not just to deal with the Anglo-Saxons, but to end their rule. Russia seems to be not passively accepting the Anglo-Saxons’ way but trying to put an end to it.

I am thinking back to the Crimea incident ten years ago. At that time, the president was Barack Obama. Obama was saying that America was no longer the world’s policeman and no longer the world’s financial backer. He took a step back from the world’s affairs.

I think he was correct in his assessment. America had been the world’s leader in everything, but Obama was saying that the United States would no longer be involved militarily in every part of the world, and would no longer be throwing money around everywhere in the globe. Obama was forthright and upfront about this.

And yet, Biden has urged Ukraine to fight on, promising to send weapons and cash. Why?

It has been ten years since Obama said that America was no longer the world’s sole superpower. Biden seems to be operating under the impression that the United States remains the world’s champion nation. Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. But for three years now, I have been thinking that his mental faculties are off. Hence, the mistaken approach to Ukraine.

K&J: Is it only Biden? Biden is surrounded by neocons, and Washington itself has the same outlook as Biden.

SM: Yes, it’s true.

America and England are one thing, but France and Germany have their own reasons separate from the former two countries. And yet, France and Germany were pulled into the present war. I think this way of doing things is behind the times. I have some doubts whether France and Germany can see what is ahead.

The Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down. Germany was reunited. The Soviet Union collapsed and we now have Russia. History changed completely.

President George H.W. Bush told the world that NATO would expand no further east than the reunited Germany. Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker wrote as much in his book. Chancellor Helmut Kohl told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO’s eastward expansion ended with the reunified Germany. Baker went so far as to say that he would not allow NATO to expand by a single inch. Gorbachev believed these statements and dismantled the Warsaw Pact arrangement.

NATO repeatedly said, year after year, that it would cut its presence. But the opposite happened. NATO expanded. It was Russia that took history as fact and faced the facts squarely. The West relied on sidestepping and deception. The West spoke of liberalism, solidarity. But behind the scenes it was plotting to weaken Russia. I don’t think this was fair.

K&J: Could it be that Obama laid a trap by appearing to retreat from the world’s stage?

SM: I think Obama made an honest and accurate assessment of America’s economic position at the time. America commanded a quarter of the world’s economic might. Today, that figure has gone down to less than ten percent.

I think Japan is making a mistake on this point. Japan is one of the G7 countries. When the G7 got underway, those seven countries accounted for some eighty percent of the global economy. Now, unfortunately, it’s forty percent.

K&J: BRICS has overtaken the G7 it seems.

SM: Yes. When you expand the G7 to take in the G20, the latter includes Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Kazakhstan [occasional guest at G20 summits], Argentina, Turkiye, and so forth. Now, the G20 accounts for eighty percent of the global economy.

The BRICS countries are in control of eighty percent of the world’s energy. Russia, Iran as of last year, Saudi Arabia, UAE–the world is moving to be carbon neutral by 2050 as part of the response to climate change, but for the next twenty-six years we will have no choice but to remain reliant on fossil fuels. Of the fossil fuels, natural gas is particularly important. The most abundant source of natural gas, and oil must also be included here, is Russia. It is essential to look at these facts dispassionately.

Russia is a superior country and is recognized as such worldwide. It is the world’s most important country in terms of energy resources, and also has a formidable might apart from this as well. Russia’s supremacy in energy resources is unwavering in the face of Western sanctions. I find it baffling in the extreme why the G7 and NATO countries do not comprehend this.

K&J: It seems there are many possibilities for Japan in a relationship with Russia. You have just visited Russia and seen for yourself. Are other Japanese politicians unaware of the possibilities that could be realized in dealing with Russia? Japan remains attached at the hip with the United States. Is this a sustainable arrangement?

SM: If America were as powerful today as it was thirty or forty years ago, then it would be understandable for Japan to be pulled this way and that by the United States. But now, even America is saying that America cannot remain the world’s sole superpower, that we have to take the rest of the world into account.

Ten years ago, Obama told then-prime minister Abe Shinzo that the United States would impose sanctions on Russia over Crimea. Obama asked Japan to cooperate. But Abe told Obama, clearly, “No.”

I heard this from Prime Minister Abe directly. He told Obama, “Japan and Russia are neighbors. There are issues between Japan and Russia that must be resolved. A peace treaty must be signed. The Northern Territories. Japan cannot survive if it takes the same position and adopts the same values as the United States. So, I will make an independent decision, for Japan.”

Abe said this straight out. He was correct in what he said. Obama, I am told, hung up on him.

The Foreign Ministry bureaucrats in Japan told Abe that President Obama would not attend the Ise Shima Summit that was being planned for the next year, 2015. The bureaucrats said that Obama also wouldn’t attend the Hiroshima peace memorial event to which he had been invited. The bureaucrats took a pessimistic view. But Obama came to the Ise Shima Summit.

[He also came to Hiroshima in 2016.]

This was proof that, at that time, a national leader with resolution and patriotism, and who had the mind of the people at heart, could expect to be understood. So I cannot understand, at all, why Prime Minister Kishida Fumio cannot do the same with President Biden. [As of September 27, 2024, Ishiba Shigeru is the new prime minister of Japan].

K&J: Russia’s relationship with North Korea has strengthened considerably as of late. The Japanese government has long entrusted to Washington the resolution of the abductions issue, wherein North Korean agents abducted Japanese civilians. But Russia’s influence over North Korea is, presumably, now considerable. What is the possibility that, if Japan were to ask Russia to intervene with Kim Jong Un and ask him concretely what his demands would be in exchange for allowing the abduction victims to return home, Russia would respond favorably?

SM: North Korea is a neighboring country, and is also a member of the United Nations. In light of these facts, it is highly unusual that Japan and North Korea have no diplomatic relations. Japan and North Korea ought to normalize relations immediately. Talks [between North Korea and Japan] must start with this.

Japan must not impose conditions before entering into talks, such as by insisting that North Korea acknowledge that it abducted Japanese citizens, or by declaring that the resolution of the abduction issue will take priority. The abduction issue is one to discuss after a summit meeting has been achieved and trust has been built.

No summit meeting is scheduled yet. Before we even get to that point, Japan’s imposing conditions will serve only to antagonize the other party. Japan will obtain nothing by doing so.

When Koizumi Junichiro was prime minister, he visited North Korea. The leader of North Korea at that time was Kim Jong Il, who admitted, before the world, to the abduction of Japanese citizens and apologized.

I think that this was an opportunity to make a fresh start. But Japan squandered this opportunity because the government, swayed by public opinion, advanced an intractable position. The Stockholm Agreement [of May 2014, in which North Korea promised to conduct investigations into the abductions issue] is one thing, but when Koizumi and Kim sat down together [in Pyongyang in 2002], they spoke with one another without any expectations. I think this was extremely important in building a relationship of mutual trust.

The six-party talks [started in 2003 and addressing security concerns in Northeast Asia, especially regarding North Korea] were underway around the time [North Korea and Japan were discussing the abduction issue]. The first chair country of the talks was Russia. The head of the Russian delegation was Alexander Losyukov [then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs]. Losyukov was a diplomat I knew very well. I thought it would have been a good idea to ask Losyukov [to help broker talks over the abduction issue]. Russia and North Korea have, historically, a close relationship. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, used to be a soldier in the Soviet Red Army. Because of these good connections, I still think it would be good to have Russia help [with the abduction issue]. It would have been good at the time, too.

But then the Americans got involved, then South Korea, and then China. There were too many parties involved, and the talks broke down.

Still, though, the only one that can broker and advise on this is Russia. Former prime minister Abe understood my views on this and accepted them. Abe was strongly determined to resolve [the abduction issue] without asking [the United States], but now it’s become such that Japan can do nothing without asking the United States. Therefore, there is no progress made at all.

K&J: Was that not the point of the six-party talks from Washington’s perspective? Far from wanting to resolve the abduction issue, it seems, even now, that Washington’s objective is to draw the problem out for political advantage.

SM: I think that the abduction issue, at the most fundamental level, can be resolved only bilaterally, only between Japan and North Korea. And how to bring about that bilateral engagement is to ask Russia to help [open channels of communication]. That is the only way. But the talks were put at the mercy of the United States in many ways, and things went awry.

Next year will mark eighty years since the end of the Second World War. I think this should mark a turning point on a number of issues, such as for example, concluding a peace treaty with Russia. I think we’re also approaching the last opportunity to resolve the abduction issue.

One often hears in Japan that it was the Soviet Union that unilaterally reneged on the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact [in 1945]. But it was the Americans who incited the Soviets to do this at the Yalta Conference. President Franklin Roosevelt told Soviet leader Josef Stalin that Germany would surrender in May, and that the Soviet Union should attack Japan two or three months later. Stalin took very serious stock of the situation and made his move after the American atomic bombings of Japan.

Taking an objective view of history, I came to the conclusion that when Japan follows the United States Japan’s legs are swept out from under her.

K&J: I find it very difficult to understand why Nagatacho should still trust a Washington which has thus proven itself devious time and again.

SM: The current American ambassador to Japan is Rahm Emanuel. He is butting into the moral values and historical sensibilities of the Japanese people. This is unprecedented. I am worried to see that some people are being led along by him and can see nothing but the United States.

The bill always comes due. And it’s surely going to be a big bill.

K&J: The United States has recently set up a joint-command structure in Japan. The new joint force headquarters is under the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, but is based in Japan. I see this as Washington’s preparing to involve Japan in a major war, possibly over Taiwan.

SM: Japan is, in part, being used for America’s global strategy. Seventy-three percent of America’s military presence in Japan is concentrated in Okinawa. This is not a normal situation.

Russia is a major nation. If there were a Japan-Russia relationship on par with the US-Japan alliance, then Japan could expect to play the role of counterweight between Russia and America. I want there to be a leader in Japan able to make the decision to do this. As things are now, it’s all one-sided for America.

Abe worked well with Trump. He worked well with President Putin. I think that if Japan’s leader was smart about it, then Japan could [work with both sides]. Japan must be firm in its dealings with other countries. We are not nearly firm enough now.

Look at India. India is very strong, but it also balances Russia against the United States very well.

K&J: Is there anyone in the Liberal Democratic Party today that can be that strong leader?

SM: No. There is no one. And it worries me.

Introduction

The following is an overview of the recent events and present state of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. We observe movement towards the end of the conflict in its present configuration and in two new directions simultaneously—a race to the final resolution of the NATO-Russia question. One direction consists of movement towards peace negotiations. The other is toward escalation into a open, direct NATO-Russia war likely to expand beyond the borders of Ukraine and far western regions of Russia. The race to resolution is on and it remains anyone’s guess whether peace or greater war will win the day.

Russia Proposes Diplomacy…Again

On June 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a roadmap for ending the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War during a speech at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He called the “Ukrainian crisis” “a tragedy for us all” and the result not of a Russo-Ukrainian conflict per se but “of the aggressive, cavalier, and absolutely adventurous policy that the West has pursued and is pursuing.” He proposed what he called “a real peace proposal” for establishing a permanent end to the Ukrainian conflict and war rather than a ceasefire. Putin based his proposal on principles he has reiterated numerous times, most of which were agreed upon by Kiev and Moscow in Istanbul in March-April 2022; a process scuttled by Washington, London, and Brussels (https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html; see also https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1750362694949966291?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ). In particular, he has now offered “simple” conditions for the “beginning of discussions.” They include: the full withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia oblasts as they existed as of 1991—that is, Russia would receive all the oblasts’ territories not just those now controlled by Russian troops. Immediately upon agreeing to this condition and a second requiring Kiev’s rejection of any NATO membership (Ukraine’s “neutral, non-bloc, non-nuclear status”), from the Russian side “immediately, literally the same minute there will follow an order to cease fire and begin negotiations” and Moscow “will guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal” of Ukrainian units. However, he expressed “huge doubts” that the West would allow Kiev to agree to this. If his offer is rejected, Putin emphasized that all future blood-letting in Ukraine would be the West’s and Kiev’s “political and moral responsibility” and that Kiev’s negotiating position would only deteriorate as its troops’ position at the front (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

To be sure, Putin’s offer was not made under the illusion that it would be taken up within the next few months and was certainly another effort to lay blame for the conflict at Washington’s, Brussels and, less so perhaps, Kiev’s doors. Nevertheless, Putin’s public offering before Russia’s Foreign Ministry personnel is a most authoritative and official statement of a specific proposal from Russia; one that included paths to both a ceasefire and permanent peace, if Washington and/or Kiev choose to take them as Ukraine continues to crumble at the front, in the political sphere, and economically throughout this year. The pressure from the Western and Ukrainian publics to negotiate with Moscow will continue to mount through the U.S. presidential elections, as Ukraine deteriorates and the risk of direct, open, full-scale NATO-Russia war grows. It is possible that if US intelligence concludes and reports to the White House that the Ukrainian front and/or army and/or regime will collapse before the November elections, then the Biden administration may be moved to open talks or force the Ukrainians to do so. 

Putin’s territorial demands are not likely to be static, as the territorial configuration changes rapidly on the ground. Russia seizes more territories beyond the four oblasts and Crimea, and the negotiating algorithm changes. Thus, the seizure of areas in Sumy and Kharkiv may not just be an attempt to begin establishing a broad ‘buffer zone’ to move more Ukrainian artillery and drones out of range. The Sumy, Kharkiv, and areas near, say, areas of Nikolaev and Odessa in the south can serve as trading cards to entice acquiescence to talks, as long as Russia makes no claims on those territories. In other words, the Ukrainians could have inferred and were perhaps supposed to infer that they could demand a request for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from Sumy and Kharkiv simultaneously with Kiev’s withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the four Novorossiyan regions. The incursions into Sumy and Kharkiv in May might reflect preparation then already for Putin’s official reiteration of the peace proposal in June. Putin’s call for Ukrainian withdrawal from the four noted ‘Novorossiya’ regions implies the ‘return’ of any and all other areas occupied by Russian troops. Continued refusal to talk with Moscow and any further Russian gains give Putin flexibility in enticing or threatening Washington, Brussels, and/or Kiev to the negotiating table. Refuse talks and lose non-Novorossiyan lands; accept talks and Kiev gets them back.        

Also, both subjectively (with Putin’s intent) and objectively (without Putyin’s intent) the proposal undermined Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s ‘disnamed’ ‘peace summit’ in Switzerland which was nothing other than an exercise in rallying support among supporters for the beleaguered Maidan regime. Tied to this issue is the Russian president’s assertions in the speech both Zelenskiy and the Maidan regime are illegitimate. Putin got mired down in some self-contradictions here. His assertion that the Maidan regime is illegitimate, since it came to power by an illegal “armed putch” – an absolutely correct one – contradicts his other claim that only Ukraine’s parliament or Supreme Rada is now a legitimate authority and representative of the Ukrainian people. According to Putin, Zelenskiy is not Ukraine’s legitimate authority according to the Ukrainian constitution and thus the Rada is, because Zelenskiy’s first five-year term expired without his being re-elected, but this is a plausible but debatable conclusion regarding a now extremely complicated legal issue. The key point here is that if the Maidan regime that arrived in power in February 2014 by way of an illegal coup is illegitimate, then the organs of power elected under it are equally as illegitimate, putting aside the issue of creeping legitimization by time (still too early) and international recognition. Indeed, it was a decision of the Rada on 21 February 2014 ostensibly impeaching the already overthrown (for all intents and purposes) President Viktor Yanukovych, without a quorum moreover, that gave a quasi-legal veneer of legitimacy to the Maidan coup, as Putin himself notes in his June speech (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

However, it should be noted that Putin’s raising of this issue is probably less driven by legalities than politics. Putin may be trying to drive a wedge between parliament and the Office of the President in order to strengthen any coup d’etat being planned in the wings by those such as former president Petro Poroshenko and former Chief of the General Staff Valeriy Zaluzhniy. In Putin’s interpretation of Ukraine’s “unique juridicial situation” as well as that of some Ukrainians, Poroshenko’s or Zaluzhniy’s legitimacy to rule is no less and indeed greater than that of Zelenskiy’s own.

It appears that Zelenskiy’s increasingly weak position at home, which I have discussed numerous times elsewhere, declining support for Ukraine abroad and most importantly in the U.S., Ukrainian forces’ dire situation all along the front and in the rear (lack of men and weapons to fight), the threat of a Russian summer offensive (see below), and Putin’s June proposals had their effect. As Zelenskiy arrived in Brussels on the eve of the NATO summit in Washington DC, a series of events confirmed the likelihood that Putin’s speech reflected developments in secret US-Russian talks, and Zelenskiy suddenly moved to suggest Kiev prepare (https://ctrana.news/news/467522-zelenskij-nameren-ustroit-perehovory-ob-okonchanii-vojny-chto-eto-znachit.html). In the days prior, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin telephoned Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and supposedly discussed measures to prevent a US-Russian clash that could lead to war likely motivated by the ATACMs attack on Crimea that killed some ten beach-goers, including children, and wounded some 40. It seems almost certain that there was some discussion of negotiations on war and peace. This was followed by rumors that a Russian plane had departed to Washington DC on June 25th. Now, just days later, Zelenskiy said in Brussels that Kiev “must put a settlement plan on the table within a few months.” This followed a statement weeks earlier by Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba and Office of the President Andriy Yermak that the next Ukrainian peace summit following the failure of early June’s session should lead to a peace agreement and include Russia directly or indirectly for the first time and lead to a peace agreement (https://ctrana.news/news/466816-kuleba-dopustil-prekrashchenie-vojny-v-ukraine-posle-sammita-s-uchastiem-rossii.html; see also https://ctrana.news/news/467121-v-kakom-formate-mohut-sostojatsja-perehovory-s-rossiej-na-novom-sammite-mira.html). This confirms my sense that the Ukrainian war will end one way or the other this year unless NATO intervenes directly with troops on the ground.

Moscow’s Military Plans: Reject Talks and War You Shall Have

Moscow’s military plans for the remainder of the year can be summed up as continuity in Ukraine and preparations for war beyond Ukraine against the West. Thus, in Ukraine Russia will continue its more offensive strategy of ‘attrit and advance’ upgraded from, an intensification of what Alexander Mercouris calls ‘aggressive attrition’ (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/02/02/russian-strategic-transformation-in-ukraine-from-aggressive-attrition-to-attrit-and-advance/). Under attrit and advance, Russian forces still emphasize destruction of Ukraine’s armed forces over the taking and holding of new territory. The attrition of massive, combined air, artillery, missile, and drone war supersedes the advances on the ground by armor and infantry in this strategy. Thus, territorial advance is slow, but personnel losses are fewer. The Russians do not have their eyes on Kharkiv and may not even be attempting to create a border buffer zone. The main military strategic goal of the Kharkiv, now Kharkiv-Sumy offensive likely is to stretch the frontlines and thus resources of the Ukrainian armed forces. Building a buffer zone is secondary and concomitant with the military-political strategy of attrit, advance, and induce Kiev to talk. Look south in summer or autumn for offensives or very heightened activity in Kherson and/or, perhaps, Zaporozhia. The goal of this will be to stretch out the length of the entire war front beyond that which is being accomplished by the attacks on Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts. The Russian strategy at this higher level is to stretch and thin out the Ukrainian forces’ already exhausted personnel, weapons, and equipment resources in the hope that a whole can be punched deep into Ukrtainian lines and the rear at some overstretched point, allowing a major, perhaps even ‘big arrow’ breakthrough aimed at some key Ukrainian stronghold or an encirclement of a large number of Ukrainian troops.

Despite the calls of some Russian hawks, Putin will never acquiesce to bomb Ukraine, no less Kiev ‘into a parking lot’ or ‘the stone age.’ For Russians, Ukrainians are a fraternal eastern Slavic people, with long-standing ties to Russia. Most Russian families have relatives or friends from or in Ukraine. Kiev is ‘the mother of all Russian cities’, and despite Russia’s possession of precise smart weapons, the risk of destroying Orthodox holy sites and other historical monuments in Kiev is too high. Russia’s overwhelming strength in weapons and manpower, despite Western inputs into Ukraine’s armed forces, could allow Russian attrit and advance to persist for many years—more than will be necessary to force negotiations or seize much of Ukraine.

Boiling the Russian Frog – Escalation by Any Other Name

There has been much talk about the US repeartedly stepping over Russian red lines. The most recent is Washington’s and Brussels’ (NATO’s) grant of permission to Kiev to target the territory of Russia proper (1991 territory) with Western-made weapons. The West itself has drawn many red lines that it said could spark direct war with Russia and, therefore, should not be crossed: offensive weapons, artillery, tanks, aircraft, various types of missiles, cluster munitions, etc., etc. Most recently, Washington crossed two red lines in rapid succession by approving Kiev use of U.S missiles, such as ATACMs to target Russian territory across the border in Kharkov and, presumably Sumy, where Russian forces have made a new incursion in order to develop a buffer zone so that Ukraine cannot target civilians as it has been doing in cities in Belgorod, send Ukrainian and Russian-manned pro-Ukrainian units across the border into Russia, and otherwise target Russian territory from northeastern Ukraine. It then expanded approval of the use of such missiles against any Russian territories from which attacks in Ukraine are being supported  (www.politico.com/news/2024/06/20/us-says-ukraine-can-hit-inside-russia-anywhere-00164261). Days later Ukraine fired 5 ATACMs (4 were intercepted) at Sevastopol which hit beach-goers far from any military target, wounding 46 and killing 3, including 2 children. The potential escalation of the overall war resulting from this Ukrainian target was compounded when on the same day jihadi terrorists attacked the ancient Muslim city of Derbent in Dagestan, long a hotbed of global jihadi terrorism in Russia. The terrorists, likely from Central Asia or Afghanistan’s ISIS-affiliated Islamic State of Khorosan, attacked an Orthodox church and a Jewish synagogue, killed several civiulians, 15 policeman, and cut the throat of an Orthodox priest. This attack will likely be conflated with the Sevastopol attack. Recall the jihadin attack on Moscow’s concert venue, Crocus City Hall, which Russian authorities immediately suspected to be one involvomng Ukrainians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has drawn few if any clear red lines, but several have been implied. Cautious and cagey Putin has never explicitly promised a particular response to any particlar crossing of a red line. Instead, he has invoked Russia’s great military potential, including nuclear, as sufficient reason for rational leaders to cease and desist. The assumption – both Putin’s and observers’ – is that this is a spontaneous, gradual escalation, driven by panic over Kiev’s deteriorating military, political, and economic situation as Russia marches forward, expanding the war front. The likelihood is that this is not a spontaneous response to conditions at the battlefront but rather a calculated policy of ‘boiling the frog’, and the ‘frog’ is as much Western publics as it is Russian political and military planners. After all, it matters less to Russian military planners at least why NATO is escalating the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War than the fact that NATO is escalating, crossing red lines. For Western publics, however, the approach of war needs to go unnoticed until it is too late. Whether by hook or crook, a false flag operation or a provoked Russian overreaction, Western NATO leaders seem intent on expanding the war beyond Ukraine’s borders and that will require Western public support and thus a vaccum of public discussion of NATO actions and national interests. Even if the constant escalation is ‘simply’ a game of chicken, upping the ante to see if Putin blinks or if the war can be dragged out past the November U.S. elections, there are many in U.S. intelligence and other departments, who are itching for a war against Russia who may escalate or enable Kiev to do so, intentionally or not, such that one is provoked. Unintentionality comes in, as Kiev has been anxious to force NATO or at least NATO member-states into direct involvement in the war. Ukraine has achieved some success in this, but so far such Western involvement has been limited, intially, to secret injections of Western troops and mercenaries, and then to open advisory roles. The summer and fall of 2024 will be a dangerous window in which a spark can detonate the larger war that such mad men and women are playing with.

To the extent that the West remains intent on continuing the escalation of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Moscow will engage in asymmetrical escalation targeting Western forces outside of Europe and prepare for possible full-scale war with NATO or NATO members in and beyond Ukraine. Putin recently noted that asymmetrical escalation would be Moscow’s choice should the Werst continue escalating against Russian in Ukraine. Many commentators have noted what such options might be: arming the Houthis with missiles or air defense, supporting Hezbollah and/or Hamas against Israel, arming terrorist groups in the Middle East to attack U.S. bases, say, in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere. Given the thousands of U.S bases around the world, American and other Western forces are eminently vulnerable. Moscow only needs the will and networks for deploying its ample means in the necessary directions. Moscow has the will. It is building networks.

Towards a Eurasian Security Pact: Getting Ready for Direct War with NATO

With war with NATO now firmly in the cards, a distinct possibility, the Kremlin is intensely set on military and military-political preparations. The rejection of Putin’s next peace proposal was likely the last straw that will set in motion the next phase in Russia’s diplomatic offensive in tendem with China aimed it rallying the Rest against the West. This new phase will focus on developing military partnerships and alliances. This was signalled most notably in the same June 14th speech in which Putin made his peace offering, evidencing the connection between it, the West-Ukraine rejection, and Russia’s first diplomatic move in this security direction. 

For years, particularly after the Maidan coup, Putin has been conducting Russian diplomacy with the goal of creating a Great Eurasian and global alternative to the West’s ‘rules-based world order’, seeking to base a new, alternative international system of political, economic, financial, and monetary institutions on different rules written by all the great powers – the ‘Rest’ – rather than just the West. This ‘democratization’ or a certain ‘de-hierarchization’ or ‘levelling’ of the international system is to be organized on the principle of multipolarity and diversity for the world’s major civilizations. Putin’s model has come to mirror the ideas of the late Russian neo-Eurasianist Aleksandr Panarin in many ways. It has taken years for Putin to arrive firmly at the idea of an interconnected Greater Eurasia as the core of a global community of civilizations, preferably ‘traditional’ (i.e. non-postmodernist Western ones) as a kind of ‘Russian idea.’

However, in his February 29th annual address to both houses of the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin introduced the idea of creating a Eurasian security system. He reiterated his idea of “democratizing the entire system of international relations,” by which he means dismantling Western hegemony or ‘rules-based world order.’ However, he also proposed replacing it with a “system of unidivided security,” under which “the security of some cannot be secured at the expense of the security of others,” and gave marching orders to Russia’s diplomatic corps and other departments to what in effect would culminate in a Greater Eurasian security ‘architecture’ or pact (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73585).

On June 14th, Putin declared the death, the “collapse of the system of Euro-Atlantic security,” and repeated his call for the international security architecture to be “created anew.” He instructed the government and foreign ministry to work out “jointly with partners, with all interested countries…their version of guaaranteeing security in Eurasia, proposing them then for a wide international discussion.” He revealed that during his May visit to China he discussed this with PRC Chairman Xi Jinping, and they “noted that the Russian proposal does not contradict, but, to the contrary, compliments and is fully in agreement with the basic principles of the Chinese initiative in the sphere of global security.” Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy responded to the summit by criticizing China for being Putin’s tool, contributing further to the anti-diplomatic dynamic and isolation of the West from the Rest (https://breakingdefense.com/2024/06/in-surprise-singapore-visit-zelenksyy-asks-for-asian-support-in-peace-talks-accuses-china-of-disruption/). China responded by declaring its geopolitical military solidarity with Russia. Nevertheless, in his June speech Putin stated that Russia “future architecture of security is open to all Eurasian countries,” including “European and NATO countries.” This Greater Eurasia security pact is thus also a mechanism for splitting NATO, particularly Europe from the U.S. This is to be achieved by networking and lobbying all the international organizations in Eurasia that Russia has been building for decades now: the Russia-Belarus Union, BRICS+, SCO, EES, CSTO, and the CIS—all specifically mentioned by Putin in his speech behind such a project—as well as “influential international organizations of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.” According to Putin, the “states and regional structures of Eurtasia should determine concrete sphers of cooperation in the area of joint security. Proceeding from this: that they themselves should build a system of working institutions, mechanisms, and agreements that would really serve the attainment of the common goals of stability and development.” In this regard, he supported the Belarus’s proposal “to work out a programmatic document: a charter of multipolarity and diversity in the 21st century” (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285). The Belarusian proposal was made by Minsk’s Foreign Minister in 23 October 2023 speech and envisaged what Putin discussed on June 14 but included the OSCE as a potential participant (https://ont.by/news/belarus-predlagaet-miru-razrabotat-hartiyu-mnogoobraziya-dlya-xxi-veka).

It is likely no coincidence that Putin openly supported Belarus’s idea of such a charter ten days before Belarus, with Russian sponsorship, was set to become a member of SCO on June 25th. Belarus’s membership in the largely Asian based organization founded by Moscow and Beijing places SCO’s flag farter west than ever before. This comes days after Putin’s visit to North Korea and the agreement to establish a de facto Russo-North Korean alliance. Thus, the gorwing network of theb Sino-Russian-organized networks of international networks based in Eurasia but extending globally through BRICS+5 to every continent is growing apace and now includes a robust security component.

         Putin suggested in his June 14th speech that building an “undivided system of Eurasian security” and in fact global security architecture would be a post-Ukrainian war focus, again implying possible inclusion of the West or elements thereof, in any such architecture. But the train of the Rest’s rejection of the Western worldview has left the station, and, with the danger of escalation in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere afoot, it seems more likely that the new Eurasian-South bloc will be an alternative to, possibly a foe of the West’s ‘rules-based world order’ rather than a partner (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285). 

Conclusion

         Again, the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – the current war with militay combat confined largely to Ukrainian and far western Russian territory — will end this year or very early next year. However, a new broader war can take its place, if the peace fails or is never agreed upon. Such a broader war could be confined to the present war’s territorial parameters in Ukraine, while expanding to a worldwide proxy war led by Russia and its direct or indirect allies against Western foreigbn bases and/or spreading to western Ukraine as a result of a NATO military intervention across the Dniepr’s Right Bank. A NATO fighter jets, such as F-16s, based outside Ukraine, could make Romanian or Polish air bases or other facilities targets for Russian missiles and drones. A NATO or Russian no fly zone of one kind or another could lead to NATO-Russian air combat. A Russian shootdown of the U.S. intelligence drone Global Hawk could be the spark for such tensions in the air.

         The hope is that cooler heads will prevail, but the U.S. is in the midst of a deep and potentially explosive political crisis in which bureaucratic politics can become highly cryptic, conspiratorial, chaotic, and irrational, provoking new more dangerous conflict. Similarly, in Kiev a meltdown of the Maidan regime could be imminent and will likely come as a shot in the dark, unexpected by all. That could lead to the same kind of breakdown of bureaucratic, state discipline, and the rule of law – something far weaker in Ukraine than in the `U.S. – and lead to clandestine adventures of desparation, such as a false flag on a nuclear plat in Ukraine’s Energodar or elsewhere or ‘Hail Mary’ operation targeting a Russian nuclear or other strategic object, sparking a Russian overreaction and a full-scale NATO-Russian war. Worse still, state organizational (as opposed to territorial) breakdown in Ukraine could bring a complete political, economic, social, and state breakdown, with opposing Ukrainian partisan armies, warlords, and ultranationalist/neofascist formations fighting between themselves and carrying out guerilla and terrorist warfare against Russian and even Western occupiers. That Zelenskiy is now broaching peace talks with Putin is a reflection of the opportunity and dangers that are in the offing.  

NEW BOOK

EUROPE BOOKS, 2022

RECENT BOOKS

MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2021

===

MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018

About the Author – 

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media. 

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.

The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism

First Things has just put out an essay by

Nathan Pinkoski

, titled “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” that I think is one of the most intellectually important pieces to be published in some time, and which I’ll go out of my way to recommend here.  

It is essentially a detailed account of how and why the United States government decided it needed to surveil and control the bank accounts and financial transactions of the entire world in the name of fighting terrorism — and then authoritarianism… and then the hazy universal evil of “hate.” More generally, it’s the story of how Western liberalism’s former separation of public and private spheres of life was torn down, thrusting us into our current hellscape of technocratic “global governance,” in which dissidents are liable to find themselves debanked from the financial system in the name of inclusion.

With this account Pinkoski fills in some important gaps in the record by identifying and documenting some of the key figures and decisions-points that led us to where we are now. In particular, he expertly reveals just how bipartisan the scheme to transform national “government” into global “governance” was, with the twin “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” sides of American politics working hand-in-hand to advance the same ambitious revolution after the end of the Cold War.

This includes uncovering some rather spectacular facts and quotes that I at least was unaware of, such as an open declaration by Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor that America’s post-Cold War strategy would be to “pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-governmental groups,” including “private firms” and “human rights groups,” in order to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” across the planet and isolate “backlash states” “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Which is exactly the foreign policy chimera we got and still labor under decades later.

Or the fact that it was not some shadowy cabal of Blackrock and the UN that first invented manipulative “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing standards, but the George W. Bush administration’s national security staff, who noted that private finance “could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments” and predicted that “the banks will fall into line” once “our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

Hence why we ought not be surprised that in 2021 G.W. Bush would stand beside his erstwhile establishment-left opponents on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and declare that the real threat to America comes from “extremists at home,” from the populist Trump supporters who, “in their disdain for pluralism,” are “children of the same foul spirit” as foreign terrorists — and who therefore necessitate that the same regime of coordinated public and private coercive force be applied at home as abroad.

Overall, Pinkoski’s essay powerfully demonstrates just how dramatically different Western “liberal-democratic” countries are from a mere three decades ago. Its publication is also something I’ve been awaiting impatiently for half a year now, because this summer I was present at the romantically-clandestine underground meeting of dissident scholars (aka a First Things seminar) at which Pinkoski originally presented his argument, then in the form of a much longer academic paper.

I was asked to present my own response to Pinkoski’s paper at the gathering, which I did, and which I will publish here below in case it is of interest. (Note that many of the lines cited in my response will not match the shortened version published in First Things, but I’ve decided to leave them unaltered here anyway.) In it, I make two main arguments: that the revolution Pinkoski describes is best thought of as the expansionary process of totalitarian managerialism (as described in The China Convergence), and — more disagreeably — that what he describes as “postliberalism” is in fact the triumph of liberalism unbound.

Definitely read Pinkoski’s essay first though! I expect and very much hope that he will continue to expand on it in the future, and that it will become a much-cited work in the years ahead.

Response to Nathan Pinkoski (N.S. Lyons, Palo Alto, June 2024)

Nathan Pinkoski has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction, and which thus — to cut to the point — grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of 20th century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the relentless expansion of the EU as a monetary union and then as a federalist empire, accompanied by the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security — a trend also pioneered by the U.S. government’s expansive efforts after 9/11 to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics” means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But it is only a case study of a larger pattern. And if I have any productive criticism to offer, it is that, in prudently limiting his scope to merely the realms of finance, monetary policy, and foreign affairs, Pinkoski has perhaps not been quite bold enough. Without a fuller picture of the leviathan that menaces us, we risk mistaking but one part of the beast for the whole, mere consequences for causes. In fact, let me posit that searching for the source of our era’s public-private collapse among the shadowy decisions of bankers and national security spooks — as noteworthy and telling as these decisions are — is to risk potentially getting causality backwards and understating larger forces at work.

After all, throughout his paper Pinkoski repeatedly notes that various policy decisions defy explanation in terms of pragmatic national interests. The architects of Clinton’s foreign policy are cited themselves describing taking actions they knew were unnecessary but felt to be of alluring “historical consequence.” The opening of borders to mass migration is described as a “quasi-theological event,” a “repudiation of a core culture or a fixed set of national values,” and “a response to Western guilt.” While in general after 1989, as Pinkoski puts it, “On both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual principle became a resolve to construct a new national, social, and cultural identity.” From my point of view, such language hints that deeper forces were indeed at work. And it might be most profitable for us to try to more clearly uncover and connect at least some of these forces.

A year or so ago I wrote a long essay titled “The China Convergence,” which I bring up here because I think its main themes are quite relevant. Namely, that the same specific form of oligarchic technocratic governance, described by James Burnham and others as “managerialism,” has today successfully taken over almost the whole developed world, West and East alike.

Managerialism is, in short, the instantiated belief that everything can and should be deliberately engineered and managed from the top down, and that this necessitates an expert class of professional managers whose business it is to do so. Rooted in the techniques of bureaucratic organization and “scientific management” that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution, managerialism took off with the early Progressive movements and flourished following the bureaucratic explosions produced by the two world wars.

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality.

To begin connecting this back to Pinkoski’s study, these managerial interests have over time in the West congealed ideologically into what we can describe as a managerial consensus: a unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs that just so happen to not only rationalize the interests of managerial elites, but also to elevate them to a position of moral superiority, serving to legitimize their right to rule. This ideology consists of a number of core tenets, including technocratic scientism, utopian progressivism, a devotion to the “liberation” of individuals from all former norms and constraints (whether of nature or tradition), and an incentive to flatten any particularity of people, nation, or culture so as to produce more “free” individuals — in other words more predictable and easily interchangeable “undifferentiated human material,” as Renaud Camus has put it. R.R. Reno has similarly described the post-WWII ideological complex as the “open society consensus,” which I think is also accurate and an appropriate name for the same thing.

Now, I’ve rehashed these points from my own essay because I would propose that most of the events and decisions that Pinkoski observes in his history can actually be best explained as products of the sweeping advance of managerialism after achieving victory in the Cold War — or rather the victory of one particular form of managerialism: liberal managerialism.

We might divide the ongoing managerial revolution into roughly three eras, the first running from the French Revolution’s Cult of Pure Reason through to WWII; the second through the “post-war” era until 1989; and the third dawning with the end of the Cold War, alongside the concurrent emergence of the digital revolution. The end of the Cold War proved a transformative moment because, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but before the rise of China — the Western liberal managerial regime appeared to have triumphed over its last remaining major competitor. The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was crushed in WWII, but for decades Soviet communism still remained a competitor to liberalism. With its fall, however, liberal managerialism was effectively liberated from all restraint, the last dam was broken and the way opened for it to rush into the global power vacuum and seek complete domination.

Pinkoski argues that “1989 unleashed the revolutionary impulse in Western elites.” I concur completely. But what was the nature of this revolutionary impulse, exactly? He writes this in the context of resurgent appetite for both a new European monetary order and a new American security order. Which, true enough, are among the things that Western elites rushed to achieve. But I think these were only expressions of the full revolutionary impulse unleashed within the managerial elite: a giddy urge to fulfill their manifest destiny by expanding the mandate of their managerial apparatus to an unprecedented, truly global scope.

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

In this context, the American managerial regime’s compulsion to begin attempting to surveil and manage the bank accounts of the whole world is wholly unsurprising — indeed it was essentially inevitable, as was the EU’s thirst for imposing monetary, regulatory, and ideological unity across the whole of Europe (and now beyond, as Elon Musk and others have discovered); as was the reckless expansion of NATO; as was the near-universal transformation of representative democracy into “managed democracy,” and so on. These things happened for exactly the same reason that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks invented themselves and burrowed into all our institutions, and why we now face the emergence of a transnational “censorship industrial complex” determined to minutely manage every word uttered on the internet: managerialism is a cancer, and cancers metastasize, it’s just what they do.

Before I conclude, however, let me address what I expect is one key difference in perspective between Pinkoski and myself: that is, the question of whether or not this managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that “the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state.” But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which is, after all, right there in the name).

Now, I’ve already described liberationism as a key part of managerial ideology, but this is perhaps to understate its centrality. For any managerial regime there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere — any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any home town, region, or today even nation — is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of managers). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers, and thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of liberal managerialism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed — or, rather, reconstructed — out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberal managerialism has always sought to tear apart and devour.

Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states’ coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state’s rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

The Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016 revealed the extent of the West’s malaise. Eight years ago, the postliberal critique seemed exciting and relevant, even as liberal intellectuals mounted impressive counterattacks. But these disputations have little to do with how we are actually governed. Governments long ago breached the barrier separating the public and private realms. Nor is the state the only danger, for the supposedly liberal institutions of civil society have given up on neutrality. Cancel culture is ­corporate and academic culture. The financial and tech giants pry into the private lives of ­citizens and punish them for their words and deeds. For quite some time, a substantive vision of the good has already been ruling over both state and society.

Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ­reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.

The triumph of the political is most evident in the way today’s debates about liberalism proceed. They are invariably concerned about connecting liberalism to international politics, the postwar liberal international order. To save liberalism, centrist stalwarts call for America to defend the “rules-based” order set up after World War II. It’s a familiar story: In the aftermath of the war, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were commissioned to establish the bases for an impartial system of economic competition. But because of communism, postwar liberalism had a limited reach. The fall of the Eastern bloc changed that. The end of the Soviet empire vindicated liberalism, and after 1989, liberal institutions could truly become international. Neutral, procedural mechanisms would coordinate divergent interests on a global scale. Now, however, Russia’s military aggression and China’s ascendancy are straining this globalized system. Populists undermine it at home. So laments the narrative.

Faced with recent events, liberal intellectuals allow that they were too optimistic about the prospects for global cooperation after 1989 and may have oversold the benefits of economic freedom. Many concede that the critics of neoliberalism are right, at least in part. Yet questioning the economic decisions of the past thirty years does nothing to undermine the mythology of a continuous postwar liberal international order. Accepting the neoliberal critique allows the stalwarts of the center to shield geopolitical ­decisions—­often their own decisions—from deeper criticism. Their modified narrative—­mistakes were made in implementing a universally acknowledged global good—conceals the fact that the liberal principles that centrist intellectuals urge us to defend had already been abandoned in the international realm.

The international situation tells the tale of postwar liberalism’s breakdown most clearly. Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends. In this realm, the erosion of the distinction between state and society has been quiet and subtle, yet startlingly effective. The political transformation of world finance has driven domestic upheavals and reordered the way we are governed. It is the engine of the West’s great transformation from liberal modernity to something new—to actually existing postliberalism.

The first sign that we don’t live in the old postwar liberal international order is that the economic system underwriting it has long ceased to exist. In August 1971, Richard ­Nixon decided to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The change shattered the economic system established at Bretton Woods during the final stages of World War II. Nixon’s decision initially shocked the global financial system, but it laid the foundation for American financial ascendancy. The dollar replaced gold as the backstop of global finance. Thus, as the United States entered the first stages of de-industrialization in the 1980s, American economic and political power did not decline, as experts anticipated. Nor did anyone really comprehend the tremendous political advantages implicit in the transition from a gold standard to a global economy based on America’s fiat currency. The American political classes were, at least at that time, only dimly aware of their own capabilities. They were focused on other objectives.

On July 3, 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wall Street Journal affirmed its commitment to the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.” The surprise events of the following November provided the opportunity to implement this vision of a truly global economy committed to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. But just as the Wall Street Journal editorial had opined that more minorities were needed to help Americans “acquire a renewed view of our own difficult past,” so openness meant advancing the spirit of anti-discrimination further than ever before. This imperative set the transatlantic tone for the next few years. In 1990, Congress raised immigration to unprecedented levels to boost economic growth. It also abolished much of the English-language testing for naturalization and made it easier for homosexuals to immigrate to the United States. That same year, the Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of all border controls within Europe. In 1991, Congress passed new civil rights legislation that cemented in place the doctrine of disparate impact. To abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, the European Court of Justice overturned national laws that prohibited businesses from assigning women nighttime shift work. Open borders, free trade, and the open society: It seemed that neoliberalism’s triumph was complete.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, it looked like the Americans and Europeans were using the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to construct a genuinely liberal global system. Economic affairs would be liberated from statist, political competition, the crude power contests of the past.

Utopianism of that sort may have animated commentators such as Thomas Friedman, and it’s still the way the stalwarts of the center recall the moment’s aspirations. But this account downplays the political and economic anxieties of the period. 1989 had set off a discreet but decisive geopolitical contest within the West. The Europeans were using the opportunity of 1989 to take continental integration to unprecedented levels, laying the groundwork for the Euro. Led by the French, they dreamed of building a new continental powerhouse that could challenge the United States. German unification was set to be the cornerstone of a single sovereign Europe. Yet George H. W. Bush made American support for German unification conditional on the French and West Germans’ preserving NATO and expanding it into East Germany. It was a cunning move. By keeping NATO alive, Bush forestalled European geopolitical independence. As the Cold War ended, the rationale for military and economic dependence on the United States receded. Yet the first Bush administration engineered events so that American political and economic power over the rest of the West became greater than ever before.

After 1989, the United States enjoyed supreme military power. In the coming years, it would occasionally attempt to exert its influence through these means. These efforts bore mixed results. Bush Sr. would preside over the swift success of the 1991 Gulf War; he would ­also set in motion the events that led to the disaster of Mogadishu in 1993. Yet military misadventures did little to alter America’s role as global hegemon. American financial power became the true engine of dominion. The United States took charge of the globalized economy and turned it into a powerful weapon.

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony Blinken.

Lake began by denouncing neo-isolationism on the left and right. Its source, he asserted, lies in misguided economic anxiety. The speech contained the usual promises that global free trade would bring prosperity for all. But the economic benefit to American citizens was an afterthought. The speech focused on America’s new global political program. With the elimination of the “big, red blob” of communism, the United States would focus on expanding the world’s “blue areas” of market democracies—on regime change.

Yet the policy of enlargement was not just about using American military might to expand liberal democracy. Enlargement, Lake argued, had a second meaning. It was about developing and enhancing state-society partnerships. The Clintonians were learning from domestic politics. In that sphere, they were launching a revolution from “government” to “governance,” what Christopher Caldwell describes as the “great innovation of the Clinton administration.”

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

The Clinton administration saw that achieving their foreign policy revolution would require looking beyond the state, just as the civil rights revolution had done at home. “We should pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-­governmental groups,” Lake argued, naming a range of social actors, from “private firms” to “­human rights groups.”

The Clintonians were offering the first theory of global management directed to geopolitical and moral objectives: a substantive vision of the good. State and social actors would be coordinated to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” abroad. They would confront what Lake called “backlash states,” isolating them “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Although he didn’t go into detail, Lake also portrayed America’s “financial” resources as “national security resources.”

Those resources were quickly put into action. As Clinton adviser James Steinberg said, “We succeeded in something that had been tried ­ever since the early seventies, which was bringing the economics into the heart of national ­security decision-­making.” Over the next few decades, the Clintonians and their successors would devise increasingly ingenious ways to put economics at the service of politics. They used America’s financial super-eminence to project political power abroad, imposing American aims without risking ­American lives.

The critics of neoliberalism recall the nineties as a time of idealistic, even naive commitment to economic cooperation. That criticism describes the peculiar American submissiveness toward China, but not much else. By the end of 1994, the Clinton administration had decided that Russia must be treated as a political competitor. “Neo-containment” was not mentioned publicly, but it was mentioned privately. Capitalizing on Moscow’s economic weakness, the Americans used their financial power to achieve their vision of enlargement; in this case, the NATO expansion that Mikhail Gorbachev had been assured in 1990 would not happen. “I think Russia can be bought off,” Clinton told Dutch prime minister Willem Kok in 1995. Under Clinton, the ­United States became Russia’s largest foreign investor. Ostensibly neutral international economic institutions were brazenly altered to serve American strategic ends. Seeing Boris Yeltsin as more moderate than the alternatives and fearing he might lose the 1996 election, the Clinton administration persuaded the IMF to give him a $10.2 billion loan, with few of the usual conditions. Yeltsin spent his way to victory.

These measures employed the carrots that American financial hegemony made possible. The sticks were even more inventive. When Yugoslavia fell apart in 1992, ethnic cleansing began, and the Serbians became the chief international pariah. In his last year in office, Bush Sr. had implemented several rounds of state-based sanctions. Clinton changed the paradigm, employing a public-private partnership that would become the norm. In April 1993 the U.S. began its first experiment with “smart sanctions.” The Clinton administration pioneered the move away from targeting states to targeting the individuals who governed the states, hitting their economic and social networks. Sanctions were imposed on Slobodan Milosevic and his entourage, freezing them out of the dollar-based international economy—effectively “unpersoning” them as economic agents. The objective was not just to try to change Milosevic’s behavior or signal moral disapproval of his actions, but also to undermine his popular support and his position as head of government. Smart sanctions looked like regime change on the cheap, changing the leadership of a national government without sponsoring bloody military operations.

The use of “smart sanctions” set a powerful precedent. Targeting individuals and their supporting institutions created new opportunities and fresh justifications for American policymakers to project influence around the world. As these uses of American financial power expanded, however, the liberal foundations of twentieth-century civilization crumbled.

Defenders of the old paradigm intuited that the new state-society partnerships could undermine the neutral reputation of America’s global economic leadership. Because of the dollarization of global finance, the credibility of the global financial system depended on international confidence in the impartiality of the United States Treasury. In the face of pressures from the American foreign-policy and security bureaucracy to act otherwise, Treasury bureaucrats tried to adhere to the liberal principle of state neutrality with respect to economic affairs. In the 1990s, the US intelligence community wanted Treasury to use its knowledge of the financial system to help disrupt the bank accounts of a terrorist organization then operating through Sudan. Treasury said no: The risk to America’s liberal credibility would be too great. The terrorist organization was al-Qaeda.

When George W. Bush entered office in 2001, he did so as a liberal. His signature initiative was supposed to be implementing capital and labor mobility across the whole continent. The summer 2001 Summit of the Americas drafted plans for expanding NAFTA, launching a “Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)” by 2005.

Bush may have dreamt of spreading liberalism more broadly than his father did. But his legacy is the opposite. Under his administration, the ­United States overturned the liberal financial system of impartial rules free of political manipulation. The apolitical neutrality of global finance slipped away. Financiers became willing instruments of U.S. foreign policy, reorienting themselves and their institutions to serve increasingly bellicose political objectives.

Globalization’s theorists often paint a picture of a global village, a decentralized community of relative equals. But globalization was always much more centralized and asymmetrical. Globalization is better understood as a hub-and-spokes arrangement, where emerging markets depend on established “hubs” to connect them to other markets. Because almost all transactions must pass through these hubs, they require the hubs’ approval. This is particularly true with respect to international finance. New York serves as the world’s most important financial hub, not just because of the size of its capital markets, but more importantly because the dominance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, making access to the American financial system critical. The essential role of American financial institutions in the weal and woe of very nearly every major economic actor in the world confers on the United States government a vast power. Previous officials at the Department of Treasury grasped that power, but they shunned it in the name of liberalism. Under Bush, that would change.

Building on the Clintonian experiments in smart sanctions, some innovative officials working in Treasury agreed that traditional state-to-state policy coordination was inadequate to achieve the desired results. They discerned that private institutions, especially money-center banks, which financed and processed commercial interactions, could achieve the ends of state policy far more effectively than the traditional tools of statecraft. If private sector financial institutions cooperated with U.S. government agencies, great results could be achieved.

After September 11, 2001, the innovators were provided with a unique opportunity to put their proposals into action. To strike back at al-Qaeda, they banished the old liberal mentality and its hesitations about weaponizing the private economy. One of the innovators, Juan Zarate, said: “We realized that private-sector ­actors—most importantly, the banks—could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments—based principally on their own interests and desires to avoid unnecessary business and reputational risk.” State actors started this process, but private actors did the essential work. “When governments appear to be isolating rogue financial actors, the banks will fall into line . . . Our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

On September 23, two weeks after the attacks, Bush signed Executive Order 13224. “We’re putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice,” he declared. “If you do business with terrorists, if you support or sponsor them, you will not do business with the United States of ­America.” The emergency executive order was broad. It enabled the targeting of financial supporters of terrorism, terrorist-owned companies or businesses, and those “associated” with them. Any bank that permitted dubious accounts or transactions to go through it risked having its American assets frozen by the U.S. government. In effect, it would be expelled from the U.S.-based international system, destroying its reputation as a trustworthy financial institution. The order created an atmosphere of ­liability for global financial institutions, just as civil rights laws had done for domestic corporations. A failure to be vigilant brought penalties. The purpose was to encourage banks to be proactive about assessing the risks associated with certain clients. The government was deputizing key players in the private economy to become its enforcers.

As its advocates anticipated, this approach to choking off funding for terrorist organizations was transformative. No bank wanted to get cut off from the U.S. banking system. Moreover, the Bush administration provided a legal framework that invigorated nongovernmental entities to target banks deemed insufficiently proactive. Banks were closely scrutinized for breaches of sanctions.

The Treasury also turned its attention to inducing international institutions to fight terrorist financing. Early on, the G7, IMF, and World Bank were brought into the sanctions regime. These measures, however, did not go far enough. To cripple al-Qaeda’s finances, the U.S. government needed information about bank-to-bank transfers. But this information is held in the databases of a private, obscure organization that serves as the switchboard for most of the world’s financial system: the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

The U.S. had tried to get information from SWIFT in the past. Under Bush Sr., a team led by Robert Mueller tried to subpoena SWIFT’s messaging system. But they had no legal authority to do so. In accord with liberal principles, communications among market actors enjoy a presumptive right of privacy. The action produced no results. After 9/11, Treasury took a different approach. It simply asked SWIFT to cooperate and provide the U.S. government with access to its transactions. SWIFT’s CEO demurred. He stressed the organization’s need to remain apolitical and neutral. The system’s ­European clientele were particularly sensitive to invasions of privacy. But SWIFT and the U.S. government developed a workaround. In public SWIFT would proclaim its neutrality. In private it would collaborate, developing a clandestine program for sharing financial information with U.S. officials. To keep SWIFT on board, government officials had to concede to the organization a significant and ongoing role in the design and implementation of the program of monitoring all global transactions. This meant providing SWIFT with classified information about terrorist suspects and their supporting organizations. The public-private partnership became profound.

The Patriot Act provided the Treasury with another powerful tool. Section 311 gives the Treasury secretary the power to label an institution risky in view of suspected money-laundering. The vagueness was ideal for targeting financial institutions. The U.S. government did not need to freeze assets directly, something difficult to do when money-­laundering is only suspected, not proved. Private banks, by contrast, are not legally constrained in this way. They are free to cease doing business with whomever they choose. Section 311 provided a powerful incentive for banks to do exactly as the Treasury recommends, to offload any entity deemed an institutional risk.

New state-society partnerships, erected on a scaffold of post–9/11 legislation, executive orders, and secret SWIFT cooperation, enabled policy-makers in government to wage the wars that American soldiers couldn’t. Beginning in 2003, after the Bush administration had turned its attention to rogue regimes and had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Treasury went much further. In the following years, banks in Syria, Belarus, Burma, and Ukraine would all be hit with the new publicly mandated, privately imposed sanctions. In 2005, a Section-311 action against a small bank in Macau that did business with North Korea, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), turned the institution into a financial pariah. By July 2006, even the Bank of China, concerned to protect its reputation, froze North Korean accounts related to BDA. The final years of the Bush administration saw similar tactics deployed against Iran. The U.S. cut dollarized transactions for Iranian oil out of New York; the European Union followed with similar actions designed for European banks.

In just a few years, the Treasury had moved beyond targeting terrorist suspects to going after financial institutions associated with national governments deemed enemies, to hitting the financial institutions of targeted governments themselves. The Bush administration marked the definitive end of the old liberal financial paradigm. The private sphere would never be the same. The tradition of bank secrecy has been a quiet but obvious casualty. Banks have changed the way they understand risk. Before, banks had given priority to client privacy. A bank that divulged information about its clients was deemed too risky to work with. How can you thrive in the marketplace when your competitors know all about your financial affairs? Now, banks were eager to expose their clients to scrutiny, at first only secretly in accord with demands by government officials, but soon also those of politically engaged organizations. This explains why “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) norms, or “socially responsible investing,” took off during the Bush years. The major banks that helped launch ESG described it as risk management, with risk now defined in political terms: national security, environmental responsibility, and social justice. By encouraging companies to expand their definition of risk, the Treasury accelerated these trends. Compliance with the law was not enough; the objective was to create and expand a new notion of good corporate citizenship. Incentives and liabilities were put in place to encourage the market itself to enforce the new consensus on what risk meant. Private actors might occasionally resist the politicization of economic life, but most often they accepted the new terms and promoted them as “good for business.”

The direction of financial means toward political ends could be accomplished only with the ­cooperation of banks and other private entities. Private actors in civil society did not oppose this cooperation. Rather than check the power of the state, as liberal theorists stipulate, the private sphere of global finance collaborated with the state. Far from limiting the state, private economic actors have enhanced its powers and extended its reach, all the while changing their own understanding of their mission, the requirements of corporate citizenship, and the contours of citizenship itself.

Barack Obama took the new paradigm further. When he made gay rights a cornerstone of American foreign policy, the strategy to ensure their spread relied on state-society partnerships. Hillary Clinton’s signature 2011 speech on gay rights promised to “support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world.” Breaking from prior U.S. practice, these organizations could conceal the source of their funds, hiding their connection to the U.S. government in order to pretend that gay rights was a grassroots movement.

Contrary to his hawkish critics, Obama wasn’t fixed only on “soft power.” In 2011, American conservatives were mocking Obama for “leading from behind” in the Libyan campaign, criticizing his reluctance to use American troops. This criticism was myopic. His administration was setting aggressive new precedents. Using the state-society partnership the Treasury had pioneered, the U.S. froze $37 billion of Libyan assets—at the time, the largest sequestration of assets in history. It marked the first time these financial sanctions had been used with the explicit intention of toppling a government. In January 2012, the Obama administration decided to strangle Iran. It invoked Section 311 against the country’s entire banking sector, including its central bank. This was the first time the measure had been used against another country’s central bank. Soon after, SWIFT crossed a rubicon from neutrality to partisanship in international relations. It sanctioned an entire country, expelling Iranian banks from its system. The Obama administration pivoted to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear program, and the Iranians, under intense financial pressure, were willing to talk.

These years were the high point of sanctions diplomacy. It was far less visible and militaristic than the British Empire’s gunboat diplomacy, but it seemed just as effective. At one administration holiday party in 2011, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sang “Every little thing we do is sanctions,” to the tune of The Police’s “Every little thing she does is magic.” The approach seemed invincible. With an array of state-society partnerships, the United States could get whatever it wanted.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Stunned, the U.S. leveled up its sanction regime, striking for the first time at a great power. The scale of what was required demanded close cooperation among U.S. agencies and across the European and American financial sectors. It was, to say the least, a messy moment. The Obama administration itself hesitated, troubled by the old liberal voice of conscience. Toward the end of his term, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew worried that the American politicization of the global financial system might turn more countries against it. Moreover, it was ­unclear whether sanctions were as effective as their enthusiasts thought. Though Russia’s economy weakened, this development probably had more to do with to the decline in oil prices. Russia certainly did not withdraw from Crimea.

From his use of tariffs to individual sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutors ­going after American soldiers, Donald Trump’s foreign policy generated apoplectic commentary: He was destroying the liberal international order! Yet Trump did not invent these tools. His innovations were to use them extensively against China and bring the tools to bear as part of hard-edged diplomatic bargaining. Along the way, his administration was ready to treat hostile legal activists like corrupt oligarchs. That’s why more sophisticated critics of Trump didn’t reject the tools. They planned to use them better than he did.

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Washington’s “geoeconomic,” sanctions-­driven strategy of “enlargement” failed, and the deep state knows it. In July, the Washington Post quoted a ­variety of active and former government officials who now criticize the excessive dependence on sanctions, including Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes. The Post also revealed that the state–society partnership is faltering. The business world has overwhelmed the federal bureaucracy with inquiries about how to implement sanctions and against whom. Corporations are thus forced to make many national security–­related decisions themselves. And the crisis is not just operational. American officials now realize that no reasonable observer believes the American-­led global financial system is still neutral. As a consequence, many countries are building alternatives. In the long run, the rise of alternative financial markets and intermediaries threatens the dollar’s status as a reserve currency and thus the financial foundation of American power.

Does the failure of sanctions against Russia mean a return to the old liberal tradition of public-private separation? Evidence suggests that the answer is “no.” Rhodes sees the foreign-policy problem, but he doesn’t grasp the effects of these changes in the domestic realm. The fusion of political power with economic power seems likely to increase, and as the political friend-enemy lines get redrawn, the application will become more ruthless. In his speech for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush declared:

We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

Whether the enemy is abroad or at home, whether they are al-Qaeda terrorists or domestic rioters, they are essentially the same, and must be confronted with the same security tools.

In February 2022, just before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the Canadian government deployed the financial weapons of war against its own citizens. Canadians who had donated to the Truckers Convoy found themselves barred from accessing their bank accounts and savings. At least 76 bank accounts were frozen, assets totaling 3.2 million CAD. Many were aghast and placed the blame for “de-banking” on Canadian prime minister ­Justin Trudeau—guilty of a dictatorial misuse of the state of emergency, just like his father. But that is obsolete thinking. The measures the ­Canadian state invoked were successfully employed because they enjoyed the enthusiastic ­cooperation of Canadian banks. State and corporate goals had been fused together long before the 2022 Truckers Convoy. Like 9/11, Covid was an opportunity. It enabled states to perfect policies that they were experimenting with and which corporations were encouraging.

Actually existing postliberalism may have advanced furthest in Canada. Yet de-banking has become more and more common in the West. Tactics once employed against al-Qaeda are used against citizens deemed “children of the same foul spirit.” In 2022, the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) had its account with JP Morgan Chase closed. Chase said it might consider reopening it if NCRF divulged some of its donors’ names. Although Chase changed its story several times, the bank insists that it is complying with federal regulations on money laundering and terrorism. ­Fidelity Charitable has brought to bear similar pressures to break donor anonymity at the Alliance Defending Freedom. In June 2023, the UK bank Coutts and Co. suddenly closed Nigel Farage’s account. This decision was later exposed as politically motivated, as an internal dossier had concluded that Farage was “xenophobic and pandering to racists.” In the investigation that followed the scandal, the Financial Conduct Authority reports that UK banks are closing almost 1,000 accounts every day, a massive increase over prior years.

After the Farage de-banking scandal, British leftists observed that free speech isn’t the main issue; account closures disproportionately affect British Muslims. They have a point. De-banking is not new in Britain. It took off in 2014, when HSBC started shutting the accounts of well-known British Muslims without providing a reason. Just over a year before, in a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government, HSBC had accepted internal monitoring to help the bank comply with money laundering and sanction laws.

Widely accepted changes in the domestic legal and financial order have banished liberal norms. As part of ever-­tightening anti-terrorist laws, governments require banks to monitor potential terrorist financing themselves. For banks, de-banking—the euphemism is “de-risking”—is necessary for responsible risk management and regulatory compliance, given present realities. Whether one strikes at conservatives, Muslims, those with ties to Brexit, or those with Russian names, there’s a pattern. Just as civil rights law allows corporations to enforce DEI ideology across the whole business world, so anti-terrorism law allows corporations to enforce political loyalty tests across the whole financial system. We are seeing in domestic life what has been happening at the global level since the 1990s. Civil society, especially its economic dimension, is being weaponized. Those who threaten the regime, or who give even the appearance of being the sort of person who might pose a threat, are at risk of being made non-persons.

As with so much in the era of actually existing postliberalism, the frankest description of its vision comes from Tony Blair. In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states. This new threat—that of bad actors among us—calls for a new state-society arrangement. “Effective security,” Reid argued, “now relies on the participation of a much wider range of ­actors—from governments and public bodies, to companies and people . . . networks of public and private organizations have a joint role in guaranteeing local, national and international security.” In short, liberalism was a product of the postwar moment. Its time has ended. After the conclusion of the Cold War, British elites traded on the glories of the postwar moment to purify the British people, removing the stains of xenophobia, ­Euroskepticism, and racism. But when pressed, these elites thought the postwar era offered little of lasting significance beyond antifascism. Indeed, according to the new Blairite standards, more enlightened Brits might come to conclude that the whole postwar era seemed like a rather dangerous time. How many fascist individuals had been walking about then? How much fan mail had Enoch Powell received? One shudders at the prospect. Better to trust Blair and his successors, all the way down to Keir Starmer, to lead us into a safer, purer age.

Some revolutionary epochs are beset by the illusion of change. As Alexis de Tocqueville saw, the architects of the French Revolution—the 1789ers—relied on the powerful tool of a centralized state and the freedom of action made possible by a hollowed-out civil society, both created by the old regime. By contrast, the epoch of actually existing postliberalism is beset by the illusion of continuity. Its architects—the 1989ers—came into positions of power and influence just as the Cold War was ending. They knew very little of the war itself and almost nothing of its beginning. But they justified their ambitious geopolitical projects by tracing a long line of continuity back through the Cold War to the Second World War. The West’s victories over communism, fascism, and racism could be stretched further and further afield, isolating and destroying “backward states” and “rogue actors.” On these terms, the ’89ers imagined that they were the next generation of defenders of a continuous liberal tradition. But their actions indicate otherwise. Their substantive vision of the good didn’t just run up against hard limits in the last few years. It devoured liberalism. The ’89ers reconfigured the whole international system away from the liberal principles they ostensibly cherished. In due course, the domestic sphere has been bent to this new order.

The central drama of the last three decades has been the fusion of state and society. The ’89ers ushered in actually existing postliberalism, a society in which governmental power, cultural power, and economic power are coordinated to buttress regime security and punish the impure. 1989 heralded not the triumph of liberalism but its downfall. However, many refuse to recognize—or cannot recognize—how profoundly the West has changed. Our task is to live in the world into which we are thrown, to see it accurately, and to push it in a better direction.

Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics.

Lecture of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 33rd Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp

• 27/07/2024
• Source: Cabinet Office Of The Prime Minister

Good morning Summer Camp and other Guests.

The first piece of good news is that my visit this year was not accompanied by the same kind of brouhaha as last year’s: this year we have not received – I have not received – a diplomatic démarche from Bucharest; what I received was an invitation to a meeting with the Prime Minister, which took place yesterday. Last year, when I had the opportunity to meet the Prime Minister of Romania, I said after the meeting that it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; at the end of the meeting this year, I was able to say “We’re making progress”. If we look at the figures, we are setting new records in economic and trade relations between our two countries. Romania is now Hungary’s third most important economic partner. We also discussed with the Prime Minister a high-speed train – a “TGV” – linking Budapest to Bucharest, as well as Romania’s membership of Schengen. I have undertaken to put this issue on the agenda for the October Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting – and, if necessary, for the December Council meeting – and to take it forward if possible.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have not received a démarche from Bucharest, but – to prevent us getting bored – we have received one from Brussels: they have condemned the Hungarian peace mission efforts. I have tried – without success – to explain that there is such a thing as Christian duty. This means that if you see something bad in the world – especially something very bad – and you receive some instrument for its correction, then it is a Christian duty to take action, without undue contemplation or reflection. The Hungarian peace mission is about this duty. I would like to remind all of us that the EU has a founding treaty, which contains these exact words: “The Union’s aim is peace”. Brussels is also offended at our describing what they are doing as a pro-war policy. They say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace. Central Europeans like us are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that the state will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war. Just as we did not understand Lenin’s thesis in our university lectures on the history of the labour movement, I do not understand the Brusseleers in European Council meetings. Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that in “Newspeak” peace is war and war is peace. Despite all the criticism, let us remind ourselves that since the beginning of our peace mission the US and Russian war ministers have spoken to each other, the Swiss and Russian foreign ministers have held talks, President Zelenskyy has finally called President Trump, and the Ukrainian foreign minister has been to Beijing. So fermentation has begun, and we are slowly but surely moving from a pro-war European policy to a pro-peace policy. This is inevitable, because time is on the side of peace policy. Reality has dawned on the Ukrainians, and now it is up to the Europeans to come to their senses, before it is too late: “Trump ante portas”. If by then Europe does not switch to a policy of peace, then after Trump’s victory it will have to do so while admitting defeat, covered in shame, and admitting sole responsibility for its policy.

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, The subject of today’s presentation is not peace. Please regard what I have said so far as a digression. In fact, for those who are thinking about the future of the world, and of Hungarians within it, there are three big issues on the table today. The first is the war – or more precisely, an unexpected side-effect of the war. This is the fact that the war reveals the reality in which we live. This reality was not visible and could not be described earlier, but it has been illuminated by the blazing light of missiles fired in the war. The second big issue on the table is what will happen after the war. Will a new world come into being, or will the old one continue? And if a new world is coming – and this is our third big issue – how should Hungary prepare for this new world? The fact is that I need to talk about all three, and I need to talk about them here – first of all because these are the big issues that are best discussed in this “free university” format. From another point of view, we need a pan-Hungarian approach, as looking at these issues only from the point of view of a “Little Hungary” would be too constricting; it is therefore justified to talk about these issues in front of Hungarians outside our borders.

Dear Summer Camp,

These are big issues with manifold interrelations, and obviously even the esteemed audience cannot be expected to know all the important basic information, so from time to time I will need to digress. This is a tough task: we have three topics, one morning, and a ruthless moderator. I have chosen the following approach: to speak at length about the real situation of power in Europe as revealed by the war; then to give some glimpses of the new world that is in the making; and finally to refer – rather in the manner of a list, without explanation or argumentation – to the Hungarian plans related to this. This method has the advantage of also setting the theme for next year’s presentation.

The undertaking is ambitious, and even courageous: we must ask ourselves whether we can undertake it at all, and whether it might be beyond our ability. I think it is a realistic endeavour, because over the past year – or two or three years – some superb studies and books have been published in Hungary and abroad, and translators have also made these available to the Hungarian public. On the other hand, with all due modesty we must remind ourselves that we are the longest-serving government in Europe. I myself am the longest-serving European leader – and I should quietly point out that I am also the leader who has spent the longest time in opposition. So I have seen everything that I will talk about now. I am talking about something that I have lived through and continue to live through. Whether I have understood it is another question; that is something we will find out at the end of this presentation.

So, about the reality revealed by the war. Dear Friends, the war is our red pill. Think of the “Matrix” films. The hero is faced with a choice. He has two pills to choose from: if he swallows the blue pill, he can stay in the world of surface appearances; if he swallows the red pill, he can look into and descend into reality. The war is our red pill: it is what we have been given, it is what we must swallow. And now, armed with new experiences, we must talk about reality. It is a cliché that war is the continuation of policy with other means. It is important to add that war is the continuation of policy from a different perspective. So war, in its relentlessness, takes us to a new position from which to see things, to a high vantage point. And from there it gives us a completely different – hitherto unknown – perspective. We find ourselves in new surroundings and in a new, rarefied force field. In this pure reality, ideologies lose their power; statistical sleights of hand lose their power; media distortions and politicians’ tactical dissimulation loses its power. There is no longer any relevance to widespread delusions – or even to conspiracy theories. What remains is the stark, brutal reality. It’s a pity our friend Gyula Tellér is no longer with us, because now we would be able to hear some surprising things from him. Since he is no longer with us, however, you will have to make do with me. But I think there will be no shortage of shocks. For the sake of clarity, I have made bullet points of everything we have seen since we swallowed the red pill: since the outbreak of the war in February 2022.

Firstly, the war has seen brutal losses – numbering in the hundreds of thousands – suffered by both sides. I have recently met them, and I can say with certainty that they do not want to come to terms. Why is this? There are two reasons. The first is that each of them thinks that they can win, and wants to fight until victory. The second is that both are fuelled by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians think that this is a Russian invasion, a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty, and they are in fact fighting a war of self-defence for their independence. The Russians think that there have been serious NATO military developments in Ukraine, Ukraine has been promised NATO membership, and they do not want to see NATO troops or NATO weapons on the Russian–Ukrainian border. So they say that Russia has the right to self-defence, and that in fact this war has been provoked. So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not give up fighting the war. This is a road leading directly to escalation; if it depends on these two sides, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought in from outside.

Secondly: in years gone by we had got used to the United States declaring its main challenger or opponent to be China; yet now we see it waging a proxy war against Russia. And China is constantly accused of covertly supporting Russia. If this is the case, then we need to answer the question of why it is sensible to corral two such large countries together into a hostile camp. This question has yet to be answered in any meaningful way.

Thirdly: Ukraine’s strength, its resilience, has exceeded all expectations. After all, since 1991 eleven million people have left the country, it has been ruled by oligarchs, corruption sky-high, and the state had essentially ceased functioning. And yet now we are seeing unprecedentedly successful resistance from it. Despite the conditions described here, Ukraine is in fact a strong country. The question is what the source of this strength is. Apart from its military past and individuals’ personal heroism, there is something worth understanding here: Ukraine has found a higher purpose, it has discovered a new meaning to its existence. Because up until now, Ukraine saw itself as a buffer zone. To be a buffer zone is psychologically debilitating: there is a sense of helplessness, a feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands. This is a consequence of such a doubly exposed position. Now, however, there is the dawning prospect of belonging to the West. Ukraine’s new self-authored mission is to be the West’s eastern military frontier region. The meaning and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence – and there’s no denying that it is quite aggressive and insistent. It is in fact the Ukrainians’ demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that makes them capable of unprecedented resistance.

Fourthly: Russia is not what we have so far seen it to be, and Russia is not what we have so far been led to see it as. The country’s economic viability is outstanding. I remember being at European Council meetings – the prime ministers’ summits – when, with all sorts of gestures, Europe’s great leaders rather hubristically claimed that the sanctions against Russia and the exclusion of Russia from the so-called SWIFT system, the international financial clearing system, would bring Russia to its knees. They would bring the Russian economy to its knees, and through that the Russian political elite. As I watch events unfold, I am reminded of the wisdom of Mike Tyson, who once said that “Everyone has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.” Because the reality is that the Russians have learned lessons from the sanctions imposed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea – and not only have they learned those lessons, but they have translated those lessons into action. They implemented the necessary IT and banking improvements. So the Russian financial system is not collapsing. They have developed the ability to adapt, and after 2014 we fell victim to this, because we used to export a significant proportion of Hungarian food produce to Russia. We could not continue to do so because of the sanctions, the Russians modernised their agriculture, and today we are talking about one of the world’s largest food export markets; this is a country that used to have to rely on imports. So the way that Russia is described to us – as a rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy – is false. In fact we are talking about a country that displays technical and economic resilience – and perhaps also societal resilience, but we’ll see.

The fifth important new lesson from reality: European policy-making has collapsed. Europe has given up defending its own interests: all that Europe is doing today is unconditionally following the foreign policy line of the US Democrats – even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions we have imposed are damaging fundamental European interests: they are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive. We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context. In the same way, we failed to do the right thing in the case of the phone tapping of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the assistance of Denmark. So this is nothing but an act of submission. There is a context here which is complicated, but I will try to give you a necessarily simplified but comprehensive account of it. European policy-making has also collapsed since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war because the core of the European power system was the Paris–Berlin axis, which used to be inescapable: it was the core and it was the axis. Since the war broke out, a different centre and a different axis of power has been established. The Berlin–Paris axis no longer exists – or if it does, it has become irrelevant and liable to be bypassed. The new power centre and axis comprises London, Warsaw, Kiev/Kyiv, the Baltics and the Scandinavians. When, to the astonishment of Hungarians, one sees the German chancellor announcing that he is only sending helmets to the war, and then a week later he announces that he is in fact sending weapons, do not think that the man has lost his mind. Then when the same German chancellor announces that there may be sanctions, but that they must not cover energy, and then two weeks later he himself is at the head of the sanctions policy, do not think that the man has lost his mind. On the contrary, he is very much in his right mind. He is well aware that the Americans and the liberal opinion-forming vehicles they influence – universities, think tanks, research institutes, the media – are using public opinion to punish Franco–German policy that is not in line with American interests. This is why we have the phenomenon that I have been talking about, and this is why we have the German chancellor’s idiosyncratic blunders. Changing the centre of power in Europe and bypassing the Franco–German axis is not a new idea – it has simply been made possible by the war. The idea existed before, in fact being an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a huge German state and a huge Russian state, by making Poland the number one American base in Europe. I could describe it as inviting the Americans there, between the Germans and the Russians. Five per cent of Poland’s GDP is now devoted to military expenditure, and the Polish army is the second largest in Europe after the French – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of troops. This is an old plan, to weaken Russia and outpace Germany. At first sight, outpacing the Germans seems to be a fantasy idea. But if you look at the dynamics of the development of Germany and Central Europe, of Poland, it does not seem so impossible – especially if in the meantime Germany is dismantling its own world-class industry. This strategy caused Poland to give up cooperation with the V4. The V4 meant something different: the V4 means that we recognise that there is a strong Germany and there is a strong Russia, and – working with the Central European states – we create a third entity between the two. The Poles have backed out of this and, instead of the V4 strategy of accepting the Franco–German axis, they have embarked on the alternative strategy of eliminating the Franco–German axis. Talking of our Polish brothers and sisters, let us mention them here in passing. Since they have now kicked our backsides black and blue, perhaps we can allow ourselves to say a few sincere, fraternal home truths about them. Well, the Poles are pursuing the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe. They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians, buying their oil – albeit via indirect routes – and running the Polish economy with it. The French are better than that: last month, incidentally, they overtook us in gas purchases from Russia – but at least they do not lecture us on moral grounds. The Poles are both doing business and lecturing us. I have not seen a policy of such rank hypocrisy in Europe in the last ten years. The scale of this change – of bypassing the German–French axis – can truly be grasped by older people if they perhaps think back twenty years, when the Americans attacked Iraq and called on the European countries to join in. We, for example, joined in as a member of NATO. At the time Schröder, the then German chancellor, and Chirac, the then French president, were joined by President Putin of Russia at a joint press conference called in opposition to the Iraq war. At that time there was still an independent Franco–German logic when approaching European interests.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The peace mission is not just about seeking peace, but is also about urging Europe to finally pursue an independent policy. Red pill number six: the spiritual solitude of the West. Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn. Once again the West has declared its expectation, its instruction, for the world to take a moral stand against Russia and for the West. In contrast, the reality has become that, step-by-step, everyone is siding with Russia. That China and North Korea are doing so is perhaps no surprise. That Iran is doing the same – given Iran’s history and its relationship with Russia – is somewhat surprising. But the fact that India, which the Western world calls the most populous democracy, is also on the side of the Russians is astonishing. That Turkey refuses to accept the West’s morally based demands, even though it is a NATO member, is truly surprising. And the fact that the Muslim world sees Russia not as an enemy but as a partner is completely unexpected.

Seventhly: the war has exposed the fact that the biggest problem the world faces today is the weakness and disintegration of the West. Of course, this is not what the Western media says: in the West they claim that the world’s greatest danger and problem is Russia and the threat it represents. This is wrong! Russia is too large for its population, and it is also under hyper-rational leadership – indeed it is a country that has leadership. There is nothing mysterious about what it does: its actions follow logically from its interests, and are therefore understandable and predictable. On the other hand, the behaviour of the West – as may be clear from what I have said so far – is not understandable and not predictable. The West is not led, its behaviour is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation that I described in my presentation here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky. This is the challenge to the West in the form of the rise of China and Asia. We should be able to deal with this, but we are not able to.

Point eight. Arising from this, for us the real challenge is to once again try to understand the West in the light of the war. Because we Central Europeans see the West as irrational. But, Dear Friends, what if it is behaving logically, but we do not understand its logic? If it is logical in the way it thinks and acts, then we must ask why we do not understand it. And if we could find the answer to this question, we would also understand why Hungary regularly clashes with the Western countries of the European Union on geopolitical and foreign policy issues. My answer is the following. Let us imagine that the worldview of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. Meanwhile the West thinks that nation states no longer exist; this is unimaginable to us, but all the same this is what it thinks. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant. In our conception, the world is made up of nation states which exercise a domestic monopoly on the use of force, thereby creating a condition of general peace. In its relations with other states the nation state is sovereign – in other words, it has the capacity to independently determine its foreign and domestic policy. In our conception, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And from this emerge shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. This is what we think of as the nation state. What is more, we do not see it as a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century: we believe that nation states have a biblical basis, since they belong to the order of creation. For in Scripture we read that at the end of time there will be judgement not only of individuals but also of nations. Consequently, in our conception nations are not provisional formations. But in complete contrast Westerners believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny the existence of a shared culture and a shared morality based on it. They have no shared morality; if you watched the Olympic opening ceremony yesterday, that is what you saw. This is why they think differently about migration. They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal internationalist conception of space. This is why they are oblivious to the absurdity – or they do not see it as absurd – that while in the eastern half of Europe hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing one another, in the west of Europe we are letting in hundreds of thousands of people from foreign civilisations. From our Central European point of view this is the definition of absurdity. This idea is not even conceived of in the West. In parenthesis I note that the European states lost a total of some fifty-seven million indigenous Europeans in the First and Second World Wars. If they, their children and their grandchildren had lived, today Europe would not have any demographic problems. The European Union does not simply think in the way I am describing, but it declares it. If we read the European documents carefully, it is clear that the aim is to supersede the nation. It is true that they have a strange way of writing and saying this, stating that nation states must be superseded, while some small trace of them remains. But the point is that, after all, powers and sovereignty should be transferred from the nation states to Brussels. This is the logic behind every major measure. In their minds, the nation is a historical or transitional creation, born of the 18th and 19th centuries – and as it arrived, so may it depart. For them, the western half of Europe is already post-national. This is not only a politically different situation, but what I am trying to talk about here is that this is a new mental space. If you do not look at the world from the point of view of nation states, a completely different reality opens up before you. Herein lies the problem, the reason that the countries in the western eastern halves of Europe do not understand one another, the reason we cannot pull together.

If we project all of this onto the United States, this is the real battle that is going on over there. What should the United States be? Should it become a nation state again, or should it continue its march towards a post-national state? President Donald Trump’s precise goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to raise them back to the nation state. This is why the stakes in the US election are so enormous. This is why we are seeing things that we have never seen before. This is why they want to prevent Donald Trump from running in the election. This is why they want to put him in jail. This is why they want to take away his assets. And if that does not work, this is why they want to kill him. And let there be no doubt that what happened may not be the last attempt in this campaign.

In parenthesis, I spoke to the President yesterday and he asked me how I was doing. I said that I was great, because I am here in a geographical entity called Transylvania. Explaining this is not so easy, especially in English, and especially to President Trump. But I said that I was here in Transylvania at a free university where I was going to give a presentation on the state of the world. And he said that I must pass on his personal heartfelt greetings to the attendees at the camp and those at the free university.

Now, if we try to understand how this Western thinking – which for the sake of simplicity we should call “post-national” thinking and condition – came about, then we have to go back to the grand illusion of the 1960s. The grand illusion of the 1960s took two forms: the first was the sexual revolution, and the second was student rebellion. In fact, it was an expression of the belief that the individual would be freer and greater if he or she were freed from any kind of collective. More than sixty years later it has since become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and in a community, that when alone he or she can never be free, but always lonely and doomed to be shrunken. In the West bonds have been successively discarded: the metaphysical bonds that are God; the national bonds that are the homeland; and family bonds – discarding the family. I am referring again to the opening of the Paris Olympics. Now that they have managed to get rid of all that, expecting the individual to become greater, they find that they feel a sense of emptiness. They have not become great, but have become small. For in the West they no longer desire either great ideals or great, inspiring shared goals.

Here we must talk about the secret of greatness. What is the secret of greatness? The secret of greatness is to be able to serve something greater than yourself. To do this, you first have to acknowledge that in the world there is something or some things that are greater than you, and then you must dedicate yourself to serving those greater things. There are not many of these. You have your God, your country and your family. But if you do not do that, but instead you focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on that, on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity. And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluity that goes with it gives rise to aggression. Hence the emergence of the “aggressive dwarf” as a new type of person.

To sum up, what I want to say to you is that when we talk about Central Europe and Western Europe, we are not talking about differences of opinion, but about two different worldviews, two mentalities, two instincts, and hence two different arguments. We have a nation state, which forces us towards strategic realism. They have post-nationalist dreams that are inert to national sovereignty, do not recognise national greatness, and have no shared national goals. This is the reality we have to face.

And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national condition that we see in the West has a serious – and I would say dramatic – political consequence that is convulsing democracy. Because within societies there is growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this creates the political problem of the elite and the people – of elitism and populism. This is the defining phenomenon of Western politics today. If you read the texts, you do not need to understand them, and they do not always make sense anyway; but if you read the words, the following are the expressions you will find most often. They indicate that the elites are condemning the people for drifting towards the Right. The feelings and ideas of the people are labelled as xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism. In response, the people accuse the elite of not caring about what is important to them, but of sinking into some kind of deranged globalism. Consequently the elites and the people cannot agree with each other on the question of cooperation. I could mention many countries. But if the people and the elites cannot agree on cooperation, how can this produce representative democracy? Because we have an elite that does not want to represent the people, and is proud of not wanting to represent them; and we have the people, who are not represented. In fact in the Western world we are faced with a situation in which the masses of people appearing with college degrees no longer form less than 10 per cent of the population, but 30 to 40 per cent. And because of their views these people do not respect those who are less educated – who are typically working people, people who live from their labour. For the elites, only the values of graduates are acceptable, only they are legitimate. This is the viewpoint from which the results of the European Parliament elections can be understood. The European People’s Party garnered the votes of “plebeians” on the Right who wanted change, then took those votes to the Left and made a deal with the left-wing elites who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. This has consequences for the European Union. The consequence is that Brussels remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy. This oligarchy has it in its grip. This left-liberal elite is in fact organising a transatlantic elite: not European, but global; not based on the nation state, but federal; and not democratic, but oligarchic. This also has consequences for us, because in Brussels the “3 Ps” are back: “prohibited, permitted and promoted”. We belong to the prohibited category. The Patriots for Europe have therefore been prohibited from receiving any positions. We live in the world of the permitted political community. Meanwhile our domestic opponents – especially the newcomers to the European People’s Party – are in the strongly promoted category.

And perhaps one last, tenth point, is about how Western values – which were the essence of so-called “soft power” – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. But the world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin’s strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.

All in all, Ladies and Gentlemen, I can say that the war has helped us to understand the real state of power in the world. It is a sign that in its mission the West has shot itself in the foot, and is therefore accelerating the changes that are transforming the world. My first presentation is over. Now comes the second.

What comes next? It needs to be shorter, Zsolt Németh says. So the second presentation is about what follows from this. First, intellectual courage is needed here. So you have to work with broad brushstrokes, because I am convinced that the fate of the Hungarians depends on whether they understand what is happening in the world, and whether we Hungarians understand what the world will be like after the war. In my opinion a new world is coming. We cannot be accused of having a narrow imagination or of intellectual inertia, but even we – and I personally, when I have spoken here in recent years – have underestimated the scale of the change that is happening and that we are living through.

Dear Friends, Dear Summer Camp,

We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation. In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; The British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans. But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. They have already created their forms, their platforms, there is this BRICS formation in which they are already present. And there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which these countries are building the new world economy. I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges. It will have – or already has – the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science. In addition, we in the West – even the Russians – have been well shepherded into this new entity that is taking shape. The question is whether or not the process is reversible – and if not, when it became irreversible. I think it happened in 2001, when we in the West decided to invite China to join the World Trade Organisation – better known as the WTO. Since then this process has been almost unstoppable and irreversible.

President Trump is working on finding the American response to this situation. In fact, Donald Trump’s attempt is probably the last chance for the US to retain its world supremacy. We could say that four years is not enough, but if you look at who he has chosen as Vice President, a young and very strong man, if Donald Trump wins now, in four years his Vice President will run. He can serve two terms, and that will total twelve years. And in twelve years a national strategy can be implemented. I am convinced that many people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. This means not only the US, but also Canada and Mexico, because together they form an economic area. And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!” This is why the capacity to raise capital from everywhere is being developed. We are already suffering as a result: the big European companies are not investing in Europe, but are investing in America, because the ability to attract capital seems to be on the horizon. They are going to squeeze the price of everything out of everyone. I do not know whether you have read what the President said. For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

What is the European response to global system change? We have two options. The first is what we call “the open-air museum”. This is what we have now. We are moving towards it. Europe, absorbed by the US, will be left in an underdeveloped role. It will be a continent that the world marvels at, but one which no longer has within it the dynamic for development. The second option, announced by President Macron, is strategic autonomy. In other words, we must enter the competition of global system change. After all, this is what the USA does, according to its own logic. And we are indeed talking about 400 million people. It is possible to recreate Europe’s capacity to attract capital, and it is possible to bring capital back from America. It is possible to make major infrastructure developments, especially in Central Europe – the Budapest–Bucharest TGV and the Warsaw–Budapest TGV, to mention what we are involved in. We need a European military alliance with a strong European defence industry, research and innovation. We need European energy self-sufficiency, which will not be possible without nuclear energy. And after the war we need a new reconciliation with Russia. This means that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project, the Union must strengthen itself as an economic project, and the Union must create itself as a defence project. In both cases – the open-air museum or if we join the competition – what will happen is that we must be prepared for the fact that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO or the European Union, because we Europeans do not have enough money for that. Ukraine will return to the position of a buffer state. If it is lucky, this will come with international security guarantees, which will be enshrined in a US–Russia agreement, in which we Europeans may be able to participate. The Polish experiment will fail, because they do not have the resources: they will have to return to Central Europe and the V4. So let us wait for the Polish brothers and sisters to return. The second presentation is over. There is only one left. This is about Hungary.

What should Hungary do in this situation? First of all, let us record the sad fact that five hundred years ago, at the time of the last global system change, Europe was the winner and Hungary the loser. It was a time when, thanks to geographical discoveries, a new economic space opened up in the western half of Europe – one in which we were completely unable to participate. Unfortunately for us, at the same time a civilisational conflict also kicked down our door, with Islamic conquest arriving in Hungary, making us a war zone for many years. This resulted in a huge loss of population, leading to resettlement – the consequences of which we can see today. And unfortunately we did not have the capacity to break out of this situation on our own. We could not liberate ourselves by our own efforts, and so for several centuries we had to be annexed to a Germanic Habsburg world.

Let us also remind ourselves that five hundred years ago the Hungarian elite fully understood what was happening. They understood the nature of the change, but they did not have the means that would have enabled them to prepare the country for that change. This was the reason for the failure of the attempts to expand the space – the political, economic and military space – and to avoid trouble: the attempts to cut our way out of the situation. Such an attempt was made by King Matthias, who – following Sigismund’s example – sought to become Holy Roman Emperor, and thus involve Hungary in the global system change. This failed. But I would also include here the attempt to have Tamás Bakócz appointed as Pope, which would have given us another opportunity to become a winner in this global system change. But these attempts did not succeed. Therefore the Hungarian symbol of this era, the symbol of Hungarian failure, is [military defeat at] Mohács. In other words, the beginning of the West’s world power dominance coincided with the decline of Hungary.

This is important, because now we must clarify our relationship to the new global system change. We have two possibilities: Is this now a threat for Hungary, or an opportunity for Hungary? If it is a threat, then we must pursue a policy of protecting the status quo: we must swim along with the United States and the European Union, and we must identify our national interests with one or both branches of the West. If we see this not as a threat but as an opportunity, we need to chart our own development path, make changes and take the initiative. In other words, it will be worth pursuing a nationally-oriented policy. I believe in the latter, I belong to the latter school: the current global system change is not a threat, not primarily a threat, but rather an opportunity.

If, however, we want to pursue our independent national policy, the question is whether we have the necessary boundary conditions. In other words, would we be in danger of being trodden on – or, rather, being trampled on. So the question is whether or not we have the boundary conditions for our own path in our relations with the USA, the European Union and Asia.

In short, I can only say that developments in the US are moving in our favour. I do not believe that we will get an economic and political offer from the United States that will create a better opportunity for us than membership of the European Union. If we do get one, we should consider it. Of course the Polish trap is to be avoided: they have bet a lot on one card, but there was a Democratic government in America; they have been helped in their strategic Polish national goals, but the Poles are subject to the imposition of a policy of democracy export, LGBTQ, migration and internal social transformation which actually risks the loss of their national identity. So if there is an offer from America, we need to consider it carefully.

If we look at Asia and China, we have to say that there the boundary conditions exist – because we have received an offer from China. We have received the maximum offer possible, and we will not get a better one. This can be summarised as follows: China is very far away, and for them Hungary’s membership of the European Union is an asset. This is unlike the Americans, who are always telling us that perhaps we should get out. The Chinese think that we are in a good place here – even though EU membership is a constraint, because we cannot pursue an independent trade policy, as EU membership comes with a common trade policy. To this the Chinese say that this being the case, we should participate in each other’s modernisation. Of course, when lions offer an invitation to a mouse, one must always be alert, because after all reality and relative sizes do matter. But this Chinese offer to participate in each other’s modernisation – announced during the Chinese president’s visit in May – means that they are willing to invest a large proportion of their resources and development funds in Hungary, and that they are willing to offer us opportunities to participate in the Chinese market.

What is the consequence for EU–Hungary relations if we consider our membership of the EU as a boundary condition? As I see it, the western part of the European Union is no longer on course to return to the nation state model. Therefore they will continue to navigate in what to us are unfamiliar waters. The eastern part of the Union – in other words us – can defend our condition as nation states. That is something we are capable of. The Union has lost the current war. The US will abandon it. Europe cannot finance the war, it cannot finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, and it cannot finance the running of Ukraine.

In parenthesis, while Ukraine is asking us for more loans, negotiations are underway to write off the loans it has previously taken out. Today the creditors and Ukraine are arguing over whether it should repay 20 per cent or 60 per cent of the debt it has taken on. This is the reality of the situation. In other words, the European Union has to pay the price of this military adventure. This price will be high, and it will affect us adversely. As a boundary condition, the consequence for us – for Europe – is that the European Union will acknowledge that the Central European countries will remain in the European Union, while remaining on nation-state foundations and pursuing their own foreign policy objectives. They may not like it, but they will have to put up with it – especially as the number of such countries will increase.

All in all, therefore, I can say that the boundary conditions exist for independent nationally-oriented policy towards America, Asia and Europe. These will define the limits of our room for manoeuvre. This space is wide – wider than it has been at any time in the last five hundred years. The next question is what we need to do to use this space to our advantage. If there is a global system change, then we need a strategy that is worthy of it.

If there is a global system change, then we need a grand strategy for Hungary. Here the order of words is important: we do not need a strategy for a grand Hungary, but a grand strategy for Hungary. This means that up to now we have had small strategies, usually with a 2030 time horizon. These are action plans, they are policy programmes, and they have been intended to take what we started in 2010 – what we call national course building – and simply finish it. They have to be followed through. But in a time of global system change this is not enough. For that we need a grand strategy, a longer timeframe – especially if we assume that this global system change will lead to a stable long-term state of affairs that will last for centuries. Whether this will be the case will, of course, be for our grandchildren to say at Tusnád/Tușnad in 2050.

How do we stand with Hungary’s grand strategy? Is there a grand strategy for Hungary in our drawer? There would be, and in fact there is. This is the answer. Because over the past two years the war has spurred us on. Here some things have happened that we have decided to do in order to create a grand strategy – even if we have not talked about them in this context. We immediately started working on such a grand strategy after the 2022 election. Unusually, the Hungarian government has a political director whose job is actually to put together this grand strategy. We have entered the programme-writing system of President Donald Trump’s team, and we have deep involvement there. For some time researchers at the Magyar Nemzeti Bank [Hungarian National Bank] have been taking part in strategy workshops in Asia – particularly in China. And to turn our disadvantage into an advantage, after we were forced into a ministerial change, we brought into the Government not a technocrat but a strategic thinker, and we created a separate European Union ministry with János Bóka. And so in Brussels we are not passive, but we have set up shop there: we are not moving out, but moving in. And there are a number of such soft power institutions associated with the Hungarian government – think tanks, research institutes, universities – which have been operating at full throttle over the past two years.

So there is a grand strategy for Hungary. What condition is it in? I can say that it is not yet in a good condition. It is not in a good condition because the language being used is too intellectual. And our political and competitive advantage comes precisely from the fact that we are able to create a unity with the people in which everyone can understand exactly what we are doing and why. This is the foundation for our ability to act together. Because people will only defend a plan if they understand it and see that it is good for them. Otherwise, if founded on Brusselian blah-blah, it will not work. Unfortunately, what we have now – the grand strategy for Hungary – is not yet digestible and widely comprehensible. It will take a good six months to get to that stage. Currently it is raw and coarse – I could even say that it was not written with a fountain pen, but with a chisel, and that we need to get through a lot more sandpaper to make it comprehensible. But for now, I will briefly present what there is.

So the essence of the grand strategy for Hungary – and now I will use intellectual language – is connectivity. This means that we will not allow ourselves to be locked into only one of either of the two emerging hemispheres in the world economy. The world economy will not be exclusively Western or Eastern. We have to be in both, in the Western and in the Eastern. This will come with consequences. The first. We will not get involved in the war against the East. We will not join in the formation of a technological bloc opposing the East, and we will not join in the formation of a trade bloc opposing the East. We are gathering friends and partners, not economic or ideological enemies. We are not taking the intellectually much easier path of latching on to someone, but we are going our own way. This is difficult – but then there is a reason that politics is described as an art.

The second chapter in the grand strategy is about spiritual foundations. At the core of this is the defence of sovereignty. I have already said enough about foreign policy, but this strategy also describes the economic basis of national sovereignty. In recent years we have been building a pyramid. At the top of it are the “national champions”. Below them are the internationally competitive medium-sized companies, below which are companies producing for the domestic market. At the bottom are small companies and sole traders. This is the Hungarian economy that can provide the basis for sovereignty. We have national champions in banking, energy, food, the production of basic agricultural goods, IT, telecommunications, media, civil engineering, building construction, real estate development, pharmaceuticals, defence, logistics, and – to some extent, through the universities – knowledge industries. And these are our national champions. They are not just champions at home, but they are all out there in the international arena and they have proven themselves competitive. Below these come our medium-sized companies. I would like to inform you that today Hungary has fifteen thousand medium-sized companies that are internationally active and competitive. When we came to power in 2010, the number was three thousand. Today we have fifteen thousand. And of course we need to broaden the base of small enterprises and sole traders. If by 2025 we can draw up a peace budget and not a war budget, we will launch an extensive programme for small and medium-sized enterprises. The economic basis for sovereignty also means that we must strengthen our financial independence. We need to bring our debt down not to 50 or 60 per cent, but close to 30 per cent; and we need to emerge as a regional creditor. Today we are already making attempts to do this, and Hungary is providing state loans to friendly countries in our region that are in some way important to Hungary. It is important that, according to the strategy, we must remain a production hub: we must not switch to a service-oriented economy. The service sector is important, but we must retain the character of Hungary as a production hub, because only in this way can there be full employment in the domestic labour market. We must not repeat the West’s mistake of using guest workers to do certain production work, because over there members of host populations already consider certain types of work to be beneath them. If this were to happen in Hungary, it would induce a process of social dissolution that would be difficult to halt. And, for the defence of sovereignty, this chapter also includes the building of university and innovation centres.

The third chapter identifies the body of the grand strategy: the Hungarian society that we are talking about. If we are to be winners, this Hungarian society must be solid and resilient. It must have a solid and resilient social structure. The first prerequisite for this is halting demographic decline. We started well, but now we have stalled. A new impetus is needed. By 2035 Hungary must be demographically self-sustaining. There can be no question of population decline being compensated for by migration. The Western experience is that if there are more guests than hosts, then home is no longer home. This is a risk that must not be taken. Therefore, if after the end of the war we can draw up a peace budget, then to regain the momentum of demographic improvement the tax credit for families with children will probably need to be doubled in 2025 – in two steps not one, but within one year. “Sluice gates” must control the inflow from Western Europe of those who want to live in a Christian national country. The number of such people will continue to grow. Nothing will be automatic, and we will be selective. Up until now they have been selective, but now we are the ones who will be selective. For society to be stable and resilient it must be based on a middle-class: families must have their own wealth and financial independence. Full employment must be preserved, and the key to this will be to maintain the current relationship between work and the Roma population. There will be work, and you cannot live without work. This is the deal and this is the essence of what is on offer. Also linked to this is the system of Hungarian villages, which is a special asset in Hungarian history, and not a symbol of backwardness. The Hungarian village system must be preserved. An urban level of services also needs to be provided by us in villages. The financial burden of this must be borne by towns and cities. We will not create megacities, we will not create big cities, but we want to create towns and rural areas around towns, while preserving the historical heritage of the Hungarian village.

And finally there is the crucial element of sovereignty, with which we have arrived here on the banks of the River Olt. We have reduced this to a minimum, fearing that otherwise Zsolt might take the microphone from us. This is the essence of the protection of sovereignty, which is the protection of national distinctiveness. This is not assimilation, not integration, not blending in, but the maintenance of our own particular national character. This is the cultural basis of the defence of sovereignty: language preservation, and avoiding a state of “zero religion”. Zero religion is a state in which faith has long disappeared, but there has also been the loss of the capacity for Christian tradition to provide us with cultural and moral rules of behaviour that govern our relationship to work, money, family, sexual relations, and the order of priorities in how we relate to one another. This is what Westerners have lost. I think that this state of zero religion comes about when same-sex marriage is recognised as an institution with a status equal to that of marriage between men and women. That is a state of zero religion, in which Christianity no longer provides a moral compass and guidance. This must be avoided at all costs. And so when we fight for the family, we are not just fighting for the honour of the family, but for the maintenance of a state in which Christianity at least still provides moral guidance for our community.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

And finally, this Hungarian grand strategy must not start from “Little Hungary”. This grand strategy for Hungary must be based on national foundations, it must include all areas inhabited by Hungarians, and it must embrace all Hungarians living anywhere in the world. Little Hungary alone – Little Hungary as the sole framework – will be insufficient. For this reason I dare not give a date, because we would have to stick to it. But within the foreseeable future all the support that serves the stability and resilience of Hungarian society – such as the family support system – must be extended in its entirety to areas inhabited by Hungarians outside the country’s borders. This is not going in a bad direction, because if I look back at the amounts spent on these areas by the Hungarian state since 2010, I can say that we have spent an average of 100 billion forints a year. By way of comparison, I can say that during the [Socialist] government of Ferenc Gyurcsány, the annual expenditure on this was 9 billion forints. Now we are spending 100 billion a year. So that’s a more than tenfold increase.

And then the only question is this: When the grand strategy for Hungary is in place, what kind of policy can be used to make it a success? First of all, for a grand strategy to succeed, we need to know ourselves very well. Because the policy we want to use to make a strategy a success must be suited to our national character. To this, of course, we can say that we are diverse. This is particularly true for Hungarians. But there are nevertheless shared essential features, and this is what the strategy must target and fix on. And if we understand this, then we do not need compromises or consolidation, but we need to take a firm stand. I believe that, in addition to diversity, the essence – the shared essence that we must grasp and on which we must build the Hungarian grand strategy – is the freedom which must also be built inwards: we must not only build the freedom of the nation, but we must also aim for the personal freedom of Hungarians. Because we are not a militarised country like the Russians or the Ukrainians. Nor are we hyper-disciplined like the Chinese. Unlike the Germans, we do not enjoy hierarchy. We do not enjoy upheaval, revolution and blasphemy like the French. Nor do we believe that we can survive without our state, our own state, as the Italians tend to think. For Hungarians order is not a value in itself, but a condition necessary for freedom, in which we can live undisturbed lives. The closest thing to the Hungarian sense and meaning of freedom is the expression summing up an undisturbed life: “My house, my home, my castle, my life, and I will decide what makes me feel comfortable in my own skin.” This is an anthropological, genetic and cultural characteristic of Hungarians, and the strategy must adapt to it. In other words, it must also be the starting point for politicians who want to carry the grand strategy to victory.

This process we are talking about – this global system change – will not take place in a year or two, but has already begun and will take another twenty to twenty-five years, and therefore during these twenty to twenty-five years it will be the subject of constant debate. Our opponents will constantly attack it. They will say that the process is reversible. They will say that we need integration instead of a separate national grand strategy. So they will constantly attack it and work on diverting it. They will constantly question not only the content of the grand strategy, but also the need for it. This is a fight that must now be committed to, but here one problem is the timeframe. Because if this is a process spanning twenty to twenty-five years, we have to admit that as we are not getting any younger, we will not be among those who finish it. The implementation of this grand strategy – especially the final phase – will certainly not be done by us, but mostly by young people who are now in their twenties and thirties. And when we think about politics, about how to implement such a strategy in political terms, we have to realise that in future generations there will essentially be only two positions – just as there are in our generation: there will be liberals and there will be nationalists. And I have to say that there will be liberal, slim-fit, avocado-latte, allergen-free, self-satisfied politicians on one side, and on the other side there will be streetwise young people of nationalist sympathies, with both feet firmly on the ground. Therefore we need to start recruiting young people – now, and for us. The opposition is constantly being organised and deployed to the battlefield by the liberal Zeitgeist. They have no need for recruitment efforts, because recruitment happens automatically. But our camp is different: the national camp will only come out at the sound of a trumpet, and can only rally under a flag that has been raised high. This is also true of young people. Therefore we need to find courageous young fighters with nationalist sentiments. We are looking for courageous young fighters with a national spirit.

Thank you for your kind attention.