This piece of writing is a twenty page essay that synthesizes and ties together a particular group of recent and fairly recent decisions and doings that, in my view, will be looked back on in years to come as the crux of events that ushered in the end of Western hegemony.
“If America goes abroad searching for monsters to destroy, she may become the dictatress of the world, but she will lose her own soul” – paraphrase of John Quincy Adams from “America: Dictatress of the World”, July 21,1821
What This Essay Aims to Make Clear
Over the course of the last 25 years, a decisive policy shift has taken place in the United States that has altered the way US politicians, the US military and the US media operate. During this period, America has adopted an agenda of perpetual war and full throttle eastward NATO expansion abroad, accompanied on the domestic front by financial deregulation and the promotion of constant fear of an external “evil” threat of one sort or another.(1)
This shift has ended up generating confusion among a large portion of the US population, who, still caught up in the now antiquated battle between team red and team blue, have not yet realized that the foreign, and, to a measurable extent, the domestic policy agendas of both US major political parties, have fused.(2)
The Key Points:
The recent merging of the foreign policy agendas of the “left” and “right” within the American political sphere has not been the product of mere chance. On the contrary, this shift was instigated and perpetuated by a group of men (and some women) who’ve spent well over half a century moving their ideas to the forefront of America’s political zeitgeist. These people are known as neoconservatives and/or neocons.
Neoconservatism is a worldview rooted in American-Israeli exceptionalism and a belief in the utilization of military force as a means of promoting state objectives as well as protecting against the state’s enemies.
Since neoconservative foreign policy became America’s modus operandi in the early 2000s, the US has been consistently losing the respect and trust of a majority of the world’s nations, who now view America as a duplicitous, ultra-violent, neo-imperialist threat.
This increasing disillusionment with the United States has triggered the birth of a new global economic alliance that includes nations from all over the world who no longer wish to be financially and militarily bullied by the US.
The United States, as a consequence of its political and military leadership’s adoption of neoconservatism’s philosophy of foreign policy, has jeopardized its integrity and its authority as a world power. This is the case to the extent that the damage it has done to itself and to its relations with other nations cannot be repaired in a manner that will preserve its hegemony.
What I Hope This Article Will Do For Those Who Read It
Firstly, I apologize for this essay’s length. I kept it as concise as I could without omitting anything that I felt to be essential to its aim and purpose. My hope is that this piece of writing will help to quell at least some confusion in the minds of readers who haven’t yet been able to pinpoint the origin of the collective frustration and strangeness we’ve all been feeling over the course of the last decade or so. So many times, I’ve heard people refer to how “crazy” and “perplexing” things have gotten, especially in the realm of politics. Hopefully this article will make clear what I believe to be a central cause of this perplexity.
“Of each particular thing, ask: ‘What is it in itself, in its own construction? – Marcus Aurelius from “The Meditations”, 175 AD
The Essential Elements of Neoconservatism
1- Neoconservatism is rooted in a Manichean interpretation of the world in which good and evil are in a constant battle. In this battle, the United States, being the indubitable source of good, must extend its power and its influence to all parts of the world.
2- Neocons hold a view that both the United States and Israel are morally exceptional. They therefore feel that the US has a moral obligation to defend Israel’s security.(3)
3- Neocons believe that force is the only language that the adversaries of good understand. Therefore, the US must use force in order to promote its influence and to fend off evil, here and everywhere else in the world.
4- Neoconservatives posit that democracy is generally desirable. However, the measure of its desirability in particular cases depends on which faction emerges victorious as a result of the voting process.(4),(4a)
A Quick Look at the Beginnings of Neoconservatism
In the late 1930s and early 1940s in New York, a group of mostly Jewish Trotskyite intellectuals decided to break with socialism and to embrace a combination of American exceptionalism, deregulated capitalism and Zionist inspired militarism.(5) One of the leading figures among this group of thinkers was Irving Kristol, who would later become known as “the godfather of neoconservatism” and who, according to the Daily Telegraph was, “Perhaps the most consequential intellectual of the late 20th century.”
It was in the late 1960s and 1970s however, that the neoconservative movement began to gain political traction. In the early/mid 1970s, Israel found itself in a precarious position in the first stages of the 1973 war. At the same time, US global power seemed to be in retreat after the fall of its clients in Vietnam and elsewhere in Indo-China. All of this created a context in which neoconservatism began to gain momentum in the United States.
A Worldview Shaped by Trauma
The 20th century neoconservative movement was largely a Jewish movement but not exclusively so. There were non-Jews like Jean Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett and James Woolsey, to name a few, who played instrumental roles in the movement over time. Until quite recently, neoconservative organizations and their offshoots were also made up almost entirely of Republicans. In fact, a major source of frustration within the movement had been the fact that most American Jews were not neoconservatives, nor were they republicans.(6)
Neoconservatism is a worldview that has been shaped largely by traumatic historic events, most notably the Nazi Holocaust. Relatedly, it emerged also as a reaction to US liberal isolationism, which prolonged the entrance of the US into WWII. Neoconservatives assert that “spineless liberals, military weakness, conciliatory appeasement and almost any sort of diplomacy”, are all forms of leaving the door ajar for the next Hitler to walk in.(7)(7a)
The Introduction of “Threat Inflation”
The remedy for all of the above, according to neoconservatives, is:
1) The development of overwhelming US military power
2) Constant American engagement and/or intervention in the affairs of countries outside its borders
3) The maintenance of a perpetual state of “threat inflation” in order to counter the tendency toward isolationism in the US.
The neocons’ utilization of threat inflation as a primary public influencing device would be on full display during the first two and a half decades of the 21st century. From their entirely fabricated revival of a Cold War era “Russian threat” to their instigation and acceleration of multiple wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the neocons would use “noble lies” to perpetuate a growing fear of an approaching evil “other” who, being contemptuous and resentful of American freedom, would soon be coming to terrorize and/or destroy the US.(8) It would therefore be necessary to terrorize and/or destroy this “other” first, in order to maintain US safety and hegemony.(9)
Unknown Unknowns and the Surreal Adventures of Team B
The farcical extent to which neocon threat inflation burgeoned in the early 2000s was exemplified by Donald Rumsfeld’s surreal pronouncements that in order to thoroughly thwart all potential evil “others” it would be necessary to pursue “unknown unknown” as well as “known known” and “known unknown” purveyors of anti-American terror.(10)
This was the same mindset and procedure that Rumsfeld and his neocon colleagues Paull Wolfowitz and Richard Pipes employed in their infamous “Team B” investigations in 1975-76. Team B produced a large series of reports insisting that all kinds of Soviet shenanigans were taking place, including a covert build up of a huge fleet of Russian nuclear submarines and a plan to invade the United States, among other accusations.
When they were investigated, all of Team B’s claims turned out to be totally false. The most curious of their claims being, that the absence of proof of Soviet wrong doings, was, in itself, proof of Soviet wrong doings, if one were to take into consideration the mental/behavioral tendencies of the Soviets. Not only am I not kidding, I’m quoting Richard Pipes’ testimony almost verbatim. Check the videotape if you don’t believe me.(11)
Neoconservatism Becomes Status Quo During the Bush Jr. years
Although neocon infiltration into the upper ranks of American government in the form of people like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney began in the 1970s and increased in 1980s during the Reagan era, it was in the 2000s, following on the heels of 9-11, that the neocon worldview became American foreign policy doctrine. This sweeping ideological shift, which had been previously outlined in the infamous “Wolfowitz Doctrine” of 1992, occurred first among republicans during the Bush Jr. years, and then, by the mid 2010s, among politicians and well-known pundits within the Democratic party as well.(12)
The “Right” and “Left” Media Proliferation of Neoconservatism
Some of the more notable hardcore proliferators of neocon doctrine in major media have been people like media mogul and FOX News Channel owner Rupert Murdoch, radio show host Michael Medved, interventionist columnist Robert Kagan and journalist Anne Applebaum, to name just a few.(13)
More prevalent and arguably more influential among political centrists and voters occupying the center-left, we find the mainstream “liberal” media. Publications and shows of this ilk include The NY Times, MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, etc. ()
These “liberal” news outlets, all of which are major corporations that belong to corporate conglomerates, usually don’t overtly promote neoconservative doctrine. That said, over the course of the last 15 to 20 years, pretty much all US “liberal” mainstream media reporting, especially in the realm of foreign affairs, specifically on war related events, has been delivered in a form that adheres to a delineated set of neoconservative guidelines.
The Pre-established Boundaries of Discussion and the New Media Model
These usually overlooked yet ubiquitous pre-established parameters define the limits of “acceptable” political discussion in the US, acting as a hidden filter that prevents any serious critique from getting through. This limitation of the spectrum of admissible forms of discourse is the key feature that accounts for the undeniable effectiveness of the US propaganda system.(14)
It’s also important to consider the new media model that has evolved over the course of the last 10 to 15 years. With the advent of cable news and the explosion of digital media, the traditional media model, which focused on drawing in a wide spectrum of viewers with differing interests and points of view, has been replaced by a subscriber based model that focuses on developing and growing an audience with a particular interest and a particular point of view.
This new factor, combined with the still existing aforementioned limitations on the parameters of discourse, has generated a tribalistic political atmosphere in which the stances people take on issues tend to automatically fall within a pre-packaged range of positions that have been ratified by the group they’ve chosen to ally with and/or subscribe to.
This change has created an increasingly polarized public in which members of team “left” and team “right” pit themselves against each other in clashes, taking apparently opposite positions on issues. What goes unnoticed though, is that these clashes ensue within a pre-assimilated, mutually shared framework that limits the possibility of the recognition that, from a broader vantage point, the opposing factions actually share a range of fundamental concerns that ultimately supersede the superficial differences they’ve become accustomed to focusing on.
Leo Strauss and the Necessity of “Noble Lies”
The full implementation of much of the neocon agenda in the 2000s, the 2010s and the 2020s has been made possible via a series of “noble lies” that have convinced the American public to go along (for a time) with policies and wars that often go against their interests and their better judgment.
One of the core tenets of neoconservatism is the adaptation of Plato’s claim which posits that it is necessary to make use of “noble lies” in order to sway public opinion so that it coincides with the opinions of a more educated, elite class. This was an idea that Leo Strauss, whose thought makes up a crucial portion of the neoconservative doctrine, put forth in the 1920s.(15) Thus, neocons have very little interest in democracy when it comes to doing what they feel is best for America and the rest of the world.
The Destruction and Death Brought on by the Neocons’ “Noble Lies”
From their massively destructive illegal invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, to their entirely counter-productive “war on terror”,(16) to their rapid eastward expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border from 2002-2024,(17) to their debunked claims of consequential Russian interference in the US presidential election of 2016,(18) to the significant damage they caused to Europe’s economy as a result of their destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline in September of 2022,(19) to the duplicity and immorality that have been the hallmark of their campaign of funding and arming Israel’s current, ongoing genocide in Gaza, the neocons have made a practice in the 21st century of lying to the American public and to their allies,(20) not to mention the myriad lies they’ve told to their declared enemies.
The Problem With Believing Your Own Bulls**t
The doubly problematic aspect of an ideology like neoconservatism, which employs “noble lies” as a working part of its doctrine, is that, over time, not only the general public but also the creators and purveyors of the lies tend to eventually end up believing many of them.
A recent example of this phenomenon is the skewed conception that Americans had of Russia and Vladimir Putin at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. I’m referring here to myths such as “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.”, “Russia’s army is disorganized and ineffectual”, “Putin is a crazed, imperialist maniac whose plan is to conquer Europe”, etc..(15a)
These stories, which were completely untrue, were actually believed by many of the higher ups within the US government and military. These misrepresentations and underestimations of Russia’s industrial and military capabilities ended up making the US and NATO’s attempt to upend Russia’s economy and their army (via Ukrainian proxy) look ridiculous. After over 2 and ½ years of battle and 14 rounds of economic sanctions, Russia’s economy has improved markedly, whereas Ukraine has lost (and will not regain) a considerable amount of territory as well as hundreds of thousands of soldiers.(15b)
The Removal of Nearly 100 Years worth of Government Protections
From the early 1980s up through to the 2020s, there has been a landslide of government deregulation in the United States. Four of the most prominent and change inducing of these acts of deregulation have been:
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which lifted restrictions on media ownership. This act ushered in the current era of media mogul monopolies.
The implementation of NAFTA in 1994. NAFTA kick-started an era of massive industrial flight from the US, as corporations could now move their points of production and labor outside of US borders, where labor was vastly cheaper.
The repeal of the Glass-Steagel act in 1999. This eliminated the firewall between commercial and investment banking that had been in effect since 1933. The repeal of Glass Steagall was arguably the primary enabler of the 2008 financial crash, which initiated an unprecedented and still widening wealth gap between a small, extremely wealthy minority and the rest of the US population.
The Citizens United Act in 2010. This act essentially removed the limits on campaign finance contributions, to the extent that there are now individuals and organizations giving hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates in both major political parties.
This removal of restrictions on the amount of power and influence that a wealthy few can legally wield, set the stage for a huge transition in the 21st century.
From an Industrially Based Republic to a Finance Based, War Oriented Oligarchy
Largely as a result of the discontinuation of the aforementioned regulations and protections, the US has essentially become an oligarchy in which the major media, the electoral process and thus the government policy making process are now controlled by an inordinately powerful group of multi-billionaires who are often referred to as the donor class. In many cases these mega-wealthy donors, who generally operate within corporate conglomerates, fund candidates in both major political parties, thus guaranteeing that no matter who wins in elections, these mega-wealthy donors and allied organizations end up getting what they want. One glaring example of this phenomenon is AIPAC.(22)
Add to this the continuing deindustrialization of the US economy due to the flight of American industry, which became super-charged in the 1990s after NAFTA went through. In other words, the lion’s share of what were formerly US created goods that were generated by an American labor force are now produced outside North America’s borders.
The most notable exception being the American Weapons Manufacturing Industry. US Weapons Manufacturing companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman have all recorded unprecedentedly large profits in the 21st century, amidst an otherwise massive decrease in overall US industrial production and profits.(23)
The Fertilization of Militarist Soil
It would be incorrect to blame US deindustrialization and wage stagnation solely on the rise of neoconservatism. There were undoubtedly myriad factors, including the influx of ever more efficient computer technologies and a sizable rise in the number of women and minorities that entered the American workforce in the second half of the 20th century. This created a labor surplus that ended the need for employers to continue appropriately raising employees wages by the late 1970s
What is certain though is that the destabilization that these changes produced helped fertilize the soil in which a disillusionment with mid 20th century liberalism gave way to an embrace of some of the more radical, militarized forms of economic neoliberalism that were being championed by the neoconservative movement in the late 20th and early 21st century.(24)
The Neoconization of the Democratic Party
After the neocon takeover of the White House during the Bush Jr. era, the financial crash of 2008 and then the implementation of the Citizens United Act in 2010, the rapid trickle-up of power and wealth into the hands of the donor class made it nearly impossible for donor sponsored politicians to challenge neocon policies. So much so that by the 2010s, neoconservative policies, especially in the realm of foreign affairs, had become status quo within the Obama administration as well.(25)
By the mid 2010s, neocon giants such as William Kristol and Victoria Nuland had migrated from the Republican party to the Democratic party. Although this migration was due in large part to the Republican party’s embrace of Donald Trump, these neocon darlings also cleverly realized that donor dependent war hawks such as future presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden would do nothing to challenge neoconservative foreign policy aims. For all intents and purposes, Clinton, Biden and a significant portion of the rest of the establishment Democratic Party, were already neocon-ized by the early to mid 2010s.(26)
As far as the Democratic party’s domestic agenda was concerned, neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, weren’t particularly concerned with beating back the New Deal. In fact, overt opposition to the New Deal has never been a featured aspect of the neoconservative agenda.
Now, in the 2020s, the neoconization of the Democratic Party’s position on foreign policy is so complete that even progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and AOC have been voting (nearly) in lockstep with Republicans and their fellow Democrats on matters such as increasing the already exorbitant 825 Billion dollar US Defense Budget and the greenlighting of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons and monetary aid to be sent to Israel and Ukraine in 2022 – 2024.
This is the case because, at this point, politicians who deviate from the now bipartisanly canonized policy model of perpetual military provocation and war, will lose the support of their donors and then be replaced by other politicians who are willing to tow the “uniparty” line.(27)
The De-Democratization of America.
If you’ve read this far then some of you have probably already done the math regarding how all of these developments have affected the condition of American democracy. Think about it. America’s production centers have largely been hollowed out. The bulk of American industry and jobs have moved overseas and there’s absolutely no reason why industry and jobs won’t continue to move out of the US.(28)
Add to this the fact that, due to the removal of almost all previous limitations on corporate power, the US mainstream media and the American electoral system have been hacked by wealthy oligarchs with strong financial and ideological ties to the military industrial complex. These people, who usually operate within conglomerates of super-rich individuals and large corporations, no longer have to deal with restrictions on how much they can spend to buy politicians’ allegiance.(29)
At present, these uber wealthy donors and the politicians whose careers they fund have little need to continue to consider our opinions or our needs anymore. Are you seeing what’s happening here in the US? As long as the donor dominated two-party system remains unchallenged, the donor class is going to get what they want no matter which of the two major political parties wins in elections. This is de-democratization, pure and simple.(30)
Neoliberal Globalization and the “Third Worldization” of the United States
Like citizens in countries all over the world that US corporations have plundered and abandoned over the course of the last half-century, we, the general population of the US, are now also approaching the vulture capitalist chopping block. This growing devaluation and dehumanization of the vast majority of America’s population has appropriately been referred to as the “Third Worldization” of the United States.(31)
Formerly thriving US cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Flint, Baltimore, Jackson, Little Rock, Stockton, Fresno, Dayton, Memphis, Springfield and New Orleans, many of which were once celebrated US industrial manufacturing hubs have, in many cases, become deindustrialized urban ghost towns that are now overrun with joblessness, homelessness, drug addiction and poverty.(32)
This is what has resulted, not just in the US but in other countries all over the world as well, from what the uber-wealthy international oligarchic class refer to as “globalization”, although a more precise term for their version of globalization would be neoliberal globalization. Those at the forefront of the 21st century neoliberal globalist project are a transcontinental contingent of extremely wealthy individuals who have, for now, been emancipated from the need to consider the existential needs and well being of the other 7 and ½ billion people they share a planet with.(33)
This is not to say that all prominent neoliberal globalists have nefarious intentions. On the contrary, a fair percentage of these people do seem, in my view, to have a genuine interest in the well being of others. Their error though, is that they either can’t see or they can’t accept the now well-documented and largely acknowledged fact, that neoliberalism has markedly failed as an applicable economic model.(33a)(33b)
*Note: Before the neoliberal elite class hijacked the term “globalization”, it used to be a neutral term referring to the rise of cross-continental communication and mutual interconnection amongst a growing majority of the world’s population in the technological age. For neocons though, the term “globalization” refers to a belief in a particular structurization of global economic and military power that places the US at its hegemonic center.
The Unipolar Era that is Ending
Since the early 1990s we have been living in what has been termed a “unipolar world”. After the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred just over thirty years ago, the United States has wielded unparalleled military and economic power. To maintain and augment this power, the United States has remained militarily engaged all over the world so as to fend off all potential challengers to its hegemony.
The neocons have made it a practice to intervene in and shape the political and economic development of dozens of countries all over the globe. Nations that have shown signs of resistance to the US dominated unipolar model have been threatened, economically sanctioned and in many cases invaded and slaughtered.(34),(35)
BRICS and the Newly Forming Multipolar World
In recent years a major challenge to the US dominated unipolar world order has arisen. This challenge has come about due to a number of factors, one of the primary factors being the rise of China as an economic superpower coupled with its newly empowered alliances with Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa. A burgeoning global interest in becoming part of this alliance of countries known as the BRICS Economic Partnership, has been increasing exponentially throughout 2022 – 2024. In fact, there are now over 50 new countries applying to enter BRICS, which just added Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to its charter.(36)
Another huge factor that has contributed to the recent collapse of the unipolar era has been the massive military and economic failure of the US/NATO funded proxy war in Ukraine.(37),(38) The abject failure of “Project Ukraine” has generated a new level of global economic crisis and also a now widespread recognition of the precariousness of US/Western hegemony, which many previously believed to be monolithic at the height of the unipolar era.(38a) These new conditions and revelations have spurred BRICS members and prospective BRICS members, a grouping that makes up more than half of the world’s population, to engage in, amongst other things, the creation of a new collective currency. This new currency will, in all likelihood, eventually challenge the dollar as the world’s central global currency.
In short, a new and undeniably formidable global alliance is now taking shape. The BRICS movement’s like-minded countries have realized, without question, that together they are capable of a level of economic and military interdependence that cannot be trammeled or undone by US economic and/or military threats.
Regarding the Actual Function of NATO.
Although I feel something akin to embarrassment having to explain this, being that it’s so transparently obvious at this point, NATO is not the “defensive” alliance that it initially set out to be in the middle of the 20th century. At least as far back as when the neocons took over Washington in 2001, NATO has acted as a trojan horse for offensive military action by the United States and its closest allies, primarily Britain, France and to a lesser extent Germany.(38b)
NATO’s function in the 21st century has largely been to assist in the destabilization of governments in countries all over the world, most often in order to force regime change. These countries’ newly established leaders, who are often hand-picked by the US, then inaugurate US approved “democratic” regimes that are installed with or without the countries’ populations’ approval. When the establishment of a democratic regime isn’t possible or isn’t conducive to US objectives, then a US approved dictatorship is propped up or newly installed.
As for NATO member states, they are each required to overhaul and align their weapons systems in order that they are in sync with NATO guidelines. These new systems are conveniently supplied in large part by US Weapons Manufacturing Companies.(38c)
At this point, NATO exists largely to manage the risks that have been created by its own existence. NATO’s illegal, mega-destructive invasions of and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen over the course of the last two decades have generated a host of new problems in the Middle East, including a huge rise in anti-US sentiment along with throngs of new terrorists and terrorist organizations. For instance, Isis, which formed in 2013, “was heavily influenced by the US and NATO’s illegal occupation of Iraq. In fact, many of Isis’ leaders met and began conspiring in US prisons during the occupation.”(39)
The Most Damaging Foreign Policy Error in American History
In a little over a year after the Bush Jr. administration took office in January 2001, NATO began a two decade crusade of eastward expansion up to Russia’s border. This campaign resulted in the entrance of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia (2004) Albania, Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017); North Macedonia (2020); Finland (2023); and Sweden (2024) into NATO.(40) This campaign was undertaken despite previous US promises to the contrary and in the face of many warnings by US and other foreign affairs experts who strongly advised against eastward NATO expansion, saying it would be both unnecessarily provocative and extremely dangerous.(41)
During this period of time, Russia, after being rejected when it asked if it could join NATO in 2000, repeatedly warned the US that it considered NATO’s continual annexation of countries on and/or near its border to be an existential threat. Especially in the case of Ukraine, which both George Bush Jr. and Joe Biden had imprudently proclaimed to be a serious candidate for NATO entry. Despite Russia’s repeated entreaties and a settlement called the Minsk Agreement, the neocons in Washington simply would not give up their plan to integrate Ukraine into NATO.
In 2019, the US began pouring billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine. Interestingly, this flood of weapons into Ukraine followed just a few months after Volodymyr Zelensky’s election in April of 2019. This snubbing of Russia’s concerns continued along with the US’ heavy assistance building up Ukraine’s military. It should also be noted that the regime in Ukraine during this period had overthrown a democratically elected government with the help of the US in 2014.
Obviously, all of this activity was an enormous red flag for Russia, which continued to demand assurance that Ukraine would remain a neutral state. Keep in mind that the US is located nearly 6,000 miles away from the Russian-Ukrainian border. The US’ physical distance from this potential point of conflict coupled with its refusal to recognize Russia’s claim that all of this activity represented a threat to its existence, clearly demonstrated the immensity of the United States’ hubris and its blatant lack of concern for the safety of Ukraine’s 37 million inhabitants.
All of this culminated in Joe Biden’s two reckless, awe-inspiringly stupid decrees in September and December of 2021, which assured Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine that they would be admitted into a joint venture with NATO.(41a) Biden’s doubling down on his refusal to respect Russia’s requests and warnings finally led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a few months later. The invasion and the war that followed it has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers in a war that absolutely did not have to happen.(42),(43)
*In my view, when the historical record of the first half of the 21st century is written, it’ll be this foreign policy error by the Biden administration that will turn out to have been the straw that broke the US hegemon’s back.
The Mutation of The American State
Over the course of the same two-plus decades, similarly incautious, though less overtly consequential NATO operations have been conducted in dozens of nonNATO-affiliated regions such as Southeast Asia, China, Africa and Latin America. All of this activity has generated a cash cow for an extremely wealthy contingent of investors.(44)
When you start putting together all of the documented facts, a portion of which are featured in this essay, an alarming realization begins to emerge. I’m not referring to anything like an undisclosed conspiracy here. For the most part all of this is pretty much an open secret. It certainly doesn’t take a master detective to figure out that the United States, as a country, has essentially become a front for a multi billion dollar war dependent global embezzlement ring.
Just over the course of the last 36 months, more than 200 billion dollars of US taxpayer money has been allocated to the arming and aiding of Israel and Ukraine alone.(45) The war in Ukraine, which could unquestionably have been avoided, was instigated, escalated and funded by the Biden administration.(45) Israel’s current US approved genocide in Gaza also could have been halted early on by US leadership.(46)
Elsewhere in the Middle East, between 4 and 6 trillion dollars have been spent on US instigated illegal invasions and their after-effects in Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of the last 2 decades. Wealthy investors in these two wars have seen their investments increase tenfold, while US Weapons Manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing have bagged profits of well into the hundreds of billions during this period.
Again, these are just 2 examples among many that have been yielding obscene payoffs for the uber wealthy weapons contractors and investors in the 21st century. (47),(47a) The US now accounts for nearly 45% of the world’s weapons sales with net export profits of about 150 billion dollars per year. In fact, US arms exports hit a record high of 238 billion in 2023.(48)
The continual, unprecedented annual increases in the amount of taxpayer money allocated to military spending and the corresponding rise in weapons sales isn’t only occurring in the US. This massive increase in profits from weapons sales is a surging global phenomenon that has upped the net worth of global oligarchs, CEOs and big investors at an increasingly escalative rate over the course of the last 20 years. All of this said, profits from American weapons sales have dwarfed those of all US competitors.(49)
The Colossal Failure of the Neoliberal Economic Model
To add insult to injury, according to HUD, it would cost 20 billion dollars to end homelessness in the US, which has been increasing in the 21st century.(50) Additionally, it would cost 175 billion dollars to end poverty in the US, which has also been on the rise over the past 20 years.(51) Parallel these figures with the fact that the US military budget costs US taxpayers 825 billion per year, which doesn’t include the 10s of billions of additional dollars that get tacked on to the budget under “extraneous costs”. You then have to consider the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and the Trump tax cuts of 2017, which together, when existing loopholes for the uber-wealthy are factored in, have transformed the American taxpayer system into a regressive rather than a progressive tax system.
In other words, you and I are the ones paying the lion’s share of the costs that are maintaining an economic model that is sinking us into debt and despair while it increases the wealth and power of an already wealthy and powerful few.
I could go on here, but I don’t think I need to. It’s simply impossible to defend the current neoliberal economic model in good faith.(51a)
The Paradoxical Meaning of the Rise of Donald Trump
Whatever else can be said about Donald Trump, one thing that is certain is that the neocon establishment, which includes politicians, pundits and oligarchs within both major political parties, cannot stand him. Here’s the key thing to understand about why this is so: Ironically, Donald Trump, who is a neoliberal Republican, is in some ways a neocon’s dream candidate.(52)
In 2017, Trump severely slashed taxes for the wealthiest Amercians. He and his administration also enacted a host of other forms of deregulation. Add to this that he’s unquestionably supportive of Israel. Sounds like their man so far, right?. Except for one glaring problem: Donald Trump doesn’t line up with the neocons’ globalist agenda that’s centered around perpetual war.. Trump is primarily an isolationist and he’s a nationalist, which means his presence in the White House is an obstruction to the neocons’ plans.
The paradox in all of this is the fact that Donald Trump, whose policies in his previous stint in the White House greatly favored the wealthy and the well situated, has become a populist icon amongst a huge swath of the struggling American working-middle class. At bottom, Trump’s continuing popularity is a testament to the ubiquitous presence in Washington of career politicians who systematically disregard the needs of the majority of the American public in order to align with the dictates of their uber-wealthy donors.(53)
Americans have become so disillusioned and desperate for change at this point that they’d rather throw in with Trump again, who is at least unpredictable, than subject themselves to yet another four years of entirely foreseeable stagnation, dejection and constant war.
Boiling Down the Neoconservative Credo
There simply isn’t a more equitable way to describe neoconservatism other than to say that it’s a brazen-faced American-Israeli exceptionalist worldview that utilizes the creation and propagation of fear of an external, evil “other” that will be coming here soon to harm us and to take away our freedom. This propagation of fear at home is paralleled by perpetual, unprovoked interventions and wars against potential evil invaders abroad. The aim being to secure global hegemony for a self-selected, self-declared, morally and ideologically superior faction of persons.
How Could We Possibly Have Been Seduced by This?
Frankly, I’m left a bit slack-jawed and slightly stunned, having come up to the surface after my deep dark dive into the history, the philosophy and the political doctrine of neoconservatism.
Here is the entirely earnest, non rhetorical question I’m left with: How could we have possibly allowed ourselves to be seduced, even a little bit, as a country, as individuals, by such a cynical, intellectually lax, morally vacant quasi-ideology that advocates directing our energy and placing our faith in the domestic promotion of constant paranoia and the propagation of perpetual war abroad? We can’t be this stupid. Not really. Right?
Western Hegemony is Twilighting as the The Multipolar Sun is Beginning to insinuate Itself
What we’re witnessing now is the onset of nothing less than a new historical era: a burgeoning multipolar world operating system diffusing itself centrifugally from an Afro-Eurasian nexus rather than from a Euro-Western middle point. Multipolar rhythms pulse from an array of sources. They beat in contradistinction to the uni-projected, increasingly subsidiary Western-Centric pulse. Multipolarity moves by spreading from the outside to the center, unlike the now twilighting Unipolar order, in which the center radiates out.
This is precisely why this transitional historical moment is so confounding, especially to Western elites and ivory tower academics. They’re still stewing in the anger phase. Their Western-Centric, infixed pedagogic moorings are producing a knee-jerk rejection of a structure that runs counter to the one that all of their previous learning was informed by.
Others of us are already bargaining for more elevated forms of distraction, for more time and for a sense of meaning we seem to have lost or mislaid. Many more of us are already depressed. We’ve accepted the inflexible fact that finding peace amidst the chaotic winds of epochal transition will only come via a form of acceptance that is unfamiliar and therefore frightening to us.
In my view, this global shift from unipolarity to multipolarity is not only inevitable, it’s already well underway. Whether this transition will go hard or easy or somewhere in between depends on the forms and levels of resistance and/or acceptance that we meet it with as a global culture. So far the West has reacted with fear, compulsivity and aimless violence to this changeover.
Obviously, if this sort of denial-spawned petulance persists among Western leadership, we’ll be in for a hell of a long and bumpy ride. Hopefully the more evolved adults in the room will eventually get hold of the steering wheel.
And so here, in the East and West, we all are.
Regarding the Potential Rise of Non Western Extremist, Retrograde Forces
This is a concern that’s gotten a lot of column space in Western liberal media op-eds over the course of the last decade. I wrote one of those articles myself, in fact.(54) There’s no question that this is a real possibility that must be considered. A not insignificant number of the countries that make up and are applying to enter the BRICS partnership employ anachronistic and repressive government policies. (54a)
Then again, reports and characterizations of nonWestern “backwardness” and the pervasiveness of “Third World” human rights infractions have often been exaggerated and distorted in Hollywood movies and in Western media. Either way, it can’t legitimately be denied that there are many human rights issues which need to be acknowledged and rectified in these nonWestern regions.
What About the Behavior of “Civilized” Nations?
On the other hand, we must also consider the recent and current behavior of those who claim to be the upholders of freedom and democracy in the world today. Is what Israel has been doing to Gaza and its people over the course of the last 11 months an example of the sort of civilized, democratic behavior we’re afraid will be replaced by barbarism if we embrace multipolarity?(55)
How about the US’ near complete rejection of pre-war diplomacy and its use of economic violence, constant intervention and war as a means to extend its hegemony and to fill the pockets of the world’s wealthiest investors and oligarchs?
The advancement of the democratic ethic and the evolution of personal freedom and human rights in the West over the course of the last few centuries has been a remarkable achievement. There’s no question that it would be a major tragedy if the baby ended up going out with the bathwater during the course of the shift to multipolarity.
That being said, the conception that many of us in the West have of the nonWestern world as being a backward and savage realm is cartoonishly racist and inaccurate.(56)
Either way, the neocons’ reaction to these changes – their impulse to threaten and/or kill all non-compliers is obviously untenable and absurd.
CODA: Should We Be Hopeful?
In my view, the answer to the question of whether or not we should be hopeful is two-fold.
As far as the possibility of continuing to maintain the current economically two-tiered, Western Centric operating system we’ve been running is concerned, forget it. This is a hopeless endeavor. In my humble opinion, if this pill isn’t swallowed; if this reality isn’t faced, we’ll just remain enclosed in a circular realm of bad faith and false hope, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Better to take the mental leap now. Better to acknowledge the innumerable, unmistakably glaring signs of oncoming shipwreck.
Afterall, we’re all in this together whether we’ve realized it yet or not. Together, we’ve got a chance to help each other to shore. Divided, we’ll drown. If we move in concert, as a community, as a nation, as a world, toward a new planetary operating system that places human life (rather than profit for the few) as our shared central value, then yes, there absolutely is hope for a better future.
Maybe accepting the inevitability of some form of shipwreck isn’t such a terrible thing after all? In fact, maybe, in a sense, we’ve always already been shipwrecked? Maybe we just haven’t noticed it?
“These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.” – Ortega y Gasset from “Revolt of the Masses”, 1929
CITATIONS:
1)https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/how-perpetual-war-became-us-ideology/238600/
2)https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-emerging-unholy-alliance-between-hawkish-democrats-and-neoconservatives/2017/08/08/3c1c7676-7bb5-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html
3)https://www.jstor.org/stable/4330357
4)https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/13/the-mess-that-nuland-made/
4a)https://www.bu.edu/articles/2006/overthrows-r-u-s/
5)https://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_krystol_2.html
6)https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/podcasts/why-most-american-jews-are-democrats-transcript
7)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tioed5gpY_c
7a)https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books/review/Noah-t.html
8)https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520929944-005/pdf?licenseType=restricted
9)https://www.ecchr.eu/en/publication/the-iraq-invasion-is-a-crime/
10)https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/rumsfeld-dead-words-known-unknowns/2021/07/01/831175c2-d9df-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html
11)Watch from 27:00 in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK3wz-OyR1U&t=1673s
12)https://english.umd.edu/research-innovation/journals/interpolations/spring-2015/rise-neoconservative-foreign-policy
13)https://greenwald.locals.com/post/5829272/supreme-neocon-warmonger-anne-applebaum-awarded-peace-prize
14)https://chomsky.info/consent01/
15)https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_1542jsp/
15a)https://theweek.com/speedreads/456437/john-mccain-russia-gas-station-masquerading-country
15b)https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/despite-war-and-sanctions-russia-becomes-a-high-income-economy/articleshow/111463177.cms?from=mdr
16)https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/foreign-and-security-policy/the-war-on-terror-and-continued-western-failure-7371/
17)https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040329-4.html
18)https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2023/05/17/durham-report-vindicates-trump-fbi-russia-investigation/70222344007/
19)https://www.brusselstimes.com/446104/deconstructing-the-obvious-seymour-hersh-on-why-the-us-blew-up-nord-stream
20)https://truthout.org/articles/active-duty-us-service-members-issue-appeal-to-congress-to-stop-funding-genocide/
21)https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll
22)https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/aipac-pro-israel-lobby-group-us-elections
23)https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68136840
24)https://theweek.com/articles/528827/rise-neocons
25)https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/05/29/obamas-neoconservative-foreign-policy-vision
26)https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-emerging-unholy-alliance-between-hawkish-democrats-and-neoconservatives/2017/08/08/3c1c7676-7bb5-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html
27)https://responsiblestatecraft.org/neoconservative-ukraine/
28)https://mellonurbanism.harvard.edu/deindustrialization-and-its-impact-us-uk-and-france-0
29)https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/17/campaign-spending-megadonors-joint-fundraising-committees/
30)https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/what-elite-donors-want
31)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0dQAUb22WA
32)https://www.businessinsider.com/10-american-cities-that-are-dead-forever-2010-9
33)https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/globalization-and-emergence-transnational-oligarchy
33a)https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/14/the-fatal-flaw-of-neoliberalism-its-bad-economics
33b)https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2019/03/05/the-failures-of-neoliberalism-are-bigger-than-politics/
34)https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/08/how-neocons-destabilized-europe
35)https://www.fairobserver.com/world-news/the-scary-not-so-winding-road-from-iraq-to-ukraine/
36)https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/04/brics-southeast-asia-thailand-malaysia-russia-china/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=DSA&tpcc=google_cpc_DSA&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw_ZC2BhAQEiwAXSgClk02RrhITYUV_97QkLTHVYEWDC7E5e7nfjrCtPkgS3IOK8nSAsjnUBoCo88QAvD_BwE
37)https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ukraine-zelensky-dc-visit-biden-war-b2249618.html
38)https://time.com/6695261/ukraine-forever-war-danger/
38a)https://www.cigionline.org/articles/americas-unipolar-moment-is-over-what-comes-next-is-unclear/
38b)Watch from 9:30 to 10:00 in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAvls_UAdlg&t=600s
38c)https://natowatch.org/newsbriefs/2016/nato-member-states-dominate-global-arms-sales
39)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR5Zbmg-l0g
40)https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52044.htm
41)https://comw.org/pda/george-kennan-on-nato-expansion/
41a)https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/
42)https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-ceasefire-deal.html
43)https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/ptgsxtcrx525gxk8a5rlnerc5sr4yz
44)https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68136840
45)https://www.crfb.org/blogs/congressionally-approved-ukraine-aid-totals-175-billion
46)https://www.counterfire.org/article/why-the-us-could-stop-the-gaza-genocide-overnight-and-why-it-doesnt/
47)https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/financial-legacy-iraq-and-afghanistan-how-wartime-spending-decisions-will-constrain#:~:text=The%20Iraq%20and%20Afghanistan%20conflicts,and%20social%20and%20economic%20costs.
47a)https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/arms-industry-shareholder-capitalism-perfect-war-syria-iraq-ukraine/
48)https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-arms-exports-hit-record-high-fiscal-2023-2024-01-29/
49)https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/weapons-sales
50)https://aah-inc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/whomeless.pdf
51)https://prospect.org/power/much-money-take-eliminate-poverty-america/
51a)https://the.ink/p/joseph-stiglitz-who-owns-freedom
52)https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/22/dont-let-his-trade-policy-fool-you-trump-is-a-neoliberal/
53)https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/deplorable-why-the-white-working-class-voted-for-trump-and-why-they-will-again/
54)https://www.pressenza.com/2022/09/rise-of-the-new-decadents/
54a)https://www.fairplanet.org/editors-pick/brics-human-rights-agenda/
55)https://afsc.org/news/gaza-after-200-days-genocide-message-world
56)https://www.alfusaic.net/blog/convene/representation-of-arabs-and-the-middle-east-in-western-media