We’re reaching a geopolitical inflection point. The proxy war against the Russian Federation, in order to facilitate its dismemberment, is becoming increasingly hard to market as a success. It hinged on utilizing America’s financial and economic dominance to implode Russia with sanctions overnight. That didn’t happen. Defeating them in a massive land war on their border was never feasible, despite the barrage of lies fed to the public about their cowardice, incompetence, and inability to supply their forces.
Meanwhile, they’re unveiling a system in partnership with China designed to divorce themselves from U.S. dominance. This has been in the making for the better part of 20 years, after the leadership of both nations wised up to the fact that their sovereignty would never be accepted and efforts, by hook or by crook, would never cease to deprive them of it. At first, they’d continued with Cold War thinking and thus naively expected that by being reasonable they’d be treated with reason in return.
What they’re endeavoring to conclusively thwart is an effort by the neocons unleashed across multiple fronts as soon as the Cold War ended. The Soviet Union had functioned as a check on their ambitions, encompassing most of Central Asia and providing existential support to its Arab allies in the Middle East.
With it gone, everything came up for grabs. It seemed to the neocons that global domination became achievable (the first attempt resulted in Joseph Stalin). Instead of global communism, that turned out to be a disaster, the unrivaled power of the United States would be their instrument. The Wolfowitz Doctrine was immediately promulgated, advocating the use of force against any entity that could emerge as a constraint on unilateral action.
The first round of aggression against Iraq was conducted, Russia was looted, and an Islamic insurgency (a signature tactic) was unleashed in the Caucasus. The Serbs were subjected to a horrific bombing campaign after being accused of a fake genocide (noticing a pattern?) in order to insert NATO into the heart of Russian-friendly territory and put its former vassals on notice. This was all before the GWOT kicked off following 9/11.
None of these were separate events. In fact, the evil and megalomania that propel them can be traced back to the Talmud. In a political context, it’s probably easiest to start with Leo Strauss, an academic who emigrated from Germany in the 1930s. The neocons are a tight group of multiple generations. The first were his acolytes.
The context is important for understanding a ghoul like Bill Kristol. His father, Irving, is considered to be the founding neocon along with his historian mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Both were heavily influenced by Strauss who was quite secretive in his lectures to this cabal within a tribe.
This sort of connection is shared in the next generation by Victoria Nuland, who overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014, and her husband Robert Kagan. His Institute for the Study of War is the central mechanism for the media operation to deceive the public about the military situation in Ukraine. They’re just a couple of examples from a network that’s never dislodged from power no matter who gets elected.
Invoking utterly disingenuous platitudes about democracy, morality, national security, and “the rules-based international order,” they’ve squandered America on plans that could best be characterized by their spectacular stupidity. Although, the sheer boldness of the grand strategy is something to behold. If they’d succeeded, Afghanistan would’ve been the first piece of an arc stretching from Syria and Lebanon, through Iraq, and across Iran.
With all the nonsense about terrorism, it wasn’t much marketed to the public that Afghanistan borders the PRC. The Muslim part is actually Xinjiang. It’s comparable in size to Alaska and adjacent to Tibet, which is almost a million square miles. The two of them combined are an enormous piece of Chinese real estate to decolonize.
If everything had gone off without a hitch, the map of the Middle East would be fundamentally reshaped in Israel’s favor and the Russian Federation should be breaking up. At this point, all the fun ought to be poking further eastwards. Straight up China’s ass, to use a crude metaphor.
None of this happened because it was never possible. Each component of the strategy has failed but they keep pressing forward. That’s particularly disturbing, seeing as each triumph was supposed to facilitate other triumphs. Going forward with the next step in a plan after the preceding steps failed doesn’t make any sense.
For instance, Iran should’ve been subjugated back in the 2000s. Due to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is too depleted to even attempt such an endeavor. This doesn’t really matter since it was never even possible. Iran has a determined military and more than twice the mountainous geography and population of Afghanistan. In the early 2000s, Russia and China couldn’t effectively oppose the agenda in the Middle East. The situation is much different now. Iran is so important to them they’d never let it happen.
This idiocy is now at work on a much larger scale with China. The media is currently beating war drums while a confrontation is prepared. A glaring problem is that as China refused to change its political system (i.e., abandon its sovereignty) after opening up economically, it was understood that it was going to be a very big nut to crack. In other words, this would require a series of steps rather than a head-on collision.
That’s why Russia, its most important energy supplier and military partner, was the first of the two major targets. China is also the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, which again, was supposed to have been taken out. It’s possible to starve China, but not with its key suppliers intact and integrated into a new financial, economic, and infrastructure system. Somehow, we’re going to hand them a crippling defeat on their home turf without strangling them and fomenting domestic insurgencies first.
One of the things that make them so dangerous is that they just keep lying and pressing on their nefarious objectives, even when the situation develops into the opposite of what they’d predicted over and over again. It’s amazing to observe people lauded as distinguished academics and strategists advocate for naked insanity.
Unfortunately, you’re not even to allowed to honestly discuss who the neocons are and what they want without getting shut down. The upper echelons of the U.S. military are stuffed with their lackeys, and their tribe owns all facets of influence in this country, from the financial system to the politicians. This creates a pair of distinct possibilities.
The first is that they steer us into a catastrophic conflict with Russia and/or China. Perhaps that pops off by accident and quickly escalates out of control. Second, the Russians and Chinese succeed in engineering a new global order that cuts out the U.S. while avoiding a direct confrontation. They’ve put up with enormous provocations so far to keep working towards a permanent, largely peaceful solution. This would have unpleasant consequences for us as well, but obviously that’s about the best for which we could hope.
Since 1991, history has taught us that if the neocons claim to have a brilliant plan, this plan is, in fact, idiotic. In order to justify taking action, a fabricated pretext is cited in conjunction with the usual platitudes. The outcome, disaster. When a pattern occurs consistently, it’s got predictive value.
There’s an inexorable logic at work: as long as they’re in control, they’ll keep pushing without ever having a realistic chance of victory. This implies that at some point in this process, things will go very wrong and much more so than anything which has transpired thus far.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
They have been failing for 3,000 years, but are still at it. Maybe there is something to this Jehovah thing.
Excellent essay, Mr Shackleford. These Lincoln-worshipping neocons such as Kristol, Nuland, Kagan, Cotton, Graham and Mississippi’s Wicker are among the stupidest people on the planet. Hopefully their stupidity will be held in check enough to prevent nuclear conflagration.
There is an interesting character who just emerged in the running for POTUS. Robert Kennedy Jr. is a leftist populist, and the regime’s media knives are already out. He is adamantly opposed to arming Ukraine, and he is calling out the Deep State as being responsible for the killing of his uncle and father. He had a powerful Twitter post not too much unlike Tom’s article.