The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy, writes Pepe Escobar.
by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with Consortium News ) by special agreement with the author)
Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above?
As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war.
Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back, metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.
But GWOT would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head, the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee” declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.
Since January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”
Remember these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul, Afghanistan.
Considering that Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than “moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of culture jamming.
Show Me The Big Picture
A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5thcolumnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.
To add to the conceptual confusion, despite countless “an offer you can’t refuse” antics unleashed by psychopaths of the John Bolton and Mike Pompeo variety, there’s this startling nugget. Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed. “Two European states, two Arab countries and one Southeast Asian state” were mediating a series of messages relayed by Trump and his son-in-law Jared “of Arabia” Kushner, according to Moussavi.
Is there a method to this madness? An attempt at a Grand Narrative would go something like this: ISIS/Daesh may have been sidelined – for now; they are not useful anymore, so the U.S. must fight the larger “evil”: Tehran. GWOT has been revived, and though Hamza bin Laden has been designated the new Caliph, GWOT has shifted to Iran.
When we mix this with the recent India-Pakistan scuffle, a wider message emerges. There was absolutely no interest by Prime Minister Imran Kahn, the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani intelligence, ISI, to launch an attack on India in Kashmir. Pakistan was about to run out of money and about to be bolstered by the U.S., via Saudi Arabia with $20 billion and an IMF loan.
At the same time, there were two almost simultaneous terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan – against Iran and against India in mid-February. There’s no smoking gun yet, but these attacks may have been manipulated by a foreign intelligence agency. The Cui Bono riddle is which state would profit immensely from a war between Pakistan and Iran and/or a war between Pakistan and India.
The bottom line: hiding in the shadow of plausible deniability – according to which what we understand as reality is nothing but pure perception – the Empire of Chaos will resort to the chaos of no-holds-barred hybrid war to avoid “losing” the Eurasian heartland.
Show Me How Many Hybrid Plans You Got
What applies to the heartland of course also applies to the backyard.
The case of Venezuela shows that the “all options on the table” scenario has been de facto aborted by Russia, outlined in an astonishing briefing by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and then subsequently detailed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Lavrov. (Wikimedia Commons)
Meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj at a crucial RIC (part of BRICS) summit in China,Lavrov said, “Russia keeps a close eye on brazen US attempts to create an artificial pretext for a military intervention in Venezuela… The actual implementation of these threats is pulling in military equipment and training [US] Special Forces.”
Lavrov explained how Washington was engaged in acquiring mortars and portable air defense systems “in an East European country, and mov(ing) them closer to Venezuela by an airline of a regime that is… rather absolutely obedient to Washington in the post-Soviet space.”
The U.S. attempt at regime change in Venezuela has been so far unsuccessful in several ways. Plan A – a classic color revolution -has miserably failed, in part because of a lack of decent local intelligence. Plan B was a soft version of humanitarian imperialism, with a resuscitation of the nefarious, Libya-tested responsibility to protect (R2P); it also failed, especially when the American tale that the Venezuelan government burnt humanitarian aid trucks at the border with Colombia was a lie, exposed by The New York Times, no less.
Plan C was a classic Hybrid War technique: a cyberattack, replete with a revival of Nitro Zeus, which shut down 80 percent of Venezuela’s electricity.
That plan had already been exposed by WikiLeaks, via a 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded, Belgrade-based color revolution scam that helped train self-proclaimed “President” Random Dude, when he was just known as Juan Guaidó. The leaked memo said that attacking the Venezuelan power grid would be a “watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”
But even that was not enough.
That leaves Plan D – which is essentially to try to starve the Venezuelan population to death via viciously lethal additional sanctions. Sanctioned Syria and sanctioned Iran didn’t collapse. Even boasting myriad comprador elites aggregated in the Lima group, exceptionalists may have to come to grips with the fact that deploying the Monroe doctrine essentially to contain China’s influence in the young 21stcentury is no “cakewalk.”
Plan E—for extreme—would be U.S. military action, which Bolton won’t take off the table.
Show Me the Way to the Next War Game
So where do all these myriad weaponizations of chaos theory leave us? Nowhere, if they don’t follow the money. Local comprador elites must be lavishly rewarded, otherwise you’re stuck in hybrid swamp territory. That was the case in Brazil – and that’s why the most sophisticated hybrid war case history so far has been a success.
In 2013, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks revealed how the NSA was spying on Brazilian energy giant Petrobras and the Dilma Rousseff government beginning in 2010. Afterwards, a complex, rolling judicial-business-political-financial-media coup ended up reaching its two main objectives; in 2016, with the impeachment of Rousseff, and in 2018, with Lula thrown in jail.
Now comes arguably the juiciest piece of the puzzle. Petrobras was supposed to pay $853 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for not going to trial for crimes it was being accused of in America. But then a dodgy deal was struck according to which the fine will be transferred to a Brazilian fund as long as Petrobras commits to relay confidential information about its businesses to the United States government.
Mattis: Wrote on hybrid war in 2005.
Hybrid war against BRICS member Brazil worked like a charm, but trying it against nuclear superpower Russia is a completely different ball game. U.S. analysts, in another case of culture jamming, even accuse Russia itself of deploying hybrid war – a concept actually invented in the U.S. within a counter-terrorism context; applied during the occupation of Iraq and later metastasized across the color revolution spectrum; and featuring, among others, in an article co-authored by former Pentagon head James “Mad Dog” Mattis in 2005 when he was a mere lieutenant general.
At a recent conference about Russia’s military strategy, Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov stressed that the Russian armed forces must increase both their “classic” and “asymmetrical” potential. In the U.S. this is interpreted as subversion/propaganda hybrid war techniques as applied in Ukraine and in the largely debunked Russia-gate. Instead, Russian strategists refer to these techniques as “complex approach” and “new generation war”.
Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation still sticks to good ol’ hot war scenarios. They have been holding “Red on Blue” war games simulations since 1952 – modeling how the proverbial “existential threats” could use asymmetric strategies. The latest Red on Blue was not exactly swell. RAND analyst David Ochmanek famously said that with Blue representing the current U.S. military potential and Red representing Russia-China in a conventional war, “Blue gets its ass handed to it.”
None of this will convince Empire of Chaos functionary Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently told a Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon will continue to refuse a “no first use” nuclear strategy. Aspiring Dr. Strangeloves actually believe the U.S. can start a nuclear war and get away with it.
Talk about the Age of Hybrid Stupidity going out with a bang.
Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.
Great article.!
I would change one though and that is I would call the US the Empire of Ruin rather than the Empire of Chaos.
Empire of Ruin as a term is closer to the point by a great margin.
The Reign of Ruin…the true Ragnorok.
Crazy thing is that one portion of descendents of the Vikings ie the Icelanders, Brits, Danes and Swedes fights now on the side of injustice and woe against the other portion of the Vikings descendents…the Russians
Stupid Icelanders, Brits, Swedes, and Danes dishonor every bond of blood and will pay a fearsome price in the hostilities about to commence.
”Crazy thing is that one portion of descendents of the Vikings ie the Icelanders, Brits, Danes and Swedes fights now on the side of injustice and woe against the other portion of the Vikings descendents…the Russians”
Icelanders, Brits, Danes, Swdedes: Gender confused Euro-trash and Zio-zombies, LOL. Rurik would be shocked looking at today’s West while approving of the East.
I saw an old video of Bertie Russell on Youtube, where he was emphasising that his brief foray into educational reform sought to repress unkindness among the pupils, and promote kind-heartedness, if that is how you spell it. It’s a term that does not get much ventilation in the glorious West these days. The dying Western ‘Rules-Based International Order’, under the control of the Zionazi supremacists and xenophobes, could not even compute the meaning of kind-heartedness, or even basic human kindness. They operate only through the ways and means of paranoia, greed, hatred and fear, hence or terminal plight.
Age of complete nightmarish insane absurdity….or nightmarish absurd complete insanity….use any combination you wish.
@JJ
Or another: Stupendous, Stupefying, Stupidity: SSS -> 666, the number of the Beast, the triple rune of the real third reich.
The Big Picture has been painted by Andre Vltchek. It’s an Empire of Chaos and an Empire of Ruin, but at the most fundamental level it is an Empire of Sadism.
If that is not so, what was the point of torturing innocent people and keeping people in Guantanamo for no good reason other than that they would file law suits for having been abused so unnecessarily?
What is the point of Michael Ledeen’s remark:
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
– Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute
https://journal-neo.org/2019/03/27/like-libya-and-syria-venezuela-is-not-just-about-oil/
It’s the Sadism.
It is Michael Ledeen who with Claire Sterling, during the 80’s, from Rome, Italy, operated a CIA assassination targeting operation to pick off Central American revolutionaries traveling through the North Africa-Middle East.
Whatever their role, they were more than neo-conservative writers. Covert Action Bulletin and others in those days fingered them.
Tie in was with Mossad. Naturally . . .
The sadism goes way back: the unnecessary nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… the oppression of Chinese immigrants who built the railroads… the genocide of the Native Americans… and further back still, when it manifest as white-on-white religious intolerance: the Mormon exodus… the Boston martyrs, the ruling Puritans taking it upon themselves to hang Quakers – fellow Christians much?
On the global scale, Puritanism manifests as elitism and racism against others. On a local scale it manifests as Nanny state totalitarian tendency, policing our activities, limiting our freedoms.
We can see in contemporary Puritanism of the U$$A the influence of the ideas of Calvin, who became prominent after the Reformation, and their distortion of Christian teaching towards a quite mistaken instrumental, material, transactional conception of the relation of Man and God. Apply this instrumental conception to the Bible and you arrive shortly at a dispensationalist reading – from which follows Christian zionism, and then Jewish zionism.
So Puritanism seems to me the dominant influence on the U$$A. I can trace Puritanism back to before 1500 in England, but at that point its exact origins remain unclear to me. Any elucidation would be useful.
Tor; An excellant post. With regard to your question about historical preconditions to Puritanism; the following makes sense to me. Hegel once remarked that the extreme of cruelty displayed by the Roman empire was actually a scandal throughout the ancient world. Hegel actually said, and I quote to the best of my memory; “The Roman Princes were so cruel and severe that as a consequence all sense and trace of human divinity was lost. Under their hand the divine fled from humanity and was lost to a far away heaven.” In effect the Romans cut humanity off from a sense of its own innate divinity. This was Hegel. From out of all of this we get the Roman conception of patriarchal government, and the rule of law. Along with the debased notion of the sanctity of private debts to private sources of finance. All of this is so strong in the Western patriarchal tradition. It is actually equated with the patriarchal concept of the spirituality and sanctity of “individuality.” All of this was brought to France and England by the Papacy. The cruelty of the ancient French Regime was a great instigator of the violence of the French revolution. And this Latin brand of extreme patriarchal power was brought to England by William the Conqueror in 1066, who then shamed himself with outright genocide against the Saxon people of England. From which we get the vital myth of “Robin Hood.” Look at England now. It is trapped inside its long tradition of unfeeling hatred for the life of the common people. Class hatred is known as “the English disease.”
The upshot of all of this is that this obscene Puritanism that you describe so well has deep roots in the patriarchal conception of Christian virtue. Crucifying proletarian slaves is a gift of the ancient Romans to modern Christians. To quote Marx; “the rule of religion is the religion of rule.” Look at all the Roman architecture in Washington DC.
Very good, Snow. I am always impressed by how many depictions of the Roman fasces, later the emblem of ‘fascism’, that are on display in the US Capitol building. The Thanatopians thought of themselves as the ‘New Romans’ from the very beginning of their Republic, but they have far outdone the Romans in slaughter ever since. One way in which they do differ however, is that the Romans didn’t mind a fair stoush, and got their backsides handed to them often, by Carthaginians, Gauls, Parthians etc, although they always kept coming back for more. The Thanatopians far prefer killing for ‘Freedom and Freedom Fries’ than dying for it, so much more approve of one-sided slaughter through superior technology, preferably after long softening-up with sanctions and subversion, after which they strut and fret, declaring themselves ‘warriors’.
Tor; I have been researching this very question myself for some time. I was able to satisfy myself as to a clear understanding of the origins of this massive distortion of spiritual culture through studying the works of transpersonal psychologists Carl Jung and Ken Wilber. I particularly recommend a reading of Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis of Christianity. I found it profoundly enlightening as it gets to the radical roots of the patriarchal distortion in Christianity. It also outlines a cure. Another work I highly recommend which augments Jung’s analysis of Christianity is the excellent book by the Jungian Ken Wilber entitled “Up From Eden: a Transpersonal View of Human Evolution.”
Tor, the sadism goes all the way back to the Old Testament/Torah, and, undoubtedly before, but the earlier examples of hatred of the other and delight in their annihilation, have been lost to posterity. As it stands the ‘Holy Books’ of ‘Judeo-Christianity’ are the oldest extant descriptions of the ways and means of genocide and ‘Divine’ injunctions to commit it, ‘…down to the last suckling babe’.
Mulga; You make an excellent point about origins (again). This is such an important and critical issue if one wants to have any semblance of a stable civilization. Your comment reminds me of some reading about Roman Catholic ideology I did many years ago. Apparently at the root of their ideological propaganda concerning “religious cosmology” is a deep commitment to promoting division making conflict wherein their vision of “the other,” and the virtue of its demonization, is at the radical root of their religious cosmology. The divide and conquer component of Ancient Rome became, in their eyes, the essential driving component of their religious world view. Of course they keep it buried deep within their openly declared theology, so as not to reveal their evil game. This always stayed with me, and it makes me hyper alert to their connections with Zionism. It comes as no surprise that they are now eating the fruits of this in the form of the child abuse scandals.
In Greek mythology there is a passage where Zeus is talking about a plan he devised to solve the problems they had utilizing the people for their intended purposes.
He proposes some modifications to the humans that should result in more conflict between them. Weakening their opposition to the Gods by easily playing the people of against each other.
Also he wants to split them into 2, so that one half of a person isn’t even aware of the other half of his being.
The root belief of Judaism is separation from, and opposition to, non-Jews. No doubt this is an excellent ideology to maintain group cohesion (and consequent elite power) in the Near Eastern Bronze Age, and one almost certainly adopted by other tribes and kingdoms etc, of the time and place. But those have mostly disappeared, absorbed by later groups, or annihilated by warfare, slavery, disease, natural disasters etc. The groups who chose openness to others and amity and co-operation probably did not last long, more’s the pity.
Therefore I rather think it appropriate if one is to use nonsensical, propagandistic, usages like ‘The Oldest Hatred’ to not use it in relation to Judeophobia. Judaic xenophobia having come first, it is surely the ‘Oldest Extant Hatred’ and Judeophobia must come second oldest at best. But, naturally, one suspects that even older hatreds, primarily the misogyny that saw matriarchies replaced by patriarchies, must be even older.
Think rather “state-sponsored usury,” and then apply it to the last 500 years of western history. This approach renders events such as the Protestant Reformation understandable as a “looting expedition.”
See: E. Michael Jones: “Barren Metal.”
subhub,
Exactly and no sadism with masochism, the endgame will be played in the home dungeons – That’s for certain.
A Death Cult basically, it has to be as an offspring and outgrow of Gnosticism (false immanentization of god), one finds all that is to be known in the Frankenstein story.
Dark black Golems reigning the ground, as dead as one can be, with an insatiable hunger and lust for flesh and blood.
”Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed.”
Iran takes the ”Guaidó” approach to the Great Satan: ’Drop dead. Who is to be accepted here is entirely up to us’. Good riddance to bad garbage.
The US may try hybrid warfare tactics, but in the end they will achieve nothing. Yes, they had some local success with Brazil, but only because of Brazil’s pro US oligarchy. However, this is a temporary victory, as the oligarchs in Brazil have to keep an eye on the population, which is none too happy with recent political changes, knowing full well who orchestrated them.
The US has now found its self in a situation which all empires experience in the end. The empire is cracking up, and the elite in the US wants to keep it intact. Impossible. The elite forgot the old army rule, which goes like this:”He who wants to control everything ends up controlling nothing”. Historically proven.
The political and economic power is shifting from the West to the East. Russia and China have stood up to the US. Germany said ‘no’ to Washington and went ahead with the Nord Stream – 2 gas project with Russia. Italy also said ‘no’ and signed up to the Chinese Silk Road. After that Merkel encouraged all EU countries to join the Silk Road. This means America’s NATO allies are saying ‘no’ to Washington. This also means that NATO is now basically useless for any potential, offensive activities against Russia, as Washington cannot rely on it’s European allies any more. How many European countries really want to be involved in a potential war with Russia, especially now that the US has pulled out of the INF Treaty ? Europe to be turned into a battlefield after two world wars behind it ? Europe to fight Russia for Wall Street’s interests ? Almost impossible. Washington still needs to fully grasp this fact.