Imperial Chutzpah in World Politics as a Factor in International Relations Today
IMPERIAL chutzpah as a phenomenon of international relations has been known since antiquity. It stems from the fact that, as the great Ancient Greek philosopher Thucydides put it back in the 5th century BC: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” [1]. Throughout history, the phenomenon of imperial insolence has invariably manifested itself in world politics and diplomacy as a destructive factor that has provoked wars, conflicts, and other calamities. However, one-sided gains and preferences that states on the road of imperial insolence expected to acquire (and did acquire) by disregarding the legitimate interests of other peoples and international security turned out to be fairly limited in the context of history and, in the final analysis, contributed to the downfall of the empire. Imperial arrogance, as embodied in American foreign policy, should never escape our attention and deserves very serious analysis. As an important factor of international relations, it should be resolutely rebuffed by any state that cherishes its sovereignty and seeks to preserve it.
Prominent American historian William Blum, in his book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, characterized US actions on the world stage as “chutzpah of an imperial size” [2]. John Bolton, who represented the US at the UN and served as US national security adviser, minced no words, saying that Americans should “be unashamed, unapologetic, uncompromising American constitutional hegemonists,” so that their senior decision makers could be free to use force unilaterally. He also said that because of its unique status, the US could not be legally bound or constrained in any way by its international treaty obligations [2].
Condoleezza Rice, who served as secretary of state from 2005 to 2009, “was equally contemptuous of international law. She claimed that in pursuit of its national security the United States no longer needed to be guided by ‘notions of international law and norms’ or ‘institutions like the United Nations’ because it was ‘on the right side of history’ ” [2]. This means that American chutzpah in world politics and security is not a figure of speech: It is an intelligent model of America’s behavior in the international arena that is proclaimed by high-level officials and reflected in US foreign policy concepts. It can be traced in the foreign policy documents and actions of the US toward the rest of the world from its first president, George Washington, to its current president, Joe Biden.
The phenomenon of American imperial chutzpah is deeply rooted in American history. It developed under the strong influence of the hubris of the British Empire, which was guided by the ideology of global domination and its strong conviction that Anglo-Saxons were destined, chosen, and called to be the world’s rulers. Having survived for several centuries, the idea of Anglo-Saxon predestination surfaced even in Winston Churchill’s famous Fulton Speech (1946), which marked the start of the Cold War. Today, it serves as the basis of US claims to world leadership.
In US foreign policy, arrogance and reliance on the threat or use of force unfolded in stages.
It all started with the Monroe Doctrine, adopted in December 1823 as a foreign policy principle. Named after President James Monroe, it was succinctly formulated as “America for Americans.” The doctrine proclaimed the principle of noninterference of European powers in the domestic affairs of the countries of the Western Hemisphere and, accordingly, noninterference of the US in the affairs of European countries. Very soon, however, the US started promoting its interests far beyond its territory while maintaining the tools of isolationism as a means of ensuring its foreign policy aims.
In practice, it looks like this: If the policy of self-isolation or independence of a particular country does not suit the US, that policy must be ended by seeking “openness,” appealing to human rights, and acting, if necessary, from a position of strength. On the other hand, if in the opinion of the US a state is acting too independently on a global or regional scale, it must be restricted: sealed off by an “iron curtain” as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, branded as a rogue state like North Korea and Iran, or pressured, mainly in the form of economic sanctions (which have been applied against Russia under various pretexts) and military force, which was used against Yugoslavia (1999), Iraq (2003), and Libya (2011).
The first stage, when the US began to flex its muscles toward other states, began with the start of the Civil War (1861) under Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American president, and ended with the inauguration of the 25th president, William McKinley (1897). Those 36 years were filled with many significant events related to the start of rapid American expansion that throughout the subsequent period manifest itself as unceasing geopolitical aggression and insolence.
During the first period, the Monroe Doctrine was used to extend US territory at the expense of nearly half of Mexico (today the states of Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and part of Wyoming.) After annexing Mexican territories, Hawaii, and the Philippines, American expansion continued with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the enlargement of NATO to include even the former Soviet Baltic republics and the establishment of its military infrastructure in Ukraine and Georgia. Washington assumed “responsibility for the world,” citing some self-conferred Manifest Destiny. The obvious “chutzpah of an imperial size” that the US is now unabashedly demonstrating invariably strains relations with Russia.
Since the American Civil War, Washington has been using brinkmanship as a foreign policy tool in the expectation that the opponent would concede at the last moment in the interests of self-preservation, thus giving the US one-sided advantages [3]. The practice was actively used during the Cold War. In 1956, for example, the author (probably US Secretary of State Dulles) of an article that appeared in Life magazine wrote that “the ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art.… If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost” [4].
Today, the American cult of power and arrogance, portrayed as two cowboys facing off with their hands on their Colts or two cars racing toward each other at breakneck speed, where the wuss is the one who backs down, is associated with a willingness to act irrationally. This is called the madman theory. Machiavelli noted that feigned madness could sometimes be useful. In 1962, American political analyst Herman Kahn concluded during the Cuban Missile Crisis that it was effective at scaring the opponent [5].
Many American presidents and top statesmen have used such foreign policy approaches. Dwight Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear bombs during the Korean War; Richard Nixon did the same when trying to force the Soviet Union to abandon its support of Vietnam. Both were forced to back down. The Americans, however, won the “nuclear poker game” twice: John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan, who scared dim-witted Gorbachev.
The destruction of its main geopolitical rival and the entire opposing social system – an incredible success that the US was not even counting on – reinforced in the American establishment the extremely dangerous delusion about America’s right to rule the world at its own discretion from a position of strength and dominance. In fact, that delusion was rooted in a multitude of theories and concepts that gradually shaped the expansionism, aggressiveness, and arrogance of American foreign policy. It began in the 1890s, when Frederick Jackson Turner, a theoretician of American expansionism, formulated his “frontier thesis”: Frontier lines should be expanded until “at the behest of destiny” the whole world became American [6].
The second stage of consolidation of America’s foreign policy began with William McKinley’s presidency, at the turn of the 20th century, when the US confirmed its intention to rely on aggression, wars, and territorial acquisitions. Annexed in 1898, Hawaii became the 50th US state in 1959. Puerto Rico has not yet abandoned its hopes to gain independence. Today, along with the Guam military base on its territory, it belongs to the US. The Philippines and Cuba (a de facto American protectorate before the revolution) managed to gain independence.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who replaced the assassinated McKinley in 1901, formulated his policy of interference with the use of force wherever his country deemed it necessary (the so-called “big stick” policy) [7]. He never hesitated to use force. In 1903, after failing to detach a strip of Colombian land needed for a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the negotiation table, he detached it by force. Panama, a new “sovereign” state set up on this land as a so-called crypto colony, a de facto colony with the outward trappings of independence, obeyed Washington. What can be described as the rape of Latin American states continued. The next year, America moved its troops into the Dominican Republic and announced that the US would now exercise international police power there.
The “big stick policy” was complemented by “gunboat diplomacy,” which is still realized in the form of “aircraft carrier diplomacy,” to increase the level of military presence of the US and its political pressure in various regions of the world. President William Taft added economic methods known as “dollar diplomacy” to the methods of intimidating other countries with the threat of force. In 1990, Gorbachev, for no particular reason, abandoned international clearing in convertible rubles for the sake of dollar settlement, which destroyed the socialist common market (CMEA). “Dollar diplomacy” acquired a new lease on life. The “open doors and equal opportunities” doctrine was formulated by US Secretary of State John Hay as a key to China’s closed market. Later, it served as a universal tool to break the systems that protected the interests of other countries.
After emerging on the world stage after World War I, the US offered its own plan in the form of President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” as an alternative to Lenin’s highly popular Decree on Peace that was unacceptable in the West. Wilson is quoted as saying: “The poison of Bolshevism was accepted because ‘It is a protest against the way in which the world has worked.’ It was to be our purpose at the Peace Conference to fight for ‘a new order.’ ” And he added “Today our turn has come” [8]. That turn took the form of brazen intervention that bathed Russia in blood but could not force it to obey the interests of the US and the “collective West.”
Confronted with the military threat of Hitler’s Germany and the existential need to fight it, the US changed its priorities for a while. President Franklin D. Roosevelt formulated the “four freedoms” concept: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The US took its ideological expansion to a new level by including the whole world in its area of responsibility.
The victory intensified fears of the accumulated Soviet military might, while the Anglo-Saxon’s plans to eliminate the global rival using American nuclear weapons induced the new American and British leaders to divide the world. They separated the East and the West by an “iron curtain.” The Cold War began, initiated by the Soviet Union’s erstwhile Western allies. Both terms were coined by Churchill. A speech he gave in 1946 in Fulton, the hometown of the new American President Harry Truman, became the starting point of bloc confrontation on a global scale [9]. The speech touched on the superiority of Anglo-Saxons. Stalin, the Soviet leader, was enraged: “A point to be noted is that in this respect, Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation” [10].
The Cold War doctrine became President Truman’s doctrine, which was presented in 1947 as a “response to Soviet expansion” but was in fact part of America’s policy of expansionism and establishment of military bases around the world. It laid the basis for the notorious “containment policy” of Russia that is still very much alive.
On August 18, 1948, the US National Security Council, acting on orders from US Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, prepared memorandum NSC 20/1 “US Objectives with Respect to the USSR” [11], extended early in 1950 by Memorandum 68 “Foreign Relations of the United States” [12]. Forrestall did not live to see the second document. The paranoid cabinet official who repeated “The Russians are coming. They’re right around. I’ve seen Russian soldiers” [13] had to be put in a mental hospital, where he committed suicide by jumping out of a window on May 22, 1949. The Soviet Union fell apart according to the pattern described in those documents, and further attempts were made to divide the Russian Federation. Russophobia bordering on madness is still rife in US politics and media.
The Marshall Plan – economic assistance extended to the postwar states in exchange for political loyalty and the removal of communists and socialists from all power structures – allowed the US to realize its plan of political subjugation through economic enslavement.
In 1953, Truman’s successor Dwight Eisenhower unveiled his “massive retribution” doctrine that permitted the US to launch preventive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union and China, which at that time, very much as today, were regarded the main foreign policy adversaries. The document was intended to ensure American imperial world leadership. In 1957, as part of that doctrine, the US confirmed its readiness to use American troops to defend the territorial integrity of victims of aggression. With its habitual imperial hubris, Washington appropriated the right to decide whether aggression had occurred and whether military intervention was needed.
The doctrine of John F. Kennedy, the next president, was obviously influenced by events in Cuba and America’s failure to stop the Cuban revolution that challenged the US’s imperial chutzpah. “Containment of communism” was thus directed at the Latin American countries in the form of the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy formulated the “domino theory”: No cost was too great to halt the spread of regimes outside US control from Cuba to Latin America and from Vietnam to Southeast Asia.
Lyndon Johnson, who replaced the assassinated Kennedy, had his own doctrine that justified American intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1985 and appropriated for America the right to armed interference anywhere in the world under the pretext of defending the interests of its own citizens, thus trampling on other nations’ sovereignty. In effect, the doctrine was about preventing governments that did not suit Washington from coming to power even if they were democratically elected by the majority of the local population.
The doctrine President Richard Nixon formulated in 1969 was about “redistributing responsibility and initiative among Free World nations”; it would ensure American interests by force and “redistribute responsibility” and costs. This manifested itself in the “Vietnamization” of the lost war in Vietnam, the “Arabization” of the fight for oil in the Gulf through the involvement of Saudi Arabia, and shifting NATO and “joint defense” costs to allies regardless of whether they wanted to be involved or not [14].
The Nixon Doctrine related to oil and the fight for its deposits was further developed in the doctrine of the next US president, Jimmy Carter. In 1979, he had moved toward Brezhnev and even embraced him, but in 1980, he declared that America could use its military force in the Gulf and encouraged accelerated development of rapid deployment forces. He wanted a broader US military presence in the Indo-Pacific. Forty years later, that became an absolute priority of President Biden’s new foreign policy concept. The pragmatism of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was obvious in the foreign policies of both Nixon and Carter: He favored détente and convergence as two tools that would ideologically infect and decompose the party and state elites in opposing countries. Combined with imperial chutzpah, the Realpolitik doctrine brought the desired results.
Ronald Reagan, the next US president, followed the tradition: He formulated a foreign policy doctrine of “new globalism” that, in a nutshell, supported those who sided with the US and opposed those who had different ideas about the world order. He made it public in February 1985: The US was prepared to oppose “world communism” on the global scale simultaneously anywhere in the world. Having branded the USSR an “evil empire,” he moved from containment to attack. He counted on reformatting the new ambitious yet narrow-minded Soviet leader who came to power in 1985. Infected by the West, he was entrusted with destroying his own country from within and, together with it, the anti-Western bloc of socialist and developing countries. In its arrogance, the US tried and achieved the unthinkable.
President George H.W. Bush, elected in 1989, was confronted by the realities of a completely different world in which there was no Soviet Union and in which the US had acquired more opportunities. According to Kissinger, “The end of the Cold War produced an even greater temptation to recast the international environment in America’s image” [15].
Driven by that temptation, President George Bush formulated the concept of establishing a new world order that in essence meant the monopoly of one state on political and economic leadership and governance. Zbigniew Brzezinski offered his own formula of a new world order set up under American hegemony against Russia, at the expense of Russia, and on the ruins of Russia [16]. The Kremlin naïvely believed that if it followed US foreign policy, it would be awarded the status of a US ally. President Bush, for his part, made it clear that new relationships could not be simply declared by Moscow or supported by others – they must be earned [17], namely by making unilateral concessions in the face of American chutzpah in all areas, by reducing [Russia’s] arms, destroying its economy, abandoning an independent course, and ruining its population.
The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a secret document, formulated the role of world hegemon for the US that must prevent “any hostile power from dominating” Eurasia [18].
Bill Clinton’s concept of promoting democracy presupposed a stronger role for the US as a hegemon in the unipolar world and its comprehensive impact on all post-Soviet states, including Russia. The concept of geopolitical pluralism spearheaded against Russia and its status of a geopolitical power was a useful addition to Clinton’s doctrine. Its disintegration into smaller states in the Soviet Union’s footsteps was another aim. NATO’s eastward movement and aggression against Yugoslavia were indications that the freshly minted hegemon was not about to reckon with Russia and, in light of Russia’s weakness, spurned its ideas, interests, and protests.
The presidency of George W. Bush was marked by the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, which made the US aware of its vulnerability. In June 2002, Bush presented his doctrine based on two fundamental principles: The US would spare no effort to preserve its superiority and henceforth acquired the right to carry out preventive actions and preventive strikes. The “American superiority doctrine” proceeded from the fact that America had won the Cold War, that it was the world’s strongest power, and that it would make use of its right as the strongest country, disregarding any other country as an equal partner. Such concentrated American arrogance shocked even the US’s closest allies, yet nobody among the diminished European politicians tied hand and foot by the Americans offered coherent objections.
Having accepted Moscow’s support in its struggle against international terrorism, Washington in words spoke of Russia as its partner but in actions used its solidarity to consolidate its positions in the post-Soviet space by deploying military bases there and moving NATO closer to Russia’s borders. The US withdrew from the ABM Treaty, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and started preparing the ground for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In 2008, it pushed Georgia to aggression to test Russia’s response and capabilities. The Project for the New American Century promised America’s domination as a traditional empire not only in the military and economic sense but also in the latest cybernetic, space, and other technological frontiers [19].
As could be expected, America’s insolent and aggressive policy of domination that tried, in particular, to marginalize Russia from global political processes contradicted the existential interests of the Russian state that revived after the change of power in the Kremlin in 2000.
Barack Obama, the first Black US president, discovered that his predecessor George W. Bush, immersed in a decade of wars in Asia and the Middle East, had missed China’s resurgence. Obama had no choice but to formulate a “reset” in relations with Russia to concentrate on “containing China.” In a world in which both states were growing stronger and BRICS had appeared as a new format, it became clear that Pax Americana had failed to materialize, and that the post-Soviet unipolar world was disappearing. Obama offered a new and outwardly less arrogant form of American conduct in the international arena. In fact, however, he did not abandon the concept of American superiority, leadership, and domination in the changing world, since that would have been cut short by the political establishment – which, despite disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, remained united on the country’s foreign policy interests.
The “reset” doctrine was aimed at achieving maximum advantages in the most important areas by feigning “concessions” to Russia. This policy allowed the US to become more active on the Chinese and Middle Eastern tracks. Washington was behind NATO’s aggression against Libya, while the French were expected to do the dirty work. President Obama’s favorite tool was economic sanctions against Russia and other countries that refused to follow American dictates. American expansion, likewise, became different: In the new world order, it relied on the dollar as a universal tool. US imperial arrogance began to include claims to extend American national jurisdiction worldwide. The list of US hostages was not limited to citizens of other countries abducted by American special services and the property of other countries arrested on the orders of American courts. Entire countries were made hostage. In June 2014, after imposing a fine of $9 billion on the National Parisian bank BNP Paribas by a decision of an American court, the US promised to waive the fine if France refused to deliver to Russia already built Mistral warships [20].
It has been claimed that Obama somewhat improved America’s image in the world. But the media, including in the Muslim world, as well as public opinion polls showed that American claims to global domination and the role of world police officer were being more and more resolutely rejected as American arrogance, unacceptable interference, and infringement on sovereignty and human rights [21].
Republican President Donald Trump, who replaced Obama, acted from slightly different positions while preserving and even increasing traditional American chutzpah and condescension with respect to allies and partners. The Trump Doctrine, which his administration defined as “principled realism,” formulated its aim as “Make America Great Again.” Trump’s “America First” slogan brought to mind unpleasant historical analogies with Germany that had started two world wars, but it nonetheless clearly articulated the goals of the new president. Trump said that America must not be a sucker. In politics, as in business, it must invariably strive for profit.
Well aware of just how unimportant NATO expansion, the promotion of democracy [abroad], and the problems of Ukraine were to ordinary Americans, Trump chose to appeal to them and their everyday problems. He brought manufacturing, jobs, and prosperity back to America; he was quite firm when dealing with foreign partners and allies. By increasing pressure on China, imposing unprecedented sanctions on Russia, and requiring allies to pay the US for their security, Trump was abandoning globalism if the US had to pay for it, as well as meaningless and unwinnable wars. The fundamental principle of the Trump Doctrine was consistency in safeguarding America’s national interests. Americans took notice and increased their confidence in him.
Trump’s reelection bid split America more or less in half. The victory of Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, raised doubts in half of the American population, and was marked by a powerful social crisis and public protests.
As president, Biden tried, very much like Obama and Trump, to shake off the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2021, he implemented an agreement signed by Trump on the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. This did not mean that the US had abandoned its claims to global domination. On the contrary, immediately after his election, Biden was ready to sit, uninvited, at the head of the table and rule the world.
In his public statements, he presented a new US foreign policy doctrine designed to unite the collective West around the US and compel it to join efforts to isolate and suppress Russia and China as global adversaries for the sake of America’s interests. This means that the level of American impudence toward those two countries has risen to a military level, and the US wants its NATO allies and other countries to adopt a combat stance. This refers especially to the Indo-Pacific region, one of Biden’s main foreign policy priorities, where the Anglo-Saxon bloc AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, and the US) was hastily formed.
Today, nothing is threatening American security and American leadership within the collective West. They were also secure in the past, when the US expanded NATO to the East, fully aware that it was disregarding and infringing on Russia’s vital interests. Judging by the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance issued by the Biden administration in March 2021, his new foreign policy concept could be called “encirclement and containment of Russia and China.” It should be said in all fairness that in this document, China was invited to “sectoral cooperation” – i.e., on issues of interest to the US. Ten years ago, Russia received a similar invitation that caused a deep crisis in relations between the two countries.
Recently, the administration approved America’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific, primarily aimed at preventing China’s development and its rapprochement with Russia (which is already a fact). Biden is the third American president in a row to describe Asia as the main priority of the US. He said there is no other region as important as Asia for the US and that America’s security and prosperity depend, to a great extent, on the security and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific. The Biden administration claims that Democrats and Republicans and America’s partners in the region and in Europe support the US and its efforts.
Such statements are fully in line with American tradition. Whether they are true remain to be seen. Besides the AUKUS bloc and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) of the US, Australia, Japan, and India (a BRICS member), the Americans plan to involve Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Pacific islands in its policy. In addition, the American strategy envisages strengthening five regional treaty alliances of the US with Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand.
For the first time in the nuclear era, the US has pledged to supply Australia, an AUKUS member, with the technology of nuclear powered submarines. China called that decision dangerous and a threat. The impudent and brazen American provocations against China and Russia are reminiscent of the actions of street thugs who never stop until they are harshly rebuffed. China and Russia will most likely have to do that in one form or another if the US refuses to grasp the seriousness of Russia’s demands for security guarantees and the warning contained in the signing in early February in Beijing of the joint statement by the heads of China and Russia: Chairman of the PRC Xi Jinping and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.
The Biden Doctrine and its Indo-Pacific expansion are another obvious outcrop of the unrestrained, cavalier imperial insolence toward other states that is so typical of America. They are fully in keeping with the doctrine of a “new world order” and, very much like the doctrine itself, are built exclusively on US national interests. They were and remain the dogma of American administrations that, starting with Theodore Roosevelt, have built their relations with other countries on the school of “realism.” He was the first American president to insist that it is America’s duty to spread its influence across the world and build relations with it on the basis of its national interests.
Lies, very much like imperial chutzpah, are another inevitable component of America’s foreign policy. In 2008, Laurence Vance published his thought-provoking book Christianity and War and Other Essays against the Warfare State [22] in which he offered a long list of state lies produced by presidents, secretaries of state, and other top American officials. Today, deception is a habitual political tool of the US that makes it hard or practically impossible for common people and even experts, professional politicians, and experienced journalists to discover the truth. In the past, those caught lying were rejected by society, lost their jobs, committed suicide. Today, American officials lie through their teeth. Every day brings fresh examples of blatant lies told by the press secretaries of the president, Department of State, the Pentagon, and other official news sources. Their lies have an ideological foundation: Lying to the enemy or about the enemy is lauded, while lying to the American president, Congress, intelligence services, the police, or in court is treated as a criminal offense. Peter Kuznick, Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, has written that the idea of its exceptionalism has convinced the US of its impunity. Other countries do not permit themselves to do what America is doing. Other countries do not kill people around the world with the help of drones, depose governments in other countries, invade them, or bomb them. The US, acting in the name of law and justice, has done a lot of awful things that would have terrified the world if any other country permitted itself to act in the same way [23].
The US is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against another country, destroying the peaceful population of two Japanese cities. The world was shaken by the Mỹ Lai massacre, in which civilians in Sơn Mỹ village were cruelly murdered by American soldiers, by the bombing of Belgrade, and the air strikes on Baghdad. To acquire freedom of action in Latin America, American leaders and intelligence services never hesitate to act hand in glove with drug dealers who poison America’s population. They have never hesitated to deal with El Chapo, one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world, with whom American intelligence officers have met more than 50 times.
It is extremely important for the US to control the main territories on which energy resources are mined, extracted, and transported, since the American economy is largely based on capturing, subjugating, and exploiting energy markets, resources, and transportation systems. This explains why Washington has fiercely opposed the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline: It is hoping to snatch the European gas market from Russia. The Americans have come up with some ridiculous fabrications – for example, dismissing Russian gas as “dirty” while touting American gas as “freedom gas.” Iraq and Libya were destroyed and plundered under false pretexts. Syria and Iran would have been next had Russia not come to their rescue. Alan Greenspan, who chaired the Federal Reserve for many years, admitted in his memoirs that the war in Iraq was principally a war for oil.
America’s global domination rests on three pillars: financial, ideological, and military might. The first is ensured by the uncontrolled emission of the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency; the second is ensured by lies about democracy concocted in “think tank” laboratories like the RAND Corporation and spread around the world by the American media and Hollywood; and the third is ensured by the US’s vast military budget and arms production. The US military budget is the biggest in the world: It is equal to those of the next six countries on the list of the world’s largest military budgets. In view of its colossal debt, the only way for the US to preserve its global leadership and get out of financial crises is to launch wars, subjugate resource-rich countries, and weaken its rivals (China and Russia) as well as its allies, including even the closest of them (Great Britain, Germany, and France.)
Today, the aforementioned Project for the New American Century treats “absolute security of the United States” as the main American value and the main foreign policy aim achieved through global domination; this justifies any crimes and violations of international law [19].
The US State Department is promoting the project through an NGO headed by neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. In his article “A Family Business of Perpetual War,” Robert Parry wrote: “They run a remarkable family business: She sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so that America can meet these new security threats…. Yet, if it weren’t for Nuland’s efforts as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, the Ukraine crisis might not exist.… She personally urged on business leaders and political activists to challenge elected President Viktor Yanukovych. She reminded corporate executives that the United States had invested $5 billion in their ‘European aspirations,’ ” and she literally passed out cookies to antigovernment protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square [24].
Only the awareness of an existential threat can stop the deeply amoral American establishment that spouts lies and double standards. Feeling safe beyond two oceans, the American political class is raising the pressure in the global cauldron that is already on the verge of exploding. The 9/11 attacks that destroyed that illusion of unassailability have been practically forgotten, and America’s dim-witted generals and politicians are again devising aggressive plans. The US and the “collective West” are threatening Russia. Amid the degradation of the West and its de facto loss of independence in decision-making, Russia should talk only to the American puppeteers who control NATO, the EU, and the “collective West” – if it is still even possible to reach any agreements with them. If not, the street thug who has gone too far should be brought to his senses by military-technical means. There is no other option. Things have gone too far; Russia has sought mutual concessions with the West far too long and not found them.
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18. Kashirina T.V. “Amerikanskaya kontseptsiya ‘sovremennogo miroporyadka’ i amerikano-rossiyskiye otnosheniya na rubezhe XX-XXI vv.,” http://www.evestnik-mgou.ru/vipuski/2010_1/stati/pdf/kashirina.pdf (Retrieved on February 16, 2022).
19. “The Project for the New American Century (PNAC),” December 6, 2007, http://t0x4.livejournal.com/786.html (Retrieved on February 17, 2022).
20. “Putin govorit, chto SShA shantazhirovali Frantsiyu iz-za voyennogo korablya shtrafom BNP,” July 1, 2014, businessweek.com (Retrieved on February 17, 2022).
21. “Peredovitsa. Doktrina Obamy,” Yezhednevnoye vremya. May 29, 2010 (Retrieved on February 17, 2022).
22. Vance, Laurence. Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State. Perfeсt, 2008. “Samye krupnye obmany v istorii amerikanskoy politiki,” http://perly.ru/kureznye-novosti/samye-samye/1253-samye-krupnye-obmany-v-istorii-amerikanskoj-politiki.html (Retrieved on February 17, 2022).
23. “Istorik: Ideya isklyuchitelnosty vyzyvayet u SShA chuvstvo beznakazannosti,” https://cont.ws/@muravei-s/98795 [translated from the Russian – Trans.]
24. Robert Parry. “A Family Business of Perpetual War,” Consortium News, March 20, 2015, https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/20/a-family-business-of-perpetual-war