The Ideological Conflict That Replaced Communism v. Capitalism

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The world’s ideological conflict ever since the Soviet Union in 1991 ended its communism, has been anti-imperialism versus the U.S. empire. There is only one empire left standing, and it aims to take control over the entire world: any country that resists being taken over by America’s Government is therefore its target and becomes targeted by all of its colonies, too (since any that would oppose it is therefore itself added to its target-list). (The U.S. Government decides what dissent is acceptable, and what is not.)

As the most articulate U.S. President championing the continued growth of the empire phrased this, when addressing America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, he said to them:

The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

He was telling his military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations and the billionaires who control them; that U.S. taxpayers fund America’s military at least partially in order to impose the wills and extend the wealth of the stockholders in America’s corporations abroad; and that the countries against which America is in economic competition are “dispensable,” but America “is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This, supposedly, also authorizes America’s weapons and troops to fight against countries whose “governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: Stop the growing economies from growing faster than America’s. There is another name for the American Government’s global-supremacist ideology. This term is the phrase “imperialistic fascism”: it’s not merely Franco’s fascism; it is Hitler’s fascism — it is out to conquer the world (not merely to conquer its own country).

What had happened to produce this imperialist-fascist Government?

In 1991, the U.S. side declared victory against communism, but secretly continued its long war to conquer now Russia (to add it to the U.S. empire), and to keep the stiill partially communist China down enough so that the U.S. would continue dominating — and to a large extent, via its World Bank, IMF, and global dollar-dominance, to continue ruling — over the entire rest of the planet.

On 11 January 2012, a year before before Obama was to take the oath of office a second time, Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland, and a leading neoconservative (U.S. imperialist) in his own right, who had unsuccessfully pressed Bill Clinton to invade Iraq, and then successfully pressed G.W. Bush to do it, headlined at a leading Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, The New Republic, “The myth of American decline”, and he argued that America alone is the world’s indispensable nation and must continue to expand its empire (but of course he didn’t use the word “empire”). And, then, on 26 January 2012, the neoconservative Josh Rogin headlined in another Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, Foreign Policy, “Obama embraces Romney advisor's theory on 'The Myth of American Decline’”, and he opened:

President Barack Obama is personally enamored with a recent essay written by neoconservative writer Bob Kagan, an advisor to Mitt Romney [who became Obama’s Republican neoconservative opponent in that year’s Presidential contest], in which Kagan argues that the idea the United States is in decline is false.

"The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe," Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening. "From the coalitions we've built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we've led against hunger and disease; from the blows we've dealt to our enemies, to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back."

"Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about," Obama said.

Just hours earlier on Tuesday, in an off-the-record meeting with leading news anchors, including ABC's George Stephanopoulos and NBC's Brian Williams, Obama drove home that argument using an article written in the New Republic by Kagan titled "The Myth of American Decline."

Obama liked Kagan's article so much that he spent more than 10 minutes talking about it in the meeting, going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed to The Cable.

National Security Advisor Tom Donilon will also discuss Kagan's essay and Obama's love of it Thursday night with Charlie Rose on PBS.

Kagan's article examines and then sets out to debunk each of the arguments that America is in decline, which include commonly held assumptions that America's power and influence are waning due to its economic troubles, the rise of other world powers, the failure of U.S. efforts to solve big problems like the Middle East conflict, and the seeming inability of the U.S. government to tackle problems.

Obama’s 24 January 2012 State Of The Union address also continued that Kagan-influenced passage:

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  (Applause.)

That’s not the message we get from leaders around the world who are eager to work with us.  That’s not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin, from Cape Town to Rio, where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years.  Yes, the world is changing.  No, we can’t control every event.  But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs –- and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.  (Applause.)  

Subsequently he used that “the one indispensable nation” phrase on a number of occasions.

While Obama had been first running for the Presidency in 2007 and 2008, against the neoconservative Hillary Clinton and then against the neoconservative John McCain, he proudly bragged innumerable times in his stump speech, the phrase claiming that he had always opposed the invasion of Iraq by President Bush in 2003, that “even at the time it was possible to make judments that this would not work out well,” and none of the reporters even questioned it, but Obama was a master-liar who knew that people with hope would read into it that he himself had opposed invading Iraq — something he didn’t actually say. For example, on NPR, the stenographic ‘journalist’ Mara Liasson introduced that quotation by saying, “Obama’s position on the war — he was against it from the beginning — gets the biggest applause everywhere.” That was on 12 February 2007, at the start of Obama’s campaign against the neoconservative Hillary Clinton. Liasson was just hoping that this was what he meant and that he wasn’t lying if he did. Then, for example, on 9 August 2007, when Obama’s opponent was the neoconservative Mitt Romney, Reuters headlined “Obama says he opposed Iraq war from start”, which was false, and it simply quoted him as saying, "Even at the time, it was possible to make judgments that this would not work out well.” The article commented, “His early opposition to the increasingly unpopular war is a centerpiece of his stump speech, drawing big cheers on a two-day swing through the state that traditionally kicks off the presidential nominating fight.”

Subsequently, Trump used similarly ambiguous phrasing to allege the false impression that he had opposed that invasion even at its start. The interesting thing about both Obama’s and Trump’s deceits about the matter is that no ‘journalist’ asked either man why he had opposed it and followed-up by asking whether he felt — and whom he had confided this to at the time — that this invasion in violation of international law and on entirely bogus grounds was profoundly immoral and an immense embarrassment to this nation and especially to its Government (and not merely “would not work out well”). There was no journalism at all but only propaganda throughout the Presidential campaign. This is how it becomes routine for a Government to be ‘democratically' ‘elected’ by deceived voters.Then, after Obama became ‘elected’ twice on that basis and even having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for nothing but his lying rhetoric, he did the February 2014 Victoria-Nuland-masterminded bloody coup that grabbed Ukraine and installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there that was rejected overwhelmingly in both its Crimea region and its Donbass region, which rebellions led to the breakaway of Crimea and the civil war in Donbass, to which Russia finally was forced to respond on 24 February 2022 by invading Ukraine, so as to prevent the U.S. regime from posting a nuclear missile in Ukraine only 317 miles from The Kremlin — a 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse. 

As regards the predictions by the neoconservatives that America will not continue to decline in comparison with “Russia” “China” “Brazil” “India” and  “rising middle classes (throughout the world),” they were false, just like their promises about the invasion of Iraq and the coup (‘Maidan democratic revolution’) in Ukraine turned out to be.

FURTHERMORE: Both China and Russia have set, and formally announced and established, their foreign policies on an explicitly anti-imperialistic basis together as two sovereign and independent nations which are entirely united on the same principles, which they announced together on 16 May 2024, in their “Joint Statement of Partnership”, so that regardless of what the future will hold for each of them going forward, they are committed together to move forward together on an entirely anti-imperialist, non-supremacist, basis, in their foreign relations — a fundamental repudiation of what the U.S. empire proposes as its model for the future world order.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.