‘The West’ is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’). That ‘alliance’ is breaking up.

22 February 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The U.S. has 917 foreign military bases (besides the 749 inside the U.S.). All other countries taken together have 399. The U.S. spends 65% of the entire world’s military costs (that’s expenses — not referring to the enormous damages that those costs have been paying to create in the targeted countries) — all of the approximately 200 other countries together spend only 35% of the global total.

The U.S. Government and its thousands of propagandists use all sorts of methods to low-ball (currently to around $900 billion per year) the money that it spends per year on its military, but without all of those tricks to deceive the public, the actual total is over $1.5 trillion, which is 65% of the global total — and yet right now the Trump Administration SEEMS to be focusing INSTEAD on cutting OTHER parts of the federal budget. And yet the ONLY U.S. federal Department that has never yet passed an audit is the ‘Defense’ Department, (the OTHER roughly $600B per year that the Government spends on its military is being paid out from the OTHER federal Departments — which ARE annually audited, and which the Trump team have thus far been searching to find and expose the “waste, fraud, and abuse”).

No propaganda-organ (‘news’-medium) in the U.S. empire (NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) even acknowledges that the U.S. empire exists. Mere mention of it is effectively prohibited from being made public by the empire’s ‘news’-media. Many critics of ‘democracies’ in capitalist countries call this prohibition (or “censorship”) by the phrase that Edward S. Herman introduced for it, “manufacturing consent”, which technique — constant self-censorship that’s practised so as to please the advertisers and the Government that they control (by their billionaires’ mega-donations to each of the two political Parties) — is done by media in the U.S. empire so that such Governments can then label any Government that the U.S. Government is trying to “regime-change” or overthrow-and-replace by a stooge, a government that is “autocratic,” or even “dictatorial,” or even a “tyranny”; and, so, this is why “manufacturing (the public’s) consent” is crucial to the further growth of the empire, by such ‘democracies’. (No empire can even POSSIBLY be democratic; they are intrinsically dictatorships, regardless of what their Constitution might say. Of course, throughout history, empires have claimed to be legitimate according to whatever standards were prevailing, at the time — but all empires are intrinsically gangland operations.)

This empire — the world’s only remaining empire, other than some of its colonies’ empires, the largest of which is Britain’s, if that can realistically even be called an “empire” after it co-founded the U.S. empire on 25 July 1945 and subordinated itself to the greater power of America — is now finally breaking up. Thus far in the Second Term of President Trump, his decisions have greatly accelerated this process, and his propaganda for those decisions is not the truth, which is that the U.S. Government is itself widely regarded around the world as being the single biggest threat to world peace and has in fact been the global aggressor ever since Harry Truman became America’s President in 1945. Instead, the case he presents is that America’s colonies are just too costly for U.S. taxpayers to continue ‘protecting’ against (according to him) Russia, China and Iran — three countries that, at least ever since 1991, have never posed ANY danger to either the U.S. or its ‘allies’ (excepting possibly only Israel, which Iran’s Government really IS committed to ending — but hasn’t any means by which it can achieve that objective). So, while Trump is not trying to educate the empire’s public about actual history (such as regarding Ukraine and Taiwan, and Israel) that is being hidden from that public by the regime’s media, and which explains the reality, he does seem to be trying to address and reduce the problem of America’s empire over-extending itself as it has been doing in recent decades. Unlike many other commentators, I won’t speculate here about what his actual motives and priorities are for doing this, and for doing it in the way that he is. But we are now in the period of the decline of the American empire.

At its start, the joint UK/U.S. empire (soon thereafter to begin growing to become the U.S.-controlled colossus that exists today) was publicly introduced to the world on 5 March 1946, by Winston Churchill (with its co-founder President Truman in attendance), at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in Churchill’s famous “Special Relationship” and “Iron Curtain” speech, which declared not ONLY that the United States and the British Empire HAVE this “Special Relationship,” but that the Soviet Union had set up an Iron Curtain which “the democracies” must break down. This was a two-faced speech, on 5 March 1946, which in its second half introduced BOTH the “Special Relationship” AND the “Iron Curtain” to contain and ultimately end that “Curtain” and the Soviet Union’s Government, but which deceptively threw in praise for ‘the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin,” so as to hide Churchill’s real (and secret) intention, which was for the U.S. and UK ultimately to invade and conquer the Soviet Union. This war was to be propagandistically called “the Cold War,” but both Churchill and Truman knew that it might become not only World War Three but apocalyptic — so “hot” as to be perhaps even world-ending.

Truman had, in fact, known about this intention by Churchill (to proceed immediately into World War Three and conquer the Soviet Union), especially because Truman had earlier, in May 1945, rejected, as being impractical, a proposal that Churchill’s team had (at Churchill’s request) drafted for the U.S. and UK jointly to invade and conquer the Soviet Union starting on 1 July 1945. It was called “Operation Unthinkable”. At the UK’s National Archives is an article by the military historian Jonathan Walker about it, “Operation Unthinkable: Churchill’s plan for World War Three”, which was based on his 2013 book, Operation Unthinkable: The Third World War: British Plans to Attack the Soviet Empire 1945. Although one reviewer of that book noted critically against it,

Walker sympathises with Churchill’s hardening attitudes on Poland and though describing the “apparent madness” of a plan that could later have involved the use of nuclear weapons, he curiously believes it “might have provided the Poles their last chance of freedom before total Soviet domination.”

While the book’s subtitle is British Plans To Attack The Soviet Empire, it was Britain in 1945 that had the empire. It was the US that would use atomic bombs and begin stockpiling A-bombs to achieve dominance.

At Potsdam, after Churchill received news of the successful test of the US bomb, Walker quotes Field Marshall Brooke as saying that Churchill “was completely carried away and was delighted to think that the bomb could redress the balance with Stalin.

“Now we could say if you insist on doing this or that well we can can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Karkhov, Sebastopol. Nowhere are the Russians!”

That the plan was known as Operation Unthinkable suggests that the Foreign Office, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought it a contingency and unachievable. Pro-Russian sentiment was still strong in 1945 and the general election robbed Churchill of any power to pursue such plans. Yet he did not give up. On March 5 1946 he gave his infamous “iron curtain” speech signalling the launch of the cold war and stoking a decade and more of anti-communism and McCarthyism in the US.

Fears about “communist domination” — the author’s phrase — had by early 1946 “become orthodox thinking in the British Foreign Office” under Labour’s Ernest Bevin.

US President Harry Truman followed Churchill in instructing the US Joint War Plans Committee to prepare contingency plans for operations against the Soviets, not excluding the use of the growing US stock of atom bombs. Walker says Truman’s special counsel Clark Clifford concluded that Stalin believed “the only outcome was war.” Stalin may have said this but I can find no evidence of it, though he probably knew of Western leaders’ plans. Nor does the book provide clear evidence of the often repeated threat of Soviet invasion of western Europe, though this fuelled the cold war and was a justification for British atomic weapons.

the book is otherwise the most authoritative investigation yet done about this crucially important historical matter. No one any longer can reasonably contest that FDR’s hostility toward Churchill’s imperialism as its posing the biggest threat to peace in the post-WW2 world, was deeply insightful and prophetic. As Walker himself said, the Churchill plan was “a blueprint for a Third World War.” That’s what Churchill was hoping for as soon as FDR died on 12 April 1945 and Truman became President — and even before there was any atomic bomb. By stark contrast, FDR had been planning, ever since August 1941 — even before the U.S. entered WW2 — for a (he called it) “United Nations” to take control over the making and enforcement of international law after WW2 would be over, and to outlaw ALL empires. Because FDR knew that BOTH World Wars resulted from COMPETING EMPIRES. So, this was FDR’s plan, and Churchill’s was the exact opposite. And, on 25 July 1945, both Churchill and Truman’s personal hero, General Dwight Eisenhower, persuaded Truman that if the U.S. Government wouldn’t eventually take control over the entire world, then the Soviet Union would; and, so, he immediately proceeded to plan this, and within just one year replaced almost all of FDR’s foreign-affairs team, and within just two years replaced all of them. Though replacing the predecessor’s foreign-affairs team is normal if the new President is of a different Party than his predecessor, it was very unusual in Truman’s case, not only because he was of the same Party, but because his predecessor was extremely popular and Truman was not. Furthermore, Truman in public always praised FDR though in private he despised him. (Obviously, if he had gone public about that, then he wouldn’t have been able to win the 1948 Presidential contest.)

Truman, who wasn’t very bright, came into the White House sharing many of the same prejudices that his hero Eisenhower and that Churchill did (and that FDR definitely did NOT), especially against Russia. Whereas FDR was deeply opposed to any empire, both Churchill and Eisenhower were not — and Churchill believed deeply in the old view, that only empires are powerful enough to maintain the peace — something that is exactly the opposite of the reality, which is that empires scheme and war against one-another. The idea that especially drove Churchill was the one that his early mentor Cecil Rhodes had come up with in 1877, that only if England could take back control over the Uniited States, would it become possible for an empire could defeat all others and so win control ultimately over the entire world and impose peace throughout the world; so, Rhodes’s scheme was precisely to achieve that, and Churchill, as one of his most favored acolytes, aspired to become the one who would bring it about. He did, but the UK/U.S. empire — like all of the prior ones — failed to achieve monopoly control over all other countries. Therefore, what we are seeing now is the unraveling of Rhodes’s plan.

The ONLY way that peace can become established is the one that FDR had planned and that his immediate successor promptly aborted.

The best way forward would be for Putin and Xi to propose to Trump that if Trump will approve the plan that FDR came up with — which would entail some fundamental reforms to the Charter that Truman had veto-power over at the founding of the U.N. — then Putin and Xi likewise will. It could happen, but ONLY if all three will agree that it SHOULD.

By declaring it to be FDR’s plan, rather than their own, no one’s ego would stand in the way of it happening. But if even just ONE of the three would try to divert to ‘something new’ instead, then the way forward would be blocked by that ego. The only thing that would be “new” about FDR’s plan would be implementing and completing it. But doing this would be the greatest thing in human history.

And just imagine what a “Summit” THAT would be.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

—————

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.