The American World Domination Agenda

A desire to lead the world is not the same as having the resources to do it

Regime change in Eastern Europe

In the winter of 1945, the Kingdom of Romania was under Red Army occupation. King Michael was still hanging on in his palace and general Radescu was in charge of the government. To  bring a pro-Communist government to power in Bucharest, Stalin sent there one of the most trusted members of his inner circle, Andrei Vyshinsky. This Ukrainian-born Polish apparatchik was at the time the deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union in charge of Eastern Europe.

In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, Vyshinsky enjoyed a meteoric rise to power in the Georgian-led USSR. In 1940 Vyshinsky was responsible for regime change in the Baltic republics and of their incorporation into the Soviet Union. He then proceeded to fire the last remaining qualified diplomats from the Soviet foreign ministry. By the time he arrived in Romania to deal with the King, the Russian diplomatic corps had become a shadow of its former self and completely under Stalin’s thumb.

On the 22nd of February 1945, Vyshinsky instructed the local communists in Romania to organise a mass rally in front of the royal palace and to ask for the demise of the Radescu government. On the day, a few communist agents holed up in the Interior Ministry opposite the palace shot and killed a few of the demonstrators to create panic. The king gave in and on the 6th of March appointed a pro-Communist government led by Dr.Petru Groza. The rest is history.

Fast forward 69 years. It’s February 24, 2014 and a mass rally held in Maidan Square in Kiev by Ukrainian nationalists provokes the fall of the Yanukovich regime. The rally follows a script eerily similar to the coup staged in Bucharest in 1945. A few marksmen take positions on top of the government buildings surrounding Maidan Square, occupied by demonstrators, and start shooting at police and demonstrators alike. Fearing a bloodbath, president Yanukovich prefers to flee the country, although prior to the demonstrations he agreed to hold early elections in December 2014.

During the upheaval, the top American official who descended on Kiev was Victoria Nuland, in charge of Eastern Europe within the US State Department. She had studied Russian history at university. Fluent in Russian, she used her skills to liaise with the Ukrainian opposition and even decided whom to appoint as Ukrainian prime minister after Yanukovich’s departure. In many respects, Nuland should be credited with the Pyrrhic success of the Maidan upheaval, which Kiev today insists on calling “the revolution of dignity”. 

Like Vyshinsky in his time, Nuland was abrasive and undiplomatic, inspiring a level of dread in Europeans not felt since the Soviets’ heyday. When confronted with a rather mild opposition against the Maidan coup from EU officials, she dismissed such concerns with the phrase “Fuck the EU”. 

In hindsight, it is very possible that -given her training in Russian history- as she was aiming to rise to the very top in her country’s foreign policy establishment, Nuland emulated Vyshinsky (after 1946 Vyshinsky was indeed promoted to the position of Soviet foreign minister). Unfortunately for her, the regime change in Ukraine turned into a geostrategic nightmare, which could yet ignite a nuclear exchange between Russia and the US. Accordingly, instead of being offered the job of Deputy Secretary of State, she was pensioned off  earlier this year. 

Initial steps towards global domination by the US

At the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945, the US had found itself as one of the two main superpowers - the other being USSR -  in charge of the reconstruction in Western Europe and of preserving  peace on the continent .

Nothing in the historical evolution of the United States up to that point, however, had prepared the American political and business elites for such a responsible role. If anything, the US was traditionally an isolationist industrial power. Being a new country, it never had the time or the inclination to develop statecraft skills like other states in Europe or Asia, or a strong and competent diplomatic service, nor did its army cover itself with the glory acquired by European military powers over the centuries.

As the new kids on the world scene, Americans thought they could remake the world in their own image and according to their wishes - a mistaken belief that is very much alive today. 

In order to prevent another war in Europe , the US created NATO in 1949. This was a military alliance which president Truman considered necessary to preempt rearmament on the continent and armed conflicts between former European belligerents. Equally important for Truman was the need to protect the devastated countries of Western Europe from a possible attack by the Soviet Union, which at the end of WWII had the most powerful military in Europe. 

Yet another idea of American inspiration led during the 1950’s to the creation of the European Economic Community, better known until the end of the 20th century as the Common Market . The initial objective of this other treaty organisation was that of creating a single market in which European corporations could compete and thrive and labour and capital can move freely. This new organisation was another way in which the old economic rivalries between European powers were supposed to be eliminated for the sake of peace on the continent.

For almost fifty years, the American official foreign policy,known as the Truman doctrine, was that of containment of communism worldwide. The main proponent of the containment policy - which was fully adopted by Truman and followed until 1989 by all US presidents - was George Kennan, an American diplomat who used to be the Ambassador to the USSR and subsequently Yugoslavia. 

Unfortunately, the Second World War left the US with an oversized military-industrial complex which refused to downsize during peacetime. Thus, instead of using diplomacy as its main tool, the containment policy envisaged by Kennan was militarised from day one. This situation pushed the US to fight two more wars, one in Korea during the 1950’s and the one in Vietnam during the 1960’s, which were both strategic and military failures.

Eventually, Soviet Communism was dismantled after 1989 by its own leaders, and in 1991 the USSR imploded, largely as a result. Eastern European satellite countries were free to throw in their lot with the American-led Western world, for better or for worse. There were no more military threats for Western Europe on the horizon, as the Warsaw Treaty was also disbanded by the Russians. 

How the US (and the world) missed out on Peace

This huge geopolitical change of the early 1990’s opened up the possibility of demilitarising Western Europe, dismantling NATO and bringing America’s troops home. There was also a clear need for a new security architecture in Europe, as requested at the time by German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and France’s President Mitterrand. 

Their calls were echoed in the US by international relations experts such as Charles A. Kupchan, who proposed the establishment of a Concert of Europe made up of leading Western European powers and Russia, organised along similar lines to the previous Concert of Europe from the 19th century which kept the peace on the continent between 1814 and 1914. 

In his 1991 study, Kupchan made a very pertinent assessment of NATO’s usefulness for the US, which is still valid today:

“Large organisations are more likely to fall prey to what Mancur Olson has called the collective action problem. In large groups that form to provide a collective good, each member has incentives to free-ride rather than contribute to the provision of the good in question. A collective security organisation provides a public good, stopping aggression. Each state benefits from deterring or defeating an aggressor, regardless of the amount of resources that it commits to the opposing coalition. Because of free-riding, an organisation with many members is likely to under-produce the public good in question. The sheer size of ideal collective security organisations [such as NATO today, author’s note ] thus militates against political cohesion and exacerbates the collective action problem.”

Unfortunately for all concerned, the framing of US foreign policy for the post-1989 world had been hijacked instead by the Defence Department, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, which collectively entrusted the elaboration of America’s new foreign policy doctrine to a small bunch of neoconservatives having Paul Wolfowitz as their chief representative.

The Wolfowitz doctrine, an agenda for world domination

Today’s American foreign policy conforms closely to a memo written in 1991 and published in March 1992 by the then-Assistant Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz for the use of the Pentagon generals. The memo outlines the steps to be undertaken for a one-superpower world in which no rival powers should be allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the former Soviet Union territories.

The 46-page document  states that the American mission will be to “convince potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” To achieve world domination, the US was supposed to maintain sufficient military might in order to deter a nation, or a group of nations, from challenging American primacy. 

To achieve this hugely oversized role, the US “must sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or from seeking to overturn the established political or economic order”.

This militaristic blueprint for world domination represents a total rejection of any type of collective security arrangement. The State Department does not have any useful role to play therein, as the policy statement was developed by Wolfowitz in conjunction with the Pentagon and the National Security Council only, and in consultation with the President.

To achieve its objective, the document calls for maintaining a minimum of 1.6 million members of the military and keeping NATO as a going concern, as well as the hundreds of US bases around the world. Japan and Germany should be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons, and nuclear proliferation in countries like North Korea or successor republics of the Soviet Union should also be prevented. 

The Wolfowitz memo made no mention whatsoever of any future collective action of the UN, stating instead that “we should expect future coalitions to be ad-hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished”. Thus, “the United States should be postured to act independently [like it did in Yugoslavia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003] when collective action cannot be orchestrated”. 

The memo is addressed to the American military, which “must maintain the mechanism [such as NATO] for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”. 

In terms of foresight, the memo says that “we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or effort to re-incorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus and possibly others”. The same document states that “Russia remains the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States”. 

Concerning Europe, Wolfowitz’s memo states that “a substantial American presence in Europe and continued cohesion within the Western alliance remains vital and we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO”.

It also offers a commitment to defend former Warsaw Pact nations against Russia, suggesting an extension of security guarantees to Eastern and Central European nations and help in order to stabilise the economies and democratic development in Eastern Europe, calling on the European Community to extend membership to Eastern European countries as soon as possible.

The principal tenets of this memo establishing the US as the world’s only hegemon have been carried out almost to the letter until the present day by various American administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, as well as by EU officials.

A Troubled Anniversary

This year marks 75 years since NATO’s founding by President Truman. The leaders who will gather in Washington to celebrate the event in June, however, have nothing to cheer about. 

True, since 1999 NATO has expanded into the former Warsaw Pact countries from Central and Eastern Europe. On paper it looks good. 

However, this expansion and the fact that NATO was repurposed as an offensive alliance to further the Wolfowitz agenda and maintain the global dominance of the US have brought the world closer than it has ever been to an outbreak of nuclear war. 

This year also marks 25 years since NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which actually signalled the death of the alliance’s original peacekeeping role, and the start of offensive actions towards Russia.

As with any collective security organisation, NATO’s plans in Ukraine have not met with the universal approval of its members. In true Soviet fashion, however, Washington has decided to bring to power in frontline states - such as Romania or Czechia - former NATO generals like Nicolae Ciuca and Petr Pavel. This option is every bit as significant for NATO as the appointment in Poland of general Jaruzelski in the eighties, shortly before the demise of Communism there.

To fulfil the Wolfowitz agenda, the EU itself has been repurposed as the political arm of the US in Europe. Gone are the days when the European Community was primarily a single market promoting the economic development of its members. The EU has been pushed to become a surrogate federal superstate, where Brussels calls the shots not only on economic matters, but also on the judicial and political affairs of its members. As a result,  over the last 3 decades the EU has ended up as a shadow of its former self: 

“A complete absence of independent thinking and willpower is the outcome. Europe’s vassalage to the United States obliges it to follow Washington down whatever policy road the seigneur takes - however reckless, dangerous, unethical and counterproductive. […] The string of painful failures and heavy costs produces no change in loyalty or mindset. It cannot - for the Europeans have absorbed totally the habit of deference, the Americans’ worldview, their skewed interpretation of outcomes and their shamefully fictitious narratives. The Europeans no more can throw this addiction than a lifelong alcoholic can go cold turkey”. (Michael Brenner, in “This is the way the West ends”)

Still, in the countries which were for fifty years under the Soviet sphere of influence, pockets of resistance have developed against the US’ world domination agenda and against its aggressive promotion of a weird version of liberal democracy which has displeased many nations.

In former Soviet satellites like Croatia, Hungary, Poland or Slovakia, citizens are more sensitive to internal political interference than in Western Europe and can more easily spot when Soviet-style policies and methods are being employed by the EU or the United States. Indeed, over the last 30 years Americans have promoted regime change and “coloured revolutions” in many countries of the ex-Soviet bloc, not only in Ukraine.

Since 2016 the EU has even lost the UK, one of its most important members, as voters rejected its encroaching authority.

One of the shortcomings of fighting an enemy for a long time, like the US fought the USSR during the Cold War, is that one ends up resembling their former foe.

For the people of Central and Eastern Europe as well as for two thirds of the developing world, a new Soviet Union-type power on the Potomac is not a desirable development. Their citizens are aware that the self-appointed world leader had failed to develop a solid tradition in diplomacy during its history, or that its military - despite its huge budget - is weak and prone to military adventurism around the world.

The desire to be on top of world affairs and being able to hold such a responsible position are two different things. Over the last 30 years, the US has proven to all that its appetite for world leadership is by no means matched by its current political, diplomatic or military abilities. 

All that US elites have succeeded in doing since the adoption of the Wolfowitz doctrine has been to start or provoke disastrous military conflicts that it cannot bring to a successful conclusion; to display a tremendous lack of statecraft skills; and to disqualify themselves from the top spot in world affairs.