Eric Zuesse

German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the most reliable news-source on geostrategic matters, reported, on March 31st, that U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin had secretly reached agreement on working together to kill the jihadists in Syria, even despite Obama’s having long been carrying out instead the policies of his Administration’s neoconservatives, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, which prioritize first America’s longstanding effort to overthrow and replace the Russian government (by overthrowing governments that ally with Russia). If this news-report is correct, then it indicates that Obama has finally come around to the position that Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had, according to the great investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, been urging upon Obama: to place the destruction of the jihadists as being a higher priority than the anti-Russian campaign (which has been carried out by overthrowing Russia’s allies — especially Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, successfully done in February 2014 — and Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Unlike Yanukovych, Assad seems to have become the all-but-certain winner of the American-and-jihadists’ war to overthrow his secular government.)

In the U.S. Presidential contests, Bernie Sanders has been arguing against Hillary Clinton, to prioritize the anti-jihadist effort higher than any anti-Russian strategy; and Donald Trump in the Republican Party has been campaigning against Ted Cruz and John Kasich similarly. The DWN report seems to suggest that, finally, President Obama has come around to Sanders’s and Trump’s position — and, to what, before that, was Martin Dempsey’s position — on this central geostrategic issue: What is the top priority?

However, the DWN news-report also makes clear that both Obama and Putin have, on certain occasions, been deceptive, so that no certainty can be attributed to any consclusions at this stage.

One can, however, say with certainty — and Hersh’s news-reports ever since the last one he did on geostrategy for the New Yorker, “The Redirection,” in 2007, have been about this, the redirection of U.S. foreign policy (since 2007) to prioritize conquering Russia — one can say that, ever since Obama first entered the White House in 2009, Obama’s top priority in international relations has, indeed, been to move forward with what has been America’s top foreign-policy objective, ever since 1990 (other than during the conquest of Iraq period, 2003-2007): the goal of placing Russia under U.S. control (i.e, to continue the process that was under way in Russia under Boris Yeltsin). When the editor of the New Yorker accepted that 2007 article by Hersh for publication, perhaps it was because the word “Russia” wasn’t even used in it — instead, Hersh cast America’s central post-2007 target as being Iran — which has been Russia’s chief ally in the Middle East ever since the 1953-CIA-installed dictator-Shah had been overthrown by the Shiite Ayatollah Khomeni’s supporters in 1979. After that 2007 article was published, Hersh hasn’t gotten any more geostrategic submissions accepted there. When he did articles starting in 2013 reporting Obama’s follow-through of Bush (Obama’s targeting Russia’s allies for being overthrown), none of the paying U.S. newsmedia would publish them. Hersh’s geostrategic articles have all been published instead by the London Review of Books. Basically, Hersh became too good for his best work to be able to be accepted by the New Yorker (which he’d prefer to have published them, because it pays lots more and has a bigger audience than LRB).

A good example of this top priority, against Russia, was Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015, which named Russia on 17 of the 18 occasions in which the term (or equivalent) “aggression” was being charged by Obama. Here, Obama was, in long form, stating the view that had been more simply expressed about Russia by his Republican opponent during the 2012 Presidential campaign: Mitt Romney’s "This is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe. They fight for every cause for the world's worst actors.” Obama’s deception of U.S. voters, by attacking that statement from Romney (though he secretly agreed with it and was already preparing his second Administration to carry it out), was typical of Obama’s strategic brilliance (at deceiving voters). (He was such a superb deceiver, that he even won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, by pretending to support a peaceful world.) It helped him to win the U.S. Presidency (since the American public considers jihadists to be vastly more of a threat); but, at least until now, Obama’s Presidency, even overtly, has, indeed, been guided by his agreement with the view that Romney there had so pithily expressed. In fact, Obama’s overthrow of Yanukovych in Ukraine was such a successful fraud so that even today there is no mention in American ‘news’ media of the fact that it was a coup, and, moreover, an extremely bloody one, which was followed very quickly by an ethnic cleansing campaign to eliminate the residents in the areas of Ukraine that had overwhelmingly voted for Yanukovych. Furthermore, foreign elites know that it was a coup, but the U.S. public are still kept in the dark about it. In fact, the one time when the American geostrategic expert George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, called it “the most blatant coup in history,” he was addressing an audience of elite Russians who already knew, from overwhelming evidence, that it was that. In the United States, it’s still called a “democratic revolution” (which merely happened to replace the democratically elected leader of that country). The recording of Obama’s operative (the super-neoconservative Victoria Nuland) giving instructions to the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine regarding whom to get appointed to lead Ukraine after the coup, still isn’t enough for U.S. newsmedia to refer to the overthrow in Ukraine as having been a “coup” instead of as something like “the Maidan revolution.” Nothing will be enough, for that. Perhaps one won’t even be able to trust U.S.-published ‘history’ books, ever to get that right. The U.S. retrospectively acknowledges that its overthrow of the democratically elected leader Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 was a U.S. coup there, but perhaps the U.S. elite’s fascism, which was then just beginning to seep into and poison the American body-politic, has by now become far more deeply embedded — too deeply embedded for U.S. ‘history’ books to be much more than U.S. mythology.

While no one can say with certainty whether Obama is changing course on this overthrow-Russia campaign (which was begun in 1990 by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush) as his Presidency winds down, there is at least a possibility that Obama is now becoming somewhat more like Sanders and Trump on this central matter, than like Clinton, Cruz and Kasich (who are neo-conservatives, like Obama if not even more so).

Only time will tell for certain, whether DWN is correct in its reading of the situation. If Obama issues a ‘National Security Strategy 2016’, then perhaps there will be more-substantial verbal evidence, at least (if one can even trust such coming from Obama), regarding this matter. However, any effort to end what has been America’s leading geostrategy ever since 1990 would be extremely difficult for any U.S. President, and the entrenched power-structure in the U.S. would resist it every step of the way. Simply deceiving the American public is so much easier to do. It has been the path of least resistance, at least since 1990. From that time till this, there is, as yet, no movement, either in the U.S. or in Europe, to end America’s anti-Russian military club, NATO, despite the fact that the Soviet Union’s equivalent, the Warsaw Pact, ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union itself did. For some reason, a U.S. President can still refer to Russia 17 out of 18 times as the world’s ‘aggressor’ even while it is the U.S. that so routinely overthrows foreign leaders — even democratically elected ones. The American public don’t trust the U.S. ‘news’ media much, but they evidently still trust it way too much. Perhaps one would expect that to be the case in a dictatorship. But once a country reaches such a stage as this, what can possibly follow after? What happens in a former democracy?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity