In 1992, at the end of the Cold War, an American political scientist infamously proclaimed "the end of history:" liberal democracy and the capitalist system has won, the rest of the world will eventually embrace western ideas as superior to theirs because only they are able to provide peace and prosperity.
This line of reasoning has since become the West’s dogma in international relations, and so under the pretext of spreading human rights and parliamentary democracy all over the world the West perceives itself to be on a mission. For a while, it worked. Most of Eastern Europe readily embraced Western democracy and capitalism and even Russia seemed to follow.
Some intellectuals brought it to a new level: the rest of the world will have to embrace capitalism and liberal democracy voluntarily or else they will be forced to. It was the birth of neoconservatism in the United States and it would spread across the Atlantic. The Neocon vision had other implications, listed in the likewise infamous “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, and these are:
- American supremacy, which translates into active prevention of the formation and rise of any power that could challenge it;
- unilateral intervention;
- pre-emptive action;
- undermining Russia, by taking out from its sphere of influence the former Soviet countries which had not embraced western values yet, like Ukraine;
- forcing the Muslim world to accept the Israeli state on the latter’s conditions.
By the 2000s, Neocons had taken over the Republican Party in the US and the Labour Party in the UK and could count on allies in Italy (Berlusconi) and Spain (Aznar). In the following decade, Neocon ideology spread virulently, substituting for the failed experiment of military intervention to overthrow non-cooperating governments with covert operations funding and/or arming local groups in Libya, Syria,Tunisia Egypt, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Neocon adherents took over the US state department, and their grip on it was strengthened by the appointment of Barack Obama as assistant to Victoria Nuland, Secretary of State for European affairs, wife of Robert Kagan, who is in turn a top Neocon ideologist alongside Paul Wolfowitz. They also created the narrative spread and reinforced by the mainstream media, which expose the alleged crimes of non-cooperating regimes in Syria, Russia and Libya, while ignoring the anti “democratic” behavior by friendly dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia’s kings.
The mission however never changed. What changed is the mood of Western citizens about the government changes and state-building projects of the Western leadership; as the economic and human cost grew endlessly, the Western public opinion has become fed up with interventionism around the world.
The British Labour party was the first to face the malcontents: Blairites are being ousted in favour of anti-NATO, sworn pacifist Jeremy Corbyn.
Then Donald Trump won the US election with his “America First” i.e. a policy of “non-interventionism and protectionism”, defeating Hillary’s hawkish one, publicly endorsed by Kagan and Wolfowitz; Sarkozy and Juppè were defeated in the primaries in France by Fillon, who is advocating the end of the trade war against big bad Neocon target Russia. The Neocon-backing Western establishment is facing political upheaval all over Europe and the US. These revolutions are not mere popular movements. Trump’s election is the handing over of power from one influential group to another because a part of the establishment has become fully aware of the problems Europe and the US are facing.
After a fourteen-year war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq the bloodshed spilled over into the streets of Paris and Berlin. The killing of civilians in the streets in Europe was not supposed to happen after the eradication of Al Qaeda and the alleged elimination of its leader Osama Bin Laden. Or should we rather say European insanity is spilling over, as the European establishment is simultaneously bombing a country and importing the country’s inhabitants? What do the Western leadership expect to have on their hands? Meanwhile Russia is reemerging as a more successful international actor.
China has become a production hub, building its own financial institutions and will become more and more independent of the US and European financial systems. In 2015 China launched its alternative CIPS for the SWIFT system, which had been for more than 30 years the center of international financial transactions.
The rapid and dramatic demographic changes cannot continue unnoticed by the establishment. The white population in the United States has decreased from 79.6 percent in 1980 to 61.9 percent in 2014. The percentage of Latino Americans has risen from 6.4 percent to 17.3 percent over the same period, while both the African American and Asian American populations have gone up. Europe is facing a multicultural quagmire and downward spiral of violence. The African and Muslim communities are hostile to Western societies and openly threatening to kill Westerners in endlessly numerous music videos posted on the internet.
The German establishment is in a complete state of denial, and the French Republican Party leaders believe they can regain control with some harsh words directed at the Muslim community on the one hand and unprecedented austerity measures dished out to the French population on the other.
In the US there are people like Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who are strongly advocating a change in the Middle East policy. Haas would like to see America using its diplomatic and military power for gaining influence in South East Asia and deal with nations rather than tribes in Syria; he would also rather the US restored order at home than resolve the problems in Mosul and Fallujah in Iraq or Sirte in Libya.
The Neocon world peaked and is now crumbling at record speed. And what is the Neocons’ reaction? A failure to topple governments may have been taken into account, but the electoral defeats in the West were unexpected. In a bid that looks like a mix of anger and desperation the Neocon machine is using the US State Department and the mainstream media to mount a gigantic offensive putting the blame for its own failures on the battered Russia: so without having much evidence, neocons created a narrative that Russia has helped Donald Trump win the elections.
But of course, why stop there? Thus Neocon Blairite remnants in the UK are joining the crowd and claim that “Russian hackers caused Brexit’’.
What else? Gustav Gressel of the European Council on Foreign Relations claims that Russian secret services (rather than European open borders refugee policy) are behind the epidemic of sexual assaults committed by migrants in Germany7) attempting to weaken Merkel’s credibility for the next year election. Whenever something doesn’t go according to plan for the Western establishment, it’s Russia’s fault. Expect to see more.
via http://ift.tt/2i86gEh Tyler Durden