Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a Swedish writer, ethnologist, and retired university professor. His essays are posted at his blog, Invandring och mörkläggning. Below is today’s installment of his “Sunday Chronicle”. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for the translation:

Sunday chronicle: America’s neocons

by Professor Emeritus Karl-Olov Arnstberg
July 9, 2023

NATO’s mission, just after the organization was created in 1949, was summarized by Secretary General Lord Ismay in a three-line sentence:

Keep the Russians out
The Americans in
and the Germans down

Keep the Russians out referred to the spread of communism. The US was far more concerned about communism than it ever was about Nazism. The Americans in also had a specific meaning, namely that the Americans would remain in Europe and keep the two Western power blocs on either side of the North Atlantic together. The United States absolutely could not turn its back to Europe, as it did with its isolationist policy after the First World War.

And the Germans down meant that Russia and Germany could not unite under any circumstances, because it would mean a new superpower to challenge the US. This was the main reason why the US admitted West Germany to NATO in 1955, the idea being that the country would be so embedded in the Western sphere, that an alliance with the Soviet Union would be impossible. In 1959, Eisenhower even advocated providing West Germany with nuclear weapons.

With reference to Lord Ismay’s three lines, a related expression has been coined in neoconservative circles:

Keep Russia down,
The US in,
and China out

Here the interpretation is more problematic. What does Keep Russia down mean? That it should be defeated in the Ukrainian war? Or perhaps — which was an idea that flourished among neoconservatives in the 1980s — that the huge country should be divided into small states that mostly fight with each other and thus become completely harmless in world politics? And what does The US in mean? The situation today is completely different from that after the First World War. With all its military bases, the US is already inside large parts of the world. In practical terms, there is no possibility for them to withdraw.

Perhaps And China out is clearer? The risk of China joining forces with Russia is greater than the risk of Russia and Germany joining forces after the end of World War II. However, neither Russia nor China allows itself be affected or controlled in any way by the US.

Neoconservatives, or neocons for short, are a political grouping that emerged in the United States in the 1950s, partly as Democrats and partly as a right-wing faction of the Socialist Party of America and its successor, the Social Democrats. They hated spineless politicians, military weakness and American isolationism. Above all, they wanted to destroy the communist and the totalitarian Soviet Union. To them, communism represented a monstrous evil. Their motto: The United States is the greatest force for good among the nations of the earth.

Leo Strauss

There are two persons that the US neocons have been deeply influenced by, although neither called themselves neoconservatives. One is the “father of neoconservatism”, the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1972), who received a Rockefeller grant in the early 1930s and who emigrated from Berlin to the United States. Leo Strauss was a philosopher, but also a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Critics say that based on Plato’s The State, he turned his students into both elitists and imperialists. One of them, Nicholas Xenos, said that:

“Strauss wanted to return to an older pre-liberal age of blood and glory, of imperialist domination and authoritarian rule, that is, of pure fascism.”

The Wolfowitz Doctrine

One of Strauss’ students at the University of Chicago, Paul Wolfowitz, later Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Bush Jr. administration and then head of the World Bank, wrote the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine. A first draft was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. The imperialist tone led to a public outcry. It said, among other things:

We will … deter and, if necessary, defend against threats to our security and interests, and exercise the necessary leadership, including the decisive use of military force when necessary to maintain a world environment in which societies with shared values can flourish.

If the US government felt that a nation did not meet its definition of democracy, free market institutions and an environment where “shared values can flourish”, the US could use military force to override that country’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.

In other words, the US government assumed the right to decide what form of political rule and economic arrangement is best for any nation in the world. Actually, this was nothing new. The US had also in the past paved the way for brutal dictators, where one wonders about the shared values. What values did the Carter regime share with the mujahideen, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan? Or the Eisenhower regime with Iran, during the Shah’s reign of terror, which was notorious for its torture chambers and being world leader in the implementation of the death penalty?

After the CIA-led coup in Iran in 1953, total US and multinational aid and credits increased nine-fold. US Iran specialist Eric Hoogland commented on the Shah: “The more dictatorial his regime becomes, the closer the US-Iran relationship becomes.”

The 1973 coup in Chile, which installed the murderous Pinochet regime, was followed by a five-fold increase in US economic aid. Reagan’s eight years in power (1981-89) led to an enormous bloodbath as Washington funneled money, weapons and supplies to dictators and the right-wing death squads ravaging Central America. The death toll in that period was staggering: more than 70,000 political murders in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala and 30,000 killed in the US Contras’ war against Nicaragua (David Edwards & David Cromwell: Guardians of power, The myth of the liberal media 2006).

What gave the US legitimacy was the myth of good and evil. In international politics, the US always represented the good and therefore had an obligation to intervene and chase evil away. This is a classic example of what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to rationalize one’s own sins as caused by difficult circumstances, while the sins of others are expressions of their evil and malevolent nature.

Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017) is the second ‘father’ of neoconservatism. He was born in Warsaw and spent part of his childhood in France and Germany, before his diplomat father moved the family to Canada. In 1953, he earned a PhD in political science at Harvard, where he later also became a teacher. In 1960, Brzezinski moved to Columbia University, where he headed the newly-founded Institute on Communist Affairs.

Madeleine Albright was one of Brzezinski’s students

In an interview reported in Newsweek, she stated that more children had died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq than in Hiroshima (one figure I have seen is 500,000). Madeleine Albright, then US Secretary of State, responded to the question of whether this was justifiable: “I think it’s a very difficult choice, but we think it’s worth the price.” This strikes a chord in the pit of my stomach. Iraq was sanctioned and invaded for the wrong reasons. There was no connection with 9/11 and Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

Together with Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski helped David Rockefeller establish the Trilateral Commission in 1973, with the aim of bringing together from the Western world elites in politics, media, business and finance in annual meetings, similar to the Bilderberg Group. In the 1960s he advised John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. In 1964 he supported Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign. He became the Jimmy Carter administration’s National Security Advisor and also a key advisor to both Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Barack Obama as President.

A Machiavellian personality

From the first pages of Brzezinski’s magnum opus The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), it is clear that Brzezinski is obsessed with imperialism and cannot imagine a world where superpowers do not compete for world domination.

He saw the nations and peoples of the world as pieces on a game board, and was one of the people who more or less tricked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan at the end of December 1979. According to the official history, the US did not start supporting the mujahideen until after the Soviet invasion. In reality, the support began six months earlier, with the intention of provoking a Soviet invasion — which did occur. In a 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski was asked if he regretted contributing to this cruel and pointless war. He replied:

“Regret what? The secret operation succeeded. The aim was to lure the Russians into the Afghan trap (Afghanistan has been described as the graveyard of empires). Why should I regret it? The day the Soviets crossed the border into Afghanistan, I wrote to President Carter: ‘This is our chance to give Russia its own Vietnam’.”

The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government. Afghanistan got 40 years of war and chaos. The world got the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Eurasia in focus

The fact that millions of people lost their lives in the war Brzezinski initiated in Afghanistan was of no concern to him. No price was too high when it came to fighting the Soviet Union. When Putin came to power, Brzezinski alternately called him a new Hitler, a Stalin, a thug and a mafia gangster.

Underlying his hatred was the belief that whoever masters Eurasia also masters the world. Approximately 75% of the world’s population lives in Eurasia, which is also home to most of the world’s raw material and energy resources. Ukraine, with its wheat production and Black Sea ports, plays a key role in this.

In an opinion piece published by the Washington magazine Politico on May 2, 2014, Brzezinski reiterated his view that the United States is exceptional and has the right and obligation to remove Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence, based on the premise that whoever rules Eurasia rules the world.

Brzezinski’s importance to the deep state and Washington’s hawks is hard to overestimate. Anyone interested in US foreign policy will find him, and later his son Mark Brzezinski, in many contexts. Mark Brzezinski is now the US ambassador to Poland. From 2011-15 he was the US ambassador to Sweden.

Exceptional states

Back in time. In the 1960s, neoconservatives resented the fact that with the Vietnam War the US lost focus on the Soviet Union . In return, they loved Israel, as an outpost of democracy and Western Civilization, constantly threatened by hostile and barbaric neighbors. They saw the US and Israel as morally exceptional. Neither of these two states would have to submit to international norms or organizations such as the UN Security Council. Their ability to protect themselves should not be restricted in any way. They act sovereignly. To do this, the US and Israel must be strong and superior military powers.

Ronald Reagan was not a neoconservative, but some key people around him were strongly influenced, such as CIA Director William Casey. He was convinced that terrorist groups around the world, such as the PLO, the Provisional IRA and Baader-Meinhof in Germany, were part of a terrorist network controlled by the Soviet Union. Some of the propaganda that Casey said proved this was made up by the CIA to smear the Soviet Union. This was a time when defense expenditures increased dramatically without regard to budget deficits. Military aid was given to dictators who said the magic words “I fight evil communists.”

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the neoconservatives risked being left out of the political game altogether. They got together and wrote a joint program statement, “The project for a new American Century”. In it, they stated that the US must at all costs maintain its position as the world’s only superpower.

Terrorists instead of communists

When Bush Jr. and the Republicans succeeded Bill Clinton and the Democrats, there was no change in foreign policy, even though a key element of Bush Jr.’s presidential campaign was that the US would avoid military intervention in other countries.

Then 9/11 happened, and the Bush regime adopted a new foreign policy that became a dream come true for neoconservatives. Many of those who were active under Reagan returned. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, Bush Jr. called Iraq, Iran and North Korea the axis of evil. The so-called Bush Doctrine gave the US the right to “pre-emptive war”, and it was alleged that the word “communist” was simply replaced by “terrorist”.

A declaration of war

At the NATO-summit in Bucharest in April 2008, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the US ambition to make Georgia and Ukraine members of NATO. She said “If there was an unlocked door before, that door is now wide open”.

Germany and France led a group of protesting European countries. They saw the decision as an unnecessary provocation to Russia’s incoming President Dmitry Medvedev. William J. Burns, former US ambassador to Russia, wrote the following in a letter to the US government:

“Ukraine’s entry into NATO is a violation of the reddest of all borders for the Russian elite. From the cavemen in the darkest recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s harshest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who sees Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who comes from East Germany, speaks Russian, and knows better than other Western political leaders how the Russians think, later called this NATO invitation a declaration of war against Russia.

Russia invades Georgia

To put an end to the concept of Georgia as a NATO country, Russia invaded on August 8 of that year. It was a quick affair. Ten days later, Russian President Medvedev announced that Russia was withdrawing from Georgia. At a NATO-meeting the following day, Condoleezza Rice commented:

“But perhaps most importantly, I think the declaration clearly shows that NATO intends to support Georgia’s territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty, and to support its democratically elected government, its democracy, and to deny Russia the strategic goal of undermining that democracy; to make Georgia weaker or to threaten Georgia’s territorial integrity. In that regard, a number of steps will be taken to support Georgia …”

However, it turned out to be mostly empty words. Russia still controls the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Georgia is not a member of NATO.

Russia counted Georgia as its security zone but, above all, it was unthinkable for Ukraine to join NATO. It is along this geographical corridor that Russia has been invaded time and again throughout its long history. The Russians therefore want a neutral Ukraine at all costs as a buffer between themselves and the West. However, Ukraine does not want to be neutral. Ukraine wants to be a member of NATO.

Neoconservatism summarized

In January of 2009, at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term, Jonathan Clarke, a prominent critic, highlighted the main characteristics of neoconservatism:

• Views the world in binary good/bad terms
• Low faith in diplomacy, readiness to use military force
• Emphasis on US unilateral action
• Contempt for multilateral organizations
• Focus on the Middle East

Victoria Nuland

Then came another setback, when Barack Obama took office. With the exception of a few key policy experts, including Brzezinski, he had no love for the neoconservatives and kept them out of the White House for his eight years. This did not prevent them from having great success at the level below, which came to be known as the Deep State. This can be illustrated by the political career of Victoria Nuland.

She was born in 1961 in the USA, the daughter of a Ukrainian/Jewish surgeon and a British mother. She first became visible in the political arena during Bill Clinton’s Democratic regime, as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Because of her roots in Eastern Europe, she was hired as an expert on the defunct Soviet Union.

Between 2003 and 2005, she was an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, where she played an important role in the invasion of Iraq. She continued as Bush Jr.’s NATO ambassador in Brussels. We then meet her as a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton. Under Obama, she was promoted to US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Victoria Nuland is married to the author and historian Robert Kagan, who is as confident as she is that the US represents ‘good’, with the duty to fight evil wherever in the world it rears its ugly snout. Although most of his predictions about regime change and war in Iraq turned out to be completely wrong, he is taken seriously in Washington. Kagan believes the US has a legitimate obligation to expand its power and “common universal values”, which is neoconservative code for the American version of democracy and free market institutions.

Victoria Nuland is one of the architects of the February 2014 Maidan uprising. A picture from Kiev on December 11, 2013 shows her handing out sandwiches to “allied” soldiers. In a leaked phone conversation she has with US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, they discuss who should be in Ukraine’s new government. It is understandable that she thinks the US has that right — as she said at a conference also held in December 2013, that the US had spent $5 billion on making Ukraine democratic. Today, with the delivery of weapons and ammunition, that sum has grown to an almost unimaginable $100 billion.

After the blowing up of Nord Stream 2, she told Senator Ted Cruz, in testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I am very pleased, like you, and probably like this entire administration, that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you say, a pile of scrap metal at the bottom of the ocean.” Earlier, before the blast, she had said: “If Russia somehow invades Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 will be stopped (‘not move forward’).”

When Elon Musk wrote on Twitter in February this year that no one is pushing the Ukraine war harder than Victoria Nuland, he was subjected to a flood of protests and accusations. That he was called “Putin’s idiot” is hardly surprising.

Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t matter

For neocons it is not important to position themselves politically, because they have an overriding goal. They became strong under the conservative Bush Jr. regime. They have grown even stronger under the democratic Biden regime. The Americans who orchestrated the 2014 coup in Kiev are the same ones running US foreign affairs today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor who was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan also led the planning of the Nord Stream sabotage.

Neocons spreading democracy, market economy and liberal values: that’s the fancy surface and legitimization. Underneath is what is far more important, that the US maintains its position as the world’s only superpower. It is extremely important to them that a victory in the Ukraine war shows China what happens to countries that challenge the US, as Russia is allegedly doing. Neocons are more interested in confronting enemies than cultivating friends. They engage in warmongering, disguised in social welfare policies and the utopian rhetoric of freedom and democracy.

The fight for the US to remain the sole superpower is being waged at all levels and at all costs. Neocons like wars and terrorist threats, because if there is no visible enemy to fight, there is a risk that the Americans will retreat into isolationism. For neocons, therefore, there is always a new Stalin. In our time, as we know, his name is Putin.

We are peace-loving; what are you arguing about?

Neocons claim that liberal democracy and the market economy are the universally best form of government for all countries on earth and see it as a duty for the United States to introduce this form of government not only in states where dictators and socialists rule, but also to intervene in countries that are disagreeable to them for other reasons. And they are prepared to do this by any means, not just by war. For them, it is perfectly okay to remove a disagreeable president in another country (Saddam), to track down and kill terrorists (bin Laden) and to overthrow regimes, even if they are elected by universal suffrage (Yanukovych): “We are peace-loving and can do whatever we want. So what are you arguing about?”

Good and bad

To conclude, I would like to remind you of last week’s chronicle on the US military-industrial complex. They are powerful and want war. Bring them together with the US neocons, who are also powerful and want war. Then realize that the US is the world’s only superstate, with by far the strongest military force. Now they have maneuvered Ukraine and Russia into a war that costs the US many billions of dollars but not the lives of American soldiers. The propaganda is convincing: Ukraine is the brave little country that wants to join Western democracy and is now fighting for its existence against the most evil empire of all: Russia. It is clear that we all have to help them win!

It is ingenious — AND DISGUSTING.

— Karl-Olov Arnstberg

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