U.S. leaders would rather accept ever-more extreme isolation as the price of power than surrender any of it.
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden boarding Air Force One at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England, June 9. (White House, Adam Schultz)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
It is remarkable how quickly the Biden administration is acquiring its stamp — the watermark it will leave on our parchment when it is done. This will be made of isolation and delusion. I conclude this partly because of what President Joe Biden and his people have done in the four months since assuming the executive branch, and partly because of Biden’s moment in the long story of America’s rise and decline in the post–1945 era.
Let us consider this moment in an historical context. Hard as it is to see one’s present as a passage in history, let us try, even as the living are too close to the present to accomplish this without conscious effort.
A string of events, chief among them lately the Alexei Navalny nonsense, the U.S.–cultivated tensions on Ukraine’s border with Russia this past spring and the HMS Defender’s purposely provocative intrusion into Russian waters off Crimea last week: It is now plain that the U.S. (by way of the ever-supine U.K. in the Defender case) simply does not want a settled relationship with the Russian Federation for the foreseeable future.
The rest of America’s traditional allies do, as Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel made plain last week, when the French and German leaders proposed a European Union summit with President Vladimir Putin — an implicit suggestion of a post–Biden summit of Europe’s own. It was the Poles and the Baltics, ever suffering from post–Soviet stress disorder, who shot down the idea.
It is the same across the Pacific: Will anybody in the end want to join the U.S. in some kind of confrontation with China inspired by game theory and other such Strangelovian procedures? This holds, once again, for core Europe and also for America’s traditional allies in East Asia — including, I must add, the almost-always supine Japanese.
This is what I mean by isolation.
Mounting Delusions
One need not range far to find evidence of America’s mounting delusions.
Antony Blinken, “Husband, dad, (very) amateur guitarist, 71st secretary of state,” as he puts it angelically, Saturday on Twitter:
“We will not waver in our commitment to condemn and eliminate torture, promote accountability for perpetrators, and support victims in their healing.”
On #InternationalDayAgainstTorture, we recognize the bravery and humanity of victims and survivors of torture around the world. We will not waver in our commitment to condemn and eliminate torture, promote accountability for perpetrators, and support victims in their healing. pic.twitter.com/KH3mgCEe35
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) June 26, 2021
Blinken is a font of such preposterous stuff, week in, week out — proclaiming freedom of the press while Julian Assange is a few miles away in a prison cell, tears for Syrian children whose suffering the U.S. inflicts — there is no limit, truly.
One is pleased to read Mr. Deeply Concerned (a nickname a Twitter friend offers) is a husband and dad, for we can rest assured he is as honest as Abe, an all-around good joe, thoroughly in the American grain, and, of course, superior to the unmarried. His skills as secretary of state seem to match his way with the guitar, but in both cases it is all good American fun.
Ned Price, the robot who flacks for the amateur strummer, one day earlier:
“Venezuelans have a right to democracy. The United States is committed to working with our partners like the EU and Canada toward a comprehensive negotiated solution…”
Venezuelans have a right to democracy. The United States is committed to working with our partners like the EU and Canada toward a comprehensive negotiated solution that leads to free and fair local, parliamentary, and presidential elections. https://t.co/k7xnmtFuw6 https://t.co/8hBkkl4y8H
— Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) June 25, 2021
I draw from two days’ output from Foggy Bottom. Not one word in either of these two tweets is true. The Biden administration has accumulated a small mountain of this rubbish since assuming office Jan. 20.
This is what I mean by delusion.
I am not here to tell you that policies the rest of the world does not like, and our illusions as to our spotless virtue as we make our hypocritical way in the world, are anything new. Hardly is this so. But they come now at a critical moment in world history. This is what makes Biden’s arrival at the White House so significant.
Biden and his national security people had a choice on Inauguration Day. Other recent presidents have had it, too. But for none has it been so sharply defined. I have wondered ever since whether Biden & Co. understood this and consciously made the wrong one, or whether they were not even capable of understanding a choice had to be made.
The rise of non–Western powers — notably China and Russia, of course — is the decisive phenom here. By last Jan. 20, either the U.S. could alter course and incorporate itself into a multipolar world order, or it could continue on. Biden went for the latter course — making a choice it may not have known it had to make.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken being interviewed by Der Spiegel in Berlin, June 24. Spokesperson Ned Price on right. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)
This already proves fateful. If creeping isolation were there in the background since the mid–Cold War years, as I would argue — it now grows ever more evident, ever more swiftly. The imperial presumption that has characterized U.S. conduct abroad since the early postwar years is now — let us look straight into its eyes — pushing us toward a profound isolation.
Delusion, it turns out, is among the direct consequences of a late-stage empire that refuses to look at history’s clock. It is a cousin, then, of isolation.
Two Books
These past months cause me to take down from their shelf two books whose spines are never, in truth, out of sight in my tiny study. In them I find the historical ballast I think we need to understand ourselves and our predicaments.
Luigi Barzini Jr. was an Italian journalist who entertained a great admiration for America, its people, its institutions and its service to the all nations in World War II. He published Americans Are Alone in the World in 1953 — in English, very curiously. This was an interpretation of America in the earliest stage of its effort to accumulate what soon turned out to be hegemonic power. (I have long wondered why he wanted English-speakers to read it before it went into Italian.)
Look, Barzini said in his 260 pages, the Americans did not go looking for the place they suddenly find themselves occupying atop the world order. Circumstances thrust this upon them. They are in consequence a nervous, uncertain people, unaccustomed as they are to so prominent and influential a role. Let us make all efforts to understand, to sympathize.
We have to count Americans Are Alone as an artifact now, but a useful one to have around. Barzini had it wrong in various ways: Thrust upon them? See Stephen Werthheim’s very fine Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard, 2020) for a reply to this bit of indulgence. An anxious people? Well, Americans are perennially an anxious people, but the empire builders were ready to rock ’n’ roll at least by 1947, when President Harry Truman dropped the equivalent of nearly $5 billion on the fascist monarchy in Greece and the Truman Doctrine was declared the rule of the road.
But Barzini had some important things right, too. America enjoyed a very great deal of admiration after the 1945 victories and deserved it. And so, he faces us with a very useful question: How did we get from then to now? He also had one great, big thing right. Let us bend Lord Acton’s old adage to make the point: Power isolates, and absolute power isolates absolutely. Barzini understood this from the start.
This is our circumstance: We live with leaders who would rather accept ever more extreme isolation as the price of power than surrender any of it. One cannot blame Biden, at least no more than any other postwar president. The only ones who even hinted at a change of course were Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and neither had the gravitas to see the point through. (We will never know about RFK, sadly.)
Barzini had one further point. His concluding chapter is titled, “The Self–Deceiving Magic of Prestige,” and I will let this sit as an introduction to the question of delusion. [prestigio in Italian means conjuring.]
Daniel Boorstin published The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream in 1962, and I have long valued this underappreciated book for its singular insights. Boorstin had been briefly a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, when it was not so uncommon to join, and upon resigning (also not uncommon) took his place among that most odious of species, the Cold War liberals. Nobody’s perfect, I remind myself in Boorstin’s case.
Boorstin’s thesis was that during the Cold War’s first decade Americans stopped seeing themselves and what they did in the world as these were, but instead substituted images of themselves and myths of their goodness as the means by which they flinched from… from nearly everything. If Nietzsche were alive, maybe he would write a book called The Birth of Delusion.
Images, as Benito Mussolini and various others of his sort understood, are diabolically powerful in manipulating the public consciousness. The cliques in Washington came to understand this, too, and so enlisted the television networks, Hollywood, the advertising industry, and other “image-makers” —curious phrase from this period — in the cause. What was the cause? To keep Americans from seeing that America was other than beautiful as it constructed a global empire and lawlessly trampled the rights and lives of countless others.
Now you know why we had to suffer the Beach Boys all those years [mocked by the Beatles in Back in the U.S.S.R]. Don’t worry, be happy.
No culture can be so inundated with images that it is not eventually overcome by them. This is our case: At this point imagery, frivolous or otherwise, constitutes a formidable barrier between us and the ordinary experience of life, a blind we cannot see around.
Our broadcast news, as Boorstin saw even then, gives us “a flood of pseudo-events.” If you are not smiling, despite all that goes on gruesomely around us, there is something wrong with you. This, the tyranny of American happiness, is heart-breakingly destructive of any true happiness, not to mention clarity of mind, one might achieve.
It is perfectly natural, I suppose, that those projecting the administration’s carefully cultivated image would continue to traffic in imagery and delusion. Either they have not noticed that our by-now monstrous edifice of symbols, pictures and postures has begun to collapse or they have noticed and simply do not know what to do other than keep on pretending it has not.
I do not see how a nation that wants to get along in a century that shouts “parity” and “common purpose” from every quarter will do so if it effectively insists on its own isolation and if it lives in an artificially constructed version of the world. There is always failure, of course, and I ask readers not to miss the optimism buried in this apparently pessimistic thought.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“The only ones who even hinted at a change of course were Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and neither had the gravitas to see the point through.”
I beg your pardon. JFK accomplished a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets. He proposed a joint space program with them. He supported Lumumba against the Dutch imperialists, and Algeria against the French. He began closing American overseas military bases and refused to send combat troops to Vietnam and intervene militarily in Cuba. In fact he was opening back-channel discussions with Fidel at the time of his execution (by Dulles, Angleton, et.al.). He paid tribute to the sacrifice of the Soviets in WW2. The Alliance for Progress and Peace Corps were not cold-war programs by design and the Alliance became so only after he was gone. Johnson dropped it altogether. The ending to his Peace Speech,”we all share this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future and we are all mortal” sure sounds like a hint of change to me. You and all CN readers who so far haven’t should check it out in its entirely; it’s on You Tube at
hXXps//www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkKnfk4k40.
The disregard and contempt for JFK, largely originally set in motion by the CIA, continues even today.
He didn’t support Lumumba against Dutch imperialists but rather Belgian imperialists. Belgian Congo – remember?
Right. My bad. Sorry.
No problem – was a pedantic comment, which I wanted to delete a second after I sent it. Would be nice if the CN comment section had an edit function.
1. Unfortunately American marketing techniques have been successfully applied to condition us to accept American “exceptionalism” as the perverted norm for many decades. I say conditioned because its been done knowingly “with malice aforethought”. Along with this was the propaganda about our Democratic system n how we were a “beacon of liberty” for the world. Unless u displayed contrary behavior that negatively affected some large corporations. Then we had to kill your leaders n replace them with the most fascist one available.
2. I grew up with this archaic Cold War b.s. and the (made up)”missile gap” et al and seeing this absolute garbage being prepped for a repeat by our Cold War era president is further proof that the rulers of America know nothing but psychotic Profitism (aka Crapitalism) and exhibit a completely sociopathic mentality where murder n destruction (usually overseas in the 3rd world – except for 9/11 here) are meaningless unless they get the contract to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure.(read the latest bloated military budget for details).
Almost no-one has noticed the billions spent in destroying n then rebuilding,for example, Iraq,while at home our crumbling decaying outdated infrastructure rates a C- to a D by the industry’s experts . Some Empire.
Tyranny always results in alienation and the need for a grand narrative that obfuscates the the grisly reality. But on a cultural level, as Americas arrow inexorably plummets, it’s difficult to imagine that many people still unconsciously invest in the images that once appeared to have solidity. Deep cynicism and apathy – along with the dehumanizing effects of trickle-down porn culture – now permeate the vapid, feel-good media presentation of the U.S.A.
On a socio-economic level the gig is up for increasing numbers of Americans; given the deindustrialization and financialization of the state. As Chris Hedges has commented, only highly organized – nonviolent – mass civil action along the lines of Extinction Rebellion will be effective in helping change this suicidal course of moribund empire.
A few comments regarding this very interesting, thought-provoking article.
The USA is isolated because it’s the world hegemon – and hegemons are by definition isolated, as they don’t have equals but only vassals, servants and a few remaining antagonists – the barbarians beyond the empire’s current reach, who have yet to be incorporated into the empire.
And it doesn’t really appear that the hegemony is in decline. OK, there may be a tactical withdrawal in Afghanistan, but there is no sign of withdrawal elsewhere in the greater Middle East, Africa etc. – it’s quite the opposite. As Piotr Berman describes in his comment below, the Europeans are fully in line – like children they may occasionally stamp their feet and try to go their own way, but at the end they do exactly what their parent wants. The last European leaders (in the West) who can considered to have been independent were Charles de Gaulle and Olaf Palme.
The “delusion” is there in the form of state propaganda, and the question is to what extent the leaders in the West are drinking their own Kool Aid. Biden’s foreign policy boy wonder Blinken seems to be doing so. He certainly seems vacuous – like a foreign-policy Dan Quayle – but at least doesn’t appear to have the malice of a Hillary Clinton or Pompeo. But the humanitarian “do-gooders” have indeed caused more evil than most. Looking back, the most adept and intelligent secretaries of state in recent memory – who could play foreign policy chess as well as, say, a Lavrov – were (surprisingly) in the Reagan era – George Schultz and James Baker.
Readers might also be interested in “Fantasyland” by Kurt Anderson.
Anderson quotes from Boorstin’s The Image” in his introduction to Part IV: “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them” The illusions that we are uniformly good and noble, peaceful, desirous of democracy for every nation on earth, care about the poor and needy and sick, that feelings and opinions are just as true as facts, that America will be rewarded because it is noble. According to Anderson, the American belief in fantasy is nothing new. “America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers … which has made us susceptible to fantasy.”
“Look, Barzini said in his 260 pages, the Americans did not go looking for the place they suddenly find themselves occupying atop the world order. ”
This statement is incorrect. The historical record shows something quite different. Clearly the author has not read “Tomorrow The World” by Stephen Wertheim which really brings together the process of empire formation which took place between 1940 and 1945. It is a key book on the key years of the formation of the Five Eyes Western white English speaking empire. It knits together a lot of partial information found in, for example “The Brothers” about the Dulles brothers and their sole control of US power after the war.
He writes as if there was some good period of a wonderful empathetic America which has never existed. We started by wiping out as much of the indigenous peoples as we could between the Aleutian Islands and Alaska all the way to Terra del Fuego nearly 30% of the land on earth no one in this civilization has ever accounted for that crime but the world is changing.
Western civilization above all else seeks power over human life. An accounting will come, and not from any Western god.
You misunderstood what you read, Mr or Ms Babyl-on. Patrick did indeed cite Wertheim prominently in the above piece.
What Barzini wrote obviously was written long before “Tomorrow the World” and a bit more careful reading is required on your part.
Cheers.
I just reject any reference to US behavior as anything other than the fascist demand of domination over the lives of all people. Power – the power of life and death over others – is the only goal of Western civilization, its religious foundations demand it. It is irredeemable in my view.
The above editorials are worth more than many journalists are trying to braiwash our minds with their ‘TRASH Articles”
Mr. Lawrence, if you do not already own / have not yet read, be sure to check out “Advance to Barbarism”, also written in the ’50s by F.J. Veale – a book I found profoundly disturbing and prophetic, analyzing another Post-War failing of our government. Here is a review for you and your readers to peruse. hXXps://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2106&context=lalrev
Another great book is “A History of Bombing” by Sven Lindqvist (“known for his book “Exterminate all the Brutes”!)
If delusion of so-called virtuous altruistic US is the cousin of isolationism, then Colonization is the cousin of corporatism.
Unfettered capitalism swims in an ocean of blood.
The only event that will wake up the American populus from it’s ignorant past is conscription. Unfortunately the powers already know this.
If the USA were to wall itself off from the rest of the world, as Ming dynasty China did, the rest of humanity might not miss us much. We are not as indispensable as we sometimes think.
“We will not waver in our commitment to condemn and eliminate torture” Is Blinken going to fire Haspell the Torturer from the CIA? Somehow, I doubt it.
“Is Blinken going to fire Haspell the Torturer from the CIA?” I doubt it too Zhu. It’s more likely that she will be held up as the standard in how to do the job for future candidates. The hypocrisy of american officials is sickeningly obvious.
At the moment, the loneliness of Americans is the loneliness of a hegemon who cannot relax by going to a bar to have some drinks and banter with fellow hegemons. But hegemony proved more robust that I have imagined 5 years ago. Exhibit one is how EU nixed the agreement with Iran concerning the nuclear program that was negotiated very, very laboriously and Germany, France, UK and EU promised to adhere INDEPENDENTLY from USA. But when Trump brusquely ordered them to cease dealing with Iran, what did they do? First, they voiced disagreement. Second, they applied to Department of Treasury for waivers. Then they were duly denied, and apart from some pseudo-actions, that was that.
Moreover, European were so mentally exhausted by this ordeal that they followed assorted follies like looting Venezuela and savaging Syria. In the case of Syria, there were elaborate justification, if bogus, but in the case of Venezuela, they took some loot too, so perhaps that made them happy. And domestically in USA, the public is admirably in line with the establishment even when savagery on epic scale happens, i.e. in Yemen. There were some toothless votes in Congress with total apathy outside narrow circles.
In the last years of Cold War, the press and opposition were less supine. Reagan was a “victim” of a Congressional resolution tying his hands concerning Nicaragua, so he resorted to subterfuge that eventually lead to Iran-Contra affair. Now we organize bloody riots in Nicaragua, sanction them to the hilt, and EU follows. Canadian refusal to sanction Cuba during Cold War seems almost quaint.
Poland is a somewhat cute example of obedience. It is VERY HARD to translate “rule based World Order” into Polish, “W0rld Order” sounds really sinister, and “rule based” has to use a word applied to “rules of soccer/basketball etc.” but weird when applied to international relations. (to me it is almost strange that in English “rbWO” is acceptable). So the local press just skips that, but obedience to the hegemon persists.
But there are some cracks. For example, there is enough of free press in Russia to make Russians familiar with Western rhetoric, but it takes only modest skill to convince the lopsided majority that it is ridiculous hypocrisy. This is very different from the situation in the final years of Soviet Communism. Similarly, rigid uniformity of “responsible media” that grew in the last 20 years does not work in Latin America. “Isolating” Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba is increasingly hard. Thus the most recent Imperial successes like swift sanctions on Belarus inspire to read chapter “On retreat” from the seminal work of Clausewitz, “On War”. Perhaps this book is not known in America, but surely it is known in many European countries.
Hmmm. It’s not clear to me why Russian freedom of the press is important to being familiar with Western rhetoric. It is a true statement of fact that Russia has a free press. Pravda simply isn’t the same mendacious publication it was back in the ’50s and ’60s. But the Russians can get their very own copies of the NYT and WaPo if they wish and they can also read just about any publication they wish on line. The free flow of information today is incredible, almost as incredible as the stupidity of the average American who continues to rely on the MSM for his news even though that MSM is lying, omitting, and ignoring real news. And so they remain woefully ignorant of what everybody else on the planet is doing and thinking.
Whilst I would always recommend Gen. Von Clausewitz’s treatise to anyone wishing to understand military behavior and the use of the military in a civil society, I would be cautious in describing the “swift sanctions on Belarus” as being an imperial success. RT reports today that Belarus has withdrawn from the “Eastern Partnership” and is in the final stages of essentially merging with mother Russia. So. Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed, it is nothing compared to the Force. It looks as if the color revolution that “The West” tried to foist on Belarus has, at least for the time being, been thwarted. After pushing Russia into China’s arms, they have pushed Belarus into Russia’s arms.
And finally, you spoke of the meaningless line endlessly repeated by fools in Western regimes. Rules based international order. It’s really not so hard to say in English but I always correct people who say garbage like that by informing them that what they are talking about is the Calvinball rules based international order. I gather from some of your comments that you’re not an American and may not understand that reference. So I’ll tell you. Calvinball is a game invented by Calvin and Hobbes (An American cartoon drawn and written by Bill Watterson from 1985 to 1995. Calvin is a 6 yo boy and Hobbes is his stuffed tiger with whom he has a reality bending relationship). Calvinball has no rules; the players make up their own rules as they go along, so that no Calvinball game is like another. And I think that pretty well describes what the US has been doing.
You are right! Pepe Escobar has quoted in “Raging Twenties” the Russian Alexander Dugan speaking with “French philosopher” Bernard-Henri Levy.
“I refuse the universality of modern western values. I challenge that the only way to interpret democracy is the rule of minorities against the majority, that the only way to interpret freedom is as individual freedom and that the only way to interpret human rights is by projecting a modern, Western, individualistic version of what it means to he human on other cultures”.
The “rules -based order” is a US construct ignoring international law.
Concerning von Clausewitz, “On Retreat” chapter discusses the need of executing a series of loosing battles to slow down the advance, with some losses that can be absorbed. After a swift advance onto Minsk, the population seems to tolerate hitherto delayed measures to integrate with Russia which will insulate them from the bulk of sanctions. The wave of “Protasiewicz” sanctions is probably a huge flop: Putin is very stingy when the cash is short (cheap oil) and the beneficiary evades obligation. I would compare those sanctions to a battle aiming to stop the advance from the East.
However, as LNG prices are reaching the Moon, European who rely on NG have to put their hopes for comfortable winter in the swift completion of North Stream II. Flamboyantly anti-Russian German Greens dropped in polls, something line from 25 down to 19, CDU/CSU, the party of mature adults, is riding high again. And for the first time in many years, normal relations with Russia are not a sign of betrayal of European values but a sensible adult behavior. The times of dreaded Russian influence are approaching. Calvin could drop a depth charge onto the pipeline, but this is a VERY BAD time to do it.
Back to Clausewitz, I was checking if the title “On War” is familiar to English speakers, at it seems that it is. However, one of the hit, from publication Diplomat, was terrifying: “Most of what you know about von Clausewitz is wrong”. To wit, most people believe in a wrong translation of “war is the extension of politics by/with other means”. By choosing wrongly between “by” and “with”, educated Americans loose most of their knowledge on Clausewitz! That says that this knowledge is pitifully small. Incidentally, I read the book during my youth in Poland, and Polish translation uses neither “with” nor “by”, the natural flow of sentence require to decline “other means” so it is clear that they are somehow used, and it is left to the intelligence of the listener to figure it out.
My understanding is that to a practical Prussian, war without political aims or with unattainable aims belongs to another book, perhaps “On Lunacy”.
Dear Mr. Berman: please learn the difference between “lose” and “loose”. Sounds like you’ve been reading too many Facebook posts. Cheers!
I like your statement that to a practical Prussian, war without realistic aims belongs to the book “On Lunacy.” Something to be written by one of our humanitarian interventionists.
(also don’t worry about some typos – if one writes quickly these happen)
Regarding the EU’s ever-obeisance to the whims of the U.S. foreign policy mongers and its only recently apparently finding some symptoms of a spine, we must remember—or for perhaps the first time for many—to factor in the machinations of the CIA / OSS going all the way back to the closing days of WW II, if not the formulating of a post-war world governing architecture that strategists were most certainly considering in secret before and throughout the war.
Patrick’s reference to Stephen Wertheim’s “Tomorrow the World,” a copy of which is right now within my arm’s reach, along with Stephen Kinzer’s “The Brothers” [Dulles] and David Talbot’s seminal “The Devil’s Chessboard” make quite clear how deeply the U.S. intel complex has surreptitiously held the governments of post-war Europe on a tight leash, its intentions and means being graphically established early-on with what was done to the Left in both Greece and Italy in the late 1940s, and nearly enough culminating in DeGaulle’s assassination by the CIA, JFK’s ultimate nemesis. President Kennedy had to admit to DeGaulle’s government that he had no control over the CIA in the wake of such a brazen act and his own fate for crossing Allen Dulles was being sealed shortly thereafter. Displeasing Allen Dulles had consequences. The French ‘secretly’ building Israel’s nuclear capabilities at Dimona had to have been done under the auspices of the CIA, especially via the works of “The Ghost,” James Jesus Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence chief, who is honored with a virtual shrine in Israel.
The point I’m trying to make is the CIA has never relented in Europe, nor anywhere, they are the omnipresent enforcement arm of US policy and you can bet it continues to hold extortion, blackmail, and assassination in its tool kit. Past and contemporary European leaders have had to live under such a pall throughout their careers. Because the CIA is everywhere, and it is quite proactive as seen in all of the world’s ‘sectors.’ Recently so in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Belarus, Ukraine, Syria, Iran, earlier on in Chechnya, hell, the list goes incessantly on and on.
The fact is, the facts are, Europe and Asia, the world near and far, has been living under an Occupation as sinister as the Nazis since the formal signing of peace treaties in 1945. Wertheim’s book goes far in its explaining the raison d’être for today’s ground truth.
“Tomorrow the World.” Indeed.