“To hell with the rest of the world“
Long-term strategy and unipolar claim of the USA
by Wolfgang Bittner* Germany
(9 August 2024) According to its power elites, the United States of America is “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, as the national anthem proclaims. And “God’s Own Country” is called to rule the world. To assert this unipolar claim, it has developed a long-term strategy since the 19th century, which includes maintaining an excessively well-equipped army and establishing around 1,000 military bases around the world.
(Photo wolfgangbittner.de)
It cannot be overlooked that US society is fanatical about religion and fundamentalism in large parts and right up to Congress. The elective affinity between puritanism and capitalism, an “economic doctrine of predestination” – whom God loves, he makes rich – is deeply rooted here to this day. In addition, many of the hardliners obviously believe that everything that benefits the USA ultimately benefits the whole world, which gives rise to their claim to global supremacy.
Continuity for more than 200 years
This unjustified hubris was also followed by the policy of President Barack Obama, who smiles winningly. He has waged seven wars and, in a speech at the West Point Military Academy, described the USA as the “only indispensable nation”, the linchpin of all alliances from Europe to Asia, “unrivalled in the history of nations”.1 In doing so, Obama was demonstrating what has long been the policy of the United States, which has been able to assert its imperial claim against Europe, especially Germany, since the 20th century.
This power policy had its beginnings in 1823 at the latest, when President James Monroe presented the outlines of a long-term foreign policy for the United States to the US Congress: no tolerance of interference by other countries on the American double continent, and at the same time the USA’s claim to protection and intervention in Latin America.2 The USA thus laid its hands on Central and South America.
In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919, President 1901–1909) then authorised the USA to exercise “international police power” and uncompromising enforcement of economic and strategic interests. His motto was: “Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far.”3 After all treaties with the Native Americans had been broken and the last devastating battle had been fought at Wounded Knee in 1890, this was primarily aimed at the Latin American countries in the “USA’s backyard”, but also Morocco and Korea, and soon afterwards worldwide.
A statement by the subsequent President Woodrow Wilson was entirely consistent with this:
“Since trade transcends national boundaries and the entrepreneur claims the world as his market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the closed doors of nations must be burst open. [...] The concessions acquired by the financiers must be guaranteed by the ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of recalcitrant nations is violated in the process.”4
Barack Obama put it this way in an interview with the US television channel Vox on 11 February 2016:
"We occasionally we have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn’t do what we need them to do. If it weren’t for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we have – if we didn’t have that dose of realism, we wouldn’t get anything done, either. [...] American leadership, in part, comes out of our can-do spirit. We’re the largest, most powerful country on Earth, [...] we have no peer in terms of countries that could attack or provoke the United States.”5
The influence of the world’s number one power
The USA finally achieved its goal of being the world’s number one power after the Second World War when President Harry S. Truman announced this to both houses of Congress on 12 March 1947:
“I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. [...] In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. […] The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world – and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”6
According to Truman’s altruistic words, this “support” of free peoples by the USA should include “above all economic and financial aid”, “which forms the basis for economic stability and orderly political conditions”, but realpolitik followed the usual path in the interests and to the advantage of the USA and mostly to the detriment and disadvantage of the “free peoples”, as a look at history up to the immediate present proves.7
The journalist Werner Rügemer has analysed the influence and exertion of influence of the USA on the European economy, especially the German economy, and comes to some startling conclusions:
“The most important entrepreneurial capital ownership in Western capitalism today is organised by different types of financial players. The largest in terms of investment capital are known as ‘locusts’. Since the end of the 1990s, they have bought up around 10,000 medium-sized companies in Germany, utilised them, sold them on or floated them on the stock exchange. Then there are the hedge funds, the venture capital investors – they get the start-ups off the ground –, the elite investment banks such as Macquarie and Rothschild, the private banks such as Metzler and Pictet, the traditional banks such as Deutsche Bank. The USA is the largest centre of capital and the most important military, intelligence and media power bloc for securing this system. The most important global financial service providers are also linked to the USA: the big three rating agencies, the commercial law firms like Freshfields, the management consultants like McKinsey, the auditors like PricewaterhouseCoopers, the PR agencies like Soros’ Renaissance – I call them the civilian private army of Western capitalism.”8
Preventing Germany from cooperating with Russia
Russia has no place in the USA’s economic and military strategy. The former director of the influential think tank Stratfor, George Friedman, made a remarkable statement on this egocentric, peace-threatening policy in his speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on 4 February 2015:
“The primordial interest of the United States over which for a century we have fought wars – World War I and World War II and the Cold War, – has been the relationship between Germany and Russia. Because united they are the only force that could threaten us; and to make sure that doesn’t happen.”9
Friedman explains why this policy continues to the present day as follows:
“For the United States, the primordial fear is [...] that German capital and German technology will combine with Russian natural resources and Russian manpower. This is the only combination, that has for centuries scared the hell of the United States. So how does this play out? Well, the US has already put its cards on the table. It is the line from the Baltics to the Black Sea. [...] The point is that the United States is prepared to create a ‘cordon sanitaire’, a security belt, around Russia.”
Basically, this has been worked on in secret since the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.
Friedman continues:
“The United States has a fundamental interest. It controls all the oceans of the world. No other power has ever done that. Because of that we get to invade people, and they don’t get to invade us.”
Many peoples are also unable to defend themselves, as has been shown recently. Anyone who opposes is ruined or bombed.
Friedman’s “confession” only caused a stir in the so-called alternative media. The same applies to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s statements, who saw Eurasia as the “chessboard of the USA” on which they made their moves in the battle for global supremacy. Brzezinski wrote in his book “The Grand Chessboard”, in which he developed the geopolitical strategy of the USA after the fall of the Soviet Union:
“Hence, the issue of how a globally engaged America copes with the complex Eurasian power relationships – particularly whether it prevents the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power – remains central to America’s capacity to exercise global primacy.”10
Henry Kissinger’s statement of 2 February 2014, according to which regime change in Kiev was, so to speak, the dress rehearsal for “what we want to do in Moscow”, should also be seen in this context.11
Joseph Biden: “I run the world”
In an interview with the US broadcaster ABC on 6 July 2024, President Joseph Biden demonstrated the self-image of the US government when he was asked about his physical and mental condition after a disastrous election campaign duel with Donald Trump. He explained on camera:
“I take a cognitive test every day. You know, I don’t just campaign, I run the world. That sounds like an exaggeration, but we are the most important nation in the world.”12
This statement was accepted by Western politicians and journalists almost without any comment, which in turn allows conclusions to be drawn about the depravity of these actors.
In a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 2 October 2014, Biden, who was still US Vice President at the time, made the following statement:
“We have given Putin a simple choice: Respect Ukraine’s sovereignty or you will face increasing consequences. That has allowed us to rally the world’s major developed countries to impose real cost on Russia. It’s true they [the EU] did not want to do that. But again, it was America’s leadership, and the president of the United States insisting, at times almost having to embarrass Europe to stand up and take economic hits to impose cost. And the results have been massive capital flight from Russia, a virtual freeze on foreign direct investment, a rouble at an all-time low against the dollar and the Russian economy teetering on the brink of recession.”13
The fact that the Berlin government has followed this policy, which is diametrically opposed to German interests, to the present day, as can be seen from statements by Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, is a disgrace and cannot be explained solely by Germany's lack of sovereignty.
The statements of top US politicians, repeated over more than a century, provide an overall picture of the monopolistic imperial policy of the USA, which Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, characterised with the words: “To hell with the rest of the world.”14
| * Writer and journalist Dr Wolfgang Bittner is the author of numerous books, including «Die Eroberung Europas durch die USA», «Die Heimat, der Krieg und der Goldene Westen», «Deutschland – verraten und verkauft» and «Ausnahmezustand – Geopolitische Einsichten und Analysen unter Berücksichtigung des Ukraine-Konflikts», 2014–2023. |
Source: first published by “NachDenkSeiten”, www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=118252
(Reprinted with kind permission of the author.)
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
2 So-called Monroe-Doktrin. See: https://amerika21.de/analyse/239008/monroe-doktrin-totgesagte-leben-laenger
3 Cf. Theodore Roosevelt: The strenuous Life. Essays and Addresses, New York 1906, as well as Theodore Roosevelt typed letter signed as governor of New York, 26 January 1900, https://historical.ha.com/itm/autographs/u.s.-presidents/theodore-roosevelt-typed-letter-signed-as-governor-of-new-york-two-pages-9-x-115-albany-new-york-january-26-190/a/6054-34087.s
4 Cit. Wilfried Röhrich: Politik als Wissenschaft – Ein Überblick, Opladen 1986
5 Cit. RT German, 12 February 2015, https://deutsch.rt.com/11745/international/obamas-diplomatie-verstaendnis-wir-muessen-gewalt-anwenden-wenn-laender-nicht-das-machen-was-wir-wollen/. Cf. also Friday 15 February2015, www.freitag.de/autoren/hans-springstein/der-us-praesident-hat-wieder-klartext-geredet
6 So-called Truman-Doktrin, cit. Manfred Görtemaker a.o.: Das Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts?, p. 58
7 At the end of the 1940s, the USA withdrew most of its troops from Germany to deploy them in the Korean War in 1950, in which around four million people died, and the country was divided.
8 Werner Rügemer: Die Wahrheit ist auf unserer Seite, Neue Rheinische Zeitung Online, 21 November 2018, www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=25399
9 See AntikriegTV: US-Strategie, YouTube, 17 March 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln_ApfoFgw (8 July 2024)
10 Zbigniew Brzezinski: The Grand Chessboard– American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997, XIV Introduction
11 Cit. www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=20079
13 Cit. newscan, Zeitdokument: Wir zwangen die EU zu Sanktionen gegen Russland, 5 January 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLO7uKVarB8 (8 July 2024)
14 Cit. Florian Linse, NachDenkSeiten, 8 August 2018, www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=45368