Is American foreign policy ‘values driven’ or ‘interest driven’?

See today’s edition of ‘Dialogue Works’ with host Nima Alkhorshid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l6yhN3Uq8Q

I am delighted that the dissonant note I sounded on air in two widely-viewed foreign policy online channels last week has reverberated and brought many different voices into the discussion both on the internet and at kitchen tables, so to speak.

The spark was my disparaging the notion that the Israel Lobby determines U.S. foreign policy on the Middle East today as the region approaches all-out war.

Alternative Media, which as a group stands up against what the general herd believing the Washington narrative is saying has within it the same very human weakness of behaving in a herd manner itself and resenting any challenges to what the best known experts and talking heads in its midst are saying.

So be it, but neither Truth nor understanding emerges from thundering herds. 

In what follows, I intend to go beyond the simple argument over whether the dog (USA) wags the tail (Israel) in the unfolding murderous rampage of the Jewish State in its neighborhood, or whether the tail is wagging the dog. 

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In the past several days I have received numerous comments on my web platforms and in emails directed to my yahoo address providing substantive support for my assertion that the Americans are in fact using Israel to fight a proxy war against Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas in the Middle East, in a manner very similar to the way that Washington is using Ukraine to wage war at  one distance and in deniable fashion with nuclear armed Russia.

One writer pointed me to a 2007 study by a subsidiary of The Brookings Institution, the highest think tank of the Democratic Party. This long document looked into what the policy options could be for further relations with Iran. The most tantalizing of these was set out on page 89 and following, explaining how and why Israel should be the tool used to destroy the Iranian nuclear installations.  Perhaps Donald Trump had been reading up on these pages before making his recommendations on the very same subject a day ago.

Another writer pointed me to an appearance on ‘Dialogue Works’ last week by Michael Hudson, who had served as an assistant in the 1970s to Herman Kahn, the author of Thinking about the Unthinkable, a book suggesting that a nuclear war could be won. Kahn was said to be the model for Dr Strangelove in the movie of the same name. He circulated very high in U.S. policy deliberations and Hudson was by his side.

 In this interview, Hudson explained how the decision to use proxies to fight its wars was taken by top U.S. decision makers as a result of lessons from the failed Vietnam War:  reversals on the battleground had resulted in political destabilization at home, forcing Lyndon Johnson to abandon his re-election bid. A second decision taken in the same period but not mentioned in this interview was to abandon the draft in favor of a smaller ‘professional army.’ The net result of such proposed policies would become apparent as from 1991 when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States with free hands to remake the world and it entered upon wars without end that cost the American citizenry nothing in blood, since proxy wars would be fought by our allies, and nothing in treasure, since they would be paid for by Treasury notes bought up by the Chinese and other foreigners.

Still another commentator suggested that I watch an interview given last week by Colonel Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson circulated at the top levels of the federal government involved in foreign and military policy.  When asked what he thought of my suggestion the United States is using Israel as its proxy rather than being led around by Israel, Wilkerson said that this view does not characterize the whole federal government but that such views do exist within it, particularly in the circle of Neocons formerly headed by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. He went on to say that many such Neocons remain at positions of responsibility to this day.

This authoritative comment that partially vindicated my argument set me to thinking, and in the end I have come to agree that there are at least two major factions at the decision-making level of the government today with respect to foreign and military policy. Let us put aside the ‘Neoliberal’ or ‘Neoconservative’ labels because they can be confusing and inconsistent.  Instead let us speak in terms that most everyone will instantly recognize distinctly:  those advocating a ‘values driven’ foreign policy versus those advocating an ‘interests driven’ foreign policy.  The former are usually identified by academics as Wilsonian Idealists, the latter as ‘Realists’ or ‘Realpolitik’ practitioners. The former today are Tony Blinken and the other State Department and security spokespersons who daily feed disinformation to the press. The latter are hidden away in their offices where they pull the levers of power.

This bifurcation of Idealists and Realists can be traced back to the Founders of the Republic, but evolved substantially over time before reaching the forms we see today. In American universities, I think that the Wilsonian Idealists vastly outnumber the Realists, who hold only a very few bastions, of which the most notable is the University of Chicago. That is where Hans Morgenthau held forth for many decades after WWII and where Professor John Mearsheimer holds forth today.

The take-over of the field by the Wilsonian Idealists has had a tragic impact on the preparation of a generation of American journalists and diplomats. This is because the underlying principle of the Idealist school is that people are the same everywhere and there is no particular reason to study the languages or history of different countries. This has led to a depreciation of the curriculum for area studies at the major U.S. universities like Harvard and Columbia, where the country specific knowledge is replaced with quantitative skills that will be better appreciated by employers in the banking industry or international NGOs where the students may go after graduation.

Incidentally, the notion that people are essentially the same everywhere and that cultural factors can be erased or ignored fits very well into the End of History thinking so cleverly set out by Francis Fukuyama as a seminal thinker of Neoconservatives at the start of the 1990s.f 

On the other side of the equation, the Realists all too often do not really take possession of factual knowledge about the regions of the world about which they talk so glibly. Though it is impossible to be a true expert on all the world’s different regions with the vast number of different languages, that does not stop professors of international relations from holding forth on any of the countries in the news today.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Transcript submitted by a reader, followed by a translation into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:02
Today is October 8th, and we’re having Gilbert with us to talk about what’s going on in the Middle East and in Ukraine. Let’s start, Gilbert, with … yesterday we had anniversary of what has happened last year between Israelis and Palestinians. What’s your take on what’s going on right now and what it means?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
What we are witnessing is the self-destruction of Israel as a Jewish state with the active assistance of the United States, which is enabling all the atrocities that Israel is now perpetrating in Gaza, in Lebanon, and which [it] would like to perpetrate yet in Iran. We can get into a discussion of to what extent this current course of policy in Israel is dictated by the United States, to what extent it is internally developed and finds support in the United States, nothing more than support.

1:13
These are issues that I hope we will explore later in this program, because they bear upon the fundamental notions of American foreign policy that seem to have come to the fore in the last week of discussions on this show and on other shows. But I think most people would look at the developments in the Middle East and speak about the destruction of Hamas or Hezbollah and so forth. No, it’s the destruction of Israel that we’re witnessing, self-destruction, because what they are now undertaking is unachievable with or without American assistance. The value of American assistance in similar situations is perfectly clear from what we see in Ukraine.

The parallels between these two different wars– call them proxy or not, that’s something we can discuss– but nonetheless, the nature of the conflict, of the warring parties receiving assistance, massive assistance [from] the United States to pursue policies that are failures, that is, I think, beyond much doubt among serious analysts of the military situation that Israel now faces with a three-front war.

Alkhorshid: 2:40
Yeah. And in your opinion, right now, yesterday Netanyahu, there was an interaction between Macron and Netanyahu. And Macron is calling on arms embargo on Israel. And on the other hand, Netanyahu responded. How do you find it right now? Because The way, as you mentioned, that they’re not… They’re fighting Palestinians, Hezbollah, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Houthis at the same [time]. They want to pick a fight, a new fight with Iran right now. How can you understand the mindset in Israel?

Doctorow:
I think they’re entirely confident that the United States will have to support them whatever they do. And it’s almost the truth, but not quite. We have an election in the United States and though it would appear that the Republicans and the Democrats are united on the issue of support of Israel, that is not quite as solid as it looks. The Democrats in particular are fractured over support for Israel in its genocidal activities. So the assumption that Israel will receive unlimited support, which it needs from the United States, is a weak assumption.

4:07
That Mr. Macron did what he did is not surprising. Macron comes out periodically with outlandish statements on every foreign policy issue or international issue before us for the sake of grabbing the microphone and demonstrating that France is still a leading power and an intellectual influence on the course of events, neither of which is true. However, this particular issue of withholding arms sales to Israel, which Mr Netanyahu has chosen to call an embargo, is a very sensitive point. Yes, to be sure, the United States is the single biggest supplier of arms to Israel, but it’s not, by no means, the only supplier. And Israel at this present moment, undertaking vastly ambitious military objectives on three fronts as I said, cannot afford to see any part of its supplies withdrawn.

5:05
It is as vulnerable to a collapse, should it experience a generalized embargo, as Ukraine is prone to total military collapse the moment the United States and the EU stop sending in arms.

Alkhorshid: 5:23
And in response to what Israel is talking about, how do you find the way that Iran is talking about the conflict? Are they looking for some sort of escalations? Are they not interested to more escalation, to have more fight, to have more escalation with Israel or even with the United States?

Doctorow:
I think Iran is ready for anything. And if it is true that they had an underground nuclear test yesterday, this can be true, it could also be fake news spread by Israel to find a pretext for attacking Iran. But let’s assume that it’s true. It would be a signal that they’re already also ready for a nuclear exchange with Israel. But that isn’t the point. Let’s look at, I think the principle thing we can talk about now is timing.

6:16
And it is true that Iran has been very patient. Its patience ran out a week ago after these sensational attacks in Beirut that decapitated the Hezbollah leadership. They lost their patience at that point. The prime minister of Iran understood that he had been viciously deceived by the Americans and EU negotiators with whom he had spoken, who had promised that restraint by Iran would be rewarded with relaxation of the sanctions on its economy and so forth.

6:59
Well, that all turned out to be a lie, as he admitted. He was greatly embarrassed, because he had been acting above and beyond his constitutional powers within Iran and had been violating the instructions from the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah. In any case, how fragile his hold on office is is a separate question. But Iran officially at the governmental level has stated that it is ready for anything with Israel and it made that 180 missile attack to demonstrate its ability to get through the Iron Dome, the Slingshot, and any of the other anti-aircraft devices and systems that Israel has in place.

However, the timing is critical here, and everyone is looking at dates that are very similar. The United States is looking at November 5th. Mr. Biden and his team [would] be quite happy to see Israel attack everything and anything in Iran, including its nuclear installations, including its gas and oil production and refining, but do it after November 5th, because it is unforeseeable what effect this will have on voting on November 5th. Under normal circumstances, a rally around the flag, a phenomenon of a country going into war, as the United States would be, would benefit candidate Harris, but that is not at all assured in this case, since the cause of the war is so clearly Mr. Biden and Harris.

8:45
Therefore, the United States doesn’t want anything serious to happen for the next two and a half to three weeks. The other major parties here, Iran, Russia, and China, they also don’t want anything to happen before a slightly earlier date, October 24th to 26th, when there will be the gathering of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia. They all, all of these leading countries want the BRICS summit to come off smoothly and not to be distracted, or world attention to be distracted by an out-of-control regional war in the Middle East that would be set off by an escalatory attack from Iran on Israel. So in this sense, Israel is ready for escalation and an exchange of devastating attacks tomorrow. In fact, they were ready for it last week, when they threatened to respond to the 180 ballistic missiles.

They were held back, and I think they may be held back until after November 5th, simply because of domestic political considerations in the United States and international considerations by the BRICS countries.

Alkhorshid: 10:16
It seems that what we’re witnessing right now in the Middle East is so similar to what has happened in Ukraine, because the failure of diplomacy between Russia and the United States led to the conflict in Ukraine, to be a major war between the West and Russia. And right now in the Middle East, the new government in Iran was trying to talk with Washington at the same time. They had two assassinations, one in Tehran and the other one in Beirut, xxxxxxx xxxx in Beirut, while Iranians were talking with Washington in New York. How do you see– because the way that China is seeing these two situations, in Ukraine and in the Middle East, they would say, “They’re going to do the same to us in Taiwan, and we have no option but fighting them.” How do you– in your opinion, is diplomacy fading away from the political arena, international political arena? Because right now we have no communication. It doesn’t seem that there is any sort of connection between policymakers in Russia, in Iran, in China with the United States.

Doctorow: 11:37
I would like to point out that the United States’ turn away from diplomacy has more than the obvious reason to explain it. It’s not simply a victory of the war party over the peace party in Washington. It has to do with the deterioration of diplomatic skills and of all of the essential training that goes into making successful diplomacy. And that is really what I hope will be the major point to come out of our discussion today: why the United States is not prepared for diplomacy. It doesn’t have the skills, and it doesn’t have the skills for very clear ideological reasons. It’s not arbitrary reasons.

12:36
That is to say, the victory of Wilsonian idealism in American academic life over the realist school is, which requires that its practitioners are well-based in history and languages in area studies. The idealist school assumes the whole world is the same. Everybody’s like everybody else. And you don’t have to know about a country’s history or language because we’re all the same guys. So these different trends with the idealist school having won out and left only certain pockets of realism in US higher education means that students who come out of area studies who are future diplomats don’t know a damn thing about the areas for which they have a diploma on the wall.

Alkhorshid: 13:34
Yeah. So, the point that you’re mentioning, and we have discussed this before, about how does it work between the United States and Israel. And we had this division that some people think that Israel is running the show and you belong to that part, to the other part that believes that the United States is running the show in Israel. And how do you put, what’s your, what are your reasons for saying that the United States is running the show?

14:06
And what’s in it for the United States? Because at the end of the day, when you look at Ukraine, we see the United States is losing politically and militarily. Right now in the Middle East, it doesn’t seem that the United States is gaining anything, because with the case of Israel, they’re losing the Arab states. They’re not talking about the majority of people. The public opinion is changing and they’re forcing their leaders to be, to make some solid policies toward Israel. It doesn’t seem that in the future that’s going to be any sort of improvement for the United States to have any sort of dominance in the Middle East? How do you understand it?

Doctorow: 14:49
Well, I’ll try to answer all the questions you’ve raised. They all deserve solid consideration. But I’d like to start from a different starting point: where we left off. I am delighted that our discussion last week prompted very broad talk, controversy in the expert community, in the commentator community, on air in alternative media. I don’t talk about mainstream media because they don’t care about anything except the few things that Washington hands them out each day.

15:24
But in the thinking world of the alternative media, there has been a controversy. And some people wrote in to me, I’m very delighted, at least on my websites, I do have room for comments. And some people have sent me comments there with very valuable information, persuading me, delighting me because I see that the audience genuinely has within it some very well-informed people, people who’ve been studying these issues in many cases far longer than I have, and the Middle East has not been my area of specialty.

And so they have added to the discussion points of reference which support my argument. And I will just mention a couple. One came up in an interview that you had last week with Michael Hudson, the assistant to Hermann Kahn in the 1970s. Kahn was known then, and into the 1980s, as the prototype for Dr. Strangelove.

16:28
And he was the one who wrote this “Thinking About the Unthinkable” and winning a nuclear war. Anyway, Hudson, as an assistant to Kahn, was present in many top-level federal meetings, sorting out foreign policy. And he saw then the reasons for the United States shifting from boots on the ground, its own boots on the ground, to proxy wars, somebody else’s boots on the ground, serving American interests. That is a side of the outcome of the Vietnam War that I hadn’t given much thought to. Proxy wars were something that we didn’t talk very much about in Russian studies for sure until recently.

17:15
However, the other side of the outcome of the Vietnam War, I was well aware of, and that is the decision to discontinue the draft and to form what was positively described as forming a professional army. Well, we formed a professional army because we no longer could maintain a nation at arms. The nation of arms became politically volatile and poisonous. It brought down Lyndon Johnson, and in the 1970s, in the late 1970s, Nixon understood perfectly, no more draft. The net result of that was to ease the way for forever wars.

On the one side, The United States would not sacrifice blood in wars because this would be done by proxies, by allies who had their own axe grind, which happened to coincide with the interests of the United States in a given location. And the United States taxpayers would not be paying for these wars, because they all would be paid for by China and other countries buying up US Treasury bonds. Therefore from the late 1970s, the biggest lessons of the Vietnam War enabled forever wars, which began when the United States no longer had the Soviet Union to keep it in check and felt that it was the sole superpower after 1991. That’s when the forever wars began. So this is a bit of background, which I was led to think about or rethink, thanks to one of the readers or commentators.

19:02
Others pointed me to a 2007 paper on policy towards, quote, Persia. This was the United States rethinking policy on Iran, a paper, a long paper, I think it’s a hundred pages or more, which was produced by a subsidiary organization within the think tank of the Democratic Party. I’ll come back to it.

The point is that this paper states very clearly how Israel could and should be used to attack the Iranian centers for developing nuclear weapons and how this would spare the United States a direct belligerent role in achieving what it wanted, which is to neuter Iran. This policy from 2007, and the paper didn’t go away, as I found out from the commentators who, I’m speaking of the Brookings Institution. This policy paper was well known. I hadn’t been aware of it, but I was made aware of it.

20:30
So I’m grateful to those people who helped fill in some gaps in my own knowledge of the past history that would justify and support what I was saying about today’s proxy war of Israel being used by the United States government to kick ass in the Middle East more generally and to bring down Iran. Now you’re asking why these policies. In the case of Ukraine, Ukraine was flagged at the end for 1997 on by Brzezinski. Zbigniew Brzezinski in his “Great Chessboard” made it clear that for the successor states of the Soviet Union, this principal successor Russia Federation, maintaining a grip on Ukraine was essential for it to be an imperial power.

21:29
A major threat almost as the Soviet Union as a whole had been to American interests. Therefore, to break Russia’s claims to a kind of superpower status, you had to prise Ukraine away from Russia. Then Russia would become just another European country, kind of fitting into a small box which the United States could control. So that was the reason for American policy of the next two and a half decades, set out by Brzezinski very well. Now what about the Middle East?

22:09
Well, Iran: Iran has been the nemesis of the United States since 1979, since the hostage taking of the US embassy in Tehran by the newly-installed revolutionary government, headed by Ayatollah, Iran has been a bone in the throat of the United States, standing in the way of United States’ total domination of the region. This role has swollen out, has shrunken over time. The United States managed to get Iran and Iraq into a bloody, a very bloody war. And that was to keep both of them out of a decisive role in the region. Well, Iran is a big country, it’s now 90 million people strong, and these setbacks of the past did not frustrate or disable its possibilities of rising again, and it has been rising.

23:17
And as Iran rises, particularly now in the security and economic brotherhood of BRICs, they become again a very dangerous opponent to United States hegemony in the Middle East and to United States global hegemony. So that the United States would be happy with Israel acting out its own dream of humbling Iran and asserting its major presence as the decisive military force in the Middle East. Well these fit together. Now these are various comments that have come in and supported what I said from just observing the present without thinking back what happened, what are the antecedents to this that go back 60 years.

24:18
Now, in the meantime, there was another comment that caught my attention, it was brought to my attention, by a Colonel Wilkerson, who is also one of the most important experts brought on air by various widely watched interview programs, both in the United States and globally. With good reason. Wilkerson was the chief of staff to Colin Powell. He’s a man who functioned at the highest levels of the United States diplomacy and military circles. He was Chief of Staff to Colin Powell in the time when he was Secretary of State.

25:07
Now, Wilkerson knew and knows a lot of people. At the top, I was very pleased when the question was put to him, what he thought of remarks about the United States as the dog that is directing Israel as a tail. He was very careful in his answer, saying that no, that such an interpretation does not characterize the entirety of the federal government.

But there are, as he acknowledged, elements within the federal government that viewed these things exactly that way. And he pointed to Victoria Nuland, to neoconservatives, who, as he said, remain firmly ensconced in the top levels of government, responsible for US foreign policy. They were never, as he said, they were never brought to justice. So we’re thinking the same way, that these people are war criminals and should have been brought to justice.

26:14
But no one in the neoconservative movement has ever paid a price for the disastrous consequences on the ground in the countries the United States invaded or punished at their urging or the expenses they caused the United States in wealth and in blood. That set me thinking indeed, Colonel Wilkerson had a very good point. It would be a mistake to think of the United States foreign policy as a unitary institution. There are different strands, and there are two strands that are outstanding. That is what I identified a few minutes ago: the idealistic strand and the other is the realistic or realpolitik strand.

27:13
But what are these, put into simple English, idealism, it’s a very attractive word. Let me put it into the vernacular that we hear every day. The people in that category are the ones who are shouting that the drivers of US foreign policy should be values. We have a values-driven foreign policy. And what are those values? Furthering democracy, free markets, human rights.

That view is taken back to Woodrow Wilson and his pronouncements after the United States entered World War I, about this being the war to end all wars, and his hope for a global body of states that would moderate disputes. This became the League of Nations absent the United States because he couldn’t persuade his compatriots that this was an essential securer of peace. In any case, Wilson’s name is put to this, and it is today what we know best as those who are advocating a values-driven foreign policy. I’d say that Tony Blinken fits into that category. He and the people around him, they are the official voice of the United States.

28:42
That type of voice is what we have heard now for 30, 40 years. It’s not just Mr. Blinken came along and is telling us that. And these are the people who have brought us into the forever wars. United States intervention, the right or the obligation to defend.

This was the whole excuse of bringing down Khaddafi. You had to intervene to save civilians. It all sounds very charitable and praiseworthy, until you look at the consequences, which are disastrous, on the spot and in terms of the overall nature of global politics. The other side of the American foreign policy community in government and out of government is in a very small minority. The preponderant view, and what universities teach across America, are in that tradition of a values-driven foreign policy.

29:46
There are certain centers of the opposite, the real politik school. The real politik school, we know best, Kissinger was the biggest … spokesman and practitioner of real politik. It doesn’t go down well with the public. The public doesn’t like what real politik stands for, which is an interests-based foreign policy. You can know your interests only if you know something about the world. You can be a champion for values-based if you know nothing about the world. And the end result of American education in international affairs is to know nothing about the world.

30:34
I was present as a postgraduate fellow in 2010-11 at Columbia University at the Harriman Institute. And I was astounded to see how this important center, one of the two centers for, in my own case, Russian studies and area studies generally, going back to 1949, the second one being Harvard University, these founders of these area studies and of Russian studies in particular had abandoned the language requirements. You could get an area master’s degree and not be able to speak three words of Russian.

Speaking is the point, not being able to read three words of Russian. That’s to say, your degree is worthless. But that’s no need to worry about it. You’ll get a job in a bank, in the international bank, in an international NGO. You’ve got that Columbia degree, you’re all fine.

31:33
The problem is that all these people who are graduating who have no knowledge of language and very limited knowledge of history, because who needs to know it? All people are the same anyway. They are utterly unprepared to lead American diplomacy. So that is the raw material going in. Now having said that, somehow the State Department does come up with some people who actually know something.

You don’t need hundreds or thousands of people with area knowledge, And you can do pretty well borrowing on those people who have arrived as immigrants and who happen to be Russian speakers or whatever. They also can be put to work and help you understand what Mr. Putin is saying, even if you don’t understand it otherwise. So somehow within the State Department, within the foreign policy group that has their hands on the levers of power, there are some people who understand interests. Those people are not really seen and therefore they’re almost invisible.

32:34
But coming back to, just to finish up the story of the academic community, there are a few centers of real politik, and Mr. Mearsheimer is sitting in the epicenter of it. He is the heir to tradition of American realistic politics founded by Hans Morgenthau, also at the University of Chicago. Therefore, I am particularly disappointed that Mr. Mearsheimer has betrayed his own calling as a spokesman for real politik in denying that Israel is being used as a proxy for American interests in the Middle East.

33:14
But that’s a separate issue for us to dispute off camera. My main point is this: that what we are witnessing now is, in a tragic sense, is the control of the levers of power of American foreign policy by people who are real politik, interest-based, And the talk show is the Mr. Blinken and company. This is what’s picked up by the “Financial Times”, the “New York Times”, and everybody thinks that these high principles are what’s guiding American foreign policy, which is rubbish. They only are a smokescreen.

Alkhorshid: 33:57
And since you mentioned John Mearsheimer, recently he had some sort of talk with Jeffrey Sachs, and they were just totally in line when it came to Russia. But in terms of China, they were totally different. They had totally different ideas. How do you understand John Mearsheimer’s position on China? Because it’s so dangerous the way that he’s talking about China, the way that he’s picturing the conflict between the United States and China, which could lead to a nuclear war, a devastating war.

Doctorow: 34:33
Let me say, admit, right up front, that John Mearsheimer knows a lot more about China than I do. He has traveled there many times as a guest of the Chinese government. This is– what I see in Mearsheimer for China is exactly what I see in Angela Stanton at Georgetown University for Russia studies. She was invited repeatedly to the Valdai conferences. She met with Putin, and she comes back, has a photograph of herself with Putin on her office desk and goes on to trash Russia.

So it is with Mearsheimer. He has been invited and privileged guest of Beijing, and he comes back and he trashes China. Why exactly that is true, I don’t know. But there are a lot of things where, in his approach to countries, which I dispute. And not for personal reasons. The man is brilliant. He’s a West Point graduate. He has a lot of things in his favor, but not enough of them. He had no appreciation for Russia, because he was using yardsticks that are not adequate. The yardsticks that he has used have always been economic yardsticks as measured by the “Washington Post”. That’s to say, without looking at purchasing power equivalency, looking– that this is the tradition of people who were saying from the 1990s on, “Ah, Russia is nothing. It has a GDP less than Netherlands”.

36:18
Well, they’re not saying that now any more. Russia is claiming to be number four economically in the world and to have moved ahead of Germany. So the idea that they’re having less than Netherlands, I think is a non-starter. But nonetheless, the idea that countries can be measured only by their gross production is false, patently false, but it is the yardstick, almost the only yardstick that John Mearsheimer has used until recently.

36:49
Therefore, Russia, in his view, was no different from the view of the “New York Times”. Russia is just a spoiler. It is a country on its way down. Until the recent military successes of the last half year, Mearsheimer was repeating the same empty statements about Russia as the “New York Times”. So one can be brilliant, one can be the leading exponent of the realist school in America, and one can also be dead wrong about a country about which you, Mr. Mearsheimer, know very little. As to Jeffrey Sachs, that’s a different story. Jeffrey Sachs is reviled by many Russia specialists– I won’t name them; I don’t want this to become personal– for the role that he played in Russia as they see it, a very destructive role in the 1990s.

37:47
That to my opinion is a very unfair criticism. Sachs was a leader, was applying in Russia things which had gone well under his advice in Poland. The only problem is that the scale of Poland is nowhere near the scale of Russia. And therefore, medicine that worked on a small patient had no effect or a very negative effect on a big patient. Somehow Sachs didn’t quite put these things together.

That’s again, nobody’s perfect and I don’t claim to be perfect. I’m just stating things as I see them. And on the positive side, everything that Sachs did in the 1990s was in, as he saw it, in Russia’s interests. And what he expected was the United States would do what it should have done. And that is to provide large financial assistance to help Russia bridge this transformation from the communist centrally- guided economy to an open market economy.

39:01
The United States didn’t give a cent. The United States didn’t give a damn. In fact, it did give a damn. It wanted Russia to go down and be out once and for all. That was the predominant view in Washington.

Saxe was deeply disappointed, and he didn’t keep it to himself. I have an archive and my personal archive, going back to my years of residence in the 1990s in Moscow, I kept clippings. And among my clippings, I found a number of articles written then by Jeffrey Sachs, in which he was saying just what I’m saying now, that he had called for financial assistance to Russia, which was not forthcoming. And therefore, the transition to a market economy was so disastrous causing widespread pauperization of the population. So Jeffrey Sachs, I know for a long time, I know of him for a long time, I’ve never met him.

40:01
But he is genuinely an expert on Russia. He’s made some big mistakes, but he’s not really to blame for that, because he was not yet given the support that he expected to make his formulas work. And in today’s world, Jeffrey Sachs stands by Mearsheimer as the two most prominent academics who have dared to go up against the prevailing Washington interpretation of the origins of the present conflict in Ukraine. I salute them both despite what I’ve said, my critique, criticism or differences as a professional expert on Russia from John Mearsheimer. I have the highest respect for his bravery, for his courage, and for his successful delivery to millions of people, not tens of thousands of people, but millions of people in the United States and across the world, showing how and why the United States- led West is to blame for the mess and the very dangerous situation that we have now in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Alkhorshid: 41:18
Again when you come to the conflict in Russia and in the Middle East, John Mears Charmer is totally on point. As you mentioned, when this conflict started, he was talking about the economy of Russia even less than the GDP, less than Texas. But at the end of the day, we saw how it has happened, the conflict, how it changed the face of the conflict in Ukraine. But with Jeffrey Sachs, it’s totally different. He has each and every point in Ukraine, and he’s totally right in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and even with China. He totally understands, and I think the way that he’s talking about the conflict with China, it would be the manner that the United States could find some sort of solution for the situation between the United States and China.

And putting this case aside, you said that the ideological manner in the United States doesn’t consider the reality on the field. And do you think that the economic decline of the United States would cause them to understand the situation, would bring them to some sort of sanity?

Doctorow: 42:36
Well, there are so many cushions to protect the general public from the American decline. The decline of the United States in terms of infrastructure is so apparent. The “Financial Times” has an article yesterday or today on this very subject, of the bridges collapsing, the need for vast infrastructure investment for the United States to remain competitive and to remain a vital society. So the situation in the States is weak, but the average American doesn’t sense that. What they sense is the price of a gallon of gasoline; that is extremely sensitive in the States. The devastation caused by latest hurricanes has hardly been addressed by the federal government, and only the Speaker of the House, Johnson, has come out and said that this is an unbelievable failure of the federal level of government. There are these occasional lapses that are so big and so shocking that the general public can be aware that something might really be wrong with their government.

But otherwise, life goes on. Unemployment is pretty good. Stock shares are pretty high. Everybody’s fussing over how much money they can make on AI companies. So everything sounds very upbeat.

44:17
So I don’t think that is what can change the realization of the fundamental problems of United States policy domestically and internationally. I’m not sure how well they will succeed in covering up the loss of Ukraine. It’s going to be lost. We’ll see whether that can be hidden from the American public or somehow disguised with enough lipstick to make it appear that it really wasn’t a loss. I don’t know how you can shake the American public from this lethargy and from this willful ignorance.

The public is not ignorant because it’s not being informed. The public is ignorant because it doesn’t want to be informed. It wants to live its own comfortable life in its own house, shut the door, and leave the world outside. And that is the problem. It is a problem among highly educated people.

45:15
All of my classmates at Harvard, all the members of the prestige social club of which I’m a member in downtown Brussels, they don’t want to know. So you can’t blame the media for that. You have to blame the public for its own willful ignorance. It’s very sad. It will take something quite shocking to shake them out of this indifference. I hope it doesn’t happen, But the way we’re headed, it is going to happen.

Alkhorshid: 45:49
Yeah. And recently we had an interview of Emmanuel Macron. He was talking about the priority of the United States. He said the first priority is the United States; the second is China. And he doesn’t know what’s going to happen to Ukraine because if they’re going to support Ukraine. He was talking about Donald Trump and he wins, in his mind if he wins that if they’re going to have this support coming from the United States toward Ukraine or not.

There is a huge confusion in the European Union right now. People are turning against the policy in Ukraine. But the policymakers, the leaders in Europe, the same thing happening in the Middle East as well, but focusing on Europe, the policymakers are trying to to keep the way that they were implementing their policies in Ukraine and they want to support Ukraine. But if Trump wins, we know that that’s going to hugely change the policies in Ukraine. And here comes the confusion, here comes the situation that the European Union is in right now.

47:10
In Germany, in France, in Slovakia recently, he wants to rebuild its relationship, the relationship with Russia. Hungary, we know what’s going on with Hungary. How do you see the situation right now in the European Union? And is it going to be devastating if Trump wins? On one hand, Trump would, as he’s mentioned, he wants to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine.

On the other hand, what’s so amazing for me that JD Vance again, in a new article, is pointing out that Germany is responsible for rebuilding Ukraine. And this is, nobody knows why he’s talking about Germany, why Germany is responsible for that. How do you understand it?

Doctorow: 47:59
Well, I think we have to, everyone’s waiting for November 5th. In Europe, yes, there are these deep divisions, and there is growing concern that a kinetic war is going to break out in Europe.

And so some people are being sobered up by that. The loose talk that we got from the Brits that the Russians really don’t mean it, that they can’t do it, and the rest of it. I think that is being overcome by the very strong language coming out of Moscow and by the strong measures coming out of Moscow. The clear victory that is underway in Donbas day by day is reported now by mainstream media. And that way they are preparing the public for the defeat of Ukraine.

49:02
But nothing at all will happen in Europe until the American election. If Trump wins, then the Von der Leyen group is going to fall. It may be it will not collapse the next day, but it will be on the skids. This absolute idiot whom she’s appointed to be to replace Borrell, I don’t know how many days she’ll stay in office.

In fact, it’s not clear if she’ll even get to office if this worsening of the situation in Ukraine continues. But again, if Trump wins, Europe will be overturned. The present powers that be will see all of their power ebb away and there’ll be a lot of people who’ll be compelled to leave office. They won’t wait for new elections. However, if Kamala Harris wins, then it will be up to Europe to decide its own fate.

50:11
And that’s going to be a tough fight, a very tough fight. There are good, strong folks on the side of the angels, like [Robert] Fico surviving his assassination attempt, as Viktor Orbán and a few others. More, another factor, dynamic change within Europe will be whether if Turkey jumps ship and leaves NATO to take the warm embrace of China and Russia. There are things like that, that are not foreseeable, but which could hasten a change in the power, relative power of the war and peace parties within European countries. But the single biggest and most immediate factor in changing the course of Europe would be a Trump victory.

51:12
Now there have been, I have received emails from people who are saying, “How can you possibly support this man who’s saying the horrible things that he is about the need to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations, who has plans to blow up China?” And to these people I say, this is all electoral rhetoric, that Mr. Trump needs every vote of every redneck in the country he can find. And there are a lot more rednecks in America than there are people like you or me or Mearsheimer or Sachs in America going into voting booths. So he’s saying these very radical, extreme war-like things to get their votes.

52:05
If he should succeed, I see zero chance of any of this, of war-like rhetoric actually being realized. Mr. Trump made a big scene of sending American aircraft carrier just off the shores of North Korea and how he was going to erase the country from the map. Did anything follow from that? Zero.

The only thing that came out of it was his begging for a summit meeting with the North Korean leader. This is all talk, it’s all pure politics. And I do not expect Mr. Trump, if he comes to power, to do anything to start another war anywhere.

Alkhorshid:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Gelbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.

Doctorow: 52:58
Well, thank you for the invitation.

Ist die amerikanische Außenpolitik „wertorientiert“ oder „interessenorientiert“?

Sehen Sie sich die heutige Ausgabe von „Dialogue Works“ mit Gastgeber Nima Alkhorshid an https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l6yhN3Uq8Q

Ich freue mich, dass der Misston, den ich letzte Woche in zwei vielgesehenen Online-Kanälen für Außenpolitik angestimmt habe, nachhallt und viele verschiedene Stimmen in die Diskussion gebracht hat, sowohl im Internet als auch sozusagen an Küchentischen.

Der Funke war meine Ablehnung der Vorstellung, dass die Israel-Lobby die US-Außenpolitik im Nahen Osten bestimmt, während sich die Region auf einen umfassenden Krieg zubewegt.

Alternative Medien, die sich als Gruppe gegen das stellen, was die Herde glaubt, nämlich das Washingtoner Narrativ, haben in sich selbst die gleiche sehr menschliche Schwäche, sich wie eine Herde zu verhalten und jede Herausforderung an das, was die bekanntesten Experten und Meinungsführer in ihrer Mitte sagen, zu verübeln.

Sei’s drum. Aber weder Wahrheit noch Verständnis entstehen aus donnernden Herden.

Im Folgenden möchte ich über die einfache Frage hinausgehen, ob der Hund (USA) mit dem Schwanz (Israel) wedelt bei dem sich entfaltenden mörderischen Amoklauf des jüdischen Staates in seiner Nachbarschaft, oder ob der Schwanz mit dem Hund wedelt.

                                                                   *****

In den letzten Tagen habe ich zahlreiche Kommentare auf meinen Webplattformen und in E-Mails an meine Yahoo-Adresse erhalten, die meine Behauptung stützen, dass die Amerikaner Israel in Wirklichkeit benutzen, um einen Stellvertreterkrieg gegen den Iran und seine Stellvertreter Hisbollah und Hamas im Nahen Osten zu führen, und zwar auf eine ähnliche Weise, wie Washington die Ukraine benutzt, um einen Krieg auf Distanz und auf abstreitbare Weise gegen das nuklear bewaffnete Russland zu führen.

Ein Autor hat mich auf eine Studie aus dem Jahr 2007 aufmerksam gemacht, die von einer Tochtergesellschaft der Brookings Institution, dem wichtigsten Think Tank der Demokratischen Partei, durchgeführt wurde. In diesem umfangreichen Dokument wurden die möglichen politischen Optionen für die weiteren Beziehungen zum Iran untersucht. Die verlockendste davon wurde auf Seite 89 ff. dargelegt und erklärt, wie und warum Israel das Werkzeug sein sollte, das zur Zerstörung der iranischen Nuklearanlagen eingesetzt wird. Vielleicht hat Donald Trump diese Seiten gelesen, bevor er gestern seine Empfehlungen zum selben Thema abgegeben hat.

Ein anderer Autor hat mich auf einen Auftritt von Michael Hudson in „Dialogue Works“ letzte Woche aufmerksam gemacht. Hudson war in den 1970er Jahren Assistent von Herman Kahn, dem Autor von „Thinking about the Unthinkable“, einem Buch, in dem die These aufgestellt wird, dass ein Atomkrieg gewonnen werden könnte. Kahn soll das Vorbild für Dr. Seltsam im gleichnamigen Film gewesen sein. Er hatte großen Einfluss auf die politischen Überlegungen in den USA und Hudson war an seiner Seite.

In diesem Interview hat Hudson erklärt, wie die Entscheidung, Stellvertreter einzusetzen, um Kriege zu führen, von den obersten Entscheidungsträgern der USA als Ergebnis der Lehren aus dem gescheiterten Vietnamkrieg getroffen wurde: Kehrtwendungen auf dem Schlachtfeld hatten zu einer politischen Destabilisierung im Inland geführt und Lyndon Johnson gezwungen, seine Kandidatur für die Wiederwahl aufzugeben. Eine zweite Entscheidung, die im gleichen Zeitraum getroffen wurde, aber in diesem Interview nicht erwähnt wurde, war die Aufgabe der Wehrpflicht zugunsten einer kleineren „Berufsarmee“. Das Endergebnis dieser vorgeschlagenen Politik sollte sich ab 1991 zeigen, als der Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion den Vereinigten Staaten freie Hand ließ, die Welt neu zu gestalten, und sie in endlose Kriege eintrat, die die amerikanische Bevölkerung nichts an Blut kosteten, da Stellvertreterkriege von unseren Verbündeten geführt wurden, und nichts an Vermögenswerten, da sie durch Schatzanweisungen bezahlt wurden, die von den Chinesen und anderen Ausländern aufgekauft wurden.

Ein weiterer Kommentator schlug vor, ich solle mir ein Interview ansehen, das Colonel Wilkerson, ehemaliger Stabschef von Außenminister Colin Powell, letzte Woche gegeben hat. Wilkerson war auf den höchsten Ebenen der US-Bundesregierung tätig, die sich mit Außen- und Militärpolitik befassen. Auf die Frage, was er von meinem Vorschlag halte, dass die Vereinigten Staaten Israel als ihren Stellvertreter nutzen, anstatt sich von Israel herumführen zu lassen, sagte Wilkerson, dass diese Ansicht nicht die gesamte Bundesregierung charakterisiere, aber dass es solche Ansichten innerhalb der Regierung gebe, insbesondere im Kreis der Neokonservativen, die früher von der stellvertretenden Außenministerin Victoria Nuland angeführt wurden. Er fuhr fort, dass viele dieser Neokonservativen bis heute in verantwortungsvollen Positionen tätig seien.

Dieser maßgebliche Kommentar, der meine Argumentation teilweise bestätigte, brachte mich zum Nachdenken, und am Ende bin ich zu der Überzeugung gelangt, dass es heute auf der Entscheidungsebene der Regierung mindestens zwei große Fraktionen in Bezug auf die Außen- und Militärpolitik gibt. Lassen wir die Bezeichnungen „neoliberal“ oder „neokonservativ“ beiseite, denn sie können verwirrend und widersprüchlich sein. Sprechen wir stattdessen in Begriffen, die fast jeder sofort eindeutig erkennen wird: diejenigen, die eine „werteorientierte“ Außenpolitik befürworten, im Gegensatz zu denen, die eine „interessenorientierte“ Außenpolitik befürworten. Erstere werden von Akademikern in der Regel als Wilsonianische Idealisten bezeichnet, letztere als „Realisten“ oder „Realpolitik“-Praktiker. Zu ersteren gehören heute Tony Blinken und die anderen Sprecher des Außenministeriums und der Sicherheitsbehörden, die die Presse täglich mit Falschinformationen füttern. Letztere halten sich in ihren Büros versteckt, wo sie die Hebel der Macht bedienen.

Diese Aufteilung in Idealisten und Realisten lässt sich bis zu den Gründern der US-Republik zurückverfolgen, hat sich aber im Laufe der Zeit erheblich weiterentwickelt, bevor sie die Formen annahm, die wir heute kennen. Ich denke, dass an amerikanischen Universitäten die Wilson-Idealisten den Realisten zahlenmäßig weit überlegen sind, die nur noch wenige Bastionen halten, von denen die bemerkenswerteste die University of Chicago ist. Dort lehrte Hans Morgenthau viele Jahrzehnte nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und dort lehrt heute Professor John Mearsheimer.

Die Übernahme des Feldes durch die Wilsonian Idealists hatte tragische Auswirkungen auf die Ausbildung einer Generation amerikanischer Journalisten und Diplomaten. Dies liegt daran, dass das Grundprinzip der idealistischen Schule darin besteht, dass die Menschen überall gleich sind und es keinen besonderen Grund gibt, die Sprachen oder die Geschichte verschiedener Länder zu studieren. Dies hat zu einer Abwertung des Lehrplans für Regionalstudien an den großen US-Universitäten wie Harvard und Columbia geführt, wo das länderspezifische Wissen durch quantitative Fähigkeiten ersetzt wird, die von Arbeitgebern im Bankensektor oder in internationalen NGOs, in denen die Studenten nach ihrem Abschluss tätig sein könnten, besser geschätzt werden.

Übrigens passt die Vorstellung, dass Menschen im Wesentlichen überall gleich sind und dass kulturelle Faktoren ausgelöscht oder ignoriert werden können, sehr gut zu dem „Ende der Geschichte“-Denken, das Francis Fukuyama, ein Vordenker der Neokonservativen, Anfang der 1990er Jahre so geschickt dargelegt hat.

Auf der anderen Seite der Gleichung machen sich die Realisten nur allzu oft nicht wirklich sachkundig über die Regionen der Welt, über die sie so leichtfertig reden. Obwohl es unmöglich ist, ein wahrer Experte für alle verschiedenen Regionen der Welt mit der großen Anzahl verschiedener Sprachen zu sein, hält das Professoren für internationale Beziehungen nicht davon ab, über jedes der Länder zu schwadronieren, über das heute in den Nachrichten berichtet wird.