Thursday, January 21, 2021

Book Review: The Making of US Empire at the Dawning of Its End — Pepe Escobar

As the Exceptional Empire gets ready to brave a destructive – and self-destructive – new cycle, with dire, unforeseen consequences bound to reverberate across the world, now more than ever it is absolutely essential to go back to the imperial roots.

The task is fully accomplished by Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy , by Stephen Wertheim, Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

Here, in painstaking detail, we can find when, why and especially who shaped the contours of US “internationalism” in a roomful of mirrors always disguising the real, ultimate aim: Empire.

Wertheim’s book was superbly reviewed by Prof. Paul Kennedy. Here we will concentrate on the crucial plot twists taking place throughout 1940. Wertheim’s main thesis is that the fall of France in 1940 – and not Pearl Harbor – was the catalyzing event that led to the full Imperial Hegemony design.

This is not a book about the U.S. industrial-military complex or the inner workings of American capitalism and finance capitalism. It is extremely helpful as it sets up the preamble to the Cold War era. But most of all, it is gripping intellectual history, revealing how American foreign policy was manufactured by the real flesh and blood actors that count: the economic and political planners congregated by the arch-influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the conceptual core of the imperial matrix....
The Unz Review
The Making of US Empire at the Dawning of Its End
Pepe Escobar

See also

Strategic Culture Foundation
Pompeo’s Last Stand
Strategic Culture Foundation
Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, now Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Also

New on Venezuelanalysis
Venezuela: Biden to Endorse Guaido After Trump Issues Parting Sanctions
Ricardo Vaz

7 comments:

Matt Franko said...

https://twitter.com/amuse/status/1352303194899165184?s=21

Biden looking at ramping up in Iraq..,

Peter Pan said...

Iraq, Venezuela...
Biden ramping up the unity!

Matt Franko said...

Trump’s “negotiation” seemingly not accepted by MIC... MIC still preferring old school kinetic warfare....

Nebris said...

"The Unz Review is an alt-right website which describes itself as an alternative to the mainstream media.[2] It contains articles and content that promote white nationalism, the international Jewish conspiracy, Holocaust denial, the white genocide conspiracy theory, racialism pseudoscience and eugenics. Many of its most frequently featured commentators actively promote violence and genocide against Jews, African Americans and other immigrants."
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Unz_Review

Tom Hickey said...

"The Unz Review is an alt-right website which describes itself as an alternative to the mainstream media.[2] It contains articles and content that promote white nationalism, the international Jewish conspiracy, Holocaust denial, the white genocide conspiracy theory, racialism pseudoscience and eugenics. Many of its most frequently featured commentators actively promote violence and genocide against Jews, African Americans and other immigrants." https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Unz_Review

That is true and they also publish other things too, some of which do not fall under the above.

Anyone that objects to material linked to the Unz Review doesn't have to read it.

And this goes for individual authors there and elsewhere. Sometimes they are worth reading and sometime not.

My only more or less hard and fast criterion of exclusion is paywalls, but sometimes I violate that, too, but I provide warning. I also avoid the obvious US propaganda sites like the NYT and WaPo, but I sometimes link there too if very high quality. But they get enough exposure without driving peeps to them from here.

Frankly, there are just about no venues I can think of that are 100%. They all have some warts. Maybe we do too. :)

Tom Hickey said...

BTW, I would not recommend Rational Wiki as a definitive source of information.

Peter Pan said...

The definitive article on Rational Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RationalWiki