COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SPUTNIK
The US establishment fears anyone who is independent-minded.
That applies to foreign leaders like Putin, Assad, or
Qaddafi and that applies to American politicians, including Trump or Ralph
Nader or decades ago, John Kennedy.
The establishment is all about keeping itself on top of the
heap, unchallenged. In the last decade and a half, its agenda has been molded
by the Neocons, a group who wants the US always to apply its full strength to
get what it wants in the world. The Neocons, while uttering the words of
classical liberal ideas to justify themselves, are as far from genuine liberals
as you can get. They are in fact advocates of America working as the world’s
schoolyard bully.
The Neocons have always had an undeclared agenda for their
advocacy, and that is support for Israel. Given all its atrocious behaviors and
its inefficient economy (it is in fact the most subsidized entity on earth),
Israel is unlikely to have a long-term future without the US always acting as a
bully boy and supplier of subsidies and a whole set of special privileges,
which range from access to the highest political levels at unbelievably
frequent times to plums like a free-trade treaty and access to American
technology.
Not that Israel is being threatened by anyone, but it is
almost certain to collapse of its own weaknesses eventually, very much in the
fashion of the former Soviet Union. There are great parallels, and both lasted
as long as they did through an almost mystical belief in what was being done. The USSR lasted a long time, but there were such
fundamental weaknesses - as no market-sensitive price system and an unwilling,
burdensome empire - which doomed it to ultimate collapse.
Exactly the same analysis applies to Israel. It is not an
efficient economy, it holds to the extremely outdated concept of being home to
only one kind of people, its military/security costs are gigantic in relation
to its size, it functions as a garrison state, and it holds millions of people
against their will. Basically, you cannot build a long-term viable state on
such weak foundations.
The Neocon program, which included everything from
destroying Iraq and Libya to the current efforts to destroy Syria with proxy
terrorist-fighters, is a terribly brutal one. It includes acts like the induced
coup in Ukraine to attack the stability of one of their greatest foes,
contemporary Russia. It needs to tolerate violent madmen like Turkey’s Erdogan
because such men too are thorns in Russia’s side. The difficulties created by
these events have provided the perfect vehicle, too, for re-asserting America’s
predominance over Europe, some of whose leaders the American establishment
views as naive children playing with dangerous strangers like Russia.
Right now they are pushing things dangerously close to war
in Europe and in the South China Sea. Trump simply threatens these
arrangements, and he is hated by the Neocons, who of course use less-than-honest
arguments about his being a dangerous man. Bernie Sanders, too, represents
something of a threat, but not so great a one because he has happily worked
inside the framework for years. Trump is a complete political outsider. Hillary
Clinton is the official candidate for all Neocons and an establishment which
genuinely embraces the idea of American exceptionalism and America’s right to
tell almost everyone what they should be doing.
