In November 1899, the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain proposed in his own words, “a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two great trans-Atlantic branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.”
His German counterpart, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bernard von Bulow, turned him down. The British Empire was at its height and Germany had a long way to go to catch up with Britain in colonies to absorb an industrial output that matched the UK. Berlin preferred working with Moscow to advance German interests in China while London teamed with Washington to force opium upon the Chinese in exchange for commodities like tea and silk —in the process turning 26% of the adult male Chinese population into drug addicts by 1907.
The United States regarded Japan as less of a threat to its Asian aims than Russia. Washington acquiesced to Tokyo’s annexation of Korea (1910) in return for Tokyo’s acceptance of Washington’s bloody conquest of the Philippines (1899-1901).
The Germans needed foreign oil while the Russians had Caspian Sea oil. The British had their own supply when oil was discovered in Persia (1908) and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (BP in 1954) assumed the exclusive right to siphon it off. At this time, the United States was the world’s largest oil producer.
Germany allied with Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire to secure oil from the Middle East through a proposed pipeline from Persia to Germany whose missing link was Romania or Serbia. The assassination of the Archduke and his wife by a Serbian nationalist provided Germany with the pretext to conquer Serbia. After Germany gave the green light to Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia, Russia declared war on Germany. Russia, France and the UK were allied against Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.
For the Germans to succeed required adherence to the Schlieffen Plan, named after General von Schlieffen. He warned that Germany would lose a two-front war because of Russia’s huge army. In the Kaiser’s words, it must be “Paris for lunch, St. Petersburg for dinner.”
When the Wehrmacht got bogged down in trench warfare on French soil, Germany’s worst fears were realized.
Berlin required twice as many troops on the Eastern front as on the Western front—the case also in World War II. If Russia left the war, German troops could then be transferred west and break through the French Maginot Line.
With 11 million Russian war dead, the Czar and his bourgeois successor Kerensky continued the war to preserve the lucrative investments of its “1%”. The Germans then sent the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in a sealed train to torpedo the Russian state. The payoff for the Germans was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty that ended the war on the Russian front as Lenin had promised the Russian people he would do.
Washington entered the war to stop Germany from conquering Western Europe and jeopardizing J.P. Morgan’s loans to Great Britain, The Lusitania sinking and the Zimmerman Note provided suitable pretexts for Washington to violate its own Monroe Doctrine by entering for the first time into a European conflict.
While the Russian Revolution itself killed very few Russians, armed intervention of capitalist nations including 12 thousand U.S. troops killed over a million Russians and stiffened the resolve of this first communist state to defend their revolution.
After World War I, the task for “the two great trans-Atlantic branches of the Anglo-Saxon race” was how to use Germany to take on a communist ruled Russia in a giant pincer between it and Japan. The Anglo-Saxon “1%” did what they could to build up an anti-communist Germany and Japan—without being too obvious about it.
To signal British intent, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, son of Joseph, counseled “appeasement” of Germany as long as the Germans marched east to fulfill the plan Adolph Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf. Consistent with this aim, King Edward VIII (1936) abdicated the British throne to marry U.S. socialite Wallis Simpson. Together they lobbied on Hitler’s behalf in upper-class circles. In return, the Fuhrer promised to restore him to the British throne once he won the war. The House of Windsor could then go back to being the German House of Hanover as it was called before World War I.
When World War II broke out, the US and the UK, fearful that Germany would conquer an oil-rich Middle East, trained their military efforts on North Africa.
Only when the Soviet Red Army vanquished the Nazi-led forces at Stalingrad in the greatest battle in history as Germany strove to conquer the oil-rich Caspian Sea region did confidence in German military superiority sink in “1%” circles.
Too late did the US and the UK react to the Red Army counteroffensive as it ploughed its way across European Russia through Eastern Europe and the half of Germany that included Berlin.
In the Far East, despair enveloped Anglo-Saxon ruling circles when Soviet forces drove the Japanese out of the Western-Europe sized mineral-rich province of Manchuria just as the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, three months after Berlin surrendered to the Soviet Union. The Soviets then allowed Mao Tse-Tung’s Red Army to use Manchuria as a base from which to wage its revolution with the aid of Kim Il-sung’s Korean communists until victory was declared on October 1, 1949.
Almost immediately, Washington tested Chinese resolve in Korea (1950) through a savage war (1950-1953) in which US air power was used to bomb North Korea into a wasteland.
The same scorched-earth policy would be adopted in Vietnam, also bordering on China. This small nation saw more bombs dropped on it (1964-1975) than all wars in history combined.
Though Washington managed to kill 4 million Koreans and 3 million Vietnamese, and one President who refused to expand the Vietnam War, it was forced to a draw in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam.
For “the 1%”, bringing down communism was paramount. The Cold War accomplished that goal, but at a cost from which the United States never recovered when President Reagan added more to the national debt than the grand total of all previous presidents.
The Russian and Chinese revolutions had accomplished the all-important goal that guaranteed their independence as sovereign states. They freed themselves from control of Anglo-American capital and any successful U.S. military attack, although Washington would persist by establishing hundreds of military bases in the Middle East, Central and East Asia, and elsewhere, amounting to 96 per cent of all foreign military bases in 2012.
In 1989, Germany and the Soviet Union settled the German question by themselves. CIA President George Herbert Walker Prescott Bush was kept out of the loop. Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl signed off on the reunification of Germany. Berlin would now look east to Russia for oil and natural gas, and in the new millennium dismantle all its nuclear energy plants.
Washington and Saud sponsored Islamic fundamentalist terrorism directed against the Soviet Union proved fatal to Western suzerainty, as well as Soviet communism. Once the USSR dismantled itself, these religious zealots turned their fury on a West that only desired the resources, and not the welfare of the 99% living in oil-rich republics.
What the upper-class architects of U.S. foreign policy failed to appreciate is that state interests transcend ideology and religion. It makes no strategic difference which Vladimir is in charge—“Vladimir the Great,” founder of the Russian state in the 10th century; Vladimir Lenin who transformed Russian state priorities to include a pivotal role for the working class; or Vladimir Putin who reaffirmed Russia’s alliance with China as the counterbalance to NATO aggression in Yugoslavia.
The relinquishing of state control by the Communist Party as well as eliminating the official state policy of atheism did not mean dismantling the Russian state. The internal state apparatus and a military with advanced missile defense systems remain intact.
Indeed, borrowing a page from Lenin, the new capitalist Russian Federation jettisoned the various states on its borders that made up the “union” in the Soviet Union. These included Muslim republics like Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan whose populations had been stirred up by CIA against “atheistic communism”. These independent republics served to buffer the Russian Federation. “Stirred up Muslims” who “brought down the Soviet Union,” to quote President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, turned their anti-imperialist attention to Washington’s designs on the region.
It is in this geo-political context that the Shanghai Five was formed in 1996 to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism. On April 26th of that year, the heads of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia and Tajikistan signed in Shanghai the Treaty of Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions; and a year later in Moscow, the Treaty on Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions. On June 15, 2001, with the addition of Uzbekistan, they signed the Declaration of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). On July 16, 2001, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) signed the Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.
Eight weeks later came 9/11. Although the attacks were plotted by Saudis, Washington unleashed an endless series of wars of aggression aimed at seizing the world’s oil reserves that it did not control and establishing military bases near the Russian and Chinese borders. The successful conquest of an Iraq that had no role in perpetrating the World Trade Center attacks enhanced Bush, Cheney and Gore family fortunes through record oil company profits; but at the cost of tripling the national deficit under presidents George Bush, Jr. and Barack Obama.
Almost no one was aware of Nine-Eleven Commissioners Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton’s book-length account of what they endured in their official investigation of 9/11. They concluded, “Fog of war could explain why some people were confused on the day of 9/11, but it could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations and public testimony by FAA and NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue.” [my bold] From the outset, “Norad had withheld documents for months, delaying the work of the staff and losing their confidence.” Subpoenas had to be issued due to their lack of cooperation. The interrogation of Rudy Giuliani, New York’s mayor at the time of the airline crashes, was considered a “low point. … We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record.” [1]
Vice President Richard Cheney’s Halliburton, the world’s largest oil services company, reaped the lion’s share of profits from Iraq’s “reconstruction” that failed to restore the basic necessities of life like clean water and decent health care that Iraqis had before U.S. conquest and occupation. As Vice President, Cheney granted his company an exclusive contract with no competition. Then, when corruption charges surged around Halliburton, its headquarters moved out of the United States to Dubai, one of its allied sheikdoms immune from U.S. legal prosecution.
In July 2005, the SCO requested that Washington set a timetable for withdrawing its troops from SCO member states. In response, Uzbekistan asked that the U.S. abandon its K-2 air base, and in 2009, Kyrgyszstan made the same request concerning the Manas air base. On April 21, 2006, the SCO announced a concerted anti-terrorist effort to fight cross-border drug gangs.
Exxon moved back into Iraq in 2012 after having been expelled by Saddam Hussein in 1972.
Note
[1] “9/11 Commissioners Expose Obstructions. Book: Pentagon and FAA Were Not Completely Honest, Giuliani Questions Too Soft.” CBS News, August 5, 2006. Kean and Hamilton, with Rhodes, Without Precedent, 83, 85-88, 261. “9/11—the big cover-up?” Peter Tatchell, The Guardian, September 12, 2007.
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