How Billionaires Fund Scholars Who Pump U.S. Imperialism

Eric Zuesse

The super-rich have always profited enormously from imperialism — and that means from invasions, coups, and other international regime-change operations.

Right now, they are especially pumping for WW III (to conquer Russia and China, above all), or at least for increasing the likelihood that it will happen; and here’s how they do this — how it’s being done, right now:

On March 28th, the great investigative historian Thierry Meyssan, at his Voltaire.net site, headlined “The preparation of a New World War”, and he reported that (and I have here added, to it — non-italicized and between brackets — explanations and linked documentation, for purposes of clarification):

The United States is pushing its European Union allies to prepare for a Third World War. They have no choice but to fight it if they want to emerge victorious from the “Thucydides trap” [the phrase coined in 2012 by Harvard’s Graham Allison and described here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap, which said that it’s natural and reasonable for the world’s dominant military power to do anything, up to and including to commit suicide, in order to preserve its remaining as the world’s dominant military power — never be willing to become “#2,” but ceaselessly fight to maintain supremacy]. [Allison’s breakthrough book, Essence of Decision (1971, co-authored by Philip Zelikow) had argued that in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, an alternative “decision” favoring WW III would have been warranted if Khrushchev had not capitulated to JFK’s demands — it assumed that Soviet aggression (instead of American aggression) had sparked the problem: “With his plans thwarted, Khrushchev tried to save face by pointing to American missiles in Turkey, a position similar to the Cuban missiles. … Allison’s primary message was that the concept of mutually assured destruction as a barrier to nuclear war was unfounded. By looking at organizational and political models, such an outcome was quite possible — nations, against what was predicted by the rational viewpoint, could indeed ‘commit suicide.'” That 1971 book by Allison also normalized or ‘justified’ virtually all bad ways of making political decisions — ways that increase the likelihood of war resulting. Allison’s career has been funded by Democratic Party billionaires such as: this and this and this. So, he was a crucial scholar who pushed for the replacement of the mutually-assured-destruction, anti-WW-III, geostrategic meta-theory, by the Nuclear Primacy, win-WW-III, meta-theory, even before the “Nuclear Primacy” meta-theory was introduced decades later, in 2006 (by Harvard, and by the American Rhodesists’ Council on Foreign Relations). “Nuclear Primacy” argues that America needs not to prevent a nuclear war, but instead to prepare for and win a nuclear war against Russia. This, of course, is in accord with Dr. Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” idea: that the world’s dominant nation has a right to conquer the entire world — even if attempting to do it might be “suicidal.” All U.S. Presidential Administrations during at least the present Century have been guided by this “neoconservative” belief.]

Unless all this commotion is just a staging to “keep” the allies on their side while many states in South America, Africa and Asia declare themselves “neutral”. At the same time, the noise of boots is stirring up the Japanese militarists who, like the “radical nationalists” in Ukraine, are back.

THE CHANGE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

In 1949, the United States and the United Kingdom created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). They included Canada and the states they had liberated in Western Europe. For them, it was not a question of defending themselves, but of preparing an attack on the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union responded by creating the Warsaw Pact.

In 1950, when the Korean War began, the United States planned to extend the conflict to the German Democratic Republic (known as “East Germany”). In order to do this, they had to rearm the Federal Republic of Germany (known as “West Germany”) despite the opposition of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. They therefore proposed the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC), but failed in the face of resistance from the Gaullists and the French Communists.

At the same time, they helped rebuild Western Europe with the Marshall Plan. This plan included many secret clauses, including the construction of a European common market. Washington wanted to dominate Western Europe economically and preserve it politically from communist influence and Soviet imperialism. The European Economic Communities – and later the European Union – form the civilian side of the US token, whose military side is NATO. The European Commission is not an administration of the heads of state and government of the Union, but the interface between them and the Atlantic Alliance. The European standards for not only armaments and construction, but also for equipment, clothing and food, etc., are established by the Nato services, first in Luxembourg, then in Belgium. They are transmitted to the Commission, and today approved by the European Parliament.

In 1989, as the Soviet Union was collapsing in on itself, the French President, François Mitterrand, and the German Chancellor, Helmut Köhl, imagined freeing Western Europe from American tutelage so as to be able to compete with Washington. Negotiations on this treaty took place at the same time as the end of the quadripartite occupation of Germany (12 September 1990), the reunification of the two Germanies (3 October 1990) and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (1 July 1991). Washington accepted the Maastricht Treaty as long as it recognized their military domination. Western Europeans accepted this principle.

However, Washington distrusted the Mitterrand-Köhl couple and demanded at the last moment that the European Union include all the former members of the Warsaw Pact, and even the new independent states, which had emerged from the former Soviet Union. These states did not share the aspirations of the Maastricht negotiators. In fact, they are rather suspicious of them. They want to free themselves from both German and Russian influence. They rely on the “American umbrella” for their defence. …

On 9 September 2019, I issued my first article on (and which was titled) “How the U.S. Created the Cold War”. It documented Dr. Allison’s historically false statements about how the Cold War started, and it documented how the new U.S. President in 1945, Harry Truman, became immediately surrounded by proponents (such as Graham Allison is) of America’s coming to achieve the world’s first-ever all-encompassing empire. General Dwight Eisenhower was Truman’s personal hero, and his advice clinched for Truman the necessity for this global conquest by the U.S. to happen. Truman founded on this basis the Department of ‘Defense’ and CIA in 1947, and NATO in 1949, and he warped FDR’s plan for the U.N. so that that organization was crippled at its very start (especially because Truman intended for the U.S. ultimately to become the dictator over all nations).

Right now, the “Thucydides Trap” is part of the conceptual armamentarium of neoconservatives, which is to say, of Rhodesists — the followers of Cecil Rhodes, who in 1877 created the theory behind what now is called “neoconservatism” or expansion of the U.S. to control all nations. It has been funded by U.S. and British billionaires ever since Rhodes died in 1902. And they continue to fund it, up to, if not into, WW III.

Here is the background on Graham Allison — a leading voice for U.S. empire:

Graham Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University where he has taught for five decades. Allison is a leading analyst of national security with special interests in nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and decision-making. Allison was the “Founding Dean” of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and until 2017, served as director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which is ranked the “#1 University Affiliated Think Tank” in the world. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton administration, Allison received the Defense Department’s highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for “reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal.” This resulted in the safe return of more than 12,000 tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics and the complete elimination of more than 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads previously targeted at the United States and left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus when the Soviet Union disappeared. Allison’s latest book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (2017), is a national and international bestseller. 

His best-selling book, about China versus America, Destined for War, closes the second paragraph of its Preface: “China and the United States are currently on a collision course for war — unless both parties take difficult and painful actions to avert it.” That’s a lie: Only the U.S. regime is on a course for war — against China — and he is propagandizing for it. The U.S. regime is lying through its teeth by saying that it agrees that Taiwan is part of China while simultaneously threatening to invade China if China takes control over Taiwan in a way that the U.S. regime disapproves of. As-if this whole matter is any of the U.S. regime’s business, instead of purely China’s to deal with! America is on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean from it! He’s equating the victim to the bully. Only idiots (or outright liars) don’t acknowledge that all of the wrong is by the U.S. side, and that China is 100% in the right, about Taiwan. It’s not 50-50 like he pretends. It’s 100-0. Graham Allison pretends that there is no aggressor (the U.S.) here, and no defender (China) here: that there is no predator, and no victim, as between the U.S. regime and the Chinese Government. Taiwan is the U.S. regime’s excuse for a WW III to grab control over China. He’s smart enough to know that what he said there is viciously false — it was intended to deceive fools (so as to benefit the owners of firms such as Lockheed Martin). To judge by the high praise by that book’s readers, there are plenty of such fools. They pay their good money, to become deceived by people such as he.

His career has been funded by billionaires. They use such ‘experts’ to testify to Congress — provide the ‘justifications’ — in order for Congress, and the public, to have the excuses for taxpayers to be funding their vile operations, of aggression. These are academic lobbyists, to ‘justify’ taxpayers’ spending more than half of all the money that Congress allocates every year, not to “non-defense” spending (health care, education, etc.), but instead to military spending, some of which isn’t being paid through the Pentagon, because the billionaires want to hide from the taxpayers the fact that most of the money that Congress allocates each year is going to ‘defense’, and that most of that ‘defense’ money is going to their corporations, which sell to the Government and further-enrich those billionaires. Another way it’s funded was described on March 31st by Meyssan, about the oil that the U.S. armed forces in Syria direct Kurds and others to steal from Syria: “The presence of US soldiers in Syria is illegal and violates International Law. US troops are supposed to fight Daesh. In reality they support the mainly Kurdish mercenaries of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which created an autonomous state under the name of Rojava. It paralyzes grain farming, but exploits oil wells. Revenues are shared in two equal parts. The first goes to the Kurds of the PKK/YPG, the second to the CIA which uses them as a slush fund to finance its covert operations around the world without having to report to Congress.” So: this is CIA money that’s stolen from Syria, instead of legally wrangled, via Congress (and under their ‘experts’ advices), from U.S. taxpayers.

If you want to know why America’s super-rich ‘earn’ so much more (and increasingly more) money than the public does, this is the way it gets done. The public doesn’t control those ‘experts’ and ‘public’ officials: they do. It’s all based on lies; and, so, liars are hired by them. That’s how it gets done.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.