The U.S. is a regime, not a democracy. Here’s how it started.

Eric Zuesse

Little more than three months after America’s last democratic U.S. President,  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died on 12 April 1945, his successor, Harry S. Truman, made the fateful decision that created the hegemoniacally-obsessed, globally grasping, regime — and, consequently the world it dominates — that we live in today, plagued by a U.S. hyper-imperialistic Government which is determined to take over the entire planet. Truman did this upon the advice of his personal hero and immediate successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who told him that “no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war [i.e., could prevent the Soviet Union from defeating Japan and so from becoming clearly the dominant power in Asia] unless victory [by the U.S., against Japan] came before they [Soviet forces] could get in.” In other words, at that time, which was nine days after the 16 July 1945 successful first test of the atomic bomb, and right before Truman’s decision to nuke Japan in order for the U.S. Government to dominate in Asia and the Pacific (as the U.S. was already set to dominate in Europe and the Atlantic), Truman decided that if the U.S. Government would not ultimately control the Soviet Government, then the Soviet Government would ultimately control the American Government. The old, World War II “us or them” between the Axis versus the Allied powers, was now to be replaced by a new “us or them” between the U.S. (as Hitler’s successor) versus its ‘enemies’ (such as Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Syria, Indonesia, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China, and any other nation that resists U.S. control). And, so, immediately after World War II, Truman decided that the U.S. Government would have, as its top priority, to win WW III if the Soviet Union wouldn’t capitulate peacefully before then. That is how the Cold War started. 

Within just two years thereafter, Truman replaced FDR’s entire Administration and cabinet, and created the CIA and the Orwellianly-named U.S. ‘Defense’ (actually aggression) Department (replacing the Founders-established “Department of War,” which had no “standing army”), and he (under the advice from Ike) thereby established America’s MIC, or Military-Industrial Complex, which had not previously existed. (The ‘Defense’ Department introduced the permanent army as a continuation from the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which had created America’s first peacetime conscription. Then, under Truman, the Selective Service Act of 1948 created a new system: the permanent-war U.S. military — the very “standing army” that America’s Founders had hoped never would become established in this country. Once established, Truman could then build the ‘Defense’ Department so that America’s armaments-manufacturers would have steady, predictable, and growing, business, selling their weapons to this Government, and, then, in 1949, establishing NATO and other vassal-nations as ‘allies’, to sell-to also — their foreign markets. This was Truman’s America, and it exists today, a country controlled by the owners of the ‘Defense’ industries, and of the international extraction corporations, which are protected by them. It’s the modern imperial state, as a ‘democracy’.)

The Soviet Union was, at the time in 1945, poised to take over Japan. The Japanese regime knew this. A “Top Secret Ultra” communication within the War Department, on 12 July 1945 that was declassified only on 30 June 2005, titled “‘MAGIC’ — diplomatic summary”, stated that Japanese Foreign Minister “Togo’s message … conveyed a ‘Soviet proposal … for the transfer of [German] property [in Manchuria],’ pointing out that the only representatives of the four victors over Germany ‘in Japan and the territory occupied by the Japanese army’ were Soviet officials, who ‘are vested with the function of taking over the property’,” and it also stated that Japan could not accept this because Japan was allied with Germany, and the Soviet Union was allied with FDR’s America. Furthermore, it quoted Togo as saying, ’We are now secretly giving consideration to the termination of the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan both at home and abroad’, and it quoted Togo as advocating for “our proposal that we pledge mutual support,” essentially a poswar alliance between Japan and the Soviet Union, which Stalin refused. While the American Government, under its new President, Truman, was soon to decide that WW II would be followed by a war between the American and the Soviet Government, the Soviet Government was determined for the post-WW-II world to be instead led jointly by a U.S.-Soviet alliance, under the global auspices of the former U.S. President FDR’s design for a U.N. that would be the sole source of international laws and would possess the global parliament of nations, and juridical authority, and monopoly on all strategic weaponry, so as to be enabled to enforce the international laws of this all-encompassing global democracy (a federal republic) of nations, against any nation that violates these internationally democratically arrived-at international laws. Most particularly, FDR was concerned that such a U.N., which he had first conceived-of in 1941, would outlaw all international aggressions, and all imperialism, and prohibit any empires. (As things turned out, Stalin agreed with him on this, but Churchill did not.) Truman agreed with Churchill that an empire is okay if it is on ‘our’ side, and privately despised FDR, and rejected FDR’s anti-imperialistic vision for the post-WW-II world. So: Truman was determined that Japan must become a U.S. vassal-nation, against the Soviet Union.

As Justin H. Libby wrote in his World Affairs article in the summer of 1993, “The search for a negotiated peace: Japanese diplomats attempt to surrender Japan prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”:

“The Japanese government turned to the Soviet government in July 1945, asking Marshall Stalin to intercede with the Allies and help bring the war to an amicable end. The Japanese were unaware that at Yalta in February 1945, Moscow, which had signed a nonaggression pact with Japan in 1941, agreed to enter the Pacific war ninety days after the surrender of Germany. These ninety days coincided with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.”

Stalin tried to adhere to all of his agreements that had been reached with FDR until the subsequent actions that were taken by U.S. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower made unequivocally clear, to him, that America was committed to conquering the Soviet Union.

As soon as Truman established the CIA, it established its “Operation Gladio” in order to hire in Europe thousands of ‘former’ Fascists and Nazis to perpetrate terrorist acts in Europe that were set up to be publicized in the aristocracy’s ‘news’-media as having been perpetrated by Communists, and so to create there the public image and fear against Russia as sponsoring terrorism. Also, the U.S. regime created the Marshall Plan to fund reconstruction in European vassal-nations so as to enable them to shine as against the Soviet-allied post-WW-II nations, which therefore needed to rely instead upon the Soviet Union, which had been just as much ravaged by Hitler as its vassal-nations were. These and other measures won the Cold War for ‘The West’ — the imperialistic U.S. regime and its vassal-nations (‘allies’).

The Soviet Union did capitulate to end Truman’s “Cold War” peacefully. However, in 1991, which was already long after the new bureaucracies that Truman had established, became established, the MIC took blatant control over the entire U.S. Government itself, as being the “military-industrial complex” that its co-creator, Eisenhower, had warned against only on 17 January 1961. This was at the very end of his Presidency, so that Ike would not be blamed for having co-created the MIC, by future ‘historians’ who take their Presidents’ explicit assertions as being sincere even when they are anything but that. For an example: even today, there are ‘historians’ who present Ike as if he had been opposed to the MIC, which he had actually co-created and nurtured. His late criticism of the MIC was pure PR for himself. Among all U.S. Presidents, Ike was unsurpassed in his slickness and skillfulness as a liar, until Barack Obama became the U.S. President and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his mere rhetoric (lies). (Even today, Obama, who, as President, started the wars in Ukraine on Russia’s border, and in Syria a Russia-friendly country, is the world’s most-admired person. He was an extraordinarily successful President, for his billionaire funders.)

When the Soviet Union capitulated in 1991, the U.S. regime faced an opportunity to terminate its NATO anti-Soviet military alliance, but instead turned it into strictly an anti-Russian military alliance, thus demonstrating that it had always been lying to call itself a ‘defensive’ alliance and was always instead an alliance to spread the U.S. empire, and now to conquer Russia and any nation that is friendly towards Russia — such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, and now China.

On 16 September 2022, U.S. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had served in several top offices at the Pentagon and White House, was headlined and interviewed at the Greanville Post, “Colonel Larry Wilkerson Interview: An Objective Look at U.S. Foreign Policy” and he — profoundly disillusioned about the top people in this Government, and about the billionaires who had selected them — said:

Empires, for that is what America is, at the height of their powers can never be at peace.  With more than 750 military installations all over the globe — the rest of the world has fewer than 75 — there is no rest for America. … Whether administering interminable sanctions on a sizeable part of the world, or using military power outright, these are the tools of statecraft for an imperial power in decline. Moreover and dramatically, America has made war, the threat of war, and intimidation, whether economic and financial, or bombs, bullets and bayonets, magnificently profitable for the “security industry”, from private military contractors to behemoths of industry such as the Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing corporations. When war is so profitable, it is a certainty there will be more of it. The Ukraine conflict is a glaring and present example. So long as these conditions persist, war is inevitable. …

Recently, with regard to security spending on Ukraine, an analysis demonstrated a 450,000 percent return-on-investment for the six largest defense contractors. In short, they donated approximately $10.2 million to the half-dozen top legislators in Congress with regard to defense budgets. In return, because of US outlays for Ukraine and NATO, the defense contractors reaped almost half a trillion dollars in arms and munitions sales. 

He was talking about the U.S. regime, which created and runs NATO. Any of its vassal-nations, which includes all member-nations in NATO, serves that supremely corrupt regime, and the billionaires who control it — NOT their own nation’s population. 

NATO is purely an alliance for U.S.-and-allied aggression. It’s an imperial alliance, and the U.S. regime is in control of its member-nations. It is an imperial alliance to market mainly U.S. weapons to all member-nations (i.e., to the Governments of those nations), and also to sell wars against non-member nations — especially against nations friendly to Russia, its chief target to conquer. Selling wars sells yet more weapons. NATO was created by Truman and has had no justification for existing, at all, after 1991 when it expanded instead of terminated — as it would have done if there were any decency to it. (After 1991, NATO is purely an organization for aggression, a murderous gang of thug-nations.) NATO is the world’s biggest organization for U.S. military hegemony, and all of its officials deserve to be publicly recognized as championing Truman’s vision, and as rejecting FDR’s vision and his United Nations, so that NATO’s incompatibility with the U.N.-as-it-needs-to-be will become public knowledge, widely recognized, instead of everywhere denied or else ignored. NATO is, in fact, a shameful abombination that has become, after 1991, a blatant scandal, which, amazingly, the whole world is, even as-of now, not publicly denouncing and demanding to terminate immediately. No decent nation can tolerate any such organization, any such organized gang of mass-murderers and destroyers that exists, now, only in order to terrorize the residents in nations that refuse to cooperate with its hegemoniacal demands. For example, though Ukraine isn’t even a member, it now is being treated as if it were, because the U.S. regime wants to position its missiles within a five-minute striking-distance (353 miles) from Moscow (and that means in Ukraine — nowhere else).

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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.