Eric Zuesse -- Why the April 14th Missiles Invasion of Syria Was a Historic Downward Turning Point for American Hegemony

Why the April 14th Missiles Invasion of Syria Was a Historic Downward Turning Point for American Hegemony

By Eric Zuesse

Global Research, April 17, 2018

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: Militarization and WMD, US NATO War Agenda

In-depth Report: SYRIA

The April 14th invasion was the apogee, the turning-point downward, for American hegemony, the end of the mono-polar world or U.S. dictatorship that ever since 24 February 1990 the U.S. Government has imposed on all of its foreign allies for them to join the U.S in imposing against Russia — the only other nuclear super-power and thereby the only effective counter-weight to America’s global dictatorship. The strategy, ever since that time, has been to pick off, one-by-one, Russia’s allies, and bring them into NATO, so as to place missiles right on and near Russia borders, and, effectively, compel Russia to surrender to the will of America’s leaders.

The embarrassing ineffectiveness of the April 14th invasion — it didn’t even get the OPCW, Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, to cancel its planned investigation of the evidence in Douma Syria regarding whether it was Assad and Putin who have been lying, or instead Trump and his foreign allies who were lying — caps what is actually the U.S. Government’s defeat in its decades-long plan for global hegemony, global dictatorship.

The Washington Post reported, on April 16th, that Trump is angry at his “aides” for their falsehoods, misrepresentations to him about what the result would be if he were to select a particular policy-option — their false advice and predictions on the basis of which he had made the decisions that he had decided, on the basis of their advice, to make, and which results did not happen as they had predicted. It reported that:

Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions [of Russian diplomats]. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words.”

In that news-article was made clear that his “aides” had persuaded him that if he expelled lots of Russian diplomats, he would satisfy not only the American newsmedia but the leaders of allied countries, which would then expel at least as many diplomats as the U.S., in order for the U.S. President to be able to be leading a real “alliance” against Russia, and not to be, essentially, pursuing a go-it-alone anti-Russia policy (and thus hardly any global dictator at all).

The WP article indicated that Trump strongly wants to win Putin’s support for his anti-Syria and anti-Iran policies (apparently, Trump is 100% committed to the policies of the royal Saud family and of Israel’s aristocracy, to conquer both Iran and Syria), and that Trump is dumbfounded that European leaders are not following through with the necessary support (of Saudi Arabia’s and of Israel’s policies). (Though George Herbert Walker Bush had intended on 24 February 1990 that the U.S. would be the global dictator; Israel and the Sauds jointly took control of the U.S. Government, and Trump is even more committed to those two aristocracies than Obama was. And, yet, even with the U.S. aristocracy’s support, the Sauds and Israel are failing to achieve their demands.)

Russia resists, and now no reasonable person can question — despite America’s spending ten times what Russia does on the military — that Russia’s weapons are vastly more reliable than America’s are. (If you click on the video, start viewing at around 1:30:00.) This is a failure also of the corrupt leaderships of America’s allies that joined in the invasion, who now can know that in any country where their billionaires can make profits from war (e.g., Lockheed Martin, BAE, etc.), corruption will flourish even more than ‘defense’ spending does. Why are the Sauds and Israelis being served by America’s foreign policies (against Syria and Iran)? It’s because that is the way for America’s aristocracy to generate wars and to cause the profits of the hundred top military contractors to soar. The only winners are those super-rich who are on the taking side of their government’s expenditures — and, secondarily, their mega-bankers who benefit also from those nations’ continuously soaring debts to fund the permanent-war-for-permanent-‘peace’ economies. Aristocracies thrive on nothing so much as the sale, to other governments, of wars, and of debts — other governments are their essential market. If an aristocracy’s allies don’t buy, that aristocracy will die. Mainly, aristocrats sell to governments weapons, and then sell, to the public, those governments’ debts.

Finally, the massive corruption in the U.S. military (what Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex”) has come home to roost. Not even the projected increases in U.S. ‘defense’ spending (and soaring federal debts) will be able to address the problem — the only result of doing yet more of the same will simply be yet further escalation of the corruption, and of the foreign corpses, cripples, and refugees. For only the most corrupt to be on the receiving end of the benefits cannot be sustained forever. The aristocracies are coming to the end of their tethers, and won’t be able to grab all that they crave to have (which is everything). The U.S. aristocracy’s dream of establishing “Nuclear Primacy” is likewise just a fantasyland.

Russia is now making the commitment to its allies clearer, upping the ante, but if the only allies that the U.S. can get behind its campaign for the Sauds and Israel remain UK and France, then perhaps Trump will prefer a face-saving way out, over invading Russia. However, given the unlimited greed of Trump’s masters, there could be a nuclear war even without any expectation that it would have a ‘winner’. For some people, being (or remaining) king of the hill is even more important than staying alive. Unless some NATO members quit the alliance, the prospect of avoiding World War III will remain unlikely. If Turkey quits NATO, that optimistic prospect will suddenly become likely. Turkey’s President Erdogan holds the most important cards of all.

The Saker remains pessimistic:

Facts [such as this and this] simply don’t matter. And neither does logic. All that matters are perceptions!

And the perception is that “we” (the AngloZionist rulers and their serfs) “kicked” Assad’s “ass” and that “we” will “do it again” if “we” feel like it. That is all that matters in the Empire of Illusions which the AngloZionist Hegemony has become.

The failed missiles-invasion of Syria might be a turning-point in reality; but, if it’s not also a turning-point in the way that Western publics view reality, then WW III will probably come soon. Can the human lemmings be fooled all the way off the cliff? Fooled much farther, we’ll all fall.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.