Eric Zuesse

On July 1st, the White House, Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued “The National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015” (officially dated June 2015), and at its top is:

"U.S. ENDURING NATIONAL INTERESTS: The security of the United States, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners."

In other words: protection of Americans is neither more nor less important to the U.S. Government than is protection of “U.S. allies and partners.” All of them are at the very top, as "U.S. ENDURING NATIONAL INTERESTS.”

America’s Founders didn’t agree with the Obama Administration’s view on this. George Washington’s famous Farewell Address asserted that, ”It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world”; and the third President Thomas Jefferson said in his equally famous Inaugural Address, that there should be “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” Instead, of that view, Obama now wants “entangling alliances” with anti-BRICS nations in Europe via his proposed TTIP treaty, and with anti-BRICS nations in Asia via his proposed TPP treaty, plus anti-BRICS nations worlwide via his proposed TISA treaty for service-industries. So, he told graduating cadets at West Point, on 28 May 2014, that they will be fighting not only against America’s enemies, but also against America’s economic competitors — that these future U.S. military officers will be serving as muscle abroad, for U.S.-headquartered international corporations:

“Russia’s [actually non-existent] aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.”

However, the U.S. military has even grander objectives than to serve as policemen for protecting “the United States, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners.” In addition to that, under the core heading of “NATIONAL SECURITY OBJECTIVES,” the “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015” lists six things, and one of them is “The security of the global economic system.” (That’s very important to Wall Street, but America’s many invasions for the benefit of Wall Street haven’t been proud moments in American history — and didn’t do the American public any good at all.) Another is: “The security, confidence, and reliability of our allies.” And yet another objective is: “The preservation and extension of universal values.”

In other words: There will always be one cliché or another, which can be cited so as to ‘justify’ any invasion by the U.S.

Furthermore, the resort there to undefined “universal values” can actually ‘justify’ anything. Islamic jihadists say that the establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth is a universal value. However, the Christian Crusaders, who slaughtered Muslims nearly a thousand years ago, likewise held this same objective, to be a universal value. Other than such fantasists as those people, there are no universal values — such ‘universality’ of values exists only in propaganda, not in reality.

Even Adolf Hitler endorsed things "which were justified from the universal human point of view.” He’s not the type of company that Americans have generally wanted to be associated with.

If U.S. President Barack Obama, who is America’s Commander-in-Chief, and whose document this therefore is, is no mere propagandist for perpetual war for perpetual ‘peace,’ but is instead carrying out his actual duties under the U.S. Constitution, which are duties to the American people, then he will not allow such propagandistic terminology to stand as representing “The National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015.”

Furthermore, how is the U.S. military — whose document this “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015” is — even going to be able to enforce: “The security, confidence, and reliability of our allies”? If “our allies” might happen to decide not to continue being such, or else to lose confidence in the U.S. Government, then will the U.S. bomb them? After all: this document speaks only for the U.S. military, and they have only military means at their disposal. Bombs, and such, are their business; soldiers aren’t supposed to be in the diplomacy-business. That’s the State Department’s domain. But Obama was addressing future military officers, not the U.S. foreign service. This fact raises the question of what U.S. President Obama’s broader, more comprehensive, view of U.S. national security is. Even though the U.S. military (at its top command, anyway — like at West Point) is ready and obviously willing to invade any country for America’s “universal values,” they can do it only via the command from the Commander-in-Chief.

At the start of February, President Obama himself issued that very document, the broader-focused view. It's his National Security Strategy 2015, and as I had mentioned at the time, in my news-report’s headline: "Obama’s New National Security Strategy Is Rabidly Anti-Russian.”

So: President Obama is actually even more determined to defeat Russia than he is to defeat ISIS. Whatever “universal values” stand at the top of his “national security” concerns, he has already made clear that a nuclear war against Russia might be the result — and this is how America's Commander-in-Chief is aiming to protect "the United States, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners.” That euphemistic phrase, from his Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounds better (at least to a naive public) than simply saying, “the financial interests of America’s billionaires.” Power isn’t only a high for the billionaire class; it can also be very profitable for them, even in crassly obvious ways.

Obama is their President; he’s not really the public’s. The billionaires have done very well under his rule, but the general American public have not. In fact, whereas the bottom 50% of Americans owned only 2.5% of America’s total wealth at the economy’s peak in 2007, they owned only 1.1% of the total wealth in 2010, after Obama had been continuing Bush’s Wall Street bailout for a year. That bailout went to the top 1%, and it was paid for by they bottom 50%. (For example, by contrast, the top 1% owned 33.8% of America’s total wealth in 2007 and 34.5% of it in 2010. So: the bottom half — the people who had been suckered by those mortgage-scam operations, which were pumped by Wall Street — were stuck with all the losses, while Wall Street boomed from the federal bailouts when those megabanks at the end were saddled with junk they could no longer sell.) Moreover, yet another study shows that whereas when Obama entered office in 2009, the top 0.1% of wealth-holders held the then all-time record high of 7% of all U.S. wealth, that figure had risen to an even higher 8% by just 2012. Obama serves those people — virtually no one else. Certainly not the people who voted for him. And America’s billionaires want what Russia has: the largest land-mass, and supply of natural resources, on this planet. Obama is going after it, for them. That’s why he overthrew Ukraine’s neutralist President in February 2014, and replaced him with a rabidly anti-Russia government, eager to base NATO missiles, right on Russia’s doorstep — the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.

It takes a lot to satisfy America’s aristocrats. Obama has performed brilliantly for them. And so we now have what is essentially the Obama doctrine: America has the right to invade (and/or otherwise overthrow) any government that is not an ‘ally.’ There was Honduras (a coup), there was Venezuela (several attempted coups), there was Ecuador (more attempted coups), there was Libya (“We came, we saw, he died!”), there was Syria, and there was Ukraine (“the most blatant coup in history”). But Russia — not yet.

-###-

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, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
.