Russian website geopolitika.ru Interview by Leonid Savin (12 Feb 2009)
With F. William Engdahl (WE)
- In Pentagon "Global Trends 2025” report issued by NIC is written that new conflicts will be possible because of inadequate supply of non-OPEC producers. Can we find suggested critics of Russia and Iran in this message as well as other countries (such Venezuela) which do not comply with U.S. Foreign policy?
WE: The 2003 Iraq US occupation demonstrated clearly that US foreign policy, national security strategy so-called is to achieve total control, militarily, over all major oil reserves on the planet. A particular target in this is Russian oil, not only as the world’s second largest but also the unique geophysical competence behind 50 years of independent Russian oil development threatens the ability of one power, Washington, to use oil to control rivals like China or Western Europe.
- Last years in agenda of many governments we can see the problem of climate change. What about climate change dealing with natural gas and oil production? Burning of subtend products leads to misbalance of air pressure that brings winds in regions and decline of regional climate…
WE: The climate scare, or what is popularly termed ‘Global Warming’ is based on scientific fraud, largely led, ironically, by US meterological scientists like NASA’s James Hansen of the IPCC who have been proven by their science peers to have deliberately faked or misused statistical data to show their alarming ‘climate predictions.’ There is no computer model of global climate able to project such a complex as world weather even six days let alone six decades in the future. That is provable fact. Global Warming is an agenda that got a new attention in 2004 in the wake of the Iraq war when the Pentagon released an alarming warning about it and the media dutifully made it overnight into the major theme. Manmade emissions, no matter how dirty or offensive or toxic locally, are to date no influence on climate in the macro domain of the earth, thank God. Natural gas and oil are two of the cleanest and most useful fuel sources man has found to date and they both exist in huge abundance, as your Russian scientists have long ago proven in their abiotic researches since the 1950’s. They deserve to have the recognition finally that Cold War security denied them.
-What about new technologies in energy sector?
WE: I refer to the above. Most of what are called ‘alternative’ energy sources are a joke. Wind? Solar panels? And the most criminal is the hoax of ‘biofuels’ that we grow corn and other crops not to feed a hungry world buzt to burn as a (highly toxic and corrosive by the way) substitute for gasoline. Biofiels in USA and the EU are responsible as a recent suppressed World Bank study documents, for 75% of the explosive recent rise in world grain prices last summer.
- In your book “Century of war” IMF mentioned as agent of neoliberal influence in ex-USSR area. IMF and World Bank were strongly criticized for destructive policy in developing country. Actually, Russia have break away from economical grip of these institutions, but rest of ex-soviet republic to continue cooperate with WB/ IMF and to use programs of structural economic adjustment. What is your personal observation about activity of WB/IMF in Eurasia and other regions? Ukraine.
WE: The IMF structure was originally designed by Washington, and voting control held by Washington and its ally Great Britain since then. It was part of a then-secret project, War & Peace Studies, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation beginning 1939 to develop a master plan of US postwar geopolitical dominance. There were two options being considered in 1944 by the US power circles. One was to use Russia as an ‘ally’ to contain Germany after the war.
The second, one that Churchill convinced Truman to adopt, was to make the wartime ally of America, the Soviet Union, suddenly into the ‘Empire of Evil’ as Reagan liked to put it. The Cold War was incited, provoked by first Chuirchill who played on Stalin’s fears of British designs in Western Europe, then used by the US power elites around Harriman, Kennan, Dulles brothers.
The presidencies of both FDR, Truman and Eisenhower were dominated in key positions by Rockefeller people, as was Nixon’s, Carter’s, Reagan’s, and both Bush’s (the Bush family is an appendage of the Rockefeller political fraction of the US elite). The Rockefeller family after World War II was arguably the most powerful family on the planet. Their control of US media, think-tanks, university research, foreign policy allowed them to shape what Time publisher Henry Luce in his famous 1941 editorial proclaimed as the ‘American Century.’
The American elites after the First World War studied and adopted British geopolitics as their own. Sir Halford Mackinder was invited to draft his thoughts on the postwar world in 1943 for the Rockefeller’s influential New York Council on Foreign Relations journal, Foreign Affairs.
- Economical crisis has shown to the world the impotence of IMF and WB. Can we to start discuss about decline of neoliberal ideology in general? Can we tell that neoliberal order is not right and not useful?
WE: YES! Not only we are in the midst of the ‘death of neoliberal ideology’. We are seeing the death of the post-1944 Bretton Woods Dollar System, one of the most effective vehicles of economic imperialism ever devised. The US elites made a conscious decision during World War II to cleverly portray themselves as the ‘Good Guys’ in the world, and deny their actual imperial agenda. Their propaganda machine proclaimed America as the ‘defender of freedom, liberty, colonial liberation, free market.’ It was a brilliantly successful strategy until the foundations of the US economy, as a result of their expansion policies globally, began to rot from neglect, as US corporations sought increased profits from cheap labor plants abroad beginning the 1980’s.
The crisis now unfolding in the United States few economists even comprehend. That is a function of the dominance of Milton Friedman ‘laissez faire’ economics in American universities since the 1970’s. They cannot think, or very few of them as a result. Look at what a disaster US policymakers have made of the situation since last September when Goldman Sachs’ Henry Paulson US Treasury Secretary and New York Federal Reserve President Tim Geithner decided to ‘let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt.’ That suddenly made the entire global payments system incalculable. No bank trusted any other. There was no longer any clear idea which banks or even insurance companies were ‘too big to fail.’ That is what triggered the massive repatriation of capital into the dollar in the last months which has caused such hardship in places like Ukraine and even Russia.
The problem of Ukraine however is not a simple economic mismanagement. Ukraine, since Washington financed the ‘Orange Revolution’ coup in 2004 of Yushchenko, has been a priority project of the Pentagon strategy to encircle Russia, still the only power with capability militarily to stand up to the US pressures. If Washington is to realize its goal of what the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance, it must literally destroy Russia as a viable state. The post-1991 IMF Shock Therapy and Harvard whiz kids like Jeffrey Sachs were the first phase of destroying the Russian and FSU economies. It was never intended to establish stable, functioning states. Too many in Russia and Ukraine were naïve in my view about the motives of the West especially of Washington, whether father Bush, Clinton or son Bush. US Lebensraum is their only concern, and how to control the world.
- But we still have a lot of groups based on neoliberal principles. CFR, PNAM as well as their sub divisional institutions and parallel structures located in Europe in Russia. Do we need political will of state’s leaders for prevention of foreign influence only or more practice intellectual investigations of persons and independent think-tanks?
WE: In my view we urgently need both. We are currently living in a perhaps once in a century or even longer end of an age, the age of Anglo-American global dominance. What is important is for various government leaders around the world to have the courage to stand up and point to Washington—and make no illusion that the foreign policy of Obama will or can be any different from that of Bush-Cheney other than in ‘tone,’—and say to them, ‘The Emperor has no clothes’ as in the famous Hans C. Andersen childrens’ story.
My various writings which appear internationally in websites and blogs such as yours, are my modest attempt to shed light on the dark corners of policy which are too little understood. Others should have the courage to so the same.
- Is there in U.S. establishment still strong ideas of Manifest Destiny and history mission?
WE: You better believe there is. Since US-imperialist historian Frederick Jackson Turner developed his thesis of America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ in the 1890’s and Brooks Adams of the presidential founders’ family, expanded it to the world as a ‘God-given’ right of America. Like Great Britain since Queen Elisabeth I, the elites of the United States developed Manifest Destiny as the pseudo religious cover for their crass imperial agenda. It remains today, merely look at Afghanistan, Iraq. No one can seriously believe US troops are in Kabul to find Osama bin Laden? Or in Iraq to destroy the threat of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction which even George W. Bush shortly before leaving office admitted was his ‘greatest regret’. The ideology is as I see it some kind of freemasonic or mystic belief structure that allows US power elites to self justify their crude expansionism.
-You also are author of book about GMO and nets of transnational corporations in the world. Please, can you tell us more facts about rotation of global elite inside authority and corporative circles of the West?
WE: So between the top Pentagon general s and the military industrial complex where retired generals or admirals go right to work as high paid lobbyists for the leading defense firms to go back to advocate their new client’s defense projects. The same corruption is prevalent in the food industry where US government officials of the Food & Drugs Administration or of the Agriculture Department leave Washington to become top executives with companies like Monsanto. Private industry, major corporate Fortune 500 companies have virtually destroyed the necessary independent watchgod function of the US government agencies, markedly since the Reagan Administration began to ‘deregulate’ in the 1980’s.
- Mr. Engdahl, you are just back from Asia. What can you tell about geopolitical shifts in this region, social and political climate and trends?
WE: My talks in Beijing and elsewhere in China suggest to me that there is a massive rethinking ongoing at the highest levels of government and academia in China. I constantly made my view clear that for the well-being of a safer more peaceful world, it would be of utmost importance, regardless of past historical frictions, for China to realize the strategic importance of a closer cooperation in all areas with Russia. The world needs a power grouping to counterbalance the too one-sided US Sole Superpower and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for example is a potential seed crystal of such Eurasian sphere, by the way the worst nightmare of geopolitical UK and US thinkers like Kissinger or Brzezinski.
-In your one of last articles you wrote about interests of China into Africa and U.S. trained forces there. Within history of directed conflicts for mineral resources (coltan and diamonds are the most known) there, can you to tell about schemes, actors and agents of influence
WE: From Darfur to Congo and beyond, the US has begun to deploy to undercut China’s rather clever ‘non-IMF’ economic diplomacy in Africa where it urgently needs starátegic raw materials such as oil, coltan, copper and many other things. Washington was furious when they realized Beijing was ignoring IMF and going with direct bilateral soft loans to secure resources. Washington had regarded Africa as a giant American colony to be exploited at will via IMF ‘conditionalities’ and the like and here comes an upstart China making success after success. The Pentagon just adopted a plan proposed, interestingly by O´bama’s new National Security Adviser, General James Jones, to create a special new USAFRICOR. The reason is China.
- Thank you, Mr. Engdahl
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