The first stage of U.S. President Donald Trump’s
plan to restore America’s former dominance as a “manufacturing country”
will be announced this coming weekend in Riyadh Saudi Arabia and
Washington DC, but its outlines are now already more than clear.
The biggest-ever foreign sale of U.S.-made weaponry will be announced at that time, and, according to a little-noticed report by Reuters on May 12th,
an unidentified U.S. government official informed Reuters that “We are
in the final stages of a series of deals,” whose size will be of truly
extraordinary historic proportions.
Trump
will announce during this, his first trip abroad as the U.S. President,
starting on Friday May 19th, deals for the fundamentalist-Sunni
government of Saudi Arabia to purchase more than $100 billion, and
perhaps more even than $300 billion, in U.S.-made weaponry.
The announced intention of Saudi princes is to defeat what they declare to be the ‘existential threat’ they face from Iran and from Shia Islam,
and so these weapons will presumably be used for ‘defense’ against the
fundamentalist-Shiite government of Iran, and against any nation whose
leader is Shiite (even if not fundamentalist, and including
non-sectarian and even secular Shiite, such as Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, and such as the Houthis in Yemen).
The U.S.
(especially the major investors in corporations such as Lockheed Martin)
will therefore be in a position to profit from intensification of the
wars in Syria and in Yemen, as well as from other national battlefields
between Sunni and Shia. That’s the plan, and, on this basis, as soon as
Trump won the 2016 election, he
appointed to all of his national-security posts people who have solid
records as being rabidly hostile, above all, towards Iran, and
secondarily, toward Iran’s allies, such as Russia and Syria. (Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton,
was hostile, above all, toward Russia; her aim was to conquer it, which
would entail unlimited spending on nuclear weapons. Trump’s plan is
focused instead on unlimited spending on conventional weapons, and the
deal that he has reached with the Sauds is designed specifically to
supply them with that — not with nuclear.)
The key international ally of the American government has long been the fundamentalist-Sunni Saudi
royal family, the world’s wealthiest family, who own Saudi Arabia,
including the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, which is 100% owned
by the Saudi government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family, actually by whomever the royal family’s princes select to be the King. No
one can be selected by the Saud family to become the King who is
disapproved of by the nation’s fundamentalist-Sunni Wahhabist clergy, who have been committed ever since 1744 to eliminating Shia Islam.
Israel also is allied with the Saud family. Consequently, on the Sunni
side are the U.S. and Israel; and, on the Shiite side are Russia and
Syria. Other countries are secondary.
For
example, Sunni Turkey is part of America’s NATO military alliance
against Russia, but is obsessed against America’s Kurdish allies and
therefore more on Iran’s and Russia’s side in that regard. (A Kurdish
state being carved from Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, would please only the U.S. government.)
The Reuters
news-report also quoted this unnamed U.S. government official as saying
that “Israel would still maintain an edge” so as to remain the most
powerful military nation in the Middle East. This suggests that part of
these “deals” will be that the Sauds will continue to say no-thank-you
to the repeated offers by Pakistan to sell some of their nuclear weapons
to the Saudi government. And it also means that the Sauds will continue
to rely upon the U.S. nuclear force as protection or ‘umbrella’ against
any possible nuclear attack, from Israel or any other nation. (The full
terms of the ‘deals’ won’t be made public but will also include purely
spoken agreements, more in the nature of the 1945 original deal that was
reached in private between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Saud.)
The Sauds are
buying the U.S., as their ally in their centuries-old war against Shia
Islam; and, the U.S. is selling the Sauds the weaponry, and the military
trainers (so as to be able to use America’s weapons), against Iran and
other Shiia-controlled or -allied countries.
The Trump
Administration has already been applying pressure against Russia in an
attempt to get them to abandon their support of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad,
and of Iran; but this pressure has not yet borne any fruit, and is not
currently a front-burner issue in Trump’s plan; it’s on the back burner
right now.
The Trump Administration has still
not decided whether to continue the Obama Administration’s refusal to
label as a “terrorist organization” the Syrian jihadists who are led by
Al Qaeda, which is funded by the royal Saud family and has been the most effective fighting force in Syria to overthrow Assad’s government.
As
regards domestic U.S. issues, they’re viewed, by the top levels in both
the Republican and Democratic Parties, more as vote-getting baits, than
as issues of actual primary concern. Whereas the public focuses mainly
upon those issues, the political-donor class (owners of international
corporations) are concerned mainly about foreign affairs; and, in
domestic affairs, on lowering the taxes that they pay and the economic
regulations that increase their costs of doing business — and even those
domestic issues have a large foreign-affairs component. So:
international alliances are the central concern of America’s wealthy.
Since the general public knows and cares little about those matters and
doesn’t understand them but instead misunderstands them, there is virtually
no political cost to any politician who, as a public official, gives
away the store to the donor-class, on what they care about the most.
What the public see in the ’news’media is propaganda that’s paid for by
advertisers and/or by the aristocratically controlled government itself,
and therefore carefully veils key realities that would enable the
public to understand what’s going on and why. Of course, individuals such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, are viscerally hated by the donor-class and get thrown into prison even while people such as George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama,
walk free and are even honored by large portions of the electorate (not
to mention by their own financial sponsors) (and even win such things
as the Nobel Peace Prize).
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.
The original source of this article is Strategic Culture Foundation
Copyright © Eric Zuesse, Strategic Culture Foundation, 2017
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