Insider View: The Tragedy of the U.S. Deep State

 

Insider View: The Tragedy of the U.S. Deep State

By Pepe Escobar
Strategic Culture

May 13, 2021

 

Pepe Escobar explains why Henry Kissinger must have lost the diplomatic plot.

Henry Kissinger, 97, Henry the K. for those he keeps close, is either a Delphic oracle-style strategic thinker or a certified war criminal for those kept not so close.

He now seems to have been taking time off his usual Divide and Rule stock in trade – advising the combo behind POTUS, a.k.a. Crash Test Dummy – to emit some realpolitik pearls of wisdom.

At a recent forum in Arizona, referring to the festering, larger than life Sino-American clash, Henry the K. said, “It’s the biggest problem for America; it’s the biggest problem for the world. Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.”

In realpolitik terms, this “kind of Cold War” is already on; across the Beltway, China is unanimously regarded as the premier U.S. national security threat.

Kissinger added U.S. policy toward China must be a mix of stressing U.S. “principles” to demand China’s respect and dialogue to find areas of cooperation: “I’m not saying that diplomacy will always lead to beneficial results…This is the complex task we have… Nobody has succeeded in doing it completely.”

Henry the K. actually must have lost the – diplomatic – plot. What Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are now involved in, full time, is to demonstrate – mostly to the Global South – how the American-enforced “rules-based international order” has absolutely nothing to do with international law and the respect of national sovereignty.

At first I had archived these Henry the K. platitudes out of sight. But then someone who used to hold a stellar position at the top of the U.S. Deep State showed he had been paying close attention.

This personality – let’s call him Mr. S. – has been one of my invaluable, trustworthy sources since the early 2000s. Mutual confidence was always key. I asked him if I could publish selected passages of his analysis, not naming names. Consent was given – ruefully. So fasten your seat belts.

Dancin’ with Mr. S.

Mr. S., in a quite intriguing fashion, seems to be expressing the collective views of a number of extremely qualified people. Right from the start, he points out how Henry the K.’s observations explain today’s Russia-China-Iran triangle.

The first point that we make is that it was not Kissinger who created policy for Nixon, but the Deep State. Kissinger was just a messenger boy.  In the 1972 situation the Deep State wanted to get out of Vietnam, which policy was put in place as containment of communist China and Russia.  We were there based on the domino theory.

He goes on:

The Deep State wanted to achieve a number of objectives in approaching Chairman Mao, who was antagonized by Russia. It wanted to ally in 1972 with China against Russia. That made Vietnam meaningless, for China would become the containing party of Russia and Vietnam no longer meant anything. We wanted to balance China against Russia.  Now, China was not a major power in 1972 but it could drain Russia, forcing it to place 400,000 troops on their border.  And our Deep State policy worked. We in the Deep State had thought it through, and not Kissinger. 400,000 troops on the Chinese border was a drain on their budget, as later Afghanistan became with over 100,000 troops, and the Warsaw Pact had another 600,000 troops.

And that brings us into Afghanistan:

The Deep State wanted to start a Vietnam for Russia in Afghanistan in 1979.  I was among those against it, as this would needlessly use the Afghani people as cannon fodder and that was unfair. I was overruled. Here Brzezinski was playing Kissinger; another overrated nothing who just carried messages.

The Deep State also decided to crash the oil price, as that would economically weaken Russia. And that worked in 1985, driving the price to eight dollars a barrel, which ate up half the Russian budget. Then, we basically gave permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait as a ploy to send in our advanced army to knock him out and demonstrate our superiority to the world in weaponry, which very much demoralized the Russians and put the fear of God into Islamic oil.  Then we created the Star Wars fiction.  Russia to our surprise lost their nerve and collapsed.

Mr. S. defines all of the above as “wonderful” in his opinion, as “communism went out and Christianity came in”:

We then wanted to welcome Russia into the community of Christian nations, but the Deep State wanted to dismember them. That was  stupid, as they would balance against China at least from their Mackinder point of view. It was naive on my part to hope to a return of Christianity, as the West was moving rapidly toward total moral disintegration.

In the meantime, our ally China continues to grow as we were not finished with the dismemberment of Russia and the advisors we sent to Russia destroyed the whole economy in the 1990s against my objections. The 78-day Belgrade bombing finally woke Russia up and they started a massive re-militarization as it was obvious that the intention was in the end to bomb Moscow into the ground. So defensive missiles became essential. Thus, the S-300, S-400, S-500 and soon S-600s.

The Deep State had been warned by me at our meetings on how bombing Belgrade in 1999 would cause Russia to remilitarize and I lost the argument. Belgrade was bombed for 78 days versus the vengeance bombing of Hitler for two days.  And China continues to grow.

Why balance of power doesn’t work

And that bring us to a new era – that started in practice with the Chinese announcement of the New Silk Roads in 2013 and Maidan in Kiev in 2014:

China wakes up to all of this in that they begin to realize that they have been just used, and that the U.S. fleet controls their trade routes, and decides to approach Russia in 2014 just about the time of their witnessing the Maidan overthrow of Ukraine.  This overthrow was organized by the Deep State when they started to understand that they had lost the arms race, and did not even know what was happening.

The Deep State wanted to draw Russia into a Vietnam again in the Ukraine to drain them and crash the oil price again, which they did.  Beijing studied this and saw the light. If Russia is overthrown, the West will control all their natural resources, which they see themselves needing as they grew into a giant economy larger than the U.S.  And Beijing starts to open up a warm relationship with Moscow seeking to obtain land based natural resources as oil and natural gas from Russia to avoid the seas for natural resources as much as they can. In the meantime, Beijing massively accelerates its building of submarines carrying missiles capable of destroying the U.S. fleets.

So where does Kissinger in Arizona fit in?

Now, Kissinger reflects the Deep State angst on the Russia-Chinese relationship and wants this split up for dear life. This is interestingly covered here by Kissinger. He does not want to tell the truth about balance of power realities. He describes them as “our values”, when the U.S. has no values left but anarchy, looting, and burning down hundreds of cities. Biden hopes to buy all these disenfranchised masses as money printing goes wild.

So we are back to Kissinger shocked at the new Russian-Chinese alliance. They must be separated.

Now, I do not agree with the balance of power intriguers in that morality or noble values should govern international relations, and not power. The U.S. has been following balance of power dreams since 1900 and now it faces economic ruin. These ideas do not work.  There is no reason the U.S. cannot be a friend of Russia and China and the differences can be worked out. But you cannot get to first base as balance of power considerations dominate everything. That is the tragedy of our time.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.