Have Your Say

Interesting point of view on World Politics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pczmpuMljY&ab_channel=JudgeNapolitano-JudgingFreedom

I read the transcript that was emailed to me.

Matthew Hoh: Who Really Controls US Foreign Policy?

The Ukrainians are going to be the next Afghans. They are going to be forgotten and left behind as soon as that’s politically convenient for the US, as soon as the US can see another path in Eastern Europe. For the US one of the reasons why I think we may have an interest in a negotiated settlement in Ukraine is because the major aspect, maybe the most important aspect for the Americans is the domination of the energy market in Europe. For me this is where it all begins. How did this go from, in 2012, Barack Obama in debates making fun of Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia is an adversary, to within a year the Russia phobia that we have seen? For me a lot of that comes from fracking and, then at the same time, the construction or the expansion of a dozen or so liquid natural gas terminals on the East Coast, in the Gulf of Mexico. They had to send all this fracked gas someplace and where’s the best market? It was Europe. For me that’s the genesis of the last decade’s worth of tensions with Russia, as well as you know the genesis of the coup in Ukraine in 2014. So in that sense the Americans have won, at least at this point, because we are dominating that energy market. We are now the largest liquid natural gas supplier to the world with much of that going to Europe, taking over from what the Russians used to provide.

So, if the Americans can say, ‘Look, we got this and this is what we really wanted,’ we can always just spin what we did in Ukraine as, ‘We stopped Vladimir Putin, he was only ever to able to advance 60 or 70 kilometers west, he only actually really took 10% of the territory because he had taken Crimea before, this is a victory. We stopped the tyrant in his tracks, he wasn’t able to march on Berlin or Paris.’ You can see how Biden could spin this when he’s out campaigning for reelection. These are all the things that should make the people in Kiev realize that they are ripe for betrayal …

We’re coming out of Christmas and I think it’s appropriate to understand the societal aspects of this–the philosophical, the metaphysical, the religious aspects of all this. What we are seeing is really something that is unholy, and I think you can use that in a religious sense but also in a secular sense: the moral horror of this and what that means for us as a people, who we are and, of course, what it has done to tens and tens of millions of people. But then, too, the nightmare of the Empire, the ever extending nightmare of the empire, in the sense that as things get out of control for our Empire, as it devolves, as it falls apart, as there’s more fractures in it, as we try to maintain more control by putting pressure on things through violence, through military force, whether direct or by proxy, it causes even greater stress which cause even greater fractures.

So what that plays out to, then, is nations saying, ‘This American hegemony just doesn’t benefit us–it harms us. We have to not just get away from it, we don’t just need to find alternatives like, say, the BRICS, but we need to actively oppose it.’ So what you see is things like what are happening in the Red Sea, with the Houthis or Ansar Allah as they’re called, fighting back, and the harm that has caused because they can fight back asymmetrically against very soft parts of the Empire’s global economy. It’s causing effects that are really outstripping what our actual capabilities are and so, rather than seeing that the way to handle this is to address what they are are fighting about, what they are standing up against–basically stop the genocide in Gaza–the desire is to double down on it and to quash them militarily. So what we’re seeing play out in the Red Sea, that could blow up into other things with consequences that we just can’t foresee but are likely going to be bad, is something that is just lost on the Romneys the Grahams the Blumenthals, because, one, they are so ideologically driven, they are infested with this religious American exceptionalism, they believe it’s good for their careers, but also this is how they’re they’re underwritten by the arms industry.