Kaganism: The People Steering Us Into Another World War
ERIC STRIKER
The Unz Review
The Iraq war debacle, the relative (to Bush) restraint of the Obama administration, and the 2016 anti-interventionist campaign of Donald Trump may have seemingly discredited the neo-conservative movement and its personalities, but they have come roaring back.
This new stage in American foreign policy could be characterized as Kaganism: neither Democrat or Republican, but rather a non-partisan 21st century crusade for “liberalism.”
Donald Kagan, the patriarch of Kaganism, followed a similar intellectual trajectory to his colleagues Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: Marxist academics who transformed into rabid Reaganoid Cold Warriors in response to the Soviet Union’s support for Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism in the 1960s. Donald was quite clearly in the Republican camp, though his children have dropped some of the “right-wing” elements of the neo-conservative doctrine (previously used to mobilize Evangelical Christian voting blocs) and replaced it with a unified American state ideology that is as at home in the Democratic Party as it is in the GOP.
Donald’s sons, the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan and the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan, were highly influential in the George W. Bush administration through think-tanks such as the Project For A New American Century and the Foreign Policy Initiative, though today they have largely distanced themselves from the GOP following the party’s alienation of Jewish elites through Trumpification.
At PNAC, the Kagans were primarily concerned with expanding Israeli power by using the United States to topple Saddam Hussein, Bashar Al-Assad and strangling Iran, but by 2006, they grew increasingly suspicious and hostile towards Russia and China for seeking more control in how they interface with Western (read: Jewish) financial institutions and cultural values, while simultaneously choosing to pursue their own foreign policy paths independent of Pax Americana. Over time, the fears of Kaganism have been vindicated, as Russia and China have evolved from wild card United Nations votes to outright revisionist powers ready to directly confront Washington interlopers in their backyards.
The Kaganists blame the rise of China, Russia and Iran on the war and free trade weary American people, who in 2016 even managed to pressure Hillary Clinton into tactically walking back her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a move that enraged Kagan). For most Americans, the nation-wrecking trade deficits (which are in truth subsidies to buy subservience), trillion-dollar wars, and mountains of body bags required to oversee a world empire are neither necessary or worthwhile for the well-being of the geographically gifted and resource rich United States.
In 2019, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Robert Kagan, the husband Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, published an editorial excoriating the “America First” message embraced by segments of both parties and reiterated the minority Jewish-held internationalist elite consensus think-tanks have been churning out for decades. According to Blinken and Kagan, a world of realism, where countries are free of Jewish minders and American blood and treasure is exclusively reserved for the benefit of American people, is a “jungle” that allows budding Hitlers (Putin), Mussolinis (Iran) and Hirohitos (China) to spread “anti-democratic” revolution against “Anglo-American” (a term Kaganists use to identify their civilizational project even as they support demographic replacement of the European stock in English-speaking country) liberal-globalist hegemony.
Under the doctrine of Kaganism, the only solution to global conflicts is to refuse diplomacy with sovereign states that have different cultures or political traditions, and instead kill and replace them through the Bolshevistic export of “American” values around the world, which they describe as the primacy of New York finance and free trade, arbitrary and illegal regime change wars, open borders and the free movement of people, actively demoralizing and disempowering racial majorities, and other planks of the Jewish Open Society that intends to salt all potential seedbeds for “fascism” or “anti-Semitism,” even though much of the world, including the American people, don’t want it.
The central domestic political theory of Kaganism purports that liberalism is in perpetual antagonism with “populism,” (which the Kagans view as a strain of Fascism), in other words, the will of the people. The Kaganists view the democratic accountability of political leaders, self-interested (at least in the case of Gentiles) trade-offs, and the free discussion of ideas as a distraction or minor inconvenience to suppress and push through, as shown in their latest book celebrating Franklin Delano Roosevelt for deceiving the American people into fighting a world war against Germany and Japan, two countries Kagan admits never posed a security threat to the United States but had to be lured into a confrontation anyway.
At the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Frederick Kagan and ISW founder Kimberly Kagan (Frederick’s wife) have written extensively about the information space as a battle realm no different from the land, sea, and air. Under Kaganism, the minds of citizens are clay to be molded, and the role of the American government and business elites is to manufacture consensus for decisions made by Jewish policy makers through the control and manipulation of cyber space and mass media in the name of policing “misinformation.” The Department of Homeland Security, a highly insular Jewish wing of the US government dedicated to domestic spying, sought to formally implement this directive, but then paused its official establishment after popular outcry. The closure of this “disinformation” board was meaningless. Recent journalistic pieces have reported that much of the political content users consume on Facebook, Google and Twitter is subject to direct editorial oversight from droves of FBI and CIA agents employed full time by social media companies. In recent years, Western and Zionist intelligence agencies have been very active in seeking to manufacture popular support for foreign interventions, which in practice range from the amateurish and analogue Syria information war ten years ago to the much more sophisticated, very online and more organic looking pro-Ukraine push.
Most of the Kagan clan is dedicated to providing Washington’s ideological framework, but its most prominent member, Robert Kagan’s wife Victoria Nuland, has been instrumental in implementing it around the world. Though previously not as well known, Nuland is no stranger to disastrous foreign policy decisions. Prior to serving under Obama, she was an important national security advisor making calls on Iraq for Dick Cheney during the first Bush government. While her husband was busy calling Europeans pussies for refusing to join the “coalition of the willing” against Saddam Hussein, Nuland was busy roping Europe into the Afghanistan quagmire in order to maintain the occupation while easing American logistical challenges in Iraq.
Nuland’s most famous moment came in 2014, after a phone call from to the US embassy was publicized exposing her as one of the shadowy figures behind the coup that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government and put the country on track for the bloody war it is currently engulfed in. Nuland has admitted that this coup cost American taxpayers $5 billion dollars.
For Nuland, the lives of “allies” and innocent people are disposable pawns on a chess board. Much like Jewish liberal interventionist Madeline Albright’s famously ghoulish appraisal of trading half a million Iraqi children’s lives just to weaken Iraq’s economy, the Kagans believe the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and irreparable harm done to the Ukrainian nation is a worthy exchange if it means potentially blemishing Russia and China’s prestige on the world stage or extending Washington’s universal hegemony by a few years.
As the war drags on, polls now show that the majority of Americans oppose giving Ukraine any more aid. Encouraging news for the Ukrainian side has become ever more scant and the famed “counter-offensive” appears to have amounted to nothing, yet Frederick Kagan — the warped mind behind the disastrous 2007 Iraq troop surge and advocate of a second surge — continues to publish articles with titles like “How The Ukraine Counter-Offensive Can Still Succeed.”
Ukraine is by no means the last we have seen of Kaganism. While the world has reacted in a far more nuanced manner to the conflict than expected and the US has struggled to win most of the world over to the anti-Russian campaign, the neoconservative doctrine is once again ascendent.
Last July, Nuland assumed a new and more powerful role as undersecretary at the State Department. In her previous role as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Nuland was publicly identified by the now imprisoned Pakistani leader Imran Khan as the principle architect behind the US orchestrated coup against him, which was executed in retaliation for Khan’s policy of neutrality regarding the Ukraine war. In Niger, where 1,000 US troops are stationed and refuse to leave, Nuland met with the country’s new government to threaten them with violence if they do not restore the deposed puppet government — a threat the Washington-Paris proxy African alliance of ECOWAS has been openly telegraphing as well.
Though Nuland has been lighting fires on every continent on the planet, the most trademark Kaganist escalation has been in the deployment of thousands of US Marines to the Persian Gulf in order to advance Israeli strategic interests.
Shortly after Nuland took her new office, the US State Department announced that continuing the Trump-era project of forging an anti-Iran and anti-Palestinian alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel is now its top Middle East priority.
Ever since Washington arbitrarily left the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the US has been paying cat’s paws like Saudi Arabia to seize Iranian oil ships in the region in order to damage the Iranian economy. Under international law, this is an act of piracy and Iran is legally allowed to defend its vessels through military measures. Since the seizures began, Iran has been responding to hostile nations by hijacking their ships back and launching drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure.
The Saudis appear to have cut their losses and signed a Chinese brokered peace deal with Tehran last spring. Riyadh’s demands for breaking this new understanding with Iran, understanding how desperate Washington is to advance Israeli interests, grow more audacious by the minute. In exchange for normalizing ties with Israel, the Saudis want the right to engage in nuclear proliferation, billions worth of high-tech offensive weapons, and a security guarantee that even the Biden administration knows will be heavily abused.
So far, Washington has been reluctant about granting all of Riyadh’s wishes, but the State Department is still keen on showing that it remains very invested in the Middle East. It could even be argued that it is seeking to find a footing for war.
This week, the Department of Defense announced that thousands of US soldiers and the Naval battleships will be deployed to the Strait of Hormuz with instructions to fire upon Iranian forces that attempt to seize any ships. This deployment is an open provocation that the Iranians have vowed to respond to in kind, including by utilizing hypersonic missiles if necessary.
There is a historical precedent for this. Previous US administrations have utilized belligerence at sea with the goal of generating cassus belli to gain popular support for a war elites have already planned. If Washington really wanted safe commerce at sea, they would stop ordering regional neighbors to hijack Iranian ships.
This outrageous behavior is reminiscent of what occurred in 1940 and 1941. While remaining officially neutral, Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided the US had a larger security sphere in the North Atlantic and deployed the Navy to escort British vessels that were losing the naval war to Germany.
By protecting British ships on the Atlantic while simultaneously allowing Allied forces to attack German ships, the US hoped to force the Axis into an open conflict, a point enthusiastically conceded by Robert Kagan in his most recent book on American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century.
FDR finally got his wish in September 1941, when a German submarine mistakenly fired upon the USS Greer three months before Pearl Harbor. Historians, including Kagan, are in consensus that the USS Greer incident was an honest accident caused by America’s belligerent behavior at sea, but FDR blatantly lied about it and used the incident to incite anti-German and anti-Italian jingoism to try and crack the American people’s steadfast opposition to another European war.
After further over-the-top escalations by the FDR administration, Germany, Italy and Japan decided that they had to take a gamble and try and fight the trans-Atlantic juggernaut in a two front war that they eventually lost in the face of American industrial, financial and numerical advantage that was, even before Pearl Harbor, already powering the Soviet, French, and the British war efforts.
In his 2023 book, Kagan does not view World War III as a conflict humanity would be better off avoiding, but instead a testament to the American empire’s invincibility and the necessity of war to spread the ideologies of liberalism, capitalism and globalism. The Kaganists believe a multi-front war against nuclear-armed China, Russia and (soon) Iran is better than sharing the world with whoever they categorize as “anti-democratic” or “fascist.”
How many Americans agree with that insane prospect?
The Kaganists don’t care. Unless we organize politically to stop them, they’re taking us along for the ride whether we like it or not.
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https://www.unz.com/estriker/kaganism-the-people-steering-us-into-another-world-war/