

Citizens will need to participate actively, rather than as passive consumers, to demand an end to this cycle of violence from governments and to defend the assault on democratic processes. The transition of Western democracy to oligarchy and the descent into soft fascism is under way.
#HOW WORLD WAR III BECAME POSSIBLE FULL#
After all, a war economy with militarisation, mobilisation, full employment and jingoism can be viewed as the ultimate solution to economic woes and social unrest. One might even argue that capitalism often resolves systemic economic crises through war. This would be in keeping with the default operational mode of capitalism. As Obama has put it, the US is exceptional because it acts. This is a dangerous discrepancy as it means that the US will use this military power to guarantee its economic prerogative – particularly as a massive national security apparatus now seems to dictate US foreign policy.

He has also stated that the Judaeo-Christian west is, “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism” and that, “We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” China will eventually overtake the US in economic terms but US supreme military dominance is unchallenged. Bannon subscribes to the Huntingtonian idea of a coming clash of civilisations between west and east with the Orient bracketing both China and Islam.īannon views China and Islam as expansionist threats. There’s no doubt about that.” If there is a coherent philosophy of Trumpism then it is represented by the ideology of Bannon. While his chief strategist Steve Bannon stated in March of last year that, “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years…. Trump has threatened a trade war with China. The Trump transition is likely to exacerbate US-China tensions. Yet this destabilisation of Iraq and Syria may well have been engineered deliberately. One possible trajectory is that a Sunni-Shia war along the Saudi-Iran axis looks increasingly likely. This contamination has the potential for a wider conflict in which western countries could be drawn in. The Syrian war has seen the return of great-power politics with the involvement of Russia. The terrorist attacks in Europe have demonstrated the difficulty in containing the spill-over from these policies. In fact, a 2012 Defence Intelligence Agency memo had anticipated the rise of Isis and its establishment in Syria in order to “isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion”. It was under these conditions that the mutation into the Frankenstein monster that is Isis took place. Hersh elaborates on how British and American intelligence have been enmeshed with the use of CIA front companies in an arms pipeline from Libya to Syria dubbed the “rat line”.

In realpolitik, the ends apparently justify the means. The Wikileaks disclosures of Hillary Clinton’s emails revealed that she too was aware of Saudi and Qatari governments arming Isis. Former Vice President Joe Biden – renowned for bloopers – frankly admitted as much to a Harvard audience.

The Syrian war has seen allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – arming and funding radical Jihadist groups, such as the al-Nusra front. Following the destruction of Iraq, this sphere remained the only obstacle to US full-spectrum dominance of the world’s largest oil fields.
#HOW WORLD WAR III BECAME POSSIBLE SERIES#
Hersh has since elaborated, in a series of controversial London Review of Books essays, that the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad would have severed this Shia sphere. Back in 2007, the veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh posited in an extended New Yorker essay, The Redirection, that US Middle East geopolitical strategy was directed against the regional superpower of Iran and its Shia sphere of influence extending through Syria and to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
