“To hell with the rest of the world” – long-term strategy and unipolar claim of the USA

The statements made by top US politicians for more than a century provide an overall picture of the USA’s imperial claim to power. It is a disgrace that the German government follows this policy, which is diametrically opposed to German interests, and cannot be explained solely by a lack of sovereignty.

Wolfgang Bittner

Introduction by Peter Hanseler

A few days ago, René Zittlau and I took a trip and met Wolfgang Bittner in person in Göttingen and spent an interesting day with him, his wife and Maria Avilova. One of the main focuses of our discussions was the role of the USA as a geopolitical heavyweight. Wolfgang explained that the role of the USA since President Monroe should be analyzed in order to better understand the strategy of the USA, and we agreed that this role should be an interesting focus of our blog.

The following article by Wolfgang Bittner is intended as the starting signal for an in-depth examination of this topic. This article has already appeared on Nachdenkseiten and RT-DE. We would like to thank Wolfgang Bittner for the opportunity to publish this article and look forward to working with him in the future.

Article

According to its power elites, the United States of America is “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, as the national anthem proclaims. And “God’s Own Country” is called to rule the world. In order to assert this unipolar claim, they have developed a long-term strategy since the 19th century, which includes maintaining an overly well-armed army and establishing around 1,000 military bases around the world.

At the same time, it cannot be overlooked that US society is fanatical about religion and fundamentalism in large parts and right up to Congress. The elective affinity between Puritanism and capitalism, an “economic doctrine of predestination” – whom God loves, he makes rich – is deeply rooted here to this day. In addition, many of the hardliners obviously believe that everything that benefits the USA ultimately benefits the whole world, which gives rise to their claim to global supremacy.

Continuity for more than 200 years

This unjustified hubris was also followed by the policy of President Barack Obama, who came across with a winning smile, waged seven wars and in a speech at the West Point Military Academy described the USA as the “only indispensable nation”, the linchpin of all alliances from Europe to Asia, “unsurpassed in the history of nations”. In doing so, Obama was expressing what had long been the practiced policy of the United States, which since the 20th century had been able to assert its imperial claim over Europe, especially Germany.

This power policy had its beginnings in 1823 at the latest, when President James Monroe presented the basic outlines of a long-term foreign policy for the United States to the US Congress: no tolerance of interference by other countries on the American double continent, and at the same time the USA’s claim to protection and intervention in Latin America. The USA thus placed its hand on Central and South America.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919, President 1901-1909) gave the USA blanket authorization to exercise “international police power” and uncompromising enforcement of economic and strategic interests. His motto was: “Speak softly and carry a big stick and you will go far.” After all treaties with the Native Americans had previously been broken and the last devastating battle had been fought at Wounded Knee in 1890, this was primarily directed at the Latin American countries in the “backyard of the USA”, but also Morocco and Korea, and a little later worldwide.

A statement by subsequent President Woodrow Wilson was entirely in line with this:

“Since trade transcends national borders and the entrepreneur claims the world as his market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the closed doors of nations must be burst open. … The concessions acquired by the financiers must be guaranteed by the ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of recalcitrant nations is violated.”

Barack Obama formulierte das am 11. Februar 2016 in einem Interview gegenüber dem US-Fernsehsender Vox so:

“We occasionally have to twist the arm of countries that don’t do what we want them to do. If it weren’t for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military pressures that we have, if we didn’t have that dose of realism, we wouldn’t get anything done. … American leadership comes in part from our grappling mentality. We are the largest, most powerful country on earth, … we have no peer in terms of states that could attack or provoke the United States.”

The influence of the world’s No. 1 power

The USA finally achieved its goal of being the world’s No. 1 power after the Second World War when President Harry S. Truman proclaimed it before both houses of Congress on March 12, 1947:

“I believe it must be the policy of the United States to assist free peoples who resist the subjugation sought by armed minorities or by external pressure. I believe we must assist all free peoples to determine their own destinies in their own way. … In helping free and independent nations to preserve their freedom, the United States is realizing the principles of the United Nations. The free peoples of the world are counting on our support in their struggle for freedom. If we falter in our leadership, we jeopardize the peace of the world – and we certainly harm the welfare of our own nation.”

According to Truman’s altruistic words, this “support” of free peoples by the USA should include “above all economic and financial aid”, “which forms the basis for economic stability and orderly political conditions”, but realpolitik followed the usual path in the interests and to the advantage of the USA and mostly to the detriment and disadvantage of the “free peoples”, as a look at history up to the immediate present proves.

Publicist Werner Rügemer has analyzed the possibilities and influence of the USA on the European, and in particular the German economy, and comes to some startling conclusions:

“The most important entrepreneurial capital ownership in Western capitalism today is organized by different types of financial players. The largest in terms of capital employed are BlackRock & Co. This is followed by Blackstone & Co, the private equity investors, popularly known as “locusts”. Since the end of the 1990s, they have bought up around 10,000 medium-sized companies in Germany, liquidated them, sold them on or floated them on the stock market. Then there are the hedge funds, the venture capital investors – they bring the start-ups into the race -, the elite investment banks such as Macquarie and Rothschild, the private banks such as Metzler, Pictet, the traditional banks such as Deutsche Bank. The USA is the largest center of capital and the most important military, intelligence and media power block for securing this system. The most important global financial service providers are also linked to the US: the big three rating agencies, the commercial law firms like Freshfields, the management consultants like McKinsey, the auditors like PricewaterhouseCoopers, the PR agencies like Soros’ Renaissance – I call them the civilian private army of Western capitalism.”

Preventing Germany from cooperating with Russia

Russia has no place in the economic and military strategy of the USA. The former director of the influential think tank Stratfor, George Friedman, made a remarkable statement on this egocentric, peace-threatening policy in his speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on February 4, 2015:

“The main interest of US foreign policy during the last century, in the First and Second World Wars and in the Cold War, was relations between Germany and Russia. Because together they are the only power that can threaten our supremacy. Our main objective was to ensure that this did not happen.”

Warum diese Politik bis zur Gegenwart fortgesetzt wird, begründet Friedman wie folgt:

“For the United States, the main concern is that … German capital and German technology will combine with Russian raw material resources and Russian labor to create a unique combination, which the United States has been trying to prevent for a century. So how can this German-Russian combination be prevented? The US is ready to strike this combination with its map: that is the line between the Baltic and the Black Sea. … The point of the whole thing is that the US is building a ‘cordon sanitaire’, a security belt, around Russia.”

Basically, this had been worked on in secret since the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.

Friedman further states:

“The United States controls all the oceans of the world out of its fundamental interest. No other power has ever done that. For this reason, we intervene with nations worldwide, but they cannot attack us.”

Many peoples are also unable to defend themselves, as has been shown recently. Those who oppose are ruined or bombed.

Friedman’s “confession” only caused a stir in the so-called alternative media. The same applies to Zbigniew Brzeziński’s comments, who saw Eurasia as the “chessboard of the USA” on which it was making its moves in the battle for global supremacy. Brzeziński wrote in his book “The Only World Power”, in which he developed the geopolitical strategy of the USA after the fall of the Soviet Union:

“However, the extent to which the USA can assert its global supremacy depends on how a globally engaged America can cope with the complex balance of power on the Eurasian continent – and whether it can prevent the emergence of a dominant, opposing power there.”

Henry Kissinger’s statement on February 2, 2014 that the regime change in Kiev was the dress rehearsal, so to speak, for “what we want to do in Moscow” should also be seen in this context.

Joseph Biden: “I rule the world”

In an interview with the US broadcaster ABC on July 6, 2024, President Joseph Biden demonstrated how the US government sees itself when he was asked about his physical and mental condition after a disastrous election campaign duel with Donald Trump. He explained on camera:

“I take a cognitive test every day. You know, I don’t just campaign, I run the world. That sounds like an exaggeration, but we are the most important nation in the world.”

This statement was accepted by Western politicians and journalists almost without comment, which in turn allows conclusions to be drawn about the depravity of these actors.

In a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 2, 2014, Biden, who was still US Vice President at the time, made the following remarks:

“We have given Putin a simple choice: Respect Ukraine’s sovereignty or you will face increasing consequences. As a result, we were able to get the largest developed states in the world to impose real costs on Russia. It’s true that they [the EU] didn’t want to do that. But again, it was America’s leadership and the fact that the president of the United States insisted, indeed had to embarrass Europe many times, to force it to get its act together and take economic disadvantages in order to be able to impose costs [on Russia]. And the consequences were a massive flight of capital from Russia, a veritable freeze on foreign direct investment, the rouble at an all-time low against the dollar and the Russian economy on the brink of recession.”

The fact that the Berlin government has followed this policy, which is diametrically opposed to German interests, to the present day, as can be seen from statements by Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, is a disgrace and cannot be explained solely by Germany’s lack of sovereignty. The statements of top US politicians, repeated over more than a century, provide an overall picture of the monopolistic imperial policy of the USA, which the former Chief of Staff of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, characterized with the words: “To hell with the rest of the world.”

About Wolfgang Bittner

The writer and journalist Dr. Wolfgang Bittner is the author of numerous books, including “Die Eroberung Europas durch die USA”, “Die Heimat, der Krieg und der Goldene Westen”, “Deutschland – verraten und verkauft” and “Ausnahmezustand – Geopolitische Einsichten und Analysen unter Berücksichtigung des Ukraine-Konflikts”, 2014-2023.