Of Cold Wars and Energy Procurement

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

08 February 17

t the core of Donald Trump’s rise is propaganda, a 20th-century style of political and social manipulation through disinformation.

Key manifestations of Trump’s Goebbels-esque propaganda machine are “alternative facts,” fake news reports, the parroting of popular political memes without any commitment to their core ideologies, and the fomentation of public disorientation through false disaster proclamations.

Central to Trump’s inner circle of advisors are the quintessential American fascist propagandists Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Bannon and Miller, along with Trump, are authoring and directing U.S. Executive Branch policy today.

Trump’s stated positions on Russia are pure propaganda.

When Trump says, “We need better relations with Russia,” that is or should be completely obvious. Of course the U.S. and Russia can do better – they could hardly have done worse since the end of WWII.

When Trump says in response to the very true assertions that Russian president Vladimir Putin is a thug and killer, “You got a lot of killers … What, you think our country’s so innocent?” what Trump is pointing to is the U.S. government’s bloody history of global domination through intervention and democratic subversion.

Yes, taken in totality, the U.S. government from the end of WWII has the bloodiest hands on earth. Putin, however, is absolutely a thug and a killer, particularly of his critics and political opponents. It is unconscionable and cannot be condoned. But Putin seems to kill his adversaries one at a time in very surgical fashion. While hardly admirable, it does not have anywhere near the devastating global impact of the U.S. government’s shock and awe tactics. Again, Trump is right in what he is saying. However, it is what he is not saying that matters most.

To understand the truth in what Trump is saying and the alliance he is promoting with Putin, you must look to the man standing behind him and to his right, former Exxon CEO and current secretary of state Rex Wayne Tillerson.

To understand the Cold War, look to its origins. The Cold War really begins before the Second World War. WWII marked a transition in thinking by imperialist empire builders. At the beginning of WWII, empires were seen and planned with a regional scope. Hitler brought a new vision, global domination. Although Hitler did not survive, his vision did.

The strategies of the victors after WWII for the first time began to incorporate world order thinking. The primary goal being natural resources as fuel for industrialized economic engines. The key being logistics. It’s not enough to control resources at their source, you have to be able to transport them to market.

“The Cold War” was really a scramble for control of global markets after WWII, which occasionally threatened to boil over into military engagement and on one noteworthy occasion in 1962 to the brink of mutually assured destruction.

This brings us the to actual business Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are discussing: how to control the resources from point of origin all the way to market. Enter the hands-on expert, Exxon’s Rex Tillerson. Not only has Tillerson spent his career in the control and transfer of oil globally, his speciality has been working with the very receptive Putin regime.

The objective is to reduce nation states to clients of a supply-side oligarchical order. That is what Putin and Trump have in mind. The problem is that these are the objectives that lead toward Cold Wars, not away from them. What will become of the interests of NATO, India, South America? Would the U.S. be seen as a “client” as well?

Rather than having individuals with personal agendas and objectives running the world’s affairs from the shadows, transparent accords between nation states, while hardly perfect, are ultimately the safest solution. That’s the best way to avoid global conflict – and domination.

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.