First published by Global Research in May 2017

Various sources have accused the U.S. of trying to enforce the model of a unitary world where it alone dictates to all other nations. The following essay develops the idea that seeing the world as multipolar instead is much more in consonance with reality.

Ability to tolerate the diversity implied by a multipolar world should be seen as a sign not of weakness but of maturity. Such maturity is urgently needed in today’s world, where humanity is sliding down a slippery slope to oblivion. This maturity can only be found if we stay rooted in our spiritual center.

While the argument is a philosophical one, it has life or death application to today’s geopolitical conflicts. Nothing could be more dangerous than the growing threats and conflicts among nuclear-armed powers that have lost the ability for self-examination and mutual respect. It’s as though we are seeing the Cuban missile crisis playing out on a daily basis.

“FULL-SPECTRUM SUPERIORITY”

In the forefront is what seems increasingly obvious—the agenda of the U.S. “deep state” is world conquest. This objective is confirmed through the open declaration by the U.S. military of its intention to attain “full spectrum dominance,” also known as “full spectrum superiority.”

The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, dated March 2017, defines “full spectrum superiority” as,

“The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains, electromagnetic spectrum, and information environment (which includes cyberspace) that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.” (p.97)

What a world view! If a patient came into a psychiatrist’s office uttering such thoughts he would be recognized immediately as delusional, paranoid, and possibly psychotic. He would be considered an imminent danger to himself and society. In the workplace he would be viewed as a maniac, possibly escorted by security to the front door and told never to come back.

Yet the people who think and talk this way have been given an arsenal sufficient to destroy all life on earth and are stationed on hair-trigger alert in approximately 150 nations, with actual military installations in 30. On the high seas, the U.S. Navy has 273 major “battle force” ships in active service ready for war at any time. Meanwhile, our supposed “adversaries” have made it clear that they are not backing down.

The U.S. quest for “full spectrum superiority” becomes even more bizarre when we realize that it must include, above all, nuclear superiority. The official doctrine therefore abandons any pretense of maintaining a balance-of-power or mutual deterrence, which, before the fall of the Soviet Union, sane people had credited with preventing all-out nuclear war.

The concept of deterrence began to be abandoned during the Reagan administration with President Ronald Reagan’s proposal of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derided by its critics as “Star Wars.” While Reagan touted the system as “defensive,” in that its aim was to shoot down incoming enemy missiles, everyone recognized that it would be grossly destabilizing by removing the fear of retaliation against the U.S. by the Soviets if the U.S. decided to launch a nuclear first strike.

One name for deterrence is “MAD”—Mutually Assured Destruction. Critics referred to SDI as “Madder than MAD.” But ever since, nuclear superiority has not meant just bigger and better bombs, even as the U.S. now plans to spend a trillion dollars upgrading its aging nuclear arsenal. Since several nations, including Israel, now possess an arsenal sufficient to destroy human life, the search for a decisive edge has meant the building of defensive systems like those conceived of by SDI planners.

This is why today’s “full spectrum superiority” involved tearing up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as did the George W. Bush administration, and now ringing Russia with batteries of surface-to-air missiles able to knock Russian nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Europe or the U.S. out of the skies.

It is easy to see how a study just released by the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research concludes that,

“The threat of a nuclear weapon detonation event in 2017 is arguably at its highest in the 26 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Such a conclusion is easy to draw as the U.S. moves its forces in Eastern Europe to a combat-ready status, according to recent testimony by U.S. generals before Congress.

Obviously, “full spectrum superiority” cannot be attained and maintained without the use of force against anyone who dares to stand in the way. It can’t be done by treaty. How, other than by force, can people who do not trust the benevolence of the U.S. military be persuaded to go along?

THE “DEEP STATE”

But who is in control of the U.S. “Deep State” that lies behind these intentions, and by whom, how, and why are decisions made to deploy military force? Especially, who controls the nukes? For three-fourths of a century this has been recognized as the premier political question of our time.

Two things are clear:

1) it is not the president of the United States who is in control. Rather he is presented with decisions that have already been made by someone else and handed to him by the national security establishment. 2) The goal of U.S. military action is not to achieve the stability of a multipolar world. Rather it is to enforce the will of an entity or entities that want to bring the world under the control of a unitary political/economic regime.

This is why every military action carried out by the U.S. focuses, first and foremost, on “regime change.”

So what really is going on here?

Let’s go back in history. Until World War II, the nations of the world had fought many wars. But after armies and navies had been mobilized and a war fought to its conclusion, the world went back to its peaceful ways. Whatever changes the war had wrought may have persisted, but usually the weapons were put away and life went on.

This has changed with the creation of standing, permanent armed forces. One of the big changes had already taken place by the late 19th century with the construction of a British Navy large enough to “protect” and control a worldwide empire.

But even after World War I the land armies that remained were largely demobilized. After World War II, however, the fighting went on. In the 1950s came the Korean War, then the Vietnam War in the 1960s-70s.

Over the next half-century, the situation gradually worsened. As indicated above, the danger escalated when Ronald Reagan was elected president. Many of his controllers came from an organization called The Committee on the Present Danger that argued that the power of the Soviet Union required that the U.S. be placed on a permanent wartime footing.

This was new. Then, after the first Iraq war under President George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, today’s doctrine of endless active warfare was implemented.

Thus, after President Bill Clinton’s attacks on Yugoslavia and 9/11 under President George W. Bush, came the “War on Terror.” What this meant in practice was that any nation the U.S. identified as an “adversary” could justifiably be conquered and subjected to regime change as a matter of our national right.

Obviously there can be no multipolar world under such conditions. There can only be one rule and one law anywhere in the world at any time—whatever the U.S. Deep State decides and enforces through military action.

ECONOMIC SINKHOLE

Meanwhile, as might have been foreseen, the U.S. military machine has become the nation’s chief economic sinkhole. The Department of Defense budget in 2015 was $598 billion. The U.S. is also the world’s leading exporter Millions of people work for this system, including the uniformed services, civilian employees, contractors, and lobbyists. Then there are the dependents and pensioners. We can add in the millions of employees in the service and manufacturing industries who work directly or indirectly in meeting the needs of everyday living for all the people employed by the military machine. This includes the nationals of other countries who service the U.S. military abroad.

We might call the system “corporate welfare,” but it can just as well be termed “military communism,” as all the managers, employees, and hangers-on get their livelihood from federal government spending. These people claim to be defending the “free-enterprise system,” though they themselves are effectively on the government payroll for their entire careers.

The system is leading the U.S. into bankruptcy. It can only be financed by more government debt through the T-bond bubble and quantitative easing, both managed by the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, as other nations mature economically, the U.S. is steadily losing its profit margins from utilization of the dollar as the international reserve currency. This utilization is based on the petrodollar as the denominator of worldwide trade in oil, but that too is declining in international markets.

In the early 1970s the U.S. abandoned the gold standard as a medium of international exchange. The petrodollar became the backing for the dollar, enforced by military might. Now this house of cards has begun to crumble. Panic has set in as the U.S. comes to resemble in its top-heavy inefficiency the Soviet Union just before that empire collapsed.

This is the soft underbelly of “full-spectrum superiority.” The shakiness of the system creates an urgency to complete its mission of total global control before it comes crashing down or is defeated by one or more adversaries.

CANCER

To approach these matters comprehensively requires us to dig deeply into the human psyche. No other species on earth could even begin to act according to such blind assumptions as does the U.S. military machine. In contrast, Nature always seeks balance and limits in the midst of diversity. When dinosaurs get too big or voracious they die off. How can Americans think they are exempt from natural law?

The only other phenomenon in nature that acts in a similar manner to “full spectrum superiority” is cancer cells. If left unchecked, such cells very quickly kill their host and die themselves.

This doctrine of the U.S. military, and hence that of the U.S. government which stands behind it, does in fact resemble cancer.

So indeed does any doctrine that seeks to base its own survival on the destruction or enslavement of other human beings. “Full spectrum superiority” requires worldwide slavery. By extension that means enslavement to the system the U.S. military is protecting and extending. This system is that of international finance capitalism—the full power of money over human life and values.

Among those who espouse this worldview are some who view themselves as “chosen people.” So it doesn’t take long to discover in their cultural mythology many references to their supposed religious, racial, cultural, and historical superiority to others. Nor is there an absence of instances where they have been slighted, abused, persecuted, etc., thereby justifying revenge.

Such an ideology is professed most emphatically and openly by the leaders of the state of Israel. The rise of the U.S. military doctrine of “full spectrum superiority” coincides with the rise of Israel to power on the world stage and the extension of its influence over U.S. politics through institutions such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

In the 1990s, PNAC laid out the doctrine whereby the U.S military would engage in ongoing warfare for regime change in the countries surrounding Israel in the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. has been doing this ever since, with the dismantlement of Yugoslavia by U.S. bombing of Serbia providing a prelude. Next came Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya.

PNAC said that for its aims to be achieved a “new Pearl Harbor” was needed. Curiously, 9/11 took place soon afterwards.

PNAC assumed that with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, U.S. military hegemony involving nations close to or adjacent with the Russian state that remained after the collapse would not meet any serious opposition.

A MULTIPOLAR WORLD?

Russian president Vladimir Putin has now appeared, however, and proposes something radical—that we are in fact living in a “multipolar world.” This is a world conceived as having more than one power center, one where the views and interests of many different players must be taken into account. Naturally, to the proponents of “full spectrum superiority,” Putin is seen as the devil himself.

But can it be that this perception—so compellingly real to those who hold it—is a projection? Can it be that the aims of “full spectrum superiority” are themselves diabolical and that unable to face such a prospect its proponents see what they hate and fear not in themselves but in what psychology calls “the Other”? Let’s at least entertain that possibility.

I would like to suggest that the perspective of a “multipolar world” is more aligned with reality than that of “full spectrum superiority.”

Humanity is composed of 7.5 billion individuals, a number that continues to grow. We don’t know why there are so many, though it no longer surprises us to hear that a single human body, according to the late Dr. Linus Pauling, consists of some 10 trillion cells.

We tend to panic at the size of the human population. Yet somehow the intelligence of the normal human body has the ability to nourish and coordinate the activity of its trillions of cells without getting into a big worry over it. Why can’t earth do the same with its human family?

Maybe instead of panicking we should stand in amazement at the incredible genius of Nature and its ability to engage in such infinite profusion of life and its bounty.

What if we saw the earth as a living being that itself possessed so much energy and intelligence that it could sustain life for the very long period of time that planetary creatures have been in existence? I don’t think earth believes it has to go out and kill a bunch of other planets out of fear that it will not have enough to support everything living on it.

Each human individual is a distinct piece of creation with its own intelligence and spirit. The most enlightened spiritual teachings have been telling us for thousands of years that these individuals—of which we are one—have been created by a Higher Being, that we live for a time on earth to do certain work and attain some degree of spiritual maturity, and that at death our spirit goes off to our next rendezvous elsewhere.

According to such teachings—and earth has witnessed many both past and present—we are here for a purpose. And obviously this purpose must be sought and found in coexistence with all other created beings. Clearly this purpose is not to attain “full spectrum superiority” over everyone and everything else.

Jesus Christ said the two great commandments were to love God and our neighbor. The existence of a neighbor that we should love and respect and whom we must view as having rights equal to our own points in fact to a multipolar world.

The idea of equality is stated clearly in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.” This is the foundation principle of America and has been replicated in the constitutions of most of the nations of the world. This principle also postulates a multipolar world.

These concepts must apply collectively as well as individually in order to be consistent. It is normal and natural for each individual to view his own existence as more important than others, simply because his own is the only one he is directly conscious of. In order to fully sense and appreciate the existence of others he needs either an obvious connection—as part of a family, for instance—or he needs consciously to extend himself to take others into account.

THE UNITED NATIONS

Thus people of wisdom have created social mechanisms for individuals to come together to share their views, coordinate their activities, and compromise their aims for the sake of social harmony. One such mechanism is the United Nations, created at the end of World War II. Contrary to the fears of some within the U.S., the U.N. does not represent a plot to take away their nation’s sovereignty as much as it is a forum to adjudicate differences among nations that arise in a multipolar world.

The need for orderly world government has long been recognized by people with vision. This need became more urgent with the Industrial Revolution, given the huge changes in transportation and communication technologies.

The enormous diversity of humanity became ever more apparent as people of different races, religions, and geographic locations came into contact. Technology applied to weapons, however, along with increased ability to extract resources, created great temptations for some nations to lord it over others. By the time of World War II, the potential for world cataclysm had become clear to everyone, especially after the U.S. dropped the A-bomb on Japan.

Nuclear weapons created an emergency. In this emergency, the people who set up the United Nations recognized the importance of a multipolar world by establishing a Security Council to be the chief forum for discussing and then taking action on matters of worldwide importance.

No one expected the Security Council to be a daily love fest. But it is there for a purpose. Yet the U.S. believes that it can take unilateral action, as with its recent attack on Syria, without reference to the United Nations or without even a discussion with other members of the Security Council. Indeed, the primary function of the U.S. representative to the U.N., Nikki Haley, seems to be to utter threats, as when she says, “I don’t think anything is off the table” in using military force in Syria.

Nor was PNAC ever discussed by the United Nations.

Now, with the resurgence of Russia, a major obstacle to PNAC exists. The backers of PNAC, both in the U.S. and Israel, have been trying to arouse fear of Russia in the minds of the American electorate, similar to the Cold War. Perhaps an even greater threat to PNAC is China, which clearly has time on its side in becoming the world’s greatest threat to U.S. hegemony.

A showdown is clearly looming. To get ready for the showdown, the U.S. strategy seems to be to complete the conquest of Syria, which has begun with the arming of ISIS and other “rebel” groups by the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East—Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. An attack against Iran is in the planning stages. North Korea is on the agenda for elimination as a threat. And preparations are probably underway for a nuclear first strike against both Russia and China when the time is right and sufficient defenses against retaliation have been deployed.

What would it take to walk back from the brink?

Clearly it would require recognition of the multipolar world that Putin and many others speak of. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc., do not show signs of wanting to conquer the U.S. With the benefit of wise statesmanship, the U.S., Israel and other nations could at least attempt to co-exist with these nations as part of the world community.

The only way to world community lies along the path of peace, not war and conquest. Trade and scientific partnership, as with the International Space Station, have long been recognized as aids to world peace.

THE TESTIMONY OF LANGUAGE

These things require communication. So those who would unite the world have been talking for a long time about coming up with a common language. That’s why Esperanto was invented. Reviving ancient Greek has been talked about.

But not too many years ago the head of NASA said—not as a joke—that his motivation for the U.S. taking the lead in interplanetary travel was so that “my language” would be spoken on the moon, Mars, and other planets. Of course English (including “American” and “tourist” English) is a long way from “full spectrum superiority” even on earth.

While English is spoken in many countries, and has become a language of convenience for world trade, only a fraction of humanity converses in it. According to nationsonline.org, the following languages are the most used in the world as a first or second language: Chinese (including Mandarin or Standard Chinese): 1.34 billion; English: 508 million; Hindi: 487 million; Spanish: 417 million; Arabic 280 million; Russian: 277 million; Bengali: 211 million; Portuguese: 191 million; German: 128 million; French: 128 million; Japanese: 126 million; Thai: 100 million; Korean: 78 million. Among language families, 180 million speak Niger-Congo languages in Africa and 145 million speak Dravidian languages, mainly in southern India. Altogether there are over 5,000 languages currently being spoken on the planet.

It’s probably an ethnocentric illusion that causes the British and Americans to think English is so important anyway. In fact, with Brexit looming, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker says he it going to stop speaking English. He says,

“Slowly, but surely, English is losing importance.”

It won’t be Anglo-American military might that causes Juncker to change his mind, even though global unity is our most urgent need in the nuclear age. But again, not on the basis of war, control, slavery, and conquest, and certainly not by demanding that others give up cultural diversity.

Thus we are a long way from one language, one religion, one race, indeed if they will ever happen, or if it is even desirable they happen. But we can still work together.

After all, diversity keeps the gene pool fluid and allows discovery and innovation. Competition will always exist and is both necessary and desirable, including competition of ideas. The bland uniformity of the U.S. controlled media, for instance, where ideas that conflict with the prevailing war-based ideology is not just unhealthy—it is deadly. Thank God for the internet.

THE REAL ENEMY: GLOBAL FINANCIAL CONTROL THROUGH USURY

Whatever movement we take in the direction of world unity, there is still a requirement for all parties to recognize that we are in a multipolar world and will remain so if there is to be a world at all.

Not only does the idea of one world under military conquest have to be abandoned, so too does that of one world under global financial control.

The international banking system seeks to unite the world under a suffocating blanket of usury that diverts all of the world’s cash flow into the hands of the monetary controllers. This is what globalism and the New World Order are all about—worldwide slavery to materialism and money. It’s a system of totalitarian control based on violence and greed, but it also uses tools like entertainment, drugs, and pornography to corrupt, exhaust, and control the population.

The financial system is even more insidious than outright military aggression, but it is just as deadly. “Full spectrum superiority” of international finance is leading to massive species extinction, drastic climate change, and a threat to the survival of humanity itself.

Alternatives to the system have been increasingly researched and discussed. Turning economic power back to the level of autonomous localities which are yet part of the worldwide marketplace is urgently needed. So is the kind of spirituality whereby humans don’t just escape into their own personal cloud but take responsibility for the consequences of their presence on earth.

I believe that creating and facilitating a vibrant multipolar world that supports a healthy human freedom is our spiritual duty. Let’s tell that to the politicians, the militarists, and the financiers. And let’s ask them to donate their skills and resources to help bring it about before they destroy us all.

These ideas will be discussed in greater detail in future articles.

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal government analyst and the author of numerous articles for Global Research and other venues. He may be reached at [email protected].