Today the NYT runs a front page article headlined “(Susan) Rice Offers A More Modest Strategy for the Middle East.” It should be headlined “Battle of the Titans: Israel Firsters versus China Haters.”

It tells of a policy review of the U.S. Empire’s bloody strategy in the Middle East. But it goes well beyond that. As Noam Chomsky tells us, the real story is usually buried away deep in a “news” article. Sure enough here the key paragraph is the penultimate, which goes thus:

“More than anything, the policy review was driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to turn his gaze elsewhere, notably Asia. Already, the government shutdown forced the president to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia — a decision that particularly irked Ms. Rice, who was planning to accompany Mr. Obama and plunge into a part of the world with which she did not have much experience.” For “notably Asia” in the first sentence substitute “notably China.”

The new policy is driven by a desire to confront and “contain” China. Right now the key to this U.S. strategy is to get Japan rearmed and poised to challenge China, as outlined here. and here This is very dangerous since it threatens us with World War III. And it is unlikely to succeed. Since Mao’s revolution in 1949, the U.S. and the Western neocolonial powers have tried to bring China back under Western domination. They failed when China was far weaker and there is no reason to believe that they can succeed now.

The second key paragraph also lies on the second web page of the article and quotes a “critic” of the new policy: ““You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,” saidTamara Cofman Wittes, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The argument that we can’t make a decisive difference, so we’re not going to try, is wrongheaded.”” The Saban Center is a hotbed of pro-Israel sentiment, a key part of the Israeli Lobby.

The struggle shaping up is between those who want to continue the depredations of the US in the Middle East, among them the Israel firsters, and those who want to turn toward smashing China. Unwittingly perhaps, Israel and its Lobby may now be China’s best allies.