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Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Hudson Institute last week that’s probably worth taking a look at just because of how much it reveals about the nature of the US empire and the corrupt institutions which influence its policies.
Pompeo is serving as a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Hudson Institute while he waits for the revolving door of the DC swamp to rotate him back into a federal government position. The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative think tank which has a high degree of overlap with the infamous Project for the New American Century and its lineup of Iraq war architects, and spends a lot of its time manufacturing Beltway support for hawkish agendas against Iran. It was founded in 1961 with the help of a cold warrior named Herman Kahn, whose enthusiastic support for the idea that the US can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was reportedly an inspiration for the movie Dr Strangelove.
A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.
Pompeo’s speech is one long rimjob for the military-industrial complex which indirectly employs him. He repeatedly sings the praises of the weapons that are being poured into Ukraine, two of them by name: the Patriot missile built by Raytheon and the Javelin missile built jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both of whom happen to be major funders of the Hudson Institute. He repeatedly decries the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” and excoriates the Biden administration for failing to control the world’s fossil fuel resources aggressively enough in its efforts to “prostrate itself to radicals.”
Pompeo, easily ranked among the most fanatical imperialists on the entire planet, hilariously says that “China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism.” He decries a “genocide” in Xinjiang and repeatedly implies that China deliberately unleashed Covid-19 upon the world, calling it “the global pandemic induced by China.” He repeatedly claims that Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
Along with praise for NATO and for the various anti-China alliances in the Indo-Pacific, Pompeo names “Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan” as “the three lighthouses for liberty” which those alliances must work to support militarily. You will notice that those three “lighthouses” just so happen to be the hottest points of geostrategic conflict with the top three opponents of the US empire: Russia, Iran, and China.
But there are a couple of things Pompeo says which have some real meat on them.
“By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East,” Pompeo says.
“We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China,” he later adds. “To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization.”
To stop a "Pan-Eurasian colossus" from forming, @mikepompeo stresses the importance of #Finland and #Sweden joining @NATO as well as #Russia's resulting increase in military capability if they are denied entry. pic.twitter.com/er0BKvcjEK
— Hudson Institute (@HudsonInstitute) June 29, 2022
That’s all the major international news stories of today are ultimately about, right there. Underlying all the smaller news stories about conflicts with nations like Russia, China and Iran, there’s one continuous story about the US power alliance trying to secure planetary domination by relentlessly working to subvert any nation which refuses to align with it, and about the nations who oppose that campaign working against it with steadily increasing intimacy.
This is all the Russia hysteria from 2016 onward has been about. This is all the phony, hypocritical hand-wringing about Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been about. This is all the staged histrionics about human rights in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba have been about. It’s all been about manufacturing international consent for an increasingly dangerous campaign to secure unipolar global hegemony at any cost.
It’s worth calling this to mind, as NATO for the first time designates China a threat due to its alignment with Russia and as NATO’s secretary-general admits that NATO has been preparing for a conflict with Russia since 2014. It is worth calling to mind the fact that the US has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any rival superpower to deny any serious challenge to its planetary domination. It is worth calling to mind that in 1997 the precursor to the US Space Force committed to working toward “full spectrum dominance,” meaning military control over land, sea, air, and space.
US unipolar hegemony.
They are right that China challenges NATO interests: the NATO cartel's existential goal of enforcing a US global dictatorship, one that imposes neoliberalism on the planet, destroying any country that proposes a state-led, people-centered economic model https://t.co/y5HCWAGkiL
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 30, 2022
People like to talk about secret conspiracies by shadowy cabals to establish a one-world government, but what is by far the most tangible and imminent global domination agenda has been orchestrated right out in the open. The US government has long sought to unite the world under a single power structure, no matter how much violence and devastation it needs to inflict upon humanity and no matter how much world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship it needs to engage in to do so.
This is the US empire which corrupt psychopaths like Mike Pompeo support. A power structure which wages nonstop wars in order to keep the peace, which continually oppresses populations around the world in order to protect freedom, and which risks nuclear war with increasingly reckless aggression to in order save the world.
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36 responses to “Mike Pompeo’s Revealing Hudson Institute Speech”
Extensive for me. I’m taking a look ahead ?n your subseq?ent publish, I’ll try to get the cling of it!
“A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid”
Spot on, first decent laugh that I’ve had in weeks.
Pompeo is the poster boy for everything I hate
“…a state-led, people-centered economic model…”
Oh my word. That has been an enduring recipe for economic stagnation amd malaise.
Please somebody help this deluded, starry-eyed Benjamin Norton to open his eyes.
I love Caitlin but this is wrong on several fronts. There’s definitely a NWO who’s trying to weaken our country, including our Globalist politicians. This NWO is trying to take out all strong Nationalist leaders: Trump, Putin, Orban, Duerte etc. They do not want the US to dominate, they want to weaken the US
Like Tucker Carlson, Mike “We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole” Pompeo further exemplifies a core American trait: accusing the American Empire’s opponents of the USA’s own imperialist crimes.
America is by far the world’s leading imperialist nation, with multiple wars of aggression around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Syria.
War criminals like Mike Pompeo are personally responsible for America’s dirty war against Syria, its colonial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, its murder of revered Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and its serial bombing of multiple nations from Pakistan to Somalia.
The fact that Pompeo is walking around free and pimped by neoconservative think-tanks like the Hudson Institute demonstrate how war criminality is an unquestioned feature of America as a society.
Ultimately, the American agenda behind all its wars is one thing: American world conquest. To control energy resources, strategic trade routes and energy corridors, and regime change any nation that stands in the way of Imperialist America and its capitalistic way of life.
Towards this end, the American Empire–like the British Empire that spawned the USA–must demonize and subvert the integration of Eurasia, outside of American control.
This is why the war criminal Pompeo is soiling his pants about the rise of Eurasia in his speech.
Ukraine and the battle for Eurasia
https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/ukraine-and-the-battle-for-eurasia/
Empire of Chaos
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/empire-of-chaos/
the belly fat may be gone. Girdle?
The brain fat definitely has not.
Caitlan,
So, if you get rid of the US but don’t fix the public/private finance problem, have you done anything? Please woman, You Aussies are the same pond scum as us Americans…we live under the same private finance cult that you seem to not focus on.
Those think tanks are the private policy development tools that need to be replaced by public ones. Pompeo is talking to those that do planning for the God of Mammon cult that maintains the jackboot of finance over the world.
Humanity needs planning and China has done such for over 70 years in the public interest. Maybe there is somethings to learn from them after the West takes the first example of China, which is to make finance a public utility at its core.
COOOOOOOOO-EEEEEEEEEEEeeee
Ah I just adore echo chambers…
EAT THE RICH.
Jesus tell you to write that?
What is it with the food references?
There is no other writer better than Caitlin to hurt and to debunk the establishment lies where it hurts the most. Scott Ritter with much less followers than Johnstone was banned because he was getting millions impressions, retweets, likes from real people which turns out it is the rarest thing to find on Twitter because it is an ocean of fake accounts. After years reading articles here I must consider in the realm of possibility that Johnstone has less than a thousand real followers. It does not represents a threat to the MSM neither the government. Perhaps it is time to assess priorities and strategies about how to become really relevant and move on into the next level where you can meet the ones making the difference being real. Johnstone knows better than anyone how to write but it is poor managing her own PR network. Get out of the closet and go accept some invitations to talk in podcasts. Cheap wine and Burger King are not the answer.
Oh yes they are.
She regularly gets highlighted on Russel Brand’s youtube channel, which has about 6 MILLION followers. I reckon her voice is being heard just fine as is.
Thanks for watching these speeches so I don’t have to. You need to be doing analysis on cable news. The ““Think tank” slam alone was worth the read. And yeah, I’ve pointed out any number of times that Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom are of course unhinged megalomaniacs for pursuing “full spectrum dominance of the world” in a comic book but it’s somehow completely nonmaniacal for the US to actually do it, and as you point out, one needn’t theorize about this because they don’t make any secret of it.
But it is not really the U.S. It is the people inside the U.S. subverting it for their own purpose and that would be Israel. The Average American is what you would call an Above Average Useful Idiot.
Yes you are right.
Israel is even involved in the Ukraine war.
And Uke government have bern trying to get Israel to negotiate for them!
Israeli news are having a very lively discussion if now is the right time to invest in real estate in Ukraine.
Sounds about right. kind of like having a film crew set up on 9/11. A film crew jumping up and down, lighting lighters and all round general Celebration as 3000 Americans die, jump out of 80 story window etc. Our BFFs
When the US was getting ready to leave Afghanistan an Israeli newspaper was saying now that US public lost interest in the war on terror, what is Israel to do!
As if the whole 20 years of the war on terror we were working for them.
Such casual tone as if they have us all under their thumb, and are not concerned we find out.
Sorry Clint. You need to stop empowering Israel so much. The US is the architect of global hegemony and Israel has just profitted from its Eurocentricism and geolocation in the midst of the Arab world. Otherwise the US would have had no use for that country. While it is true they have garnered a lot of influence in American politics they are not the author of them. The US stands on its own 2 totalitarian, war mongering, repressive anti-democratic feet all by itself!
Mike Pompeo is so hideous that he will probably become the next POTUS and bring the end to the world as his religion calls him to do.
Only political correctness insures that he does not get mugged every day of his pathetic life.
He truly is a great candidate for having been aborted before full term without any medical reason. His mom probably was really nauseous while being pregnant with him.
Caitlin justly admonishes the Democrats for their incompetence, but whenever we hear the most rabid, draconian, war-mongering politician – it is always a right-wing, evangelical, republican.
I asked one time “Just exactly what type of gun would Jesus have owned?”
I can’t really agree with you on that. The GOP might be more outspoken and forthcoming when it comes to supporting American imperialism, but at least they have some libertarians in their proximity that reign them in a little. Democrats, on the other hand, are both craftier and more insidious…Reagan, the Bushes and Trump are pegged as militaristic, but Clinton, Obama and Biden stage-manage their imperialistic actions better, hiding behind provocations, fake color revolutions and the like…
When you are on the receiving end of the US/nato democracy you don’t really see any difference.
I’m not talking rank and file GOP (I’m talking the yahoos in the GOP that claim they are guided by GOD).
Hopefully, the Supreme court will be ridded of these evangelical nutcases, Barret, Kavanah, Thomas and America may once again have freedom FROM religion.
Based on what these freaks have passed in the last few weeks it sure looks like the GOP will become America’s Taliban.
How bad is it? A bunch of Republicans would still vote for Donald J. Trump. Who cares about Democracy?
George Bush and Dick Chaney (are and were evangelicals) destroyed Iraq using lies as their pretext. Now the latest is the evangelical GOP nutcases are stripping women of their reproductive rights.
Same as the supreme court is making criminals of women who get abortions.
By the turn of the 20th century, temperance societies were prevalent in the United States. These religious nuts browbeat (Republican majority) Congress (the lobbyists of their day) into passing the Volstead Act.
Prohibition did nothing the curtail alcohol consumption. I just made criminals of those who made, sold and consumed alcohol. And allowed the rise of organized crime. Millions were spent with law enforcement chasing down drinkers. DUH!!
Many more millions are being spent today by giving high-paying jobs to DEA and other agencies for a (futile) WAR on drugs. Should legalize all drugs and regulate them, but oh GOP religious nutcases that’s a crime against Jesus
Meanwhile, the Reagan administration tacitly approved of Cocaine being shipped to America by the CIA, to put it bluntly, being sold to minority communities. So Reagan could fight communism in far-off countries that have no ill effects on the USA
Where are the libertarians when it comes to women’s rights? The drug war?
Are the Dems and GOP much the same with foreign policy – you betcha!
At one time the GOP was anti-war, smaller government, balanced budgets, (Hell it was a Republican President) Abe Lincoln who ended slavery – because it was the right thing to do. But today they have been taken over by religious nuts Pompeo, Bolton, Pence etc.
When your thinking becomes guided by religious dogma instead of common sense solutions. You will not enact rules and regulations that benefit the most, but rather ones that will keep your idiot base supporting you.
The one thing I’d like to add to Caitlin’s excellent piece is the way US imperialism always uses smoke and mirrors to conceal its activities. Taking a page from Hitler’s false flag operation in Poland, US psyops since at least the Gulf of Tonkin have leaned heavily on the art of provocation and deception in convincing Americans that US imperialism is always just and benevolent. In this larger historical context, the NATO provocation of Russia is only the latest in a long line of clever moves that conceal the baseline geopolitical agenda of Empire. This way of extending imperialism by way of colonizing the minds of American citizens and triggering recurring bouts of media-induced, popular outrage has worked for a very long time, and unfortunately, as long as Americans continue consuming media in their customary way, American imperialism will continue to prosper well into the future…
Very well put!
The poster is referring to the USA. Seemed pretty clear. The poster us also making something of a joke, which perhaps didn’t seem so clear.
It is sad to see so many unworthy men and women in power. The rest will just have to give birth to babies without a say.
What you write is true except your end comes across as weak. These hegemonic wars, both military and economic, are never about peace. They all destroy peace, democracy, and freedom everyplace the US and NATO land. Hegemony cannot stand real freedom as it means the people will speak out and fight back against the repressive ventures of the US
Patrick Lawrence has a good article at scheerpost about the democratisation of foreign policy. At least from the sampling of people I come across, most don’t feel any connection to foreign policy. It’s as if the US government is separate from its citizens and the two sock puppet candidates for any federal office both tout job creation as the top priority even though they oppose public sector jobs. This disconnect between policy and citizens allows populists to decry gubmint as inherently evil rather than encouraging citizen participation. Pompeo is no more of a rat turd than Secretary Clinton or President Obama who allowed the security state to propagandize domestically.
Yes. We also have media sock puppets, like the NYTimes and FOX News, which stop their fake fighting whenever its time for America to extend its global reach…
He’s lost a lot of weight too. Bad health due to former morbid obesity or is the ghost of Soleimani out to get him?
He is preparing to become a presidential candidate.
God forbid! His Wikipedia entry says that In 2014, he told a church group that Christians needed to “know that Jesus-Christ as our savior is truly the only solution for our world” and in 2015 in a talk at a church, that “politics is a never-ending struggle… until the Rapture.”
Talk about insanity…
I left this in WaPo this am in response to caterwauling about China’s ascendancy. It echoes your thoughts on the American Empire.
“It’d be good for you. You’ve had a good run of ruthless, amoral and malicious exploitation, murder, invasion, theft, lying , cheating and stealing. And you can be content knowing everyone sees you’ve pissed it away by succumbing to all the worst features of human nature. The biggest being fraudulence? Why, you’re the neo 4-H club. Hubris, hypocrisy, humbuggery and HS.
Besides , they’ve achieved what they have honestly, more or less, and in record time. Despite you trying to thwart them. One of the lesser well-known is the way you addicted them to cigarettes, just like the devil-incarnate British did with opium in the 19th c.
The American Tobacco Company targeted them, kept promoting, decades after they knew it was poisonous, accounting for what? 150 million deaths? It dwarfs your other successes, like your Native American genocide, easily 50 million there, , and your massacres in your slave trade, ten million maybe?. The 3.5 million you killed in Vietnam to “protect them from communism” and the measly 2.5 million in Iraq are just baby potatoes to you, right?
You’re the worst thing that ever happened to the planet in other important ways. Notably by having been it’s biggest polluter for a hundred years.
But you did give the world Motown. I’ll grant you that.”
Which “you” are you referring to? Some mythical beast that encompasses US policy, arts (you mention Motown), sciences, the whole of Americans, over most of a century?
~
Such an entity doesn’t exist unless you are an occultist talking with egregores.
Motown????? NO THANK YOU but the US did introduce House music to the world and THAT should be respected!