Tail Wags Dog

The great Martin Sieff on what ails the faltering American Empire.

Martin Sieff received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting for The Washington Times. He served as Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (UPI) from 1999 to 2009.

It should be cold comfort indeed, but the successive inability of one US administration after another to control Israel and the extraordinary passion with which the leaders of Western Europe, Canada and NATO continue to defy the United States to risk thermonuclear world war with Russia at the whims of Ukrainian junta leader Volodymyr Zelensky are not unprecedented.

For the dark, universally unacknowledged world history of the past 120 years is clear: Tails Wag Dogs. Global superpowers and great continent-spanning empires are brought into needless total conflict and utter mutually assured destruction by the machinations, betrayals and petty intrigues of tiny postage stamp states - usually with unacknowledged, disgusting and even genocidal recent political histories.

It has happened again and again, like the hugely respected anti-hero in Shakespeare’s Scottish play, who is seduced into treachery, murder and escalating deep dives into utter evil by the three dark witch-women who cross his path (A touch that the author expressly designed to impress King James I from Scotland who had grown up with vague and frightful memories of his own mother, other, the murderous husband-killer Mary, Queen of Scots).

We see the same pattern in Georges Bizet’s wonderful opera “Carmen,” where the noble, gallant soldier Don Juan, convincingly transformed into an American GI in the classic US movie version “Carmen Jones,” is doomed onto a road of ruin, humiliation and self-destruction by his infatuation for the aforementioned beautiful and outrageous gypsy seductress.

Thus it was that the Russian people and their elevated tsar himself, Nikolai II charged recklessly into a totally avoidable war with Imperial Germany in 1914 that led to total annihilating catastrophe in order to protect “gallant little Serbia”. Yet the Serbian government of the day, like Zelensky’s regime in Kiev now, had come to power in a shameless and bloody coup d’etat a decade earlier.

For in 1903 the previous Obrenvic dynasty’s King Alexander I and his terrified wife Queen Draga had both been literally hacked to pieces in a cupboard in their palace as they cried desperately for mercy.

One of the masterminds of this disgusting crime, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, also known as Apis, personally signed off on the plot to send assassins to Sarajevo a decade later in 1914 to murder the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a passionate champion of peace, as he rode through the streets of the Bosnian capital in an open motor car with no security screen. Here too, the archduke’s innocent and loving wife Sophie was gunned to death at the same time. Murdering innocent women was clearly an Apis specialty.

In the West, the vast, globe-spanning British Empire, controlling one quarter of the territories and human population of the entire planet, charged into needless war with Imperial Germany because of the machinations of a tiny cabal, or inside deep state elite of only four men - War Minister Richard Haldane, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer or finance minister David Lloyd George and worthless Foreign Secretary Edward Grey.

Eleven members of the 15-member Cabinet all from the ruling Liberal Party as well as the vast majority of Liberal members of parliament (MPs) were totally opposed to going to war. Yet it happened.

The motivating emotion was to protect “gallant little Belgium” from supposedly evil German aggression and conquest. Yet even this was based on pathetic ignorance and outright lies.

Belgium over the previous 30 years had been responsible for one of the greatest genocides of modern history - the deliberate murder of 10 million innocent people across the vast heart of Africa, the Congo, purely for profit - and the maiming of hundreds of thousands more with their limbs deliberately hacked off, including women and children. All this had been exposed by a handful of Europeans including British humanitarians and investigators over the previous decade.

In 1914, Churchill carried the day with his argument that Germany must at all costs be prevented from occupying the Belgian seaports because that would open Britain to German invasion. But this too was ludicrous, hysterical and plain wrong. Not for the first or the last time, Churchill did not know what he was talking about.

For Germany did indeed occupy those ports for the next four and a quarter years and British maritime security was hardly scratched.

Ironically Churchill’s own massive program of building a super-modern fleet of superfast oil turbine-powered dreadnought battleships assured the security of the North Sea. A million British and Empire young men died horrifically and needlessly on the battlefronts of northern France and Belgium - for nothing. German control of Belgium’s North Sea ports made no strategic difference at all.

The same kind of dark and twisted scenario played out in 1939. Britain and France avoided preemptive war with a weak Nazi Germany when they could easily have won it from 1936 for three years.

Then, only after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had lost all trust and faith in his repeated efforts to make common cause with London and Paris , the two Western imperial democracies went to war alone against Hitler to defend “gallant little Poland.”

Yet Poland in 1939 was a military dictatorship and an ugly racist regime based on an apartheid system very similar to white South Africa’s through the Cold War. Its ruling colonels treated their fellow Slav Orthodox Christian Ukrainian and Russian minorities shamefully, and its three million Jews even worse.

Nevertheless, the British government of the witless Neville Chamberlain in London ruled out any preemptive military alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union purely because the Poles refused to contemplate it. Only Winston Churchill, of all people, among prominent British politicians, in vain pleaded for such an agreement, not to trigger a world war but to prevent it.

Instead, once again, the Tail Wagged the Dog.

Today the role of Poland’s malignant tail propelling Britain and France into the wrong war at the wrong time without the crucial ally they most desperately needed is being played by Zelensky.

It is no coincidence that one of the greatest voices relentlessly blocking any peace in Ukraine has been former British prime minister Boris Johnson. Johnson’s policies have directly caused the death of up to two million Ukrainians - an entire generation of young men. Johnson has also published an admiring and superficial biography - really a shameless hagiography - of Churchill and regards himself as the Great Winston’s heir. Which indeed he has been, only not in the way that he imagines.

As a consequence, the great cities of Paris, London, Brussels and even Berlin now face the threat of thermonuclear destruction because all their leaders are more terrified of the moral displeasure of the former prancing television clown Zelensky than of a world war.

Also, of course, we have just seen the classic case, now revealed and documented by veteran journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the New York Times on April 7, of how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Mossad intelligence chief David Barnea talked US President Donald Trump into launching a wildly irresponsible and again avoidable decapitation air strike war on Iran.

Netanyahu and Barnea, we have now learned, personally assured Trump to his face that the Islamic Republic of Iran would fall apart after only four days of no doubt “hard but fair” bombardment of its cities by the Israeli and US air forces.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J. D. Vance and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all flatly challenged and rejected this ludicrous assertion, but Trump, in probably the most fateful and fatal decision of his two presidencies ignored them all and swallowed Netanyahu and Barnea’s claims hook, line and sinker.

Did they even believe it themselves? That is open to debate but personally I believe they were so crazed, stupid and wilfully ignorant that they probably did.

There have of course already been an abundance of conspiracy theories claiming that evil Zionist puppets, bankers, One World Soros subversives, and no doubt Freemasons, the Skull and Bones society and the Knights Templar, to name but a few, all pulled the strings on the fateful decision.

But at the end of the day it came down to Trump, just as it came down to Kaiser Wilhelm II casually issuing the blank check to Austria Hungary to crush Serbia in 1914 and Churchill’s casual ignorance and hysterical imagination that unlimited world war with Germany was preferable to him having more panic attacks over German battlecruisers at anchor at Ostend or Antwerp.

It is - once again - one of the oldest rules or principles in world history, Tails Wag Dogs.

Senator Robert Taft was right in his warnings about the long-term dangers in creating the NATO alliance 75 years ago. Unlimited commitments to security automatically generate unending and unlimited wars. And over the decades and the generations, the power of the weak, the stupid and the irresponsible to manipulate and ultimately doom the strong, the powerful and the far too confident will ultimately doom them all.

Around 130 years ago, the great German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, genius architect of the modern welfare and social security state, without its vices, famously exclaimed that the entire Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomerian grenadier - and Bismarck, as a Prussian junker, had an exceptionally low opinion of Pomerian grenadiers. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, his great personal friend, Prime Minister of Britain Benjamin Disraeli fully agreed with him.

Yet 36 years later, the great and civilized German and British peoples were pulled into a mutually catastrophic, unprecedented world war by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, the unworthy successors to Bismarck and Disraeli.

Wilhelm II and Asquith, along with Tsar Nikolai II, allowed tiny yet sinister - and far from innocent - Tails to Wag their Great Dogs. And all their entire magnificent civilizations were destroyed as a result.

President Trump and the leaders of Canada and Western Europe sit on the edge of an even worse precipice today.