Tag: politics

The US does to Canada, what Canada has helped the US try to do to other countries for decades: Rob them of their sovereignty

The United States has been dropping economic atom bombs on designated enemies for decades, in order to pressure them into giving up their sovereignty and becoming US vassals—often with Canada’s assistance. Now Washington has dropped an economic atom bomb on its “closest friend and ally,” seeking its annexation.

March 12, 2025

By Stephen Gowans

Canadians like to think of their country as the United States’ closest friend and ally. They’re now coming to the conclusion that the aphorism, “countries don’t have allies, only interests,” is true. US president Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Canada needs to become the fifty-first US state, and that he’ll use economic coercion to ensure it does. His plan is to use tariffs to severely weaken Canada’s economy, until Canadians cry uncle, and beg to be annexed.

So far, Trump has offered a dizzying array of pretexts for his tariff action, but the key one is that Canada has been allowing illegal immigrants and fentanyl to pour across the border. Trump has invoked this false motivation in order to secure a legal foundation for his tariff measures. Its falsity, however, is obvious. Few illegal migrants and little fentanyl actually flow south across the US border. What’s more, the Canadian government has taken significant steps to reduce what began as a trickle and has become a mini-trickle.

Last week, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, decried Trump’s fentanyl reason for imposing tariffs on Canada as “completely bogus.” He’s right. Trump’s response has been to double down on the necessity of Canada becoming the fifty-first US state. The only way Canadians can avoid tariffs (and the massive economic pain they’ll bring), he warns, is to allow their country to be annexed.

If Canadians fail to capitulate, they’ll pay a hefty price. The governor of Canada’s central bank, Tiff Macklem, has just lowered interest rates as a way of providing some protection against the coming economic storm. Canadians, he said, are “facing a new crisis” and, depending “on the extent and duration of new U.S. tariffs, the economic impact could be severe.” Trudeau has gone so far as to say that Trump wants to destroy the Canadian economy, “because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”

Evan Dyer, a veteran journalist with the publicly-owned Canadian broadcaster, the CBC, has recently posted an article titled “The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. With Canada, it’s being done in public.” Dyer talked to former members of the Canadian intelligence community to find out how US destabilization efforts work, and how Trump’s destabilization will affect Canada.

Neil Bisson, a former intelligence officer who teaches at the University of Ottawa, told Dyer that “If you have individuals who are concerned about where their next meal is coming from or if they’re going to get a roof over their head, that supersedes [their commitment to] sovereignty.” These people will be inclined to pressure Ottawa to accede to US demands for annexation. Bisson also told Dyer that “there will be individuals within Canada who could potentially be co-opted to push [the] narrative forward” of US “citizenship as the answer to [the country’s] economic woes.”

Ward Elcock, who headed Canada’s intelligence agency for a decade, told Dyer that Trump “intends clearly to try and destabilize our economy. The reality is that if Canada is really impoverished, people may start to think about it. That’s always the possibility — that not all Canadians are going to be willing to endure economic deprivation. And so, some may start to think about it as time goes along.”

It’s revealing that Dyer approached former intelligence officials, who will have worked closely with their US counterparts on destabilization operations around the world, for insight into what the United States is up to. The United States has destabilized countries economically for decades, including Arab nationalist Iraq, communist Cuba and North Korea, Islamic nationalist Iran, and Arab nationalist Syria, among others. All these countries had one thing in common: They had their own developmental agenda which excluded their becoming vassals of the United States. For that, they were punished.

Significantly, US operations against these countries shared three key features with the current operation to destabilize Canada.

  • They aimed at destroying the target country’s economy in order to cause enough pain that the country’s citizens would pressure their government to accede to US demands.
  • The overarching goal of the operations was to bring the target country under US control.
  • The real motivation was hidden behind a false reason given to justify the action (fentanyl in Canada, WMDs in Iraq), as well as the claim that the country’s economic difficulties were due to the government’s economic mismanagement.   

Cuba is a paradigmatic case.  In the wake of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory, concluded that the only way to bring Cuba back under US supervision was to alienate internal support for the government by wrecking Cuba’s economy to cause disenchantment and disaffection among the Cuban people. The key was to make sure the blame for economic hardship was misdirected to the government’s socialist economic policies and away from US destabilization operations.

As historian Louis A Perez Jr. explained,

Mallory recommended that ‘every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba’ as a means ‘to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government’. Assistant Secretary Rubottom similarly outlined the approach by which ‘the United States use judiciously elected economic pressures … in order to engender more public discomfort and discontent and thereby to expose to the Cuban masses Castro’s responsibility for mishandling their affairs.’

The expansion of the embargo was designed to deepen Cuban economic distress as a means of political change, once more an effort to use hardship as a way to foment rebellion among the Cuban people. The Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws were particularly harsh, both in timing and in kind, for they sought to visit upon the Cuban people unrelieved punishment, to make daily life in Cuba as difficult and grim as possible, to increase Cuban suffering in measured but sustained increments, at every turn, at every opportunity at a time when Cubans were already reeling from scarcities in goods and the disruptions of services in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cubans faced a new round of shortages, increased rationing, declining services, and growing scarcities, where the needs of everyday life in their most ordinary and commonplace form were met often only by Herculean efforts. Representative Torricelli proclaimed his intention succinctly: ‘My objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba … My task is to bring down Fidel Castro.’ [1]

Now, the economic warfare used to destabilize Cuba, as well as North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, is being turned on Canada. The irony is that Canada itself participated in US operations to destabilize many of these same countries, eagerly contributing to the immiseration of peoples who wanted to safeguard their own sovereignty, in order to soften them up for US domination. Canadians weren’t so concerned about sovereignty when that of other peoples was at stake and they were helping to undermine it. Now that the tables have turned, they’re beginning to discover that their neighbor to the south has no friends and allies, only interests—and that it doesn’t care a fig about their sovereignty.

Canadians’ outrage at Trump’s efforts to bully them into ceding their independence calls to mind Aime Cesaire’s analysis. He argued that Europeans were outraged at Hitler, not because of his Nazism, but because he had turned what Europeans collectively had done in Africa, Asia, and South America onto Europeans themselves. What the European “cannot forgive Hitler for,” wrote Cesaire, “is not the crime in itself, the crimes against man, it is … the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.” [2] Likewise, Canadians are outraged that what they have helped their “friend and neighbor” do to the Arab nationalists of Syria and Iraq, the communists of North Korea, and the economic nationalists of Venezuela, is now being done to themselves.

Finally, an explanation as to why I said the United States is dropping an economic atom bomb on Canada. The effects of economic warfare on countries are often more lethal than the consequences of conventional military coercion. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the unofficial journal of the US State Department, John Mueller and Karl Mueller showed that US economic warfare on Iraq during the 1990s produced more deaths than all the weapons of mass destruction in history, including all the chemical weapons used in the First World War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the political scientists found sanctions to be so devastating to qualify as instruments of mass destruction, even more injurious to civilian populations that weapons of mass destruction. For this reason, some began to talk of economic warfare as an “economic atom bomb”—a way to achieve atom-bomb levels of destruction in human terms, without incurring the opprobrium of actually dropping one.

1) Louis A Perez Jr, “Fear and loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US policy toward Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 34, 2002, 237-254.

2) Aime Cesaire, “Discourse on Colonialism,” Monthly Review Press,2000, p. 36.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy: A Realistic Marxist View vs. Mearsheimer’s Realist View

By Stephen Gowans

May 21, 2024

Recently, Laurence H. Shoup presented data in Monthly Review that shows that the key personnel of the organizations comprising the Israel lobby, as identified by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, are also the key personnel of the leading US foreign policy think-thank, the Wall Street-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The key foreign policy members of the Biden cabinet, the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, along with the director of the CIA, national security advisor, and US ambassador to the UN, are all CFR members. Cabinets in previous administrations have also drawn heavily from the Wall Street-based organization to fill top cabinet posts.

Shoup has argued in two books and multiple articles that US foreign policy is shaped by a Wall Street power elite operating largely through the Council on Foreign Relations to serve the economic interests of the US economic elite, the country’s ruling class. This is a Marxist view.

The Marxist view contrasts with the view of John Mearsheimer who has recently argued that US foreign policy—not just that touching Israel, but all US foreign policy—is shaped by a powerful lobby of Jewish and Christian Zionist business people who have used their wealth and influence to pressure US decision-makers to put Zionist interests ahead of US interests.  

These two views differ on the following questions:

Who decisively influences US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says wealthy and powerful Zionists, both Jewish and Christian. A Marxist view says that a Wall Street power elite holds decisive sway over US foreign policy, and Shoup shows that the group includes members of and overlaps the Israel lobby.

What is the aim of US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says the aim is to protect and advance the Zionist project, in contrast to a Marxist view which says it is to protect and advance Wall Street’s interests around the world.

Is Israel a foreign policy asset? Mearsheimer says that far from being an asset, Israel is a liability, because Zionism creates problems in the Middle East which demand incessant US attention, diverting Washington from devoting its full energies to containing China, its principal foreign policy threat. A Marxist view holds that defending and promoting the interests of its patrons has always been central to the Zionist project and that this makes Israel a valuable instrument to be used in defending Wall Street’s interests in the Middle East.  

Mearsheimer recently presented an argument that supports the idea that the US foreign policy establishment subsumes the Israel lobby, as Shoup has shown, though it was hardly Mearsheimer’s intention to support a Marxist view. We might suppose that the Israel lobby focuses on US-Israel relations, while the ambit of the US foreign policy establishment is broader—the world as a whole. But Mearsheimer sees the lobby’s ambit as coterminous with that of the US foreign policy establishment; in his view, Israel is not the only matter that commands the Israel lobby’s attention; it is also concerned with US foreign policy as a whole.  Even to Mearsheimer, then, the Israel lobby looks like the US foreign policy establishment in the breadth of the regions in which it takes an interest.

But here’s where Mearsheimer introduces a new element into his thinking. Not only does he believe that the Israel lobby has pressured the US foreign policy establishment into robustly backing Israel, he also makes an argument that can be construed to mean he believes the Israel lobby has pressured US decision-makers into adopting an interventionist foreign policy everywhere in the world.  Asked whether the lobby is concerned with US-Israel relations alone, Mearsheimer replies (at 14:32):

“The fact is that the lobby is deeply interested in seeing the United States involved militarily all over the planet. The reason is, is that if the United States is intervening all over the planet, that means it will have a commitment to intervening in Israel. You don’t want a situation where the United States pulls back its forces, implements a policy, a foreign policy, of restraint, and is very reluctant to interfere in other places around the world, because if that’s the case it means that Israel may get into a conflict and the United States might not be willing to intervene on its behalf. So, the lobby has had an interest in seeing the United States pursue a very aggressive foreign policy all across the globe.”

One interpretation of the text above is that Mearsheimer believes the Israel lobby has caused US foreign policy to be globally interventionist. Another is that he sees the lobby as favoring a broadly interventionist policy, but doesn’t go so far as to suggest it has caused US decision-makers to adopt one. But if the Israel lobby is powerful enough to cause US decision-makers to support Israel unconditionally as Mearsheimer contends, we might expect it also to be powerful enough to cause decision-makers to support a globally interventionist foreign policy that supports the Jewish state. It seems likely that Mearsheimer is arguing that the Israel lobby not only causes US decision-makers to favor Israel unconditionally but that it also causes them to adopt a globally interventionist foreign policy.  This extends the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis considerably, from: the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to back Israel unconditionally to: the Israel lobby causes US foreign policy to be robustly interventionist around the world.

Mearsheimer defines the lobby as a group of wealthy and powerful people who are committed to Israel. We might ask what lies behind their commitment. Mearsheimer cites Zionist convictions. The Israel lobby comprises people who are either Zionist Jews or Christian Zionists, he argues. But is that the only reason to be committed to Israel? Could one not also be committed to a policy of the United States backing Israel owing to the role the Jewish state is able to play as an outpost of US elite interests in the Middle East? Pace Mearsheimer, could it be that US foreign policy is shaped by US decision-makers guided by a Wall Street-based power elite that perceives Israel as an asset able to defend US ruling class interests in the Middle East in return for helping it carry forward the Zionist project?  

Political Zionism has always rested on the idea of a quid-pro-quo between settler Jews emigrating from the West and the governments of the Western states from which they emigrated. The former would represent the interests of the latter in West Asia and North Africa, serving as a bulwark against Arab and Muslim nationalist interests, in exchange for the latter’s support for the Jewish settler project in Palestine. That project would inevitably arouse the enmity of the natives, who would naturally bristle at their displacement and the negation of their national aspirations.  A Western backer would be vital to the project’s success, and Israel would return the favor by countering forces that opposed its sponsor’s interests in the region.

Israel, of course, isn’t the West’s only choice as proxy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Washington could look to Arab states to help police the Middle East and assert US profit-making and strategic interests in the region. Indeed, Washington has done this, establishing relations with a series of royal and military dictatorships, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.

The trouble is that US support in the Middle East is largely limited to the autocrats Washington helps keep in power over the opposition of their populations. It would be difficult for US-backed Arab despots to mobilize their countries against other Arabs and Muslims, specifically Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen—states and movements which reject US domination of the Middle East. US-backed autocrats command little support at home. Their populations are imbued with nationalist aspirations, and unlike Israeli Jews, reject the idea that the region ought to be subordinate to US leadership. Tel Aviv, in contrast, can mobilize Israeli Jews against Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as hostile barbarians, embittered against Israel, and bent on eliminating the Jews as a people.

To put it another way, Israeli Jews, who largely see themselves as Westerners, identify with the Western world and its project of imposing US leadership on the globe, including on the energy-rich and therefore strategically important Middle East; Arabs and Iranians are far less likely to share this view. Native states are, thus, poor choices as effective proxies for US interests in the Middle East. Israel, which sees itself as the West’s outpost in West Asia and North Africa, is, in contrast, a superb choice, motivated to cooperate with the US agenda by its security concerns which can only be satisfied by the United States and its Western partners and a common Western culture and commitment to the ideas of manifest destiny, Western superiority, and the desirability of US global leadership.

Mearsheimer has been known to reply to challenges to his view by asking, “Then why does the lobby exist?” The fact of the existence of an organization with a specific aim is hardly evidence that the organization has achieved its aim. The Democratic Socialists of America exist as an organization to bring socialism to the United States. Is the United States socialist?

The reason the Israel lobby exists is to shape public opinion, media coverage, intellectual discourse, and the research agendas and curricula of the universities and schools, and where public opinion cannot be manipulated to Israel’s advantage, to discourage elected representatives from responding to public opinion by initiating legislation or government action that could interfere with Washington’s accustomed support of its Israeli client. The lobby, as Shoup points out, is largely focused on electoral contests, not on twisting the arms of the unelected Wall Street-connected personnel who occupy the consequential foreign policy roles in the state—the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, chief of the CIA, and UN ambassador, and their phalanx of deputies and undersecretaries—all of whom are largely removed from the influence of public opinion. The role of the Israel lobby is, in short, to persuade US society and its elected representatives to accept US support of a client in the Middle East whose conduct is likely to inflame public opinion against it.

The idea that the Israel lobby is able to shape all of US foreign policy, as Mearsheimer contends, is, to use one of his favorite locutions, just not a serious argument. The idea that the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to put Israeli interests ahead of US interests, fails to grasp (i) the complementarity of the two country’s interests; (ii) the trouble that local forces of independence and national assertiveness in the Middle East can create for US ruling class interests in the region; and (iii) the role Israel plays as the “rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of… Arab [and Muslim] nationalism will be broken,” as Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, once put it.

Mearsheimer’s view comes perilously close to the idea that a cabal of rich Jews and their Christian Zionist friends pull the strings in Washington, diverting the country’s government from pursuing US interests to pursuing Jewish Zionist interests in the Middle East. Some might say the Marxist view is hardly different; it too attributes US foreign policy to a cabal, except, in this case, a cabal of Wall Street financiers. While it might seem on the surface that this is so, the Marxist view sees US foreign policy as reflecting the character of US society—one devoted to capitalism, indeed, thoroughly dominated by it, where the idea that billionaires, wealthy investors, and top-level corporate executives exercise considerable sway over almost every aspect of US society, including public policy, is almost axiomatic. As a 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page showed, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” The Council on Foreign Relations is only one of many instruments the US ruling class uses to influence public policy. It also funds the political campaigns of candidates that will support pro-business policies; donates to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; owing to its significant wealth, lobbies the legislative and executive branches of government to a degree which unions, working people, and grassroots groups, which command significantly less wealth, are unable to do; and owns and controls the mass media, allowing it to shape public opinion and set the public policy agenda. The US ruling class uses all of these mechanisms to influence US foreign policy and tilt it in favor of US ruling class interests. The Marxist view, thus, holds that a class, not a cabal, pulls the strings in Washington, using its ownership and control of the economy to fund political campaigns, lobby government, and shape the public discourse, in its interests.

In contrast, Mearsheimer’s view is hardly different from the idea that a cabal of wealthy Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians has hijacked the US state in order to use it to serve the interests of Jews in Israel at the expense and to the detriment of the citizens of the United States. This view shares similarities with reactionary views that date as far back as 1789 and continued into the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century–ideas about conspiracies of wealthy Jews operating in the background to pull strings and shape world politics to the benefit of Jews and at the expense of everyone else. If wealthy Jews were once thought by reactionaries to be behind everything they hated–the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, international capitalism–they have become, in Mearsheimer’s hands, the reason why the United States supports Israel; in other words, they have been made to reprise their role as scapegoats.

Related:

Israel is a Class Issue

The Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy Establishment Are Largely the Same, Reflecting the Complementarity of US Elite and Israeli Colonial Settler Interests