"The National Security State": Part 2 of 4. Chapter 12 from "Our Country, Then and Now"
"America Opts for Global Military Dominance," "The Council on Foreign Relations Moves In"
Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we have the 2nd installment of Chapter 12: “The National Security State” with sections on “America Opts for Global Military Dominance” and “The Council on Foreign Relations Moves In.”
As we saw with our previous installment, the world today is embroiled in crisis, but what else is new? As we hearken back to the turn of the 20th century, we remember a time when a substantial portion of humanity, especially in the United States, actually believed that mankind had turned a corner and that a Golden Age of peace and prosperity lay just ahead.
Unfortunately, World War I, followed all-too-soon by the Great Depression, blew that illusion to smithereens. By 1939, the world was on the verge of an even more devastating war. In less than a decade, the destruction had barely died down than the era of endless conflict starting with the Cold War had begun.
What characterized governance in the US now became the existence of the infamous “National Security State” as a permanent feature of international relations, whereby ordinary citizens lost all right to know what was really going on behind the scenes within the military-industrial-intelligence complex and the governmental institutions that fed it money for reasons barely ever articulated. The era of 24/7 government by propaganda had begun along with the never-ending lies and constant wars, big and small, around the world.
What few people realize is that the National Security State was created to extend, protect, and conceal a conscious decision made prior to US entrance into World War II that the US would seek and attain global military dominance. This decision was not haphazard or incremental. Rather it was inflicted on the nation and the world at a specific point in time by a specific group of people: those who ran the US Council on Foreign Relations. Ostensibly a public service think tank, the CFR was largely an instrument of the Rockefeller financial empire and was joined at the hip with the British Round Table which ran the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Joining the two national elites was the Pilgrim Society.
We are now looking deeply into the “Heart of Darkness” of what became the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire.
America Opts for Global Military Dominance
Like an engine that was running out of gas, the New Deal was sputtering as economic recovery slowed in the mid-to-late 1930s. Though it has never been proven conclusively that President Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately helped provoke World War II against Germany and Japan in order to rescue the US economy, such calculations were likely part of the thinking of the time. Everyone knew that war was a potent economic stimulus. The world’s banking fraternity, in particular, had been growing rich off war for a very long time.
It’s a little-known fact that even before the US entered the war on the side of Great Britain, a decision had been made in America’s highest official circles that the long-term objective of the US was to become the world’s dominant military power. The fact of planned American global military dominance has been documented in extensive detail in an impeccably precise book published in 2020, Tomorrow the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy by Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. Another corroborating source is F. William Engdahl’s Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century.
Both Wertheim and Engdahl relate that as war clouds began to gather over Europe in the late 1930s, consultations were taking place among the Roosevelt White House, the US State Department, and the War Department—all still minuscule by today’s standards of bloated executive bureaucracies and intelligence agencies (there were none in 1940)—on what would be the policy objectives of the US once war in Europe broke out.
When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, followed by Britain and France declaring war, the debate within the US became more urgent. When the Germans next occupied Denmark and Norway, followed by its blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France in 1940, the US faced two contingencies. Either Britain would also be defeated, leaving all Europe in German hands—except for the Soviet Union—or Britain would hold out until the German victories could be rolled back. Meanwhile, in the Far East, Japan had invaded China following its earlier conquest of Manchuria in the mid-1930s.
Whether or not Britain would stand or fall, the war was obviously an excellent business opportunity for the US. It was President Calvin Coolidge who had said in 1925 that, “The business of America is business,” and it was Roosevelt’s implementation, first, of Cash-and-Carry on September 21, 1939, and then the Lend-Lease Act, that made the US the “arsenal of democracy.” This ended the Great Depression and set America on a course of staggering economic prosperity lasting until the 1960s.
Still, the US government’s assumption at the time was that mainland Europe was going to be controlled by the two authoritarian states of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, at least in the near term. So where would the US draw the line that it would defend at all costs? A consensus was forming that the US would be able to secure control of the Western Hemisphere, but possibly not much else.
The debate was fierce, with a more radical party emerging which believed that long-term US economic power could not be assured unless the goal were established for total global military dominance.
The Council on Foreign Relations Steps In
The decisive studies delivered to President Roosevelt, along with the State and War Departments, were drafted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), established in New York following World War I, with funds supplied largely by the Morgans and Rockefellers.
By 1939, the Rockefeller dynasty was under the control of the founder’s son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960). The Rockefellers had been intimately involved, personally and by marriage, with the growth of the US banking industry after the creation of the Federal Reserve, with David Rockefeller, one of John D. Jr.’s sons, eventually becoming head of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the figure at the center of the global financial spider’s web until his death at the age of 101 in 2017. [David’s brother Nelson was instrumental in extending Rockefeller banking interests across Latin America in the 1930s.]
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) never had any official standing with the US government. It was rather an elite instrument giving voice to the Rockefellers’ global ambitions, in league with the big New York banks, and was intimately linked with the parallel imperial and financial interests of Great Britain. At the head of these interests stood the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England. The Council on Foreign Relations is the US equivalent of the Royal Institute of International Affairs which, according to American scholar Carroll Quigley, was founded by Cecil Rhodes’ secret society, the Round Table, becoming a “fief” of Rhodes’s successor in influence, Alfred, Lord Milner. [i]
The CFR lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt and his administration to adopt policies in the prosecution of World War II that would not only defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan, but that would also set the stage for long-term competition with the Soviet Union, and eventually transform the US into a juggernaut of multi-spectrum warfare against any country that stood in its way.
Within two weeks of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the US State Department turned to the Council on Foreign Affairs for advice on what to do. [ii] Despite the fact that Britain and France had declared war against Germany, it appeared that few Americans wanted the US to do the same. A poll in late 1939 identified only seventeen percent of Americans as wanting to enter the war. In fact, Congress had passed a series of Neutrality Acts in 1935 that banned the export of weapons, granting of loans, and travel of citizens to nations at war. But in 1937, the Acts were modified to allow the president to discriminate between “aggressors” and “victims.” [iii]
On September 12, 1939, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a founder of the CFR and the editor of its Foreign Affairs journal, along with CFR director Walter Mallory, met with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and several aides, and told them that the war that just began was a “grand opportunity” for the US to become “the premier power in the world.” They offered to undertake planning for the post-war peace. Welles agreed, provided that Armstrong and Mallory kept it quiet. [iv]
The CFR created an ad hoc organization called “War and Peace Studies” that ended up sending 682 memoranda to US government policymakers. Head of the project was Prof. Isaiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University and CFR director. [v] The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project’s entire cost of $350,000. The team’s Armaments Group was led by future CIA director Allen Dulles, who would one day be fired over the Cuban missile fiasco by President John F. Kennedy. Dulles would then go on to sit on the Warren Commission that investigated Kennedy’s assassination.
While the CFR was working in the shadows, the Roosevelt administration followed the same path of being an observer as President Woodrow Wilson had done early in World War I. In February 1940, Roosevelt sent Undersecretary Welles to meet with the conflict nations’ leaders in Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome to secure a peace agreement that would include military disarmament. While Welles talked, Allen Dulles’s CFR Armaments Group was examining military expansion no matter which way the European war went. [vi]
As Germany began to sweep across Western Europe in 1940, invading Norway and Denmark in April, then Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France in May-June, several organizations in the US were lobbying for continued American neutrality, including the Keep America Out of War Congress, the American Peace Society, and the America First Committee, where aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., became a spokesman. The America First Committee advocated defending the Western Hemisphere but going no further. It was journalist Walter Lippmann who began to derisively label opponents of entering the war as “isolationists.”
By the autumn of 1940, the US had begun its largest military buildup ever, far greater than in the run-up to World War I. This included a decision to build the world’s largest navy, exceeding Britain’s. With the enactment of the military draft, the first in American peacetime history, US unemployment ended. [The Democrats, with Roosevelt in the White House, were ecstatic.]
In 1940, the US was still more than a year away from entry into the war. The common assumption is that the US slept until Pearl Harbor, then suddenly awoke with its world on fire. This is far from the truth. As the country was building its military forces, the CFR and government insiders were already envisaging a much-expanded role of the US in future world affairs, as it was increasingly clear that the British Empire no longer could control the world. But in the autumn of 1941, President Roosevelt had a problem. The American people still didn’t want war.
Meanwhile, Britain had terminated its alliance with Japan in 1923. Japan had been fighting a war of conquest in China since 1931 and had been allied with Germany and Italy since 1940. Now, with the US anchored in the Philippines, and the British arc of Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and India in place, a Japanese clash with the Anglo-Americans seemed likely, particularly after September 1940, when Japan invaded and occupied French Indochina.
A modern consensus has grown that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan to attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I would refer you to the article “Pearl Harbor: Hawaii Was Surprised; FDR Was Not” by investigative journalist James Perloff. This article appears on-line and contains references to additional books and articles. [vii]
The provocations were these: freezing Japanese assets being held in US banks, a move that Japan viewed as an act of war; a far-reaching plan to cut Japan off from overseas petroleum supplies through an embargo; a ban on exporting steel to Japan; repeatedly sending US warships into Japanese territorial waters; keeping the US fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor late into 1941, rather than anchoring safely at its home Pacific Coast ports, especially San Diego. Instead, Roosevelt left the fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, where he was told by his highest-ranking officers it was a sitting duck. All these circumstances are well-known to today’s military establishment. [viii]
[i] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p.3ff.
[ii] Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, London, 2020, p 8.
[iii] Ibid, p. 32.
[iv] Ibid, p. 37. Maybe the US could take over the world without anyone noticing?
[v] William Engdahl, Gods of Money and the Death of the American Century, p.137
[vi] Ibid, p. 42.
[vii] <https://www.fourstatesnews.us/2015/12/07/pearl-harbor-hawaii-surprised-fdr-not/>
[viii] Col. Douglas McGregor interview, “We Are Co-Belligerents,” The Saker, YouTube, January 28, 2023. F. William Engdahl also recounts the US government’s actions in enticing a Japanese attack in Gods of Money.
The National Security State -- Part 1 of 4
Books Available from the Three Sages:
Richard C. Cook, Our Country, Then and Now. ORDER HERE
Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World. ORDER HERE
Dr. Lewis Coleman: 50 Years Lost in Medical Advance: The discovery of Hans Selye's stress mechanism. ORDER HERE
Rick Cook is a fantastic resource of historical truth, and everybody ought to read his book. I agree with everything he says here, except that I believe that WWI never really ended, and the interlude between WWI and WWII was dominated by clandestine preparations for the final defeat of Germany and Japan and their incorporation into the Anglo-American Empire. The “Roaring 20’s stock market boom, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and the infamous Versailles Treaty all reflected a cohesive scheme of financial warfare against Germany and Japan designed to force them into WWII. The 1925 real estate crash followed by the 1929 stock market crash was caused by a deliberate currency contraction coordinated by Montagu Norman of the British central bank and Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve. The resulting deflationary depression caused severe American unemployment that rendered working men happy to become soldiers where they could at least earn a meager living. It simultaneously trapped Germany in a financial debacle because the worldwide depression made it impossible to sell German goods to obtain currency needed to purchase food to feed its population, and set the stage for Hitler to implement social programs and military preparations for the impending war. All the while America and Britain were quietly preparing their industries to mass produce gigantic gun barrels, advanced tanks and warplanes, and so forth. The British went so far as to bomb German cities at night and murder German citizens in Poland and Czechoslovakia to goad Hitler into war, and both Britain and America provided money, pre-fabricated factories, cargo ships, and vast supplies of military equipment to enable Stalin to form gigantic, fully equipped armies that were poised on the Russian borders, waiting until Germany and France had exhausted themselves so that he could launch his armies to sweep throughout Europe and impose a draconian form of communism with him in charge. However Hitler’s spies detected these preparations in the nick of time, and he was able to organize a surprise attack that devastated the Russian armies and supplies. Books are now available that reveal all these details.