Paul Wolfowitz

Can we explore that a little bit? Can we explore that a little bit? You know, how do you characterize this search for enemies and the institutional refusal to accept the general demobilization?

Well, the key element here was in 1992, a group of neoconservative intellectuals in the Defense Department, led by Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense, a key figure in the very influential neoconservative movement, It's unclear if Wolfowitz wrote this document or if he just presided over its writing, but essentially it reflected Wolfowitz's viewpoint.

It's called the Defense Planning Guidance Document of 1992.

We know about it because some of its critics internally leaked it to the New York Times.

And there's a couple reasons why.

In fact, the neoconservative movement, if one just goes back and reads the manifestos of the neoconservative movement, you can go back to 1992 when one that was mainly authored by Paul Wolfowitz, who later became the subsecretary of defense and then the World Bank head until he had to resign, was... was one in which they talked in 1992 about that once the Soviet Union was gone, the main threat that we had to stop, either with UN help or not, in a coalition that if we needed for the prospect at hand, not a consensus with the world, we need to take down, use our American Muslim power to unilaterally take down countries like Iraq and Iran.

And then for the strategic concern that they had after the Cold War, the next great focus of danger would be who controls the most affordable oil that can still be pumped out of the ground for an affordable price and sold for an affordable price that sustains our economy, the global economy.

A lot of people think, well, we've got oil.

I think this is also relevant to Iraq and Afghanistan because you saw a case of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you look at what Paul Wolfowitz was saying in 2003, he was saying, well, we democratized the Philippines, Indonesia, so why not Iraq? Well, yeah, it turns out Iraqis are not the same people as Indonesians.

Yeah, so we're seeing the same thing.

I do think we tend to ignore, downplay these factors.

But instead, we keep opting for military power.

And I think the lessons tell us pretty clearly, going back to Wolfowitz and company, is that hard power... doesn't work as well as soft power.

After all, it was soft power that brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that we made some cardinal errors in the early post-Cold War age when we were rather... triumphalent about the defeat of the Soviet Union.

And in those 40 pages, I went through some of the backgrounds.

And that is how the book came about, because once I got started, I got more interested and I also linked it up with my earlier work on class formation, especially the making of an Atlantic ruling class, the idea of different stages in the development of capitalism which each produce different vanguards class vanguards so to speak which guide the whole system in a particular direction and i think that what we're witnessing today is is the face of zionism so zionism as a transatlantic phenomenon which is not an Israeli matter on its own, but which is a process in which key US figures like, well, Trump is simply a puppet figure in my view, but people like Paul Wolfowitz and especially Richard Perle, I mean, these are background figures who are driving the US side of the Zionist project.

And of course they are closely linked to Israel, no doubt about it, but also Latin America now.

So Millet in Argentina, who is also a nutcase like Trump in a way, but also Bolsonaro.

And Benjamin Netanyahu actually supported this idea of secularizing the Zionist idea.

So there's a whole...

And then I shouldn't forget PNAC, Project for a New American Century, in which some of the same people, but then coming from the American side, involving people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, but also Paul Wolfowitz and Pearl again, behind the idea that the United States should become more aggressive.

And well, everybody knows the phrase that the new Pearl Harbor might help getting the modernization of American military doctrine restarted.