A shocking Pentagon plan for the US’s open-ended dominance of the world, leaked in 1992, remains the underlying end-goal for the cluster of countries supporting Washington. But while China demonstrated a new way of governance, lifting 100s of millions of people out of poverty, the US has clung to its need to dominate the planet. The result is a polarized world of conflict, war, and the horrifying tragedy now taking place in Gaza. Top legal professor Richard Cullen reports.
THE ORIGINAL “WASHINGTON CONSENSUS” that emerged by the 1990s focused on spelling out how under-developed countries should develop, in accord with Western-certified economic principles. It became controversial.
The “New Washington Consensus” (NWC) that has evolved over the last several years is a far more brazen, blood-soaked creation whose essence has been gruesomely developed, finalized and applied in Gaza.
The Previous Washington Consensus
The British economist John Williamson coined the term “Washington Consensus” in 1990 “to refer to the lowest common denominator of policy advice being addressed by the Washington-based institutions to Latin American countries as of 1989.” The primary policies embodied in this consensus stressed the argued benefits of: fiscal discipline; deregulation; secure property rights; redirected public expenditure; tax reform; plus interest rate, foreign exchange, investment and trade liberalization (link).
This important policy-shaping discussion gained serious traction as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the USSR was dismantled in 1991.
Despite Williamson’s firm objections, the phrase was later used in Washington – and globally – by advocates (and critics) to brand a broader more radical set of Western market policies being forcefully advanced worldwide, often also referred to as “market fundamentalism” or “neoliberalism.” Think tanks and universities, especially across the Global West, ran many conferences, seminars and workshops favouring – and challenging – this new, asserted post-Cold War consensus.
By 2006, a broad breakdown of faith in what the Washington Consensus had come to represent was evident, as the Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, signaled in an article entitled “Development in defiance of the Washington consensus” (link).
Stiglitz stressed how, “China has carried off the world’s largest reduction in poverty by grasping that market economies cannot be left on autopilot” adding that, “Never before has the world seen such sustained growth; never before has there been so much poverty reduction.”
The New Washington Consensus
Although nobody of Williamson’s standing has stepped forward to catalogue the substance of the NWC, the facts speak for themselves and they are presently doing this horrifically every day.
In fact, almost three years ago, Caitlin Johnstone convincingly explained how:
The US empire is indisputably the most murderous and destructive power structure on the world stage today. No other power has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other power is circling the planet with hundreds of military basesand working continuously to destroy any government that disobeys it. No other power is starving entire populations with economic sanctions, military blockades and brazen theft. No other power has been interfering in foreign elections anywhere near as often. No other power is terrorizing populations around the world with wars, covert ops, drone strikes, proxy conflicts, and staged coups and uprisings. No other power is using its military, economic, diplomatic and media dominance to bully the world into serving its interests. (Link)
Full Spectrum Global Dominance
We can actually date the keystone foundations of the NWC to a crucial, detailed American proposal to secure indefinite American global supremacy. This secret, Washington incubated plan, revealed in 1992 by the New York Times, was designed to ensure that no other nation could ever challenge American hegemony again (link).
Moreover, it is clear how certain pioneering American steps (relying on habitual Global West support) have graphically put this plan work to maintain American, globalized, full spectrum dominance (link).
Learn about the leaked document in this video report, less than 10 minutes, long, or scroll down to read more of this essay.
Eastward Ho!
First, there is NATO’s unremitting, post Cold War, dangerous eastward expansion towards Russia. Here is a summary, drawing directly on a decisive article published by Professor John Mearsheimer in 2014, confirming how the EU cemented the existence of the NWC by recklessly signing up to a drastic US-led, aggressive geopolitical thrust into Eastern Europe right up to the border with Russia (link).
In the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration began pushing for NATO to expand Eastwards. The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start but was too weak to do anything more.
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base.
Other experts, like Dr Michael Lawriwsky, have strongly criticized Mearsheimer’s analysis, especially following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But those critiques do not challenge the fact that the clear majority of Global West, including Five Eyes and NATO members, have ardently locked themselves in behind the massively expensive, US-led martial project to confront Russia collectively in Ukraine (link).
Cremating Enlightenment Values in the Middle East
Last year, the distinguished former American diplomat Chas Freeman argued that: “The hateful things Israel is doing have made it the most hated society on the planet. Netanyahu is seen as the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler and Israel is a pariah everywhere outside the West” (link).
At about the same time, I argued that horrific events in Gaza (literally executed by Israel and very widely supported or tolerated across the Global West) were eclipsing the monstrous Nazi-Spanish-Italian, fascist-era, terror-bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937 (link).
More recently:
- The fearless Israeli commentator, Gideon Levy, has documented, in terrible detail, Israel’s deliberate mass starvation of over 2 million people in Gaza (link).
- Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in the US said of this latest iniquitous Israeli project that: “I’ve been working on this topic for more than four decades, and there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled” (link).
- John Mearsheimer has recently concluded that the words, actions and gruesome plans of the Israeli leadership today look hardly different to those of the Nazi leadership in Germany in the 1940s – including the way Israel’s land-grabbing invasion strategy resonates with the Nazi’s “lebensraum” conquering war cry (link).
- Even the Economist, normally a nose-holding, devoted supporter of Israel, has finally begun to smell the wickedness in the air, arguing that: “The continuation of the war in Gaza disgraces Israel” (link).
Israel’s more recent territorial rampaging has included: horrific pager-bomb terrorist attacks in Lebanon; massive, brazen invasion-attacks on Lebanon and Syria; and treacherously bombing Iran (with America) as negotiations were in progress. All of this bold war mongering has resulted in countless civilian deaths. Naturally, all these ghastly events have been widely celebrated in Tel Aviv and Washington.
As Owen Jones recently argued in the Guardian, “Israel’s military has reportedly committed every war crime under the sun” (link). Findings by the International Court of Justice against Israel and the arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister (inter alia) issued by the International Criminal Court buttress this sharp summary (link).
Conclusion
Even as it was clear, soon after October 7, 2023, that Israel anticipated cleansing all Palestinians from Gaza, then US President Joe Biden rushed to Tel Aviv to deliver a sickening public hug to Prime Minister Netanyahu, prior to ramping up the delivery of American armaments to support Israel’s genocidal project.
This year, the reckless, bullying second Trump administration has alienated close allies and designated adversaries in equal measure with its belligerent, chaotic trade and tariff policies, which are also set to drive US consumer prices steadily higher – given that the tariffs are delivering barely disguised significant sales tax increases (link).
This disaffection with the US amongst its allies has been further aggravated as the White House has engaged in:
- Geopolitical intimidation politics to massively boost: (A) militarism generally; and (B) US-sourced military spending (link).
- Continuous gaudy spectacle-politics, including Oval Office humiliation (link).
Furthermore, it is clear that the operation of the NWC today is now being steered, more than ever and to an extraordinary degree by Israel and its terrible, criminal priorities. The US is particularly complicit in this outcome.
Despite this monstrous reality, almost all of the Global West, thus far, remains devoted, limpet-like, to the NWC. They remain committed to supporting what has evolved into a homicidal, geopolitical psychosis, guided by the wretched example of the Hill Billy White House (link).
Still, eventually, the NWC will fragment and unwind (in a manner analogous to the folding of the original, evolved Washington Consensus) contributing to the further collapse of American moral authority (link).
As it happens, the commentator, Ida Audeh, convincingly observed, recently, how:
In time, North Americans will look back with incredulity at the way a partisan force had them rooting for so long for a settler colonial project (Jim Crow on steroids, fraudulently packaged as “the only democracy in the Middle East”) that terrorized an entire region, wiped out at least 1,400 bloodlines in Gaza alone and celebrated the slaughter as necessary for its self-defense. The end of that settler colonial project, which will remove one shackle choking [America], cannot come soon enough (link).
Richard Cullen is an adjunct law professor at the University of Hong Kong and a popular writer on current affairs.
To see a list of articles he has written for this outlet, click this phrase.