Brian Berletic on the US strategy of weakening Iran, Russia, and China simultaneously
Glenn Diesen interviews Brian Berletic, former US Marine and host of The New Atlas, on the interconnected US strategies targeting Iran, Russia, and China.
Summary
Glenn Diesen and Brian Berletic discuss what Berletic describes as a unified US grand strategy aimed at maintaining global primacy by weakening or subordinating Iran, Russia, and China simultaneously, rather than seeking a genuine balance of power. Berletic argues that US diplomacy with all three nations — including Trump's recent meeting with Xi Jinping — is not intended to produce peaceful outcomes but to generate pretexts for further conflict and to shape geopolitics in America's favor. He contends that the US has deliberately created instability in the Middle East to disrupt energy flows to Asia, mirroring the strategy used to cut Europe off from Russian energy, and that the reorganization of the US Marine Corps into an anti-shipping force was prepared years in advance for exactly this purpose. Berletic warns that China's ability to build and expand faster than the US can destabilize and destroy will determine whether a direct military confrontation occurs, and cautions against underestimating how far the US is willing to go — including, he notes, presidential references to the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
The conversation also examines the post-Cold War history of US diplomacy with Russia, including the OSCE's indivisible security framework, the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, and what Berletic and Diesen describe as a consistent pattern of the US making assurances to Russia while simultaneously pursuing NATO expansion — a precedent they argue is being replicated in current diplomacy with China over Taiwan. Berletic further argues that China, paradoxically, comes closest to fulfilling the 'benign hegemon' role theorized by Kindleberger — not seeking dominance but genuine multipolarity — and that Western fear of Chinese leadership is largely irrational and manufactured by US strategic interest in preserving unipolarity.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
US Diplomacy as a Strategic Tool, Not a Path to Peace
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined again by Brian Berletic, a former US Marine, author, and host of The New Atlas, to discuss what brings together the economic war against China and the wars against Russia and Iran — the commonalities, what connects them all. Thank you. It's good to see you again.
Brian Berletic: Thank you so much for having me back.
Glenn Diesen: Trump recently had this meeting with Xi Jinping, and it seemed like one of the key objectives was for Trump to get China's support to put pressure on Iran — to essentially put an end to the war on terms favorable to the United States. It reminded me to some extent of how the United States also wanted China to put pressure on Russia to essentially capitulate. The problem there would be that if China is next on the chopping block, then helping the US would be great self-harm. How are you seeing this? Because you have argued that China would be the ultimate target in all of these theaters of war.
Brian Berletic: Absolutely. And the US administration admits this. There are senators and representatives in Congress who constantly — almost on a daily basis — admit this. I don't think the United States, and I don't think President Trump as a policy maker, went to China thinking that China was going to put pressure on Iran, just like China would never put pressure on Russia. Why would China help the United States eliminate one of their own allies and isolate themselves even further?
People have to understand what the US uses diplomacy for. They don't use diplomacy to solve issues peacefully. They use diplomacy to create more pretexts for additional war and to shape geopolitics ahead of those wars. This is what they've done in the lead-up to the overthrowing of Ukraine in 2014, provoking the war with Russia in 2022, and the last two years of war of aggression against Iran. And this is exactly what they're doing to China itself, using diplomacy.
When you understand that's why they're doing it, that's how they're using diplomacy, then it makes much more sense. The way they try to frame it in the minds of Americans — and people have to remember they have many different target audiences when they do these different things — is to put into the mind of Americans that America is such a reasonable country. No matter how evil China is, America wants to talk with them. This is the same game they just played with Iran up until the US launched its war of aggression against Iran. This is the same game they've been playing with Russia for years in regards to Ukraine. "We're the neutral mediator," when it's their proxy war from the beginning, run by the US top to bottom all the way up until and including today.
Glenn Diesen: But it seems to some extent to be self-defeating. If one looks at the international system, peace would be created through a balance of power in which all the major powers would be constrained. You would think that having a more independent and stronger Iran or Russia would create some balance of power on the Eurasian continent. Is the only reason for the United States to seek to weaken all the centers of power to assert a hegemonic path to security, or are there other objectives? Because if I were in the United States, I would see myself in rapid relative decline with China rising very powerfully. I would want to restore a balance of power. This is traditionally what the United States did with its offshore balancing — it would come late into wars when all the major powers had exhausted their blood and treasury, and the main goal was to assert or restore a balance of power where the major powers would balance each other. But now, attempting to weaken Iran and weaken Russia, it seems like there won't be any check on its main adversary. For the Russians or the Iranians to survive now, they really have to put even more trust and dependence on China. It just doesn't seem like rational behavior for a country that would want to balance its opponents.
Brian Berletic: The United States only pretends to seek a balance of power between nations. It ultimately wants primacy. This is stated US foreign policy objective — since during the Cold War, after the Cold War, and from the very end of the Cold War all the way up until now. Every official US government strategy paper, every think tank policy paper — this is what they're obsessed with. This is their ultimate objective: primacy.
They wanted to try to put wedges between Russia and Iran, Russia and Iran and China. They tried to play these games for decades and decades, all during the Cold War and ever since. But this is at a very late stage of the game where everyone knows what's going on. They know there's this window of opportunity that is closing for the US to assert primacy over the entire planet. They understand this. They know their only way of surviving is to work together.
There probably are still circles of political interests around the world who don't get that, who actually think they can cut a deal with the United States. I hope that's a very small number. I'm almost certain that especially in Moscow and Beijing, they understand this fully. There's nothing the US can do to trick them. They basically have to trick them into working against each other, because they are actually natural allies — natural economic partners. The vast majority of their history, sharing a border for centuries and centuries, has been in peace and prosperity, not conflict. The Sino-Soviet split was a historical anomaly. It was not the norm.
And so that's where they are at this point. If they could, the US could topple Iran or topple Russia and install a client regime in its place and control them that way — that's what they ultimately would want to do. That's what they have tried to do and have so far failed to do. But that's the only way they could create what wouldn't be an independent center of power — it would be just another US proxy. And that's ultimately what they're trying to do. That's what they've always done. This is what they've transformed Europe into. It's not an independent power balancing between the US and Russia, Iran, and China. It is just an extension of US foreign policy. So is Israel and the Persian Gulf states in the Middle East. So is Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines here in the Asia-Pacific region.
That's how they are doing their business right now. That's what their objective is. They could say that they want independent power to try to create some sort of balance, but they want primacy — only primacy. And when you understand that, again, everything that they're doing makes so much more sense. They're weakening even their own so-called allies to subordinate them further, to extract more use out of them as proxies against countries that are still resisting US primacy — especially Russia, especially Iran, and especially China.
The Energy Disruption Strategy and the Maritime Blockade
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. That's a great point, because I was even thinking back to 2012 when Hillary Clinton was making the point that the Russians were trying to re-Sovietize the region. She was referring to the Eurasian Economic Union, which is a geoeconomic grouping seeking to organize a more or less a trade bloc. Her whole argument was we should seek to slow this down or reverse it, or break up what was becoming the Eurasian Economic Union. And I thought to myself then: doesn't that seem foolish? If the US is really worried about the rise of China, wouldn't this geoeconomic club arrange some kind of balancing with the Chinese? But of course, this would only make sense if you're after an actual balance of power. If the goal is to knock out not just the Russians but the Chinese as well, then suddenly it makes more sense.
But when you talk about restoring primacy, how would you assess this? Are we talking about global military primacy, financial dominance, control over trade routes, technological dominance? What is it? How are you reading the situation?
Brian Berletic: The United States seeks to do all of these things. How realistic that is — that's another question entirely. A lot of it isn't realistic, and a lot of it is becoming less and less realistic as time goes by.
What they're trying to do — they realize that China is surpassing the US, not just the US, but the US plus all of its proxies. And there really is nothing they can do about that. So they're thinking: if we cannot fight with China head-to-head, what can we do? We can just wreck everything, drag everyone down, create a mess out of absolutely everything, and then possibly emerge on the other side of this stronger. This is their thinking. This is what they're basically saying openly now.
They almost admittedly say that they've gone after Iran — they've not just disrupted energy exports from Iran to China, but from the entire Middle East to not just China, but to all of Asia. At the same time, they had these LNG export projects from the US to Asia that made no business sense at all. They were working on these for years, and you can even find old presentations online where they're presenting it to the public and saying, "No, if you really think about it, it makes perfect sense." And they were talking about contested waterways, and people were asking, "What contested waterways?" And then in the back of their mind, they were thinking: just wait, you'll see. And here we are now. There are contested waterways. Who created them? The US created them, knowingly.
They created this crisis in the Middle East. They are interdicting ships from the Middle East all the way to the Indian Ocean and beyond. They're putting pressure on Indonesia. Whether they succeed or not is another story, but they want military access to the Strait of Malacca — or more military access to the Strait of Malacca, because they have already been placing what is essentially a global blockade on Russian energy exports. They've included Venezuelan energy exports until the US just outright captured Venezuela. They're blockading Cuba. They've targeted ships traveling to China.
When you really think about it and zoom out and look at the big picture, they're going after trade routes all around the globe. They've been preparing for this for years. They reorganized the entire US Marine Corps into an anti-shipping force specifically for this. And this isn't a Trump administration policy. This was something that was being prepared since probably the Obama administration and carried over through each subsequent administration. And now it is ready. Now they're actually using the US Marine Corps to interdict shipping in the Middle East, and they're going to use it everywhere from the Middle East all the way to the Asia-Pacific.
That's what they're doing. They're using their remaining military power — they understand they're not going to catch up with Russia or China — but they're using their remaining military power to create as much damage, destruction, and instability as possible, trying to target Russia, Iran, and China as much as possible. But also Asia more broadly. There are countries in Asia now signing deals with the United States for those LNG exports from the US, which again made no sense until just now that the Middle East has been turned into a war zone. And what does this grant the US? It grants them not complete control over these countries, but more leverage over them to coerce them further into making an enemy out of China rather than performing this balancing act so many countries in the region have been performing.
This is what they did to Russia. We all remember before 2014 how much business was going on between Europe and Russia, how well that was going, how optimistic things were. I was very optimistic about Europe's future with Russia and even with China. And then the US, incrementally, step by step, through a series of wars and proxy wars, managed to shut all of that down. They literally blew up pipelines to cut Europe off from Russia. And now they're doing the same thing to Asia, using energy dependence. They used energy dependence to subordinate Europe, and now they're going to do the same for Asia. I think they'll have less success and at a much slower pace than they have with Europe, for many different reasons. But I would not underestimate that. That is their goal.
So their goal isn't to somehow come up with more power to overwhelm Russia, Iran, and China, but to use the remaining power to create as big a mess as possible, to derail peace, prosperity, and cooperation as much as possible, and then hope that out of the ashes they are the ones who come out strongest. This is what they're doing. This is why I would warn people: don't underestimate what they're willing to do.
The amount of damage they're willing to create — this disaster they've created in the Middle East — fits perfectly into this strategy. This is not something they want to undo. This is something they want to make worse. Which is why they have not made any serious deal with Iran. They easily could have, many times over. They could have saved face at any point along the way. They're deliberately moving forward with escalation and further conflict. They want the conflict to continue. They want to implode things, but not all at once overnight. They want to manage it, just like they managed cutting Europe off from Russian energy. That wasn't overnight. That was over years. It's still taking place right now. And now they've started this process of cutting off Middle Eastern energy to Asia, and they're going to repeat the whole process for Asia that they're already well underway with in Europe. And again, if you zoom out, you see they're targeting Russia, Iran, and China in the process.
Glenn Diesen: The massive flaw in this strategy, though, is that you have Russia as the largest energy producer with a massive direct border with China, which is the largest consumer. And unlike the relationship between the Russians and the Germans, for example, there's no middle country where you can disrupt. Before the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, about 80% of gas from Russia going to Europe went through Ukraine. So if you just disrupt Ukraine, you can disrupt that gas supply. But you don't have this with China and Russia. So you're putting these two massive Eurasian giants together, and together they can have a gravitational pull to bring in countries like Iran as well as others.
So it looks as if this strategy has a lot of flaws, or at least risks. But the great powers have always sought control over international waterways. This was recognized by Alfred Mahan at the turn of the century moving into the 20th century — this was a source of British dominance, then American dominance. What surprised me is, as you said, there's always been great openness about this among politicians and in academia. After World War II, the US set up the dual island chains outside China to shut it down. If you go through the literature all the way to the 1990s and 2000s, they would regularly write that if China ever got confrontational or tried to challenge US leadership, they could shut down the Strait of Malacca — again, a key chokepoint. You also have people like Brzezinski writing that if the Russians after the Cold War ever began to try to balance or challenge US authority, they should be made clear that their key maritime corridors would be shut down — the most important one being the Baltic Sea, which we're seeing happen now. And as you said, the Nord Stream pipelines — they discussed destroying them years before they actually did.
And still, in the Western media, it almost falls into the realm of conspiracy theory — the idea that no, the Americans would never shut down energy trade or transportation corridors. It's just anti-history and goes against all the evidence.
But sorry — I was getting to my question, which is: how effective do you think this US double blockade, if you will, on the Strait of Hormuz is? Because we see a lot of Iranian ships getting through, and it's being somewhat offset by increased energy prices, so essentially the Iranians are doing reasonably well. How are you assessing it?
Brian Berletic: If the US is trying to replicate its success in cutting Europe off from Russia, they're not going to shut everything down overnight. And what the US has actually demonstrated is that they don't need to seize all of these ships. They don't need helicopters to land on every single one of them. A lot of the ships are just turning back.
If you look at the statistics — the Financial Times put out an article about ships running the blockade — almost an equal number of ships have been turned back or seized by the US. That seems to be pretty much what's going on. So they didn't shut it down completely. Claims by the US that it has — that's just outright a lie. But cutting back half of the shipping is significant. That's not a non-issue. And at any time of America's choosing, they could just start firing on these ships. As a matter of fact, over the course of three days, US warplanes fired on three ships and disabled three ships. What they're basically saying is: we could do this to all of the ships if we wanted to.
What they're probably trying to achieve — and we don't know, we're not in the room when these decisions are being made — is probably a greater deterrence, to force more of these ships to turn back than to run through the blockade. But at any time of their choosing, they could just start disabling these ships or even outright sinking them. They have the firepower to do this.
The reason they're not is the same reason you see President Trump playing games on social media — talking about peace one minute, war the next, manipulating the markets. They are creating an economic disaster, but they're trying to manage it. They don't want it to collapse all at once. They really don't want it to collapse completely. They want it to be in a very controlled way to get what they ultimately want at the end, which I would say is most of Asia placed under increased dependency on US energy exports — not complete dependency, but at least increased dependency — and they'll use that leverage to disrupt what China is trying to do in the region.
If you've been in this region for as long as I have — almost my entire adult life — you can see the transition from a US-dominated region. Asia had been dominated by the US for decades and decades. And then the rise of China, and the way the rest of the region rose with it, in ways it hadn't been rising under US domination. Because the US doesn't want anyone to rise. The whole point of being a small percentage of the global population and maintaining primacy over everyone else is keeping everyone else down. If you're helping lift everybody else up, they're going to have the power and the ability to say no to you. And this is the last thing the US wants.
This is why the US, and the British Empire before that, weren't lifting poor people up out of poverty into peace and prosperity. They were keeping these people down. They maintained leverage over them, using lethal force when and if necessary. And that's what the US is still doing, and that's the design of their future ambitions for primacy over the globe.
Of course, Russia, China, and Iran have a say in all of this, and they are exercising their own options to resist this. We just have to wait and see: does the multipolar world led by Russia, China, and Iran have the ability to build faster than the US can disrupt and destroy? That's the question. China has a tremendous ability to build and expand and lift up. Can the US continue to push back down with equal or greater force? That's what we have to wait to find out. And all I'm warning is for people not to underestimate how far the US is willing to go to ensure that China doesn't permanently surpass the US, and that the US doesn't irreversibly decline into a regional power or even something less than that.
Financial Fragility and the Belt and Road as a Buffer
Glenn Diesen: The problem, again, though, would be if the US disrupts too much of global markets. The US doesn't stand on very solid ground itself. It's $39 trillion in the hole — a massive debt. They're struggling now with their bond markets. If a financial crisis were to set in now, it's unclear how they would manage it. Would they defend the dollar by increasing interest rates and making the payments unmanageable? Would they reduce rates and see the dollar fall apart? So it's very hard to imagine what they would do if a financial crisis kicked in now. It seems like a foolish strategy — essentially betting the whole republic on preserving the empire.
But you mentioned that the Chinese have to build faster than the Americans destroy. A lot of the goal during the past years, when the US was engaged in these forever wars around the world, was that the Chinese were pumping trillions into the Belt and Road Initiative. To what extent do you see this as a significant buffer, or as allowing China to diversify away from US-controlled maritime corridors?
Brian Berletic: It's kind of hard to tell. They have pipelines. They have transportation corridors that are in operation and already being used to bypass the different conflicts and crises the US has created for them. But as soon as China began working on these corridors, the US began building up armed proxies to attack them and disrupt them.
For years I've been covering US-backed militants attacking Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure in Myanmar, here in Southeast Asia — Thailand's neighbor to the west. Also in Pakistan, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is constantly under attack by US-backed terrorists. And ISIS in Afghanistan is attacking the Afghan government and Chinese investments in Afghanistan to disrupt China's attempts to build Afghanistan up into an exporter of raw materials, using the wealth from that to build up a country that has been impoverished by decades of US war of aggression, occupation, and proxy war — including the proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US occupation from 2001 to 2021, and now another proxy war against the Afghan government and their Chinese allies.
So this is a constant process, and it is almost a global dirty war the US is waging. We know they're waging a dirty war against Russia through Ukraine, against Iran openly — a war of aggression — but they've been waging this dirty war against China for decades essentially. It has mixed results, and at any time they can escalate, but they know at any time China can escalate also. So it's always a balance.
Just as you said, if they disrupt too much, yes, it could destabilize the US economically. I think they're less worried about that than the type of escalation Russia, China, and Iran could resort to if they were pushed. All of these countries — and this is how it has been all throughout history — empire has expanded and picks on and pushes countries it knows really don't want war, would prefer to avoid war. An empire thrives on aggressively pursuing war that it knows everyone else wants to avoid. The Americans are worried that if they push too hard, they might find themselves in a situation where all of these targeted nations are very willing to wage war for self-preservation.
The Geopolitical Endgame and the New Great Game
Glenn Diesen: Well, we've kind of reached this point where the Iranians are going all out. They can strike a deal with the US today if they wanted to, but they want to make sure there's no going back to the old status quo of crippling sanctions and perpetual threats. Same as the Russians — they could possibly strike a deal this week if they wanted, but that would imply a return to the old status quo, which isn't really a status quo at all, which is NATO's incremental expansion towards Russian borders. So they've all essentially laid down the gauntlet and made the point: there's no more going back to this hegemonic approach to security. From now on, the adversaries of the United States have to be included in the security architecture.
But a lot of this reminds me of the 19th century great game. You saw the British Empire and the Russian Empire competing — essentially the British dominating from the sea, controlling maritime corridors, while the Russian Empire was seeking to connect through land corridors. This is the Mackinder heartland thesis as well, which — if you go through American strategic documents — they keep referring to the idea that you have to keep the massive Eurasian continent divided, because once all these powers come together — be it the Russians and the Germans, or the Indians and the Chinese, or the Chinese and the Russians — then suddenly the maritime power or hegemon at the periphery will no longer be able to dominate. Do you think this could fit conceptually in the same category as a new great game?
Brian Berletic: I think that's very much the thinking, and it kind of answers the question as to why the US doesn't just make friends with Iran or with Russia. It's because they don't want any of these countries to be strong. They need to either subordinate them or weaken them. If they refuse to be subordinated, then weaken them — because otherwise, just as you explained, they will all start working together. And they are all working together.
The United States has done everything within its power. If you go back to the RAND Corporation paper, Extending Russia — all of these conflicts, including the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, what they've done in the Caucasus region, in Central Asia, in the Baltics — this is all to create all kinds of dilemmas for Russia, to weaken Russia. They have a similar strategy they're using against Iran, and again a similar strategy they've been using against China. It's all to keep them weakened. If you cannot divide them against one another, just weaken them and create division between them and all of their immediate neighbors. And that is exactly what they're doing.
So I would say it's a continuation — the most advanced version of this great game. It probably stretches out far beyond Eurasia at this point. And then it spills into the realm of technology, which is playing a role now that it really wasn't an issue back then. Today you could have a country like Iran that is able to rapidly adopt and integrate high technology and use it to not just augment its economic activity, but its military deterrence. And that is what they've been doing — of course with help from their allies — in ways you wouldn't have seen during the British Empire's days.
The way technology is rapidly advancing now is something that I think a lot of these policies the US is pursuing — which were set in motion decades ago — really didn't take account of. How exponentially quickly this technology would be advancing, how it would disseminate into all of these nations big and small. And so maybe the — you keep saying it's not rational or sustainable. I completely agree. It's completely irrational. It's unsustainable. The whole concept of global empire in itself I think is irrational and unsustainable. The question is just how much damage they're going to cause. Because we know all empires rise and fall. We know this empire is almost certainly going to fall. How much damage is it going to do in the process? And I think that's why we should have heightened caution and not underestimate what the US can do, what it's willing to do — not in the sense that they'll be successful, but the amount of damage they will create in the vain hope that they will be successful.
The Benign Hegemon Theory and China's Rise
Glenn Diesen: I remember in the 1990s and 2000s, the theories of Kindleberger on the benign hegemon — the US being a benign hegemon — were very popular. At that time, so much power was concentrated in the US, and the whole idea was that because of this, the US had the ability to essentially mitigate international anarchy. There was no great power rivalry anymore, so the US would be able to deliver stability to the world. This would make it benign — it would offer the world open access to technologies and trade, open transportation corridors by sea, freedom of navigation, and everyone could participate in international finance. This was the source of the benign hegemon concept.
But it doesn't seem sustainable, because if one allows this open economic system that allows powers to rise — and the Chinese did rise spectacularly since the 1980s — then it would pose a dilemma for the US. Once you have all these rising powers, if you allow them to become very powerful, then the hegemonic era is over. There can't be a benign hegemon if there is no hegemony. Now the Chinese are outgrowing the US. The alternative option is to use administrative control over the economic architecture to prevent the rise of rivals — shut down their access to technologies, shut down the maritime corridors, shut down access to dollar banking, or even use military force to prevent the rise. But then they wouldn't be benign anymore. So the benign hegemon was always a very unsustainable concept, but my god, how popular it was back then. Of course, it's a good way of legitimizing the empire.
But how do you see the approach to China now? Because going back to the meeting between Trump and Xi, it looked as if Trump was backing off a bit on Taiwan — which is what the Chinese were very much insistent on. Do you think the US is willing to let go of Taiwan? What I mean is this incremental chipping away and undermining of the one China policy by doing ever more military and political cooperation and pushing for secession. Or do you think this is just a distraction by now?
Brian Berletic: Just a distraction. This is what the United States has done since agreeing to a one China policy in the first place. Out of one side of their mouth they say: we agree Taiwan is part of China, there's only one legitimate government of China, that's the People's Republic of China — that is the one China policy that almost every country on earth upholds, including the United States. And at the same time, even as soon as they were saying that, they were making unilateral declarations inside Washington — the Taiwan Relations Act and the assurances — and what that basically meant was: yes, we said one China to Beijing, but we didn't mean it, and we're going to constantly undermine it, just as we have been all the way up until now.
There are US troops on Taiwan right now, even though it's internationally recognized as Chinese territory. And I didn't hear President Trump announce anything about the status of those troops, let alone claiming he will pull them out. And they're not going to. Everything that they have been doing, are doing, and will continue to do all feeds into using Taiwan — alongside the Philippines, alongside Japan and South Korea — as a Ukraine-style battering ram, a regional battering ram to use against China. They're not going to back down from that.
If we look back to the Biden administration, every time President Biden met with President Xi Jinping, or there was some sort of meeting between high-ranking US and Chinese officials, the US would rhetorically back away from Taiwan, but in practice they just continued undermining Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan. It's just such an absurd point of contention to begin with. The fact that the US wouldn't back off of that just shows what a bad faith actor it is. The fact that it's a point of contention in the first place shows what bad faith actors the United States are.
For people out there who say Taiwan is independent — it isn't. It's 100% dependent politically and militarily on the US, and economically on the rest of China. It wouldn't exist economically, or as any sort of functional place where human beings live, without the rest of China supporting it economically. This is important for people to understand. It is part of China, but the US has used China's weakness after World War II to basically capture it and hold on to it — in the same way the British Empire was holding on to Hong Kong. That was always Chinese territory, and the British Empire took it from China. When China was strong enough, they took it back. And when China is strong enough, they will take Taiwan back.
The United States will never voluntarily give it up, and they will never even back down from their stance regarding it. They will just say it — just like President Trump says he's going to make a deal with Iran. There's zero chance of a deal with Iran. If there could be a negative percent chance, it would be a negative percent chance. The same goes for any sort of US-Russia-Ukraine deal. It's never going to happen. They just use diplomacy as cover to continue. And that's the unfortunate part. We all want to see all of these conflicts end. We want to see a multipolar world.
You were talking about the benevolent hegemony —
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, benign hegemon. That was Kindleberger.
Brian Berletic: The problem is the United States has always been profit-driven. It is continuously pursuing profit and power. It's interesting how China is the closest thing to that theory — only they don't want to be a hegemon. They want a multipolar world, a balance of power between nations. They don't want to be the nation controlling everyone else. They want cooperation. And the way China is actually building its own military demonstrates that desire — that's not just words, it is also actions. Their military is physically incapable of taking the US's place if the US collapsed today. It couldn't. It physically couldn't, because it's not building that type of military.
And that is kind of the future everyone says they agree to, but they just don't want it to be Chinese people leading the way. And they have to ask themselves why. Myself personally, I'm not uncomfortable with that at all. I'm quite happy — if China can do it, let them do it. The United States obviously couldn't. The British Empire had no intention of doing that. The US had no intention of doing that. Let China do it. You can see their rise this 21st century. They've done that without invading a single country. Who has China gone to war with this 21st century? Who has the US gone to war with? I bet you couldn't name all of the countries the US has waged war against without missing at least one of them, because they've been at war constantly.
So it's just so strange how in people's minds — even people who are skeptical — yes, they know there's something wrong with the US, but they are still resisting an alternate system, multipolarity, because of China. And they can't really explain rationally why it's China, because this fear of China is irrational. The US of course invested a lot in creating irrational fear of China specifically, because they don't want it to threaten their unipolar system. They don't want multipolarity. They don't want a balance of power between nations, because that will be the end of their primacy.
Glenn Diesen: Yes, you make a great point about using diplomacy as a distraction strategically. Because this was also largely the experience with the Russians after the Cold War. When we essentially developed a common inclusive European security institution — the OSCE in 1994 — which was supposed to be based on indivisible security, in which we would have security with the Russians, not against them — in other words, not NATO. The US was already planning NATO expansion, and indeed Chas Freeman, the former US assistant secretary of defense, was making this point as well: that the Clinton administration was talking out of both sides of their mouth. On one hand, they were telling the Russians, "No, we're not going to expand NATO. We're going to have a common security architecture. We're done with bloc politics. We're going to have an inclusive Europe." And then of course they went to the former Warsaw Pact countries saying, "Oh no, no, NATO's coming. We're just trying to calm down the Russians while we essentially stab them in the back."
And even after the decision had been made to expand NATO — when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was established in 1997 — the whole idea was that the US would commit not to put its troops into the former allies of Russia, not to move the NATO military infrastructure to the east. And there's a great quote by Clinton which appears in the book by Sarotte, where he essentially says: okay, how binding is this agreement? And he says: oh, let me get this straight — this is just an assurance that we're not going to put our military equipment into the territory of former allies of Russia, unless I one day wake up and decide we do it anyway and we've changed our minds. That's essentially an actual quote. So there was never any pretense that they were actually going to live by any of these deals. It's just: let's find a way of calming down the opponents while we continue to steam ahead.
The Multi-Domain Strategy Against China and the Risk of Escalation
Glenn Diesen: My last question is: what do you see as the ultimate US objective towards China's rise? Is it simply to destabilize it gradually and grind it down, or do you think an actual military confrontation — either by the US army or through proxies — is planned?
Brian Berletic: They're working on a multi-domain strategy. They're working on it from every single conceivable angle. What they're doing to Russia and Iran plays into it. We were talking about Russia and China sharing a border and Russia providing energy to China — but according to the New York Times, the US through the CIA and the US military are overseeing drone strikes into Russia striking at Russian energy production. Right now we could debate what impact it's having on Russian energy production, but they're only going to continue doing that until they're forced to stop. And I don't see when that is going to happen. I can only see that it's going to continuously and incrementally escalate. I don't know how far it could escalate, but I see them just continuing that policy.
So they're striking at Russia's energy production to hurt China. They're striking at Iran and disrupting the entire Middle East to hurt China. They're constantly putting pressure on every single country here in Asia. Political subversion through the National Endowment for Democracy — that's still a thing they're still doing. They've been putting pressure on Indonesia right near the Strait of Malacca, which we discussed earlier. And the US military still has a massive footprint here in the Asia-Pacific region. They are right now integrating South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines into what is essentially a de facto joint NATO-style military alliance where everything is interoperable — they're all working together with the same systems, using the same intelligence, basically all subordinated under the US.
The South Koreans want to change the law so that in a time of war, the South Korean government has control over South Korean troops — because right now the United States would be in control of all South Korean forces during a time of war. I don't know if people know that, but that's actually a debate they're having in South Korea, and the United States is not tolerating it and will not allow them to change that law.
And so that's the trajectory everything is going on right now. This is what they are constantly working on. Whether or not President Trump has a throwaway comment about maybe backing off Taiwan a little bit — in words, that's what he's saying today. Tomorrow could be a different story. In action, they haven't even slowed down this march to war with China.
So it's going to be war. It's going to be economic proxy war. The US is waging a proxy war against China already. They have terrorists attacking Chinese investments in Myanmar, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In Pakistan there was an attempt to kill the Chinese ambassador. So it's a very, very serious dirty war that has already been ongoing, and it will just continue to escalate — but to what point, I don't know.
And again, that goes back to the question that I think we all have: can China rise and build faster than the US can destabilize and destroy? If the answer is yes, then maybe there won't be a war, because China will ultimately be able to deter it. But again, don't underestimate how far the US will go. Because if you understand the mindset of the people who believe in Western primacy and even Western supremacy — these are people who cannot imagine living in a universe where the white West is not dominating over everybody else. It's just been such a matter of fact for them for so many centuries that they just can't think about it any other way.
And so we can't underestimate what they will do to try to achieve this. We've all heard people in Europe and even in the United States talking about using nuclear weapons against Russia, against China, against Iran. The president of the United States — I don't know if he's joking or trying to warm the public up to it — but he has referenced the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iran. So we're in a very dark, dangerous place right now. We all have to be very well aware of that, and we have to try to put as much pressure on the West to make the right decision. And we have to do what we can to support everybody else in this fight against what the West is doing — and its resistance to living among all other nations rather than forcing itself upon all other nations.
Glenn Diesen: The speech by Trump — it's interesting because it normalizes the crazy stuff. If he says a few times, "Well, soon we're going to annihilate an entire civilization," and this has become okay — this is apparently what a president says. You had the same in Europe. Was it 2022 or 2023? You had a German foreign minister who was making the point that we should fight amongst each other — "we're at war with Russia." And this was immediately pushed back on: "Well, we're not really at war with Russia, this is a Ukrainian-Russian war." But these days all the European leaders can say, "Oh, we're essentially at war with Russia," unless Russia wants to retaliate — in which case, of course, "this is ridiculous, we're not at war with Russia."
So it's an interesting development. At one point you see the Americans alienating a lot of their allies, but still they're all kind of falling in line as well. In this part of the world, I see the Scandinavians doing the same. They're all horrified by Trump — how awful it is, we might need an alternative to NATO. But at the same time, the Scandinavian countries can't act fast enough to open up American bases across their territory and hand over their sovereignty to the US — even as they describe Trump as a fascist and all this stuff. It's quite remarkable. There's no cohesion. If you think the American president is a fascist, why are we transferring sovereignty to him? Like the South Koreans — why are we handing over control of our military? But those questions are not asked.
Anyway, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time. I always look forward to talking to you.
Brian Berletic: Thank you.