Our Existence Becomes Increasingly Tenuous by the day
Paul Craig Roberts

Recently I explained that “Presidents have little control over their governments.” 

The same holds for monarchs and “authoritarians.” There are many examples. I will use one in front of me at this moment as I reread Harry Elmer Barnes’ book, The Genesis of the World War.

World War I was planned by the French President, who wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine, which Napoleon 3rd lost to Prussia in 1871, and the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador to France, who wanted to take from Turkey the Dardanelles Straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Their conspiracy to ignite a European war in order to achieve these goals was put in place over several years. The French president, Poincare, and the Russians, Foreign Minister Sazonov and Russian Ambassador to France Izvolski, were not confident to take on Germany and Austria-Hungary without British support. Consequently, they brought the British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey into their plot, without the awareness of the British monarch.

Once the alliances and reassurances among the war plotters were in place, the Russians and French arranged, encouraged, the Serbian assassination of the Austrian Archduke, successor to the throne, and his wife, and if not responsible seized on the assassination to set in motion the wheels of war. Russia took the line that it had to protect Serbia from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire’s retaliation and used Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia as an excuse to order Russian mobilization.

The three monarchs–the British King, the Russian Tsar, and the German Kaiser were first cousins, all being Queen Victoria’s grandsons. On receipt of a telegram from his German cousin warning that a European catastrophe awaited them if war broke out, the Tsar ordered the Russian mobilization to be halted, convinced that the mobilization would not serve to intimidate Austria but to provoke European war. The Tsar’s ministers told him it was too late to countermand the general mobilization, and it proceeded.

The Tsar had been left out of the plot and at best was only vaguely aware of what was afoot. Once the light dawned on the Tsar, he found himself unable to control the military zeal in his government. In a telegram to his German cousin he confessed his helplessness before the militarists:

“I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought upon me, and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies (Austria) from going too far.” The Tsar was asking Germany to restrain Austria’s actions against Serbia, which the Kaiser tried to do.

The Kaiser’s response to his Russian cousin’s telegram was: “A confession of his own weakness, and an attempt put the responsibility on my shoulders.”

The war, which resulted from the inability of the British, German, Russian monarchs, and French people to prevent it, destroyed Europe. The war destroyed the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and left Russia in the hands of Lenin. The deaths World War I inflicted on France and the British wiped out a generation of leaders, eliminated aristocrats, who at least had a system of honor whether or not they abided by it, from leadership, and turned the leadership over to “jackets and sheep” to use the apt term of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa. Britain was left so financially weak that it was easy for US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use WW II to push the British aside and assume for the US dollar the role and power of the country of the reserve currency.

Germany, whose Kaiser tried to prevent WWI was held responsible for it. Consequently, at Versailles, Germany in violation of US President Wilson’s guarantee, was faced with territorial loss and unpayable reparations, which caused WWII and left Europe with Soviet rule over Eastern Europe.

Today the world faces an even more absurd situation. Israel, a tiny country with no resources except American money and protection, has Western foreign policy, and apparently also Russia’s, in its tiny hands. For a quarter century Americans have fought to destroy Arab nations for the sake of expanding Greater Israel. American soldiers were told by their lying government that they were dying and being permanently disabled to protect America from a non-existent Muslim terrorism, when in fact they were dying for Greater Israel.

Now we are on a new road to our destruction in pursuit of the Zionist American neoconservatives’ agenda of a hegemonic America and Israel.  Where is the leadership to stop it?

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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