As Israel’s crimes and impunity in Southwest Asia continue, a US diplomat has given some very candid assessments about his own country’s role. And it offers us some rare honesty about the empire’s cold decision-making process.

The stick, the carrot, and the fight for dominance

Western billionaires have overwhelmingly backed Israel’s genocidal rampage throughout Southwest Asia in the last two years. And US envoy and ambassador Tom Barrack suggests Washington fuelling Tel Aviv’s multinational forever-war is simply about the empire’s “interests”. In short, it wants its friends to dominate in the oil-rich region, and its foes to submit.

Barrack insisted in an interview with Emirati media outlet the National that “there’s never been peace” and “will probably never be peace” in the region because:

somebody wants dominance, which means somebody has to submit. In that part of the world, submit, there’s no Arabic word for submit. They can’t wrap their head around submit.

In the first instance, Barrack’s outrageously racist remark that there is no Arabic word for “submit” reveals the Orientalist and profoundly racist attitude American diplomats hold towards their oil barons. And, of course, the  reference to ‘somebody who wants dominance’ is the billionaire class, via US wealth and Israeli crimes. That would leave ‘somebody that has to submit’ is everyone else. Ceasefires, he said, are “not going to work”. The only solution is a win-lose situation.

Groups resisting Israel’s war crimes, he clarified, have no incentive to put down their weapons “when Israel is attacking everybody”. In fact, their justification for resistance simply gets “better and better”. That includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, which “runs the best municipalities” and pays its troops well, and isn’t going anywhere any time soon. This in turn seems to be why the US government currently prefers to avoid direct involvement itself, instead preferring to outsource the task to Israel. As he asserted:

We’re not going to go take Hezbollah out with our troops, with CENTCOM. Israel will just continue on.

Israel is very much the empire’s stick in the region, but there’s a carrot too, in the form of lucrative deals for ruling elites that toe the line. And that’s the case for local dictatorships submitting to US interests:

if you look at what’s worked, ‘benevolent’ monarchies work, right? They’ve worked in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE.

(That particular section may have caused discomfort for the Emirati paper, as it later disappeared from the final edit of the interview.)

The US values war crimes, because they serve billionaire interests

Although the US has numerous allies in Western Asia, including Israel and the Gulf dictatorships, Barrack insisted:

I don’t trust any of them.

He continued by stressing that:

Our interests are vectors, right? There’s metrics. There’s things that we’re aligned with and there’s things that we are not aligned with… We find alignment of the necessity of interests and we bond together.

And continuing to back Israel’s regional rampage of impunity is very much part of those interests. Commenting on Israeli actions, Barrack said:

it seems as though they’re marching towards a resolution of the entire problem, which is what Gaza is, right?

But Iran continues to be an obstacle for Israel’s dominance, he admitted, suggesting further attacks on Iran could still be on the cards for Israel:

I would imagine that just getting Gaza under control, and Hezbollah under control, and the Houthis under control is not fruitful if you don’t get the Iran regime under control… I wouldn’t rule that out.

The green light for what Israel’s doing, of course, is massive and ongoing US support:

Israel is a valued ally. We subsidise them $4 or $5 billion a year. It has a special place in America’s heart.

In 2025, humanity has a big dilemma. The US is the world’s richest country and biggest military spender, and billionaire rule there is currently out in the open. And the billionaire class is trying to cement the notion, through the US and Israel, that ‘might is right’ – that ordinary people need to accept dystopia or face the consequences. Power and money are speaking – or, more accurately, screaming – and leaving blood and destruction in their wake. So if humanity is going to challenge this machine, it’s going to have to do a whole lot better.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Al Jazeera English

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.