Date: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/the-most-imperiled-of-all-countries
https://theduran.com/the-most-imperiled-of-all-countries-are-americas-allies/
The most-imperiled of all countries are America’s ‘allies’.
20 January 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Right now, America threatens 8 NATO nations with punishment if they will not reverse their opposition to America’s ‘negotiating’ with Denmark (with a gun to Denmark’s head) a purchase of Greenland away from Greenland’s current owner (which America denies to actually be its owner) Denmark. America recently seized Venezuela; and it has previously seized (sometimes by means of coups, but also by invasions) many other nations; so, this threat by the U.S., to those 8 nations, must be taken seriously, if Europe’s leaders are at all competent.
The countries that are America’s ‘allies’, such as in America’s NATO military alliance against Russia, which America had created in 1949 in order to be able, ultimately, some day, to conquer Russia (but America used the excuse of its being ‘anti-communist’ instead of anti-Russian, so as not to seem imperialistic and just looking to gain control over more lands) are actually U.S. colonies, not mere allies. To be a colony is necessarily to grant the master-nation (the imperial nation) the right to exploit it, and especially to control its foreign relations. This means that a colony must cede to its imperial master its own sovereignty, grant its sovereignty to the master-nation. And this is exactly what the U.S. Government has been doing ever since 25 July 1945: taking more and more lands, some by coups, some by invasions, but also some by using internal subversion. On that date, 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government made the final decision that it must ultimately take control over the entire world. It was thus the birth of what today is called “neoconservatism.”
On 25 July 1945, the new U.S. President Harry Truman decided to accept the advice from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and especially from Truman’s personal hero, General Dwight Eisenhower, that if the U.S. Government would not ultimately take over (create the world’s first global empire to include) the entire world, then the Soviet Union would do it; and, so, Truman reversed the foreign policies of his immediate predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had instead been planning, ever since August 1941 (even before Pearl Harbor), that if Hitler would become defeated, then a new democratic global federal democracy amongst nations must be created, a global federal republic of nations, which FDR named “the United Nations” (but which Truman ended up shaping). On that date, 25 July 1945, Truman told the Soviet Union’s leader Joseph Stalin that the U.S. Government would not recognize the legitimacy of its control over the countries that it had conquered from Hitler unless the U.S. Government is granted veto-power over the Soviet Union’s decisions regarding those Governments (both their internal and external affairs); and, in Truman’s letter that night to his wife, Bess, he even gloated over it, by saying:
Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the Germany Axis countries. I told Stalin that until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned there'd never be recognition. He seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.
Suddenly, the amicable relationship between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., which had prevailed throughout FDR’s three terms in office, and which had won WW2 for the Allies, and which FDR had been planning to continue afterward, ended in a crash of mutual hostility, because Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else, and from that date forward Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire.
The current war inside Ukraine started with U.S. President Barack Obama’s coup there in 2014 but had been in preparation ever since the Truman Administration; and here is how that happened, as recounted by the CIA’s historian:
——
Secret
Fifty Years of the CIA Central Intelligence Agency 1998 DECLASSIFIED AND RELEASED BY CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY. SOURCES METHODS EXEMPTION3B2B NAZI WAR CRIMES DISCLOSURE ACT DATE 2004 /2008
“Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA's Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists” (S) [by] Kevin C [Conley] Ruffrer
In April 1945, Adolf Hitler's Thousand Year Reich faced imminent and catastrophic military defeat. From the west, Allied troops poured into Germany after securing a bridgehead over the Rhine at Remagen. From the east, the Red Army advanced toward Berlin. (U)
Millions of refugees fled before the advancing armies — especially in the east. Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Hungarians, Rumanians, and countless others became displaced persons or DPs in military jargon. By the end of the war in May 1945, 13 million DPs were in the American-occupied zone of Germany alone: Allied occupation authorities organized the DPs into camps until they could he repatriated. Many, however, refused to return to their homes in countries the Red Army then controlled. (u) Contact with ethnic groups from the Soviet Union gave American intelligence officials the first direct knowledge of dissent within the USSR. Initially the United States recruited espionage agents from among the emigre groups, but soon expanded its effort to include recruitment In potential covert action and paramilitary operations. Recent wartime experience with resistance groups behind German lines heavily influenced American thinking about the emigres. Americans hoped that if war with the USSR broke out, Eastern and Southern Europeans would become resistance fighters like the French maquis. (II) As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated [which was inevitable once Truman on 25 July 1945 told Stalin that the U.S. wouldn’t recognize the legitimacy of the governments in the countries that Soviet forces had liberated from Hitler], the [OSS predecessor of thee] Central Intelligence Agency expanded its ties with these emigres. Using the Ukrainians as an example, this bonding illustrates the pitfalls and problems of enlisting disaffected [a CIA euphemism here for pro-Nazis, such as predominated in far-western Ukraine] ethnic minorities in an ideological struggle [the CIA’s euphemism for the new U.S. empire they were to build]. (U) …
p.27:
Stefan Bandera was not a member of R-33, but was another personality — perhaps the personality of the Ukrainian emigre community [since these escapees were amost entirely pro-Nazis] — that had to be recognized. According to an OSS report of September 1945, Bandera had earned a fierce reputation for conducting a [pro-Nazi] “reign of terror” during World War II. He led the largest faction of OUN (which split when the war broke out), and Andrey Melnik led the smaller. Both factions participated in terrorist activities against Polish officials [and Jews, and communists, and liberals] before the war, and Ukrainian nationalists allied themselves with their Nazi "liberators" during the first days of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
p.31:
The Soviets wanted Stefan [for his having supported Hitler against Stalin]. American intelligence officials recognized that his arrest [by the victorious Soviet forces] would have quick and adverse effects on the future of US operations with the [pro-Nazi] Ukrainians [because now, the U.S. Government was pro-Nazi and protecting pro-Nazis to hire to work in The West against the Soviet Union].
p.33:
In December 1947 the National Security Council issued NSC 4-A, which had important consequences for CIA in general and the emigre programs in particular. NSC 4-A gave the DC1 responsibility for conducting covert psychological operations. This meant that CIA could now take the offensive in ways not possible previously. (u)
Before NSC 4-A the Central Intelligence Group tried unsuccessfully to use emigres to collect intelligence. With the NSC's directive, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency [and this was the transition between FDR’s OSS and Truman’s CIA] could move toward active cooperation with them [Ukraine’s pro-Nazis] in other areas of activity. The change resulted in part from CIA's first attempts to penetrate the Iron Curtain and linked the fate of the Ukrainians (and other Eastern European [pro-Nazi] emigre groups) with the CIA's efforts [to conquer the Soviet Union]. (C)
DCI Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter initially opposed the employment of emigre groups despite the pressure from other federal agencies, including the State Department and the Army. In early March 1948 [which by that time had removed all of FDR’s appointees and repplaced them by Truman’s], Frank Wisner, a former OSS officer and a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, proposed that the State-Army-Navy-Air Force
Coordinating Committee (SANACC) form an ad hoc committee to explore the use of Soviet exiles [pro-Nazis]. Under the authority of NSC 4-A, SANACC took up Wisner's proposal and circulated his paper, “Utilization of Refugees from the Soviet Union in U.S. National Interest," as SANACC 395 on 17 March 1948. Shortly afterwards, SANACC's ad hoc committee, comprising members from State, Army, CIA, and other agencies, began considering the paper and its recommendations.' (U)
Wisner proposed in SANACC 395 to "increase defections among the elite of the Soviet World and to utilize refugees from the Soviet World in the national interests of the U.S.”
p.41:
CIA's reluctance to use East European and Soviet ethnic minorities as intelligence sources and operatives had waned considerably as the 1940s grew to a close. NSC 4A was one reason: another was the growing fear in Washington that World War III was imminent. … Hillenkoetter did not deny that many emigres had sided with the Nazis, but did so, he said, less out of "a pro-German or pro-Fascist orientation, but from a strong anti-Soviet bias. … CIA later informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it had concealed Stefan Bandera and other Ukrainians from the Soviets. "Luckily the [Soviet] attempt to locate these anti-Soviet Ukrainians was sabotaged by a few farsighted Americans who warned the persons concerned to go into hiding.” …
On 28 May 2014, the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning U.S. President Barack Obama gave the clearest (though, carefully, ONLY implicit) expression of the neoconservative claim to be above all other nations, better than all other nations, and supreme over the entire planet, when he told America’s future military leaders, on 28 May 2014:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.
He was telling his country’s future military leaders that all nations except America are “dispensable.” He also was saying that a key function of America’s military is to keep every other nation down, especially where “rising middle classes [such as in Rusia and in China] compete with us,” and these future generals were being tasked to wage war against those “competitors,” if necessary in order for such “dispensable” countries to REMAIN down. That was his clearest statement of his zero-sum-game view of international relations. He was, essentially, saying, there, that he was an imperialist-fascist head-of-state, even a hegemonic one (seeking to control the whole world). And he ruled in that way. This is also what he taught.
In his 24 January 2012 U.S. State-of-the-Union address, he said: “From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies, to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back. … America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs.” He didn’t tell ONLY his military that all other countries are “dispensable.” He told the American public this. Do Europe’s leaders not know this? That Nobel Peace Prize winner was teaching that the U.N. Charter’s Article 1’s creating a U.N. that’s “based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” is to be simply ignored by the U.S. Government. Obama was a true Trumanite.
On 3 September 2022, I headlined “THE AMERICAN CENTURY IS OVER BECAUSE only fools don’t yet recognize that America has become a dictatorship.”, and I documented that
It is a one-dollar-one-vote Government; it is rule by its billionaires, who select and fund the careers of all successful candidates for federal and state offices; it is, in other words, an aristocracy, not a democracy. A democracy is a government that represents the people, not the dollars (not the wealth). A synonym for a democracy is a “republic.” But America is instead a dictatorship, in which the Government represents the billionaires. It pretends to be a democracy (or a “republic”), in order to be able to browbeat into submission countries that haven’t yet become its ‘allies’. (It calls those countries “dictatorships” or “authoritarian regimes.”) And, like billionaires do, it craves ever-bigger empire. So: it continually browbeats against ‘authoritarian regimes’, of which it actually is itself one — and perhaps the very worst one of all (certainly the most dangerous). …
What is the significance of this lie? It is enormously significant, and here is WHY:
It enables that Government to pound other Governments — ones that it intends ultimately to regime-change and thereby to add to its existing long list of stooge-regimes (vassal nations), which it calls its ‘allies’ — by accusing those targeted Governments (Governments that have been resisting to become yet another of this dictatorship’s slave-nations) of being a ‘dictatorship’ or ‘totalitarian’, or whatever other pejorative term applies actually to itself (even more than to any other nation), in order to add, to its already existing empire, yet another vassal nation that it has conquered either by direct military invasion, or by proxy-invasion (such as it has been trying to do, with hired armies of jihadists and of separatist Kurds, in Syria), or by coup, or by economic strangulation via imposing sanctions against it (such as in the cases of Venezuela, Iran, and others), or else by subversion (such as in Brazil) — against all of America’s ‘enemy’-nations, such as Venezuela, Iran Syria, China, Russia, North Korea, or on-and-on.
The BBC’s “Operation Gladio - Full 1992 documentary” is full of testimony from fascists and nazis who were paid by the CIA to set up terrorist events such as bombings throughout Western Europe that were designed to be — and which were — officially blamed upon the Soviet Union and Soviet agents, so as to fool Europeans to think that NATO was fighting against the aggressive and psychopathic enemy, instead of being the aggressive and psychopathic enemy. Europeans have spent their lives under such propaganda; and, so, widely believe that NATO is necessary in order to PROTECT them from Russia. It is a deep-seated and widespread prejudice in the U.S. empire, nurtured constantly by the billionaires’ media. That BBC documentary was an exception because the Soviet Union had just ended in 1991 and there wasn’t yet enough time passed for the “not one inch to the east” pretense to start publicly to be trashed.
On January 19th, I headlined “How Trump Got the Idea to Take Greenland: It came from President Truman.”, and documented that Truman had tried to purchase Greenland in his effort to ultimately take over Russia, but unlike Trump, Truman did not even consider invading Greenland for that, because his strategy was to begin the build-up of America’s empire, and this needed willing-to-join colonies. In 2026, now as a declining power, lots more sheer force is needed for the U.S. regime to continue growing — and America’s existing colonies are thus being forced to choose whether they are willing to continue as colonies, while the empire is in its declining phase and America is consequently turning the screws harder and beginning even to cannibalize them. The slaves are going to be whipped a lot harder now, and, if they resist, might end up being served for dinner. At some point, they will collectively resist — and that will be when NATO breaks and then ends altogether. But is NATO really defending Europe, or is its bugaboo Russia instead really meaning it when it says that the U.S. empire’s grabbing the nearest-to-the-Kremlin of all nations, Ukraine, is what had provoked Russia finally to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2022 to prevent a U.S. missile from becoming posted there just five minutes from Moscow? Russia says it has no designs on any NATO nation, other than that it not serve as a springboard for an American invasion of Russia. Which of the two nations — America, or Russia — is the more to be trusted? If Europe will let America take Greenland, then when will Europe ever say no to America? This is the time of decision. Each European nation would be foolish to not contact Putin to ask whether Russia will negotiate a peace-settlement with it. The collectivity of Europe, as it has been — NATO and EU — will surely break up. The first nations to break away will get the best deals. The longest holdouts will get mere scraps, because Russia will distrust them the most — and those holdouts will be the nations that will be staying with America and its overpriced energy and overpriced products and services, and over-expensive militaries. The time for decisions in Europe is now.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
