Workers World, Vol. 21, No. 12
March 19 – The cynicism of the U.S. diplomatic corps is surpassed only by the brazenness of the military establishment. It takes the particularly venal character of the military mind to get Carter to include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as companion to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski on the mission to Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
The makeup of the delegation to include Gen. David C. Jones, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is particularly odious, offensive, and threatening to King Hussein and Prince Fahd when one considers some of the very pertinent developments in the relationship between the U.S. and the two monarchs.
It is to be remembered that when King Hussein got wind of what was afoot among Sadat, the U.S., and the Israelis, he became fearful and recalcitrant. He knew it was his ox which would ultimately be gored and, even though he well deserves the appellation “Butcher of Black September,” nevertheless understood the implications for his own country if all hope of self-determination for the Palestinian people is destroyed. So he made some diplomatic maneuvers with the Soviet Union in order to obtain Hawk missiles and other weapons.
In an attempt to club Hussein into line and humiliate him at the same time, the Carter administration leaked a story which exposed CIA dealings with Hussein involving a bribe of a million dollars a year. As though this made any difference! Most U.S. aid goes directly to the royal family anyway, to be disposed of as he sees fit – with some parliamentary camouflage.
In any event, it was most painful and humiliating for a monarch to be exposed in the role of a servile puppet treated like dirt at the hands of his masters.
The situation with Saudi Arabi is no less offensive or humiliating. It is far more dangerous than that in Jordan and fraught with greater peril for the royalist governing group, for reasons which are all too obvious to the entire world.
It was King Faisal who was most for the 1973 oil boycott which created a universal hysteria in the imperialist world. Little about this came out at the time, but it was subsequently revealed that it was Faisal who took the initiative for the boycott. It should be remembered, however, that while it set off a wild campaign of vilification among the imperialist, the oil boycott was the least that could have been done in light of the 1973 war. It was a passive measure with no risk of evoking a revolutionary explosion of the masses.
It is most significant, however, that the hysteria against the Arab people, and Saudi Arabia in particular, did not really begin to die down until after the assassination of King Faisal in 1975 at the hands of an American trained and educated member of the royal family who had only recently returned to Saudi Arabia.
In all the speculative books and articles in the West on recent political assassinations, there has been suspiciously little, scarcely a hint, about what lay behind the assassination of Faisal. Suffice it to say that relations improved with the U.S. after the assassination.
This could scarcely be a forgotten incident in Riyadh. The appearance of Jones in the delegation, calculated to “persuade” the Saudis to go along with the Sadat conspiracy, cannot but act as a grim reminder of what took place in 1975.
There is much in the makeup of this delegation which is at once both instructive and illuminating. It discloses the evolution of the fundamental trend in the capitalist establishment vis-à-vis the growing danger of a U.S. plunge into another, far more dangerous and far bloodier conflagration than Viet Nam.
First of all, by selecting Brzezinski to head the delegation together with Jones, President Carter violated a promise he made to Cyrus Vance regarding the latter’s status as Secretary of State. That promise included a stipulation that Secretary Vance would be the only one to appear before congressional committees to speak on foreign policy on behalf of the administration and the only one to negotiate for the administration and the President – not Brzezinski.
When he violated this promise by dispatching Brzezinski to China, which ultimately resulted in the U.S.-China-Japan-NATO alliance, Carter again promised that Brzezinski would thereafter confine himself to advising the President and maintaining a low profile in public. He was not to act as a negotiator in foreign relations, which is the prerogative of the Secretary of State.
The fact that the kept imperialist press do not today call attention to this violation by Carter in dispatching Brzezinski rather than Vance, the so-called moderate, to Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, shows how closely allied and subservient the media are when crucial issues are at stake. Vance was kept home and confined to one of those dull and dreary Sunday afternoon television talk shows in which he revealed nothing; he merely “endorsed the President’s policy” and by implication the Brzezinski-Jones mission to the Middle East.
That alone indicates once again that, win or lose this or that phase of the inner struggle in the capitalist establishment, the ultras, the hardline, rabidly militarist elements ultimately surface at the top.
There is, however, a more important element involved in the makeup of this latest mission to the Middle East than the fact that Brzezinski headed the delegation. It is that Brzezinski was accompanied by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Why was this necessary? After all, the President is the chief executive and the Commander in Chief of the armed forces. He presumably has both the civilian and military wings under his domination. Jones is not, according to the bourgeois press, one with diplomatic experience, particularly in the Middle East.
Was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs chosen to accompany Brzezinski to show “military muscle,” as Pentagon jargon goes? To whom? It is scarcely possible that one needs to show military muscle to two such close allies, such puppet regimes, whose every gun, every plane, in a word every dollar, is held in escrow by U.S. banks or imperialist banks allied with the U.S.
Neither Jordan nor Saudi Arabia at this moment is in any way concerned with the bogus external danger from the USSR which the U.S. capitalist press is peddling all over the world. Both Jordanian and Saudi sources have been quoted in the U.S. press as maintaining that they are not fearful of the USSR but of the impact on the Arab world of Sadat’s selling out to the U.S.-Israeli conspiracy.
In effect, from the point of view of making a military show of strength by dispatching Jones with Brzezinski (and also Christopher Wren from the State Department who is just a cover meant to show that the State Department has a hand in the matter), it is utterly unnecessary and could not possibly impress anybody. Neither the Jordanian nor the Saudi Arabian monarchs had sent out any SOS call that “the Russians are coming.” The capitalist press may like to play up this theme here but it is an unvarnished falsehood which would fall flat on its face anyway in the present circumstances.
The basic reason why Joint Chiefs Chairman Jones was sent was to upstage Brzezinski. Jones’ inclusion in the mission to the Middle East has, of course, military implications. No doubt about that. But the larger significance of it is not so much to show Hussein and Prince Fahd that military considerations are underway, but to demonstrate in a scarcely veiled way to the rest of the world which trend in the U.S. capitalist establishment is edging forward. This is really the main point to be learned from the Brzezinski-Jones mission.
We thus have this sequence of events in the unfolding struggle for hegemony, for leadership, in U.S. imperialism’s global thrust toward war: Vance is constantly upstaged by Brzezinski in the civilian wing of the capitalist establishment (assuming one can talk of a purely civilian wing in the age of the military-industrial complex). Brzezinski, in turn, is now upstaged by the military. If this does not clearly illustrate the growing predominance of the far right in U.S. foreign policy, then little else does.
Where, then, is Carter in all this? Increasingly the attacks emanating from the capitalist press and from Democratic as well as Republican politicians are centered on Carter for his alleged vacillations, weakness, lack of firmness.
What does all this add up to? To a tidal wave of far-right pressure for a more adventurist foreign policy and for war. At times it appears that Carter can juggle Vance and Brzezinski and make them play the role he assigns them. To a limited extent, this is true, but the momentum of revolutionary developments in the Middle East and elsewhere inevitably gives the far right the upper hand. And Carter in turn concedes to them.
If we are to believe the reports in the press, the Brzezinski-Jones mission was a failure. Brzezinski was to speak some “plain words” to the Jordanians and Saudis. And the presence of Jones as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was to reinforce Brzezinski’s words. But it was a foregone conclusion, attested to by even the most naïve observers, that it could not work that way. To come out openly under present circumstances for the Sadat-Begin-Carter conspiracy would be sheer suicide for the ruling cliques in Jordan as well as Saudi Arabia.
The danger that the so-called moderates, that is, reactionaries, face is now of a wholly domestic character. They live in fear of the intervention of the popular masses, suddenly and spontaneously, and on a scale for which the Iranian Revolution is a true forerunner.
It is little comfort for the Jordanian or the Saudi royal clique to be told by Jones that the U.S. can marshal the greatest air armada in the world to “defend and protect” them, when in truth these groupings, in the event of a U.S. attempt at military occupation, cannot even rely on their own royal entourage. Thus the capitalist press had been forced to obliquely, as inconspicuously as possible, mention that the “external danger,” meaning the USSR, is not really what worries the Saudi and Jordanian rulers, but a sea of rebellion engulfing all of the Arab people.
This doesn’t mean at all that the USSR is not the biggest element in the calculations of the U.S. militarists, the governing cliques of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt. The truth of the matter is that it is an obsession.
It is in this connection that Brzezinski’s presence in the delegation as an emissary of Carter is significant. For he more than all the others stands out as the symbol of U.S. imperialism’s holy war against the Soviet Union. He is the incarnation of the thesis that the ultimate struggle must be directed against the Soviet Union and he agrees with the Saudi governing royal family that the U.S. should have resisted, and by implication used military force against, the revolutions in Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.
No one has yet accused him of urging direct military intervention in Iran, but that catastrophe for U.S. finance capital is still in the so-called classified, secret discussion stage in the inner circles of the Carter administration.
Brzezinski has to expostulate to his frightened and beleaguered clientele among the feudal riffraff in Jordan and Saudi Arabia that his and Carter’s strategic alliance with China has “got the Russians pinned down” in the East and on the run and will result in a war which is bound to consume both China and Russia in millions of battle casualties. They perceive China’s invasion of Viet Nam as merely the first phase of the struggle.
It follows from Brzezinski’s thesis that provoking the USSR in the Middle East region offers little danger of massive Soviet intervention in light of its heavy commitment of troops on the Eastern front, especially if the Chinese invasion of Viet Nam or Laos escalates. Although not talked about publicly, with the kept press in the U.S. maintaining silence on the matter, this is regarded as a good selling point to all the shaky bourgeois regimes in the Middle East, either to get them to shun Soviet assistance or to inspire them with renewed confidence.
This argument comes at a bad time, however, for the ruling reactionary groupings in the Middle East. The specter that haunts them now is the specter of internal popular insurrection. To keep harping on the Soviet Union as an aggressive, belligerent power and the main danger must of necessity seem remote and false even to the most diehard reactionaries and virulent anti-communists.
In this connection, it is best to remember what General Smedley Butler said with respect to the foreign policy of monopoly capitalism: “If the Soviet Union didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.” It is a thought worthwhile pondering by all those who continue to hold faith in U.S. imperialism’s façade of democracy and its posture of peace when the military budget is now well over $130 billion and growing, growing.
Last updated: 11 May 2026