/edu/ - Education

Manufactured Enemies, Managed Wars: From the Cold War to the War on Terror

By the late 2000s, the curtain had been pulled back on America’s “perpetual enemy machine.” The Cold War, the War on Terror, and even cultural products like *Metal Gear Solid* all reveal the same pattern: empires manufacture threats in order to sustain war economies. The names change — communists, terrorists, rogue states — but the structure remains constant.

—

## Supplying the Enemy: Jordan and Sutton

Major George Racey Jordan, stationed at Great Falls during World War II, kept meticulous diaries of shipments moving to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. Among the cargo: uranium, heavy water, and precision instruments for nuclear development. Jordan later testified that Washington “deliberately built up the Soviet atomic arsenal.”

Historian Anthony C. Sutton confirmed the broader picture: Western corporations built the Soviet industrial base. “The United States government was, in effect, financing its own enemy,” Sutton wrote in *National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union* (1973). Ford Motor built the Gorky plant, Standard Oil supplied fuel, and General Electric exported electrical infrastructure.

—

## The Iron Fist of Capital

Kevin Carson, in his 2001 essay *The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand*, argued that capitalism as we know it is inseparable from state power:

> “What we call the ‘free market’ is in practice a set of monopolies, cartels, and privileges maintained by force of law and police power.”

Carson’s framework reframes Sutton’s research: collusion wasn’t an aberration, but the system’s essence. State capitalism requires enemies, subsidies, and permanent crisis.

—

## Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger: The Elite Blueprint

This logic wasn’t hidden. It was articulated by America’s own strategists.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in *The Grand Chessboard* (1997), bluntly admitted:

> “America’s capacity to exercise global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

Henry Kissinger was even more candid about war as management:

> “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

These aren’t slip-ups. They are the quiet part spoken aloud: power requires engineered scarcity and dependency.

—

## The U.S.–Israel Axis

Noam Chomsky has long emphasized that U.S. support for Israel is not about democracy but about strategy:

> “Israel has become a kind of offshore U.S. military base in the Middle East.” (*The Fateful Triangle*, 1983)

Whitney Webb has extended these critiques into the 21st century, tracing networks linking Israeli intelligence firms, Wall Street financiers, and Silicon Valley platforms. The “special relationship” is not sentimental. It is structural: an integrated war economy.

—

## Cultural Mirror: The Metal Gear Saga

The *Metal Gear Solid* series (1987–2015) is perhaps the clearest cultural allegory of this collusion. Hideo Kojima’s games dramatize the military-industrial complex as a secret network — “the Patriots” — that manipulates conflicts to perpetuate its own dominance.

* In *MGS2*, the Patriots manufacture “terrorist” threats to justify control over information flows.
* In *MGS3*, the Cold War is shown as a stage-managed conflict, with superpowers colluding behind the scenes.
* In *MGS4*, war becomes fully privatized: PMCs (Private Military Companies) fight endless, meaningless battles, sustained by nanomachine control systems — a critique of the War on Terror’s corporate dependency.

Kojima’s fiction resonates with Sutton and Carson: the enemy is constructed, the battlefield is managed, and war becomes the operating system of global power.

—

## The Pattern

* Jordan’s diaries: the U.S. helped build Stalin’s bomb.
* Sutton’s histories: Wall Street built the Soviet economy.
* Carson’s analysis: capitalism runs on subsidies and violence.
* Webb’s investigations: 21st-century intelligence, finance, and tech form a single network.
* Chomsky: U.S.–Israel policy is about domination, not defense.
* Brzezinski and Kissinger: global primacy requires crisis and control.
* Kojima’s *Metal Gear*: culture reflects the machinery of manufactured enemies.

—

## Conclusion: Breaking the Machine

The Cold War was a business deal. The War on Terror is, too. The enemy is never communism or terrorism — it is empire itself, feeding on crisis.

Unless we strip away the illusion, we remain like Snake in *Metal Gear Solid 2*, trapped in a simulation of war designed to condition obedience. The challenge is not just to expose the collusion, but to refuse its logic.

As Carson reminds us, the invisible hand is a fist.

And as Chomsky has said for decades, democracy is only real when people dismantle the manufactured consent machine.