Epstein Geopolitics
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Jeffrey Epstein. You might know him as a convicted pedophile, sex-trafficker, and friend of seemingly all politicians. You might know he accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars through highly opaque means having to do with a speciality for which he was not qualified (tax advice). You might even know him as the beating heart of all manner of conspiracy theories in American culture.
What you probably haven’t heard about Epstein is that he was also one of the world’s preeminent geopoliticians, which is why he entangled so many powerful people in his misdeeds. The human-trafficking sexcapades were not the main thing bringing him together with his pedo friends. It was money, power politics, and the living embodiment of US global hegemony.
Epstein—as a broker between Israeli intelligence and foreign oligarchs and kleptocrats—was also a creature whose existence owed to the structure of American hegemony, aka the neoliberal economic order, aka the era of neoliberal globalization.
It’s not often we get to peek under the hood of geopolitics to see its inner workings, but Drop Site News has some of the most mind-blowing investigative reveals I’ve ever read. As primary sources go, the documents that Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim got ahold of says so much more about how the world works than anything in the Snowden or Chelsea Manning dumps from the Obama years.
Smoking Guns
What Hussain and Grim show is smoking-gun proof that Epstein worked with—and on behalf of—Israeli security services. He was only able to do this because US foreign policy treated Israeli primacy in the Middle East as a proxy for its own global hegemony. Epstein sought to move geopolitical realities (actual events and US policy) in ways that would allow for favored firms to extract wealth from national security decision-making…effectively validating what Naomi Klein once called disaster capitalism.
The tranche of emails that Hussain and Grim got access to was large and their reporting isn’t finished, but already a vivid, damning picture of geopolitics under American hegemony has emerged.
In one case, Epstein was working with Ehud Barak, Israel former prime minister who had also just finished serving as Israel’s Minister of Defense. The two of them:
sought to pressure the Obama administration to either intervene directly in the Syrian war, or make concessions to the Kremlin in exchange for Assad’s graceful exit.
On February 21, 2014, Epstein wrote to Barak to say that “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied: “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow. A subject for Saturday.” The grift implied here is part plundering the resources of destabilized governments, part selling desperate autocrats an Israeli-furnished security-state-in-a-box—cameras, signals intelligence tech, software, analyst training, and the like, all meant to unleash pacification on restive societies.
Epstein was able to broker high-level meetings with Russian oligarchs (and Putin himself!), in part to try and convince Russia to support a plan to oust Bashar al-Assad from Syria. Israel viewed Assad as an Iranian proxy, and the Israeli state was specifically concerned about Syrian weapons (which came from Russia and Iran) being directed against Israel by Hezbollah or al-Qaeda-linked militants. Consequently, Epstein’s meetings with the Kremlin in 2013 facilitated what became the Russia-US cooperation agreement to inspect and dispose of Syrian chemical weapons.1
And if backroom dealings were one workstream of Epstein-politik, the other was manufacturing public consent for elite activity through media manipulation. As Hussain and Grim report:
Before approaching Putin, Barak and Epstein sought to use one of the major American newspapers to frame Israel’s narrative about the Syrian war, and telegraph a framework for peace talks led by the United States and Russia.
After Barak left government in 2013, Epstein advised him on how to be a geopolitical consultant to a specific Russian oligarch, and helped setup meetings for him with the head of Russia’s central bank, Russia’s foreign minister, and a future Russian consulting client for Barak. Epstein was so well connected to Russia’s oligarchy that in 2013 he told Ehud Barak that Putin sought a meeting with him (Epstein) and Epstein declined until Putin could “set aside real time and privacy.”
Epstein and Barak also “searched for opportunities to promote U.S. strikes on Iran” and kill the JCPOA (the former Iran Nuclear Deal). As the documentary Pistachio Wars captures, these destabilizing moves against Iran were also a project among some anti-Iran interest groups in the US. Eventually, it all worked out for the oligarchs: Trump 1.0 did kill the Iran nuclear deal and Trump 2.0 did bomb Iran.
Throughout all of this, Epstein worked relationships with Obama administration officials in parallel with Russia’s oligarchy and the Israeli security state. Bill Burns’s name comes up, so does cyber-czar Richard Clarke, Larry Summers, and George Tenet (a Bush-era CIA director), as well as Leon Panetta (Obama’s director of the CIA and secretary of defense). It’s unclear the full scope of Epstein’s contacts with the US national security state, but if it mirrors his contacts with US politicians, everybody is implicated.
Hilariously, Henry Kissinger’s 90th birthday was a site for further elite coordination.2 Both Epstein and Barak attended, knowing that Secretary of State John Kerry would be there and hoping to shape him toward the ouster of Assad; the removal of chemical weapons; the bombing of Iran; and the subverting of diplomacy with Iran.
A second tranche of reporting from Hussain and Grim notes that Epstein also helped Israeli intelligence firms sell a security-state-in-a-box to Mongolia and Côte d’Ivoire. In Mongolia, this relationship facilitated energy projects and the extraction of critical minerals for Russian oligarchs. In Côte d’Ivoire, it advanced Israeli security operations across West Africa. Israeli spy tech powers the active repression of civil society in both nations.
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Hegemonic Order As Imperialist Peace
What I see in these Jeffrey Epstein documents is the gritty functioning of power politics under neoliberal globalization (which is inseparable from American hegemony). It actually reveals a truth about geopolitics: Global order during that era was about profiteering from world affairs and consolidating state control of societies, whether democratic or authoritarian regimes. American hegemony imposed a kind of imperialist peace.
In this “end of history” moment, “the people” were not a unit of analysis, not a historical actor. They were subjects of the state, existing to be disciplined through state power and extracted from, to the enrichment of politicians and multinationals…but otherwise, “the people” did not really exist when it came to foreign policy. The agents of history under neoliberal globalization were policy entrepreneurs, oligarchs, and technocrats of the national security state.
It’s hard to overstate how different this is from the conventional understanding of American hegemony or the unipolar moment. Yet, Giovanni Arrighi outlined precisely that in his canonical book, The Long Twentieth Century:
World hegemonies…can only arise if the pursuit of power by states in relation to one another is not the only objective of state action…the pursuit of power in the interstate system is only one side of the coin…The other side is the maximization of power vis-a-vis subjects. A state may therefore become hegemonic because it can credibly claim to be the motor force of a general expansion of the collective power of rulers vis-a-vis subjects.
American domination was consensual to the extent that it gave a place to governing elites, whether dictator or democrat. In the hubristic glow of the post-Cold War, states sought international stability—the core element of which was the absence of great-power wars—not for its own sake but to make the world safe for transnational capital, and to consolidate the “monopoly of violence” in the state over the people in whose names the state ruled.
In effect, American primacy was global dominance. American hegemony, which presupposed primacy, was ruling-class solidarity against working-class interests. The critical intellectual Thomas Meaney summarized it even better in a recent interview:
There was an extraordinary moment of international class coordination in the 1990s and early 2000s. Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Brussels all agreed—despite their mounting geopolitical tensions—that they wanted their capitalists to get richer, that they no longer faced real threats from their working populations, and that they would help each other in the other great cause of the day, “counterterrorism”…
Never genuinely threatened by “terrorism,” untroubled by rebellions of workers at home, the states superintending the 21st-century world economy found their hold on power jeopardized by the very success of the globalized capitalism whose ascendancy they oversaw, as powerful fractions of their ruling classes came to see themselves as unmoored from anything so constrictive as a national interest, however notional. Each state still believed it needed to enrich its elites—that was never in doubt—but there was a question now of which faction of the elite to enrich, and which to cast aside.
This is the world that made Jeffrey Epstein, and that Epstein made in turn. He was an agent of the “powerful fractions of their ruling class” Meaney refers to. And far from being constrained by the national interest, he sought to remake what it meant, and to profit from it.
What’s not so obvious is how much Epstein mattered as a causal force in all the geopolitical machinations he was part of. Was he a grifter arbitraging world events and telling moneyed interests what they wanted to hear? Or were his various brokered meetings between national security states and oligarchs setting now-familiar world events in motion?
Anecdotally, I remember when I worked in the system that there were wealthy “consultant” outsiders types who filled the calendars of principals like Leon Panetta. They seemed to have unlimited access to the celebrity appointees of the Obama administration but very little influence on them. It’s possible Epstein is one of those hangers-on, a bro who thought he was running the world while he was really just squeezing a dime out of it.
But not everyone had ties to Mossad like Epstein. Not everyone was filthy rich for no obvious reason like Epstein. And not everyone had the human-trafficking credentials of Epstein. So maybe he’s different, and a super empowered individual. He certainly was the epitome of “Davos Man.” And to the extent that he was doing Israel’s bidding, he was also working for American hegemony.
The thing I find so disturbing is that, contrary to all the claims that neoliberalism is dead or that the neoliberal order has passed—which is true in a sense—the most brutal realities about how power worked in that era are even more true today. Oligarchs and financial capital are running the world. Scumbags are still brokering backroom deals between democrats and autocrats. Corruption reigns. The difference now is that the national state form is amassing unprecedented levels of capacity to control its populations while the old regime ruling-class solidarity is breaking down and interstate conflict becoming normal again.
The worst of all possible worlds. Thanks, Epstein.
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I have friends who worked on the US side of the disposal of Syrian chemical weapons during the Obama years. It is fucking mind-altering to think that the overwhelming demand for that unilateral disarmament project was Epstein lobbying on behalf of Israeli intelligence.
To affirm, I have a low opinion of Kissinger, and all war criminals for that matter.