Since WWII, the United States has sought global dominance, primarily though an attempt to control oil. Though not mentioned in the above quote, control of oil was made all the more important after the Nixon Administration took the U.S. Dollar off the Gold Standard in 1971. Oil replaced Gold as the collateral for the U.S. Dollar under the Kissinger “Petrodollar” scheme, necessitating a major U.S. commitment both to the security of Saudi Arabia, and to the domination of the entire Middle East.

After Vietnam, U.S. policy makers had realized that both a draft and major foreign wars were intolerable to the American public. U.S. military presence in Vietnam peaked in April 1969 at approximately 543,000 personnel, drafted from a population of a little over 200 million. We all remember what the anti-draft (not really anti-war) movement looked like in the States, even if only from movies about the period. American strategists needed to learn how to exert control over key oil producing areas on the cheap.

That meant the U.S. needed proxies to do the dirty work, especially in the Middle East. These proxies could be ethnic minorities (fighting wars that possibly resulted in small, controllable statelets), could be jihadists dedicated to overthrowing secular regimes (who are often based in nationalism, a threat to foreign dominance), or movements that were both ethnic and jihadist. Preferably proxies would create controllable puppet regimes, but exploitable chaos worked for American purposes just as well. A failed state could not very well be trusted to mind important strategic assets such as oil, right? Further, the U.S. was already seeking to carry chaos and conflict into both Russia and China by triggering ethnic / religious minorities to rise up. Direct war against either Russia or China would go nuclear. A proxy war, however, would not. https://orthodoxreflections.com/why-does-the-u-s-fund-jihad-while-christians-are-murdered/