Like balding old guys who compensate by growing beards and mustaches, the U.S. is trying to make up in military power what it’s losing in economic power. From Vijay Prashad at consortiumnews.com:
From its attacks on Global South countries to its willingness to go to war with a great power such as Russia, the U.S. is increasingly employing military force to compensate for its economic decline, writes Vijay Prashad.
LeRoy Clarke, Trinidad and Tobago, “Now,” 1970.
This month, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organized the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
U.S. President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies.
At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning a visit to Saudi Arabia – a self-described theocracy. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s exclusionary stance, and so Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras refused to come to the event. As it turned out, the summit was a fiasco.
Down the road, over a hundred organizations hosted a People’s Summit for Democracy, where thousands of people from across the hemisphere gathered to celebrate the actual democratic spirit which emerges from the struggles of peasants and workers, students and feminists, and all the people who are excluded from the gaze of the powerful.
At this gathering, the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela joined in online to celebrate this festival of democracy and to condemn the weaponization of democratic ideals by the United States and its allies.
Next year, 2023, will be the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. asserted its hegemony over the American hemisphere. The malign spirit of the Monroe Doctrine not only continues but has now been extended by the U.S. government into a kind of Global Monroe Doctrine.
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