The Indispensable Nation crap just isn’t resonating with the rest of the world. To paraphrase Napoleon, history’s graveyard is filled with indispensable nations. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
US President Joe Biden’s November 18, 2023 op ed for The Washington Post opens with his rendition of Madeleine Albright’s no longer popular hit, “we are America; we are the indispensable nation.” “The United States,” Biden writes, “is the essential nation.”
Biden’s tune is tone deaf to the rising voice of the nonaligned world and the Global South – or the Global Majority – that is no longer listening to that hegemonic arrogance. Biden’s insistence that “The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time” is tone deaf even to the warnings of his own director of the CIA, William Burns, who said half a year ago that “the United States . . . is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”
Biden continues to argue that “Putin [is] fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map,” despite wiping Ukraine off the map never having been stated as a goal of Russia’s invasion. Russia has clearly identified keeping Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine as well as protection of Russian speakers in the Donbas as their military objectives. John Mearsheimer has pointed out that “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it part of greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th.”
Biden continues to insist that “when aggression in Europe goes unanswered, the crisis does not burn itself out. It draws America in directly” instead of realizing America pushing NATO expansion east in Europe contributed to the aggression in Europe.
