Tag Archives: American empire

Russia, China, Iran… and Saudi Arabia? By Ron Unz

Posted on March 13, 2023 | 1 comment

America is reaping what it has sown. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

On Friday geopolitical plates of tectonic scale may have visibly shifted as Iran and Saudi Arabia, two of the most important countries in the Middle East and erstwhile bitter adversaries, announced that they had reestablished diplomatic relations after a lengthy round of negotiations held with top Chinese officials in Beijing.

Back in 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt famously met on an American cruiser with Ibn Saud, and our important alliance with oil-rich Saudi Arabia came into being.

Though sometimes stressed during the 1973 Oil Embargo and in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, the relationship remained our most important in the Arab World, being responsible for the rise of the Petrodollar and the maintenance of our own greenback as the world’s reserve currency. With America’s industrial base having been reduced to a mere shadow of its once global dominance and our country plagued by horrendous annual budget deficits and accumulated debt, much of our national prosperity and current standard of living probably today depends upon that maintaining that status.

Meanwhile, during the four decades since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, no country in the region has been a greater object of American hostility than Iran. As recently as January 2020, we assassinated Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s greatest military commander, who had been considered a likely presidential candidate in their 2021 elections.

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Death of a Myth, by George D. O’Neill, Jr.

Posted on March 13, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. is no longer the unchallenged king of the hill. From George D. O’Neill, Jr., at theamericanconservative.com:

As we witness the collapse of various mainstream narratives, especially those surrounding the U.S./NATO war with Russia in Ukraine, Americans should begin to reassess their understanding of U.S. national leadership. Most American citizens have no notion of the great disparity between what their government does overseas and the stories they hear from its mouthpieces. As a result, Americans unwittingly support all sorts of foreign operations with little or no understanding of what is actually going on. For years, they have been misled by a non-stop propaganda campaign that is only now beginning to crumble.

We are experiencing the death throes of the United States’ unipolar hegemony over large parts of world. Until citizens begin to realize the magnitude of their government’s policy deceptions, it will become increasingly difficult to understand the United States’ changing global position and adjust to the effects of the growing negative perception of our country held by many people around the world.

Since World War II, and particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was the dominant and unrivaled world power. Instead of being a peacekeeper and honest “world’s policeman,” the U.S. has increasingly been a destabilizing bully. Many leaders worldwide have been reluctant to speak up about the increasingly destructive nature of U.S. foreign policy for fear of being punished. But as U.S. stature and power declines, large parts of the world have been seeking arrangements to protect themselves from U.S. predation.

Most Americans do not understand why such realignments are occurring, thanks to a constant stream of propaganda about America being the “most generous,” the “exceptional nation,” a “nation that sets aside its interests for the benefit of the world,” an “important source of good” around the globe as the “protector of the rules based order,” always shouldering the heavy responsibility to protect the international system and weak nations from bad actors, ad nauseam. According to a number of sources, U.S.-caused wars have been directly responsible for the deaths of more than 10 million people since World War II. The neoconservatives will scoff at these facts and their sources, but most of the rest of the world believes this to be true.

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Quoth the Vultures “Evermore”, by Edward Curtin

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S.’s many wars since World War II have not been “mistakes.” They’ve been quite deliberate. From Edward Curtin at lewrockwell.com:

On the short roof outside the bedroom window, two black vultures sit, staring in.  They have come to remind me of something.  I put my book down and peer back at these strange looking creatures. The book: Our War: What We Did in Vietnam And What It Did to Us by David Harris.  I had read it when it was first published in 1996 and it has stuck with me, as has the utterly savage U.S. war against Vietnam that killed so many millions, what the Vietnamese call The American War.

I am of the same generation as Harris, the courageous draft resister and anti-war campaigner who died on February 6.  Like him, many of us who were of draft age then have never been able to extricate the horror of that war from our minds.  Most, I suppose, but surely not those who went to Vietnam to fight, just moved on and allowed the war to disappear from their consciousness as they perhaps tried to think of it as a “mistake” and to live as if all the constant American wars since weren’t happening.  As for the young, the war against Vietnam is ancient history, and if they learned anything about it in school, it was erroneous for sure, a continuation of the lie.

But it was no mistake; it was an intentional genocidal war waged to torture, kill, and maim as many Vietnamese as possible and to use drafted (enslaved) American boys to do the killing and suffer the consequences.  It’s Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination and torture operation, became the template for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites, hybrid wars, terrorist actions, etc. up to today.  Harris writes:

[that] . . . . “calling the war a mistake is the fundamental equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. . . . Let us not lose sight of what really happened.  In this particular ‘mistake,’ at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans.  These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet through the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive by jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumps, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers.  They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of who had even less idea than that.

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What the America got wrong, by Observer R

Posted on February 26, 2023 | Leave a comment

A comprehensive analysis of America’s many mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with a little self-examination. From Observer R at thesaker.is:

BACKGROUND

A quick search of the internet for the term “What Russia Got Wrong” yields a lot of entries. However, a quick search for the term “What America Got Wrong” yields a rather sparse list. This is understandable since the narrative in the West has been that Russia is losing in international relations. Also, the United States (US) think tanks and government studies are oriented toward analyzing Russia, as a competitor country, and not so much toward what the situation in the US is like. There are exceptions, but these are often couched in terms of the need for more money for various US military programs. It may be useful, therefore, to look at a few topics and see how the US fares.

WHAT AMERICA GOT WRONG: MILITARY

Going forward it seems past time to consider some significant deficiencies that have become evident in the American quest to remain a great or the greatest military power. Many of these elements have been brought forward recently in pubic discussions and are important considerations in terms of weapons and military force.

The US has continued to procure weapons that many critics perceive as not suited for the modern age, or that are simply obsolete. These weapons are generally very expensive and prevent funds from being shifted to better uses. The usual examples are aircraft carriers, stealth fighter planes, littoral combat ships, and so forth. Instead, the US should have switched funding and effort into hypersonic missiles, electronic warfare, air defense systems, and perhaps more advanced submarines. Thus, the US really does have a “missile gap” to contend with. The bad name that air defense got with the “Star Wars” episode under President Reagan delayed work in that area for many years. Now it appears that at least one foreign country, Russia, is considerably ahead of the US in air defense equipment.

In addition, long ago the US set up approximately 800 military bases around the world. These bases were useful in the days of gunboat diplomacy and when US hegemony required extensive preparation for military action anywhere around the globe. Then and now these bases require a lot of manpower and funding to operate, but it is not clear that they serve an essential purpose in this age. Other countries have taken up the chore of fighting pirates and bombing terrorist dens. The US effort could be greatly scaled back.

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A Fantasy of Angelic, US Omnipotence, by Bruce Fein

Posted on February 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

Ah, to be a citizen of the only perfect nation on the planet, the only perfect nation in history. From Bruce Fein at consortiumnews.com:

Bruce Fein says Robert Kagan is convinced the U.S. has yet to metamorphose the world into paradise because of insufficient appreciation of its omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence, as outlined in Kagan’s 2006 neocon book Dangerous Nation.

U.S. personification Columbia in a World War I patriotic poster. (Paul Stahr, Herbert Hoover Library, National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain)

If you love fairy tales with happy endings, you’ll swoon over Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation’s fictional portrayal of America’s foreign policy from its earliest days to the dawn of the 20th century as a chivalrous aspiration or quest to bring Camelot to every corner of the globe.

The narrative veers from truth like the geocentric theory of the universe veers from the heliocentric.

According to Kagan, the gravitational pull of America’s foreign policy has always been a selfless giving and risking that last full measure of devotion to bring foreigners enlightened self-government and prosperity.  

The author posits that Americans uniquely enjoy angelic DNA.  They weep like Niobe upon witnessing foreigners groaning under oppression and eagerly champion American military intervention, i.e., the legalization of first-degree murder, to alleviate or end their misery.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote is put to shame.  Americans, Kagan insinuates will go straight to heaven without the need of an interview with God!

The fabulist nature of Kagan’s story is underscored by the heartlessness Americans were displaying at home over lynchings, white male supremacy, subjugation of Native Americans and rampant racism while purportedly acting like fairy godmothers abroad up to 1900. 

The tale is as implausible as if the anti-Christ in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Simon Legree, volunteered to fight to emancipate slaves in Cuba or Brazil.

Kagan is convinced that the United States has yet to metamorphose the world into paradise because of insufficient appreciation of its omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence in exhibiting every noble instinct of the human heart. (Was someone asleep at the switch in composing the book title conveying the opposite impression?)

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Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on February 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

The costs are incalculable and they are burying the U.S. in debt. And those are just the monetary costs. How do you put a price tag on a nation losing its soul? From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

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From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses, by Batiushka

Posted on February 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

The war in Ukraine marks a huge rupture between the West and the rest of the world. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest….Instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon

Introduction: Imperial Failures

Empires in terminal decline, like the American today, go from one usually military disaster to another. ‘Might is Right’, is the old dictum they wrongly believe in. It happened to the Roman, as described above. It happened to the British, starting with the Boer War, then the bankrupting Pyrrhic victories in two World Wars and ending with the Suez humiliation in 1956. And the French with their World Wars and Indo-China and then Algerian debacle. It happened to the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan, though its failure was more about its failure to deliver on its promises to consumers because it could not finance debt like Western countries. Imperial failure is always a frightening phenomenon.

After catastrophic failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US Empire has now chosen to bet everything on someone else’s country in Europe. This is the big one, not a war against sandal-wearing tribesmen, but against a Superpower with a professional army and the best rocket artillery, drones and hypersonic missiles in the world. This was is in the south-western borderland backwaters of Russia, called the Ukraine. Having lost its attempt to occupy the naval port of Sevastopol in the Crimea and so control the Black Sea, the US aggressor-state has turned the Ukraine into yet another failed attempt to try and impose its global hegemony. At present, attention is focused on a town called Bakhmut in south-eastern Ukraine.

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A tale of two worlds, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on February 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

One world is based on debt and fiat currencies, the other world is moving towards production and gold. Which shall prevail? From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

In the war between the western alliance and the Asian axis, the media focus is on the Ukrainian battlefield. The real war is in currencies, with Russia capable of destroying the dollar.

So far, Putin’s actions have been relatively passive. But already, both Russia and China have accumulated enough gold to implement gold standards. It is now overwhelmingly in their interests to do so.

From Sergey Glazyev’s recent article in a Russian business newspaper, it is clear that settlement of trade balances between members, dialog partners, and associate members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) optionally will be in gold. Furthermore, the Russian economy would benefit enormously from a decline in borrowing rates from current levels of over 13% to a level more consistent with sound money.

To understand the consequences, in this article the comparison is made between the western alliance’s fiat currency and deficit spending regime and the Russian-Chinese axis’s planned industrial revolution for some 3.8 billion people in the SCO family. China has a remarkable savings rate, which will underscore the investment capital for a rapid increase in Asian industrialisation, without inflationary consequences.

With a new round of military action in Ukraine shortly to kick off, it will be in Putin’s interest to move from passivity to financial aggression. It will not take much for him to undermine the entire western fiat currency system — a danger barely recognised by a gung-ho NATO military complex.

Introduction

In the geopolitical tussle between the old and new hegemons, we see the best of strategies and the worst of strategies, where belief is pitted against credulity. It is the season of light and the season of darkness, the spring of hope and the winter of despair…

Recalling some of Charles Dickens’ famous opening lines from his Tale of Two Cities to describe the current state of global politics sums up the potential of a new industrial revolution throughout Asia and much of the rest of the under-developed world (the best of times), compared with the western alliance abetted by its military arm, NATO, which is determined to suppress the plans for the new hegemons at its own peoples’ expense (the worst of times). Ironically, the nations which will benefit most from the western alliance’s proxy war are those which align themselves with its enemies. 

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Japan Reenlists as Washington’s Spear-Carrier, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on January 26, 2023 | 1 comment

Japan is now a paid-up U.S. vassal. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Patrick Lawrence reflects on Prime Minister Kishida’s radical turn toward the militarism his country’s pacifist constitution forbids.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida with President Joe Biden at the White House on Jan. 13. (White House, Cameron Smith)

It is always the same when Japanese premiers travel to Washington to summit at the White House. Nothing seems to happen and nobody pays much attention even when important things happen, when we should all pay attention, and, when we do pay passing attention, we usually get it wrong. In January 1960, when Premier Nobusuke Kishi visited Washington, President Dwight Eisenhower blessed a war criminal and signed a security treaty the Japanese public vigorously opposed. That week Newsweek marked Kishi down as “that friendly, savvy Japanese salesman.”

Kishi proved a salesman, all right. Three years later he used armed police to clear the Diet of opposition legislators and force ratification of the Anpo treaty, as the Japanese call it, with members of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) the only ones present to vote on it. “A 134–pound body packed with pride, power and passion — a perfect embodiment of his country’s amazing resurgence,” TIME wrote of the man who ought to have been hanged a decade earlier.

Now we have Premier Fumio Kishida, who summited with our asleep-at-the-wheel president in the Oval Office a week ago. I do not know how much Kishida weighs or how proud of himself or his nation he is, but, in an uncanny echo of the Kishi–Eisenhower summit, Joe Biden blessed his radical turn toward the militarism Japan’s pacifist constitution forbids.

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Decline of Empire: Parallels Between the U.S. and Rome, Part IV, by Doug Casey

Posted on January 25, 2023 | 1 comment

Part IV of Doug Casey’s exploration of parallels between the Roman and American empires. From Casey at internationalman.com:

rome

See here for Part III

Now to gratify the Druids among you.

Soil exhaustion, deforestation, and pollution—which abetted plagues—were problems for Rome. As was lead poisoning, in that the metal was widely used for eating and drinking utensils and for cookware. None of these things could bring down the house, but neither did they improve the situation. They might be equated today with fast food, antibiotics in the food chain, and industrial pollutants. Is the U.S. agricultural base unstable because it relies on gigantic monocultures of bioengineered grains that in turn rely on heavy inputs of chemicals, pesticides, and mined fertilizers? It’s true that production per acre has gone up steeply because of these things, but that’s despite the general decrease in depth of topsoil, destruction of native worms and bacteria, and growing pesticide resistance of weeds.

Perhaps even more important, the aquifers needed for irrigation are being depleted. But these things have all been necessary to maintain the U.S. balance of trade, keep food prices down, and feed the expanding world population. It may turn out, however, to have been a bad trade-off.

I’m a technophile, but there are some reasons to believe we may have serious problems ahead. Global warming, incidentally, isn’t one of them. One of the reasons for the rise of Rome—and the contemporaneous Han in China—may be that the climate cyclically warmed considerably up to the 3rd century, then got much cooler. Which also correlates with the invasions by northern barbarians.

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