Tag Archives: Fall of the American empire

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, War

American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama, by Michael Hudson

Posted on July 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

Toe the American line or else might have worked in the Cold War period. The tragedy now is that it won’t work anymore, and America’s rulers are doing their best to not comprehend that reality. From Michael Hudson at thesaker.is:

As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.

What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear. Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19^th and early 20^th century.

Posted in Geopolitics, Government, Imperialism

On Liberating Europe, by Batiushka

Posted on July 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

Many of the best perspectives on the U.S. and America these days come from outside the country. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

And they had tails like scorpions and there were stings in their tails and their power was to hurt men for five months.

Apocalypse 9, 10

Introduction: ‘The End of History’

Just over thirty years ago the Communist USSR went bankrupt – it could not raise enough money to pay off its debts on capital markets. The West should have gone bankrupt at the same time because it too had colossal debts, however through the financial manipulations of its Capitalism it was able to raise the capital. So it went morally bankrupt instead.

Firstly, there was the fascism of political correctness. Like so many destructive movements the initial intentions were good, but as we know that the road to hell is paved with them. It was precisely after 1991 that the use of the phrase ‘political correctness’ as a pejorative phrase became widespread in the USA. Secondly, at the same time there began the Western attack on Islam, or rather the Western grab of Arab oil and gas, by telling Saddam Hussein that he could recover Kuwait, which had been illegitimately cut off from oil-rich Iraq by British imperialism, but then withdrawing that support once he had done it and so pretexting a reason to attack him. The first Gulf War followed, with a second one to follow after the invasion and failed occupation of Afghanistan, and then chaos in the ‘Arab Spring’. Thirdly, at the same time, in 1992 there began the attempt to depopulate, dismantle and destroy the Russian Lands, culminating 22 years later in the US coup d’etat in Kiev in 2014, which cost US taxpayers $5 billion and has cost them many times more since. Inbetween there have been all manner of Western manipulations, from 9/11 to covid.

Posted in Governments, History, Imperialism

Another One Bites the Dust… Geopolitical Fallout from U.S.-Afghan Failure, from the Strategic Culture Editorial Board

Posted on August 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

You’ve got to wonder if the US failure in Afghanistan gives the globalists pause. Maybe they still want to rule the world, but they’ll steer clear of Afghanistan. From the Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

The American empire and its lackeys are going down, as we have mentioned many times before. Afghanistan is another nail in the coffin.

Every day can be said to be history-making. But this week saw a watershed event with huge historical ramifications: the final collapse of the United States’ and NATO’s military occupation of Afghanistan.

America’s longest war has come to a close after 20 years of futile fighting, destruction and suffering. The Taliban militants whom the U.S. ousted in an invasion back in October 2001 are now back as the governing power in Afghanistan. And a regime that Washington propped up with billions of dollars folded like a house of cards as the Taliban took control of the capital, Kabul, on August 15.

This week the new rulers declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. America’s avowed starry-eyed project of “nation-building” and “Western-style democracy” lies in ruins. Fittingly, this week also marks the centennial anniversary of the liberation of Afghanistan from British colonial rule in 1919. Another one bites the dust.

The desperate, chaotic scenes of the U.S. and its NATO allies evacuating from Afghanistan speak volumes. The pretensions of Washington and its Western partners have fallen to Earth with a crash – like the bodies of poor Afghans who clung to U.S. military cargo planes as they took off from Kabul airport. What the world witnessed was the shameful, diabolical end to a two-decade criminal occupation of Afghanistan that has wrought nothing but destruction and grief. And the Afghan people have been abandoned to their fate.

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

Tagged Afghanistan, Fall of the American empire

Please Tell the Establishment That U.S. Hegemony is Over, by Daniel Larison

Posted on April 27, 2020 | Leave a comment

To paraphrase a line from one of the Star Wars films: the harder the US grasps for empire, the more it slips away. From Daniel Larison at theamericanconservative.com:

Our dominance in the world is in the rear view, yet Trump and other pols refuse to get the message.

Donald Trump gives a national security speech aboard the World War II Battleship USS Iowa, September 15, 2015, in San Pedro, California. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

More than 10 years ago, the columnist Charles Krauthammer asserted that American “decline is a choice,” and argued tendentiously that Barack Obama had chosen it. Yet looking back over the last decade, it has become increasingly obvious that this decline has occurred irrespective of what political leaders in Washington want.

The truth is that decline was never a choice, but the U.S. can decide how it can respond to it. We can continue chasing after the vanished, empty glory of the “unipolar moment” with bromides of American exceptionalism. We can continue to delude ourselves into thinking that military might can make up for all our other weaknesses. Or we can choose to adapt to a changed world by prudently husbanding our resources and putting them to uses more productive than policing the world.

There was a brief period during the 1990s and early 2000s when the U.S. could claim to be the world’s hegemonic power. America had no near-peer rivals; it was at the height of its influence across most of the globe. That status, however, was always a transitory one, and was lost quickly thanks to self-inflicted wounds in Iraq and the natural growth of other powers that began to compete for influence. While America remains the most powerful state in the world, it no longer dominates as it did 20 years ago. And there can be no recapturing what was lost.

Alexander Cooley and Dan Nexon explore these matters in their new book, Exit From Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order. They make a strong case for distinguishing between the old hegemonic order and the larger international order of which it is a part. As they put it, “global international order is not synonymous with American hegemony.” They also make careful distinctions between the different components of what is often simply called the “liberal international order”: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and liberal intergovernmentalism. The first involves the protection of rights, the second open economic exchange, and the third the form of international order that recognizes legally equal sovereign states. Cooley and Nexon note that both critics and defenders of the “liberal international order” tend to assume that all three come as a “package deal,” but point out that these parts do not necessarily reinforce each other and do not have to coexist.

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics