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Is Gaza the Next Sarajevo? Examining Parallels to WWI & American Empire's Suez Canal Moment
As important as declining U.S. economic and military power are to collapsing American influence in the world, declining U.S. diplomatic power is equally important.
Nov 27, 2023
Is Gaza the Sarajevo on the Sinai or the U.S.’ Suez? That is, is it the starting point of World War III, or the apex of U.S. empire, signaling irreversible decline? The difference could not be more important.
Sarajevo was the city in Bosnia where World War I started. The Great War, as it was called, industrialized human slaughter, destroyed four great empires, led eleven countries to become dictatorships, and laid out the contours of the modern Middle East. It was the moment when the center of global leadership shifted from Europe, where it had resided for the prior 400 years, to the United States.
World War I rearranged the architecture of global power more quickly, completely, and to lasting effect than any event of the last 1,000 years. It is useful to understand what the War was all about and what it can tell us about today.
The War was the result of ascendant German power threatening to displace dominant British power. The parallel between ascendant China and dominant America is inescapable.
The peaking of economic vitality is one thing, military impotence still another.
Britain had invented the First Industrial Revolution, in the 1700s. It was based on iron, steam, and textiles. That was the reason Britain was the leading power in the world for the whole of the nineteenth century. But it was Germany that pioneered the Second Industrial Revolution, the one based on steel, internal combustion, and chemicals. As a result, by the end of the 1800s, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial and commercial power. The numbers tell the story.
In 1860, Britain held 59% of global wealth to Germany’s 3%, a twenty-to-one advantage. But by 1913, the year before World War I started, Germany held 21% of global wealth to Britain’s 14%. The reversal in economic power was stunning. If it was not reversed, Britain would be eclipsed as the world’s leading power. So, they went to war.
Is this where the U.S. is today with regards to China? No historic comparisons are ever perfect, but the numbers are ominous.
In 1980, the U.S. produced 21% of the world’s economic output, measured as purchasing power parity. China’s share was just over 2%, a ten-to-one advantage for the U.S. But by 2022, the positions had switched. The U.S. produced 15% of global output, China, 21%. The reversal in economic power is stunning, and the gap is increasing. China is simply blowing by the U.S. If it is not reversed—and there’s no sign that it will be—the U.S. will be eclipsed as the world’s leading power. The parallel to World War I is inescapable.
U.S. national security dogma echoes the concern with this dynamic. Documents describe China as the U.S.’ “pacing challenger.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated that, “China is the only nation that has both the means and intent to challenge U.S. leadership of the global order.” An Air Force general has ruminated that he believes the U.S. will be in a kinetic war with China by 2025.
Is Gaza going to be the Sarajevo of World War III, the trigger that escalates to the point that global war—World War—is inevitable? Save for a cataclysmic error, it will not.
To be sure, Israel will do all that it can to goad the U.S. into attacking its (Israel’s) arch-enemy, Iran. It succeeded in getting the U.S. to take out its earlier rivals, Iraq and Libya, and attack Syria and Sudan. But the U.S. is too leery to commit to a war with Iran, which would inevitably drag in Iran’s allies, Russia, and China. That’s the potential path to War, but the U.S. has the most to lose from it.
Wars destroy economic orders, even for the victors, as Britain learned at such cost in World War I. As THE chief beneficiary of the global system, the U.S. has the most to lose by its destruction. Besides, its own war gaming exercises consistently show that it will lose a war against China. That is made much more likely now that the U.S. has stupidly driven Russia, the world’s #1 military power, into a deep strategic alliance with China.
Additionally, the U.S. has not been able to extricate itself from the Middle East and complete the “Pivot to Asia” that Barack Obama began in 2011. That was the purpose of the U.S.-sponsored Abraham Accords where Arab states would recognize and assume normal relations with Israel. The Gaza war has put an end to that. Until the U.S. can stabilize the Middle East in the hands of a group of collaborative, U.S.-friendly nations, it isn’t ready to carry out another war, certainly not a World War.
Most importantly, save for an all-out nuclear war that would destroy much of life on the planet, the U.S. is not even capable of winning a minor war, not to mention a World War.
It couldn’t win in Iraq, a nation of 45 million people that had been bombed nonstop for more than a decade before the calamitous U.S. invasion in 2003. It couldn’t win in twenty years in Afghanistan, either, a fourth-world country of 40 million, with no air force or even artillery. Its Taliban fighters had literally been living in caves.
And, it hasn’t been announced yet, for political reasons, and won’t be until after the 2024 elections, but the U.S. has been roundly defeated in Ukraine. Ukraine is a country that was willing to sacrifice more than 500,000 of its men (recall, the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam because it could not tolerate the loss of 58,000), but the U.S. could not even manage to keep it supplied with artillery shells.
Given all of this, it is laughable to even contemplate that the U.S. is ready to escalate to World War with China + Russia and their combined 1.6 billion people. They have been on notice of U.S. intentions for decades, have equal or superior weapons system to the U.S. (think hypersonic missiles of which the U.S. has none), and, of course, nukes.
So, if Gaza is not the world’s Sarajevo, is it the U.S.’ Suez? This is a much more likely scenario.
Suez was the event in 1956 that signaled the end of the British Empire. Britain had enlisted France and Israel to invade Egypt following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. It was an all-but Keystone Cops caper that was ended when Eisenhower threatened to destroy the pound sterling if Britain did not desist.
So, Britain tucked its tail between its legs and slunk home. It was the moment of high humiliation for the country that once had boasted that “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” It was reduced to second class status as a world power and forced into selling off the family china to maintain appearances.
Suez is a much more likely portent of the future for the U.S. than is Sarajevo. The reasons are all around us.
First is the declining economic power, mentioned above. China simply offers a more compelling model to the world for how to organize a nation’s economy, not to mention a world’s. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than has any nation in history. Its stunning ascent has been accomplished without the invasion, brutalizing, and pillaging of other nations that has been so prominent a feature of U.S. hegemony.
Besides, the U.S. abandoned industrial power beginning in the 1980s so that its industrialists could make more money by producing in China, paying workers $1 an hour, and shipping the goods to the U.S. It worked. The already-obscenely wealthy became the newly-Pharoically wealthy, but the result was/is a hollowed out economy and society that the MAGAts are all too happy destroy to somehow get revenge on the perpetrators.
In important ways, the U.S. economy is a basket case. It cannot begin to pay its bills. It only keeps the lights on by borrowing trillions of dollars a year from other nations. In the past 32 years, since the end of the Cold War, it has borrowed $30 trillion, basically a trillion dollars a year. Now, it’s up to $2 trillion a year. Nobody has any illusions that it will ever be paid back. This is not a model of economic vibrancy. When the rest of the world refuses to buy any more U.S. debt, it will be lights out on the American Imperium. The U.S.’ principal adversaries, China and Russia, are working feverishly to see that that day comes, soon.
Similarly, declining military power. Besides the humiliating losses mentioned above, the military come-uppance for the U.S. is palpable as smaller nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and even Yemen—the poorest nation in the Arab world—are no longer intimidated by U.S. bullying. This disdain for U.S. military power was made especially apparent in Ukraine where Russian-made weapons routinely made minced meat of supposedly superior American ones. All the world could see it.
As important as declining U.S. economic and military power are to collapsing American influence in the world, declining U.S. diplomatic power is equally important. Consider only the collapsing U.S. influence in the Middle East.
It lost its War in Iraq which was always premised on a lie, but not before killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children, a feat that U.S. Secretary of Madeleine Albright said on Sixty Minutes “was worth it.” Its use of depleted uranium weapons left Iraq the most radioactive country on earth. While in Iraq, the U.S. oversaw the creation of ISIS, not unlike its nurturing of al Qaeda in the Afghanistan war of the 1980s.
The U.S. shipped weapons from Libya, to ISIS in Syria, to help it overthrow the Syrian government, an ally of Iran. That’s what Benghazi was all about. But the U.S. plan failed when Russia intervened to stop the overthrow, in 2015. The U.S. still occupies Syrian oil fields in the east, stealing its oil to fund its black operations around the world. All the world sees it.
China pulled off a rapprochement between historic rivals Iran and long-time U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia announced last year that it would soon begin selling oil in yuan, a body blow to the dollar as the international reserve currency. Saudi Arabia also threw in with Russia against the explicit request of Joe Biden that it lower oil prices to help Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 election. It also buried the hatchet in its hostility against Syria.
By ceding the diplomatic initiative and losing its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon (via its proxy, Israel, in 2006), the U.S. has left its arch-enemy, Iran, with dominant influence over much of west Asia, from the Indian Ocean in the south to the Caspian Sea in the north, from the border with Afghanistan in the east, to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. It is a collapse in influence of startling speed and catastrophic proportions in one of the most important regions of the world.
It is likely that this plummeting loss of U.S. power and prestige was a factor behind Israel’s vastly disproportionate response to the Hamas attack in Gaza: it knew that U.S. influence was waning and that the U.S. would not be able to provide cover for it much longer. Collapsing power develops its own self-reinforcing dynamic.
Most important in defining Gaza as a Suez moment for the U.S. is its collapsed moral power.
The U.S. is deeply, inextricably complicit in the most notorious genocide of the twenty-first century. It is not only providing funding, weapons, intelligence, and military cover to Israel in the form of two full aircraft carrier groups in the eastern Mediterranean. For 75 years, it has provided the diplomatic cover at the United Nations that has allowed Israel to carry out its nakedly apartheid regime against the Palestinian people, and now, with impunity, its genocide.
Most of the rest of the world recognizes the overtly colonialist nature of the Israeli enterprise. It is a group of European- and later, American-descended settlers who came to the Middle East explicitly to dispossess the Palestinian people of their land through the process of ethnic cleansing. One of the ideological fathers of Zionism, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, said exactly this in his infamous essay, The Iron Wall:
“We shall trace the root of the evil to this – that we are seeking to colonise a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force. Everything else that is undesirable grows out of this root.”
The first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, by then engaged in the war that created Israel, laid out the mechanism—ethnic cleansing—by which this colonization would take place:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Everything in past 75 years of Israeli history is but a footnote to these two vestigial sins: colonization and ethnic cleansing. The present war is simply Netanyahu’s seizing the pretext of war, as Ben-Gurion commended, to carry out the Final Solution. The world sees this. It is as unmistakable as it is despicable, something no civilized nation could sanction. Yet, the U.S. claims impunity, for both itself and Israel, in supporting Israel’s destruction and rape of the Palestinian people.
It is important to understand why this is so abhorrent to most of the people of the world, and, therefore, so damaging to longer-term U.S. interests.
It is impossible to overstate the collapse of U.S. influence and prestige in the world, especially in the Middle East.
Most of the nations of the world were at one time in the not-too-distant past colonies of Western imperial powers. They carry in their cultural consciousness, their historical narratives, the obloquy, the shame and disgrace, of having been dominated and humiliated by white Western powers for decades, in some cases for centuries.
They see Israel and Palestine as simply an updated version of the same predation they suffered themselves before their struggles for national independence, beginning right after World War II. This is what the Wars for National Liberation were about in the 1950s and 1960s. More than 90 nations fought their Western imperial occupiers to achieve independence. Their names are the iconic battles of the Cold War: Algeria; Vietnam; Indonesia; Angola; Cuba; Congo; Nicaragua; Kenya…
What is different this time is the fact of pervasive global social media. No longer are local leaders, so often bought with U.S. money, able to dictate what their people know and are allowed to believe. No longer are U.S.-controlled mass media able to hide the truth to insulate the perpetrators of atrocities from the opprobrium, the stigma, of their heinous acts.
Four billion people are witnessing daily the unthinkable horrors inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians, and the U.S.’ breathless support for it: the murder of thousands of innocent, defenseless children; the intentional destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, relief agencies, escape convoys, water and power stations; the shutting off of food, water, electricity, medicine, and fuel, in the certainty that this will render Gaza uninhabitable, i.e., to complete the ethnic cleansing that has always, since the beginning of the enterprise, in the Zionists’ own words, been the goal.
The peaking of economic vitality is one thing, military impotence still another. The resultant diplomatic flaccidity (or, ineptness; it’s hard to say which) is an almost inevitable concomitant. But it is the moral collapse, obvious for all the world to see, that has cost the U.S. the most, has devastated its capacity to credibly claim to be “the leader of the world.” It believes itself impervious to the dictates of universal moral and ethical standards. It could not be more wrong.
It is impossible to overstate the collapse of U.S. influence and prestige in the world, especially in the Middle East. That is why Suez might be the right analogy for how the U.S. empire has peaked and is now destroying itself. It bumbles along, intoxicated with the childish delusion of its “exceptionalism” and its rosy remembrance of its once-great, glorious past. It is, instead, like a snowball, careening down a mountainside, oblivious of its path, heedless of its destructive, out-of-control nature, and picking up mass and momentum as it hurtles to its own demise. What lies at the bottom is impossible to know. But it will not be pretty.
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US Imperial Dominance Disguised as Democratic Deterrence
As a soaring Pentagon budget allows the American Empire to do what it likes, the rest of the world forced to suffer as a result.
Jan 16, 2023
More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the U.S. Army War College and many other military institutions across the world. A passage from it describing an ultimatum Athens gave a weaker power has stayed with me all these years. And here it is, loosely translated from the Greek: “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.”
Recently, I read the latest National Defense Strategy, or NDS, issued in October 2022 by the Pentagon, and Thucydides’s ancient message, a warning as clear as it was undeniable, came to mind again. It summarized for me the true essence of that NDS: being strong, the United States does what it wants and weaker powers, of course, suffer as they must. Such a description runs contrary to the mythology of this country in which we invariably wage war not for our own imperial ends but to defend ourselves while advancing freedom and democracy. Recall that Athens, too, thought of itself as an enlightened democracy even as it waged its imperial war of dominance on the Peloponnesus. Athens lost that war, calamitously, but at least it did produce Thucydides, a military leader who became a historian and wrote all too bluntly about his country’s hubristic, ultimately fatal pursuit of hegemony.
Imperial military ambitions contributed disastrously to Athens’s exhaustion and ultimate collapse, a lesson completely foreign to U.S. strategists. Not surprisingly, then, you’ll find no such Thucydidean clarity in the latest NDS approved by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In place of that Greek historian’s probity and timeless lessons, the NDS represents an assault not just on the English language but on our very future. In it, a policy of failing imperial dominance is eternally disguised as democratic deterrence, while the greatest “strategic” effort of all goes (remarkably successfully) into justifying massive Pentagon budget increases. Given the sustained record of failures in this century for what still passes as the greatest military power on the planet — Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, of course, but don’t forget Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and indeed the entire $8 trillion Global War on Terror in all its brutality — consider the NDS a rare recent “mission accomplished” moment. The 2023 baseline “defense” budget now sits at $858 billion, $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.
With that yearly budget climbing toward a trillion dollars (or more) annually, it’s easy to conclude that, at least when it comes to our military, nothing succeeds like failure. And, by the way, that not only applies to wars lost at a staggering cost but also financial audits blown without penalty. After all, the Pentagon only recently failed its fifth audit in a row. With money always overflowing, no matter how it may be spent, one thing seems guaranteed: some future American Thucydides will have the material to produce a volume or volumes beyond compare. Of course, whether this country goes the way of Athens — defeat driven by military exhaustion exacerbated by the betrayal of its supposedly deepest ideals leading to an ultimate collapse — remains to be seen. Still, given that America’s war colleges continue to assign Thucydides, no one can say that our military and future NDS writers didn’t get fair warning when it comes to what likely awaits them.
Bludgeoning America with Bureaucratese
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.
That’s a saying I learned early in my career as an Air Force officer, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to discover that it’s the NDS’s guiding philosophy. The document has an almost Alice in Wonderland-like quality to it as words and phrases take on new meanings. China, you won’t be surprised to learn, is a “pacing challenge” to U.S. security concerns; Russia, an “acute threat” to America due to its “unprovoked, unjust, and reckless invasion of Ukraine” and other forms of “irresponsible behavior”; and building “combat-credible forces” within a “defense ecosystem” is a major Pentagon goal, along with continuing “investments in mature, high-value assets” (like defective aircraft carriers, ultra-expensive bombers and fighter jets, and doomsday-promising new ICBMs).
Much talk is included about “leveraging” those “assets,” “risk mitigation,” and even “cost imposition,” a strange euphemism for bombing, killing, or otherwise inflicting pain on our enemies. Worse yet, there’s so much financial- and business-speak in the document that it’s hard not to wonder whether its authors don’t already have at least one foot in the revolving door that could, on their retirement from the military, swing them onto the corporate boards of major defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon.
Perhaps my favorite redefined concept in that NDS lurks in the word “campaigning.” In the old days, armies fought campaigns in the field and generals like Frederick the Great or Napoleon truly came to know the price of them in blood and treasure. Unlike U.S. generals since 1945, they also knew the meaning of victory, as well as defeat. Perish the thought of that kind of campaigning now. The NDS redefines it, almost satirically, not to say incomprehensibly, as “the conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military initiatives aimed at advancing well-defined, strategy-aligned priorities over time.” Huh?
Campaigning, explains the cover letter signed by Secretary of Defense Austin (who won’t be mistaken for Frederick II in his bluntness or Napoleon in his military acuity), “is not business as usual — it is the deliberate effort to synchronize the [Defense] Department’s activities and investments to aggregate focus and resources to shift conditions in our favor.”
Got it? Good!
Of course, who knows what such impenetrable jargon really means to our military in 2023? This former military officer certainly prefers the plain and honest language of Thucydides. In his terms, America, the strong, intends to do what it will in the world to preserve and extend “conditions in our favor,” as the NDS puts it — a measure by which this country has failed dismally in this century. Weaker countries, especially those that are “irresponsible,” must simply suffer. If they resist, they must be prepared for some “cost imposition” events exercised by our “combat-credible forces.” Included in those are America’s “ultimate backstop” of cost imposition… gulp, its nuclear forces.
Again, the NDS is worthy of close reading (however pain-inducing that may be) precisely because the secretary of defense does claim that it’s his “preeminent guidance document.” I assume he’s not kidding about that, though I wish he were. To me, that document is to guidance as nuclear missiles are to “backstops.” If that last comparison is jarring, I challenge you to read it and then try to think or write clearly.
Bringing Clarity to America’s Military Strategy
To save you the trauma of even paging through the NDS, let me try to summarize it quickly in my version — if not the Pentagon’s — of English:
- China is the major threat to America on this planet.
- Russia, however, is a serious threat in Europe.
- The War on Terror continues to hum along successfully, even if at a significantly lower level.
- North Korea and Iran remain threats, mainly due to the first’s growing nuclear arsenal and the second’s supposed nuclear aspirations.
- Climate change, pandemics, and cyberwar must also be factored in as “transboundary challenges.”
“Deterrence” is frequently used as a cloak for the planetary dominance the Pentagon continues to dream of. Our military must remain beyond super-strong (and wildly overfunded) to deter nations and entities from striking “the homeland.” There’s also lots of talk about global challenges to be met, risks to be managed, “gray zone” methods to be employed, and references aplenty to “kinetic action” (combat, in case your translator isn’t working) and what’s known as “exploitable asymmetries.”
Count on one thing: whatever our disasters in the real world, nobody is going to beat America in the jargon war.
Missing in the NDS — and no surprise here — is any sense that war is humanity’s worst pastime. Even the mass murder implicit in nuclear weapons is glossed over. The harshest realities of conflict, nuclear war included, and the need to do anything in our power to prevent them, naturally go unmentioned. The very banality of the document serves to mask a key reality of our world: that Americans fund nothing as religiously as war, that most withering of evils.
Perhaps it’s not quite the banality of evil, to cite the telling phrase political philosopher Hannah Arendt used to describe the thoughts of the deskbound mass-murderers of the Holocaust, but it does have all of war’s brutality expunged from it. As we stare into the abyss, the NDS replies with mind-numbing phrases and terms that wouldn’t be out of place in a corporate report on rising profits and market dominance.
Yet as the military-industrial complex maneuvers and plots to become ever bigger, ever better funded, and ever more powerful, abetted by a Congress seemingly lustful for ever more military spending and weapons exports, hope for international cooperation, productive diplomacy, and democracy withers. Here, for instance, are a few of the things you’ll never see mentioned in this NDS:
- Any suggestion that the Pentagon budget might be reduced. Ever.
- Any suggestion that the U.S. military’s mission or “footprint” should be downsized in any way at all.
- Any acknowledgement that the U.S. and its allies spend far more on their militaries than “pacing challengers” like China or “acute threats” like Russia.
- Any acknowledgment that the Pentagon’s budget is based not on deterrence but on dominance.
- Any acknowledgement that the U.S. military has been far less than dominant despite endless decades of massive military spending that produced lost or stalemated wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
- Any suggestion that skilled diplomacy and common security could lead to greater cooperation or decreased tensions.
- Any serious talk of peace.
In brief, in that document and thanks to the staggering congressional funding that goes with it, America is being eternally spun back into an age of great-power rivalry, with Xi Jinping’s China taking the place of the old Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin’s Russia that of Mao Zedong’s China. Consistent with that retro-vision is the true end goal of the NDS: to eternally maximize the Pentagon budget and so the power and authority of the military-industrial-congressional complex.
Basically, any power that seeks to push back against the Pentagon’s vision of security through dominance is defined as a threat to be “deterred,” often in the most “kinetic” way. And the greatest threat of all, requiring the most “deterrence,” is, of course, China.
In a textbook case of strategic mirror-imaging, the Pentagon’s NDS sees that country and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as acting almost exactly like the U.S. military. And that simply cannot be allowed.
Here’s the relevant NDS passage:
“In addition to expanding its conventional forces, the PLA is rapidly advancing and integrating its space, counterspace, cyber, electronic, and information warfare capabilities to support its holistic approach to joint warfare. The PLA seeks to target the ability of the [U.S.] Joint Force to project power to defend vital U.S. interests and aid our Allies in a crisis or conflict. The PRC [China] is also expanding the PLA’s global footprint and working to establish a more robust overseas and basing infrastructure to allow it to project military power at greater distances. In parallel, the PRC is accelerating the modernization and expansion of its nuclear capabilities.”
How dare China become more like the United States! Only this country is allowed to aspire to “full-spectrum dominance” and global power, as manifested by its 750 military bases scattered around the world and its second-to-none, blue-water navy. Get back to thy place, China! Only “a free people devoted to democracy and the rule of law” can “sustain and strengthen an international system under threat.” China, you’ve been warned. Better not dare to keep pace with the U.S. of A. (And heaven forfend that, in a world overheating in a devastating way, the planet’s two greatest greenhouse gas emitters should work together to prevent true catastrophe!)
Revisiting the Oath of Office
Being a retired U.S. military officer, I always come back to the oath of office I once swore to uphold: “To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Naturally, if China, Russia, or any other country or entity attacks or otherwise directly menaces the U.S., I expect our military to defend this country with all due vigor.
That said, I don’t see China, Russia, or weaker countries like Iran or North Korea risking attacks against America proper, despite breathless talk of world “flashpoints.” Why would they, when any such attack would incur a devastating counterattack, possibly including America’s trusty “backstop,” its nuclear weapons?
In truth, the NDS is all about the further expansion of the U.S. global military mission. Contraction is a concept never to be heard. Yet reducing our military’s presence abroad isn’t synonymous with isolationism, nor, as has become ever more obvious in recent years, is an expansive military structure a fail-safe guarantor of freedom and democracy at home. Quite the opposite, constant warfare and preparations for more of it overseas have led not only to costly defeats, most recently in Afghanistan, but also to the increasing militarization of our society, a phenomenon reflected, for instance, in the more heavily armed and armored police forces across America.
The Pentagon’s NDS is a classic case of threat inflation cloaked in bureaucratese where the “facts” are fixed around a policy that encourages the incessant and inflationary growth of the military-industrial complex. In turn, that complex empowers and drives a “rules-based international order” in which America, as hegemon, makes the rules. Again, as Thucydides put it, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.
Yet, to paraphrase another old book, what does it profit a people to gain the whole world yet lose their very soul? Like Athens before it, America was once a flawed democracy that nevertheless served as an inspiration to many because militarism, authoritarianism, and imperial pretense didn’t drive it. Today, this country is much like Thucydides’s Athens, projecting power ever-outwards in a misbegotten exercise to attain mastery through military supremacy.
It didn’t end well for Athens, nor will it for the United States.
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The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony
The death count resulting from “American Era” U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions.
Feb 22, 2018
There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm's-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power--to the erosion of the United States' superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.
This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essaytitled "How Trump Is Ending the American Era." Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced "America's standing and ability to influence global affairs." He worried that Trump's presidency would leave "America's position in the world stunted" and an "America lacking confidence" on the global stage.
But it isn't just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women's March against Trump) frets that that Trump's "America First" and authoritarian views have the world "looking for leadership elsewhere."
"Could this be it?" Vick asks. "Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?"
I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it "worrisome" that other nations see the U.S. "abdicating its role as the world's leading policeman" under Trump--and that, "given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, U.S. hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time."
For the purposes of this report, I'll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly is) and how he's doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so awful about the end of "the American Era"--the seven-plus decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the "premature" end of the "American Century"?
It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the U.S. would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam's weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to world events.
According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth's people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin.
There is nothing surprising about that vote for anyone who honestly examines the history of "U.S. foreign affairs," to use a common elite euphemism for American imperialism. Still, by far and away world history's most extensive empire, the U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and "troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories." The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet's military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year it increased its "defense" (military empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China's, and nine times higher than Russia's.
Think it's all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. presidents, diplomats and senators?
Do you know any other good jokes?
A Pentagon study released last summer laments the emergence of a planet on which the U.S. no longer controls events. Titled "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World," the study warns that competing powers "seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance" in an increasingly multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to "engage," the Pentagon study reports, "in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, reach influence and impact." What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the endangered U.S.-managed world order was "favorable" to the interests of U.S. and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it favors any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to U.S. interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from U.S. control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand "unimpeded access to the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity." The report recommends a significant expansion of U.S. military power. The U.S. must maintain "military advantage" over all other states and actors to "preserve maximum freedom of action" and thereby "allow U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes," with the "implied promise of unacceptable consequences" for those who defy U.S. wishes.
"America First" is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn't agree with that (to quote President George H.W. Bushafter the first Gulf War in 1991: "What we say goes."
It's nothing new. From the start, the "American Century" had nothing to do with advancing democracy. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that "favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country," according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States' remarkable possession of half the world's capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt that U.S. investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the "liberal" and "dovish" imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in "Policy Planning Study 23," a critical 1948 document:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. ... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. ... We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
The harsh necessity of abandoning "human rights" and other "sentimental" and "unreal objectives" was especially pressing in the global South, what used to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast "undeveloped" periphery of the world capitalist system--Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East--a less than flattering role. It was to "fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market" (actual State Department language) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.
"Democracy" was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Since most people in the "third" or "developing" world had no interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical "idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people" (what U.S. planners called "communism"), Washington's real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least. "Democracy" was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon's coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew Chile's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."
The U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington's approval. The Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a "free market" model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national constitution.
"Since 1945, by deed and by example," the great Australian author, commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago: "The U.S. has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum's histories). Bombing is apple pie." Along the way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of "sovereign" nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage over real or alleged Russian interference in "our" supposedly democratic electoral process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons.
If we "consider only Latin America since the 1950s," writes the sociologist Howard Waitzkin:
[T]he United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently ... the United States has spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.
The death count resulting from "American Era" U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians--including terrified women holding babies in their arms--in South Vietnam was no isolated incident in the U.S. "crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (Noam Chomsky's phrase at the time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that "every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere."
It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one's mind around the extent of the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:
The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America's own leaders. 'Over a period of three years or so, we killed off--what--20 percent of the population,' Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed 'everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.' After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops ... [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.
Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam?
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Some benevolent "world policeman."
The ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in "America Era" did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the "Golden Age" height of the "American Century." In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto's 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as s "the model operation" for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," the officer wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965."
As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, "the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a 'zap list' of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. ... The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called 'the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.' "
"No single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate [Suharto's] massacre."
Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington's approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island's residents.
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the "Highway of Death," where the "global policeman's" forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. 'It was like shooting fish in a barrel,' said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun ... for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. ... 'Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic,' said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. ... U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. ... U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. ... The victims were not offering resistance. ... [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.
The victims' crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America's unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the "war" (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the "Vietnam Syndrome," the reigning political culture's curious term for U.S. citizens' reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: "No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists."
But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton's U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS News' Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first "Persian Gulf War" (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a "price ... worth paying" for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
"The United States," Secretary Albright explained three years later, "is good. We try to do our best everywhere."
In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman--an advocate of the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia--felt free to openly state that the real purpose of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of U.S.-centered global capitalism. "The hidden hand of the market," Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as U.S. bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, "will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
In a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported "victory" in Iraq: "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah."
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, "Incoherent Empire," Michael Mann wrote:
The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 ... [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S. casualties. In April ... military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted ... insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly... [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. ... In November ... [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin's Russian troops had razed it to the ground.
The "global policeman's" deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there.
Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called "a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory." It reflected the same callous mindset behind the Pentagon's early computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: "bug-splat." Uncle Sam's petro-imperial occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi "bugs" (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, "Iraq has been killed. ... [T]he American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century."
Along with death came the ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled "I Helped Create ISIS," Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine, recalled his enlistment in an operation that gave him nightmares more than a decade later:
I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities. ... I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons. ... [T]hose of us in infantry units ... round[ed] up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed. ... Some of them would hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. ... [W]hen they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes. ... After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal.
The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-"global policeman" soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. "You haven't begun to see [all the] ... evil, horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run," Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.
It isn't just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the U.S. thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminds us that:
[Syrian President Assad's] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the U.S., which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the region apart. The U.S. has providedSaudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin.
Chomsky has called Barack Obama's targeted drone assassination program"the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen." The program "officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who happens to be nearby." As Chomsky adds, "It is also a terrorism generating campaign--that is well understood by people in high places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others will want to take revenge."
"We lead the world," presidential candidate Obama explained, "in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. ... America is the last, best hope of earth."
Obama elaborated in his first inaugural address. "Our security," the president said, "emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint"--a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the "Highway of Death" and more.
Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama's rapidly accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. "In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament," the New York Times reported, "the governor of Farah Province ... said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed." According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, "the villagers bought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor's cried, watching that shocking scene." The administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge the "global policeman's" responsibility.
By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology.
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: "Peace prize? He's a killer. ... Obama has only brought war to our country." The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.
Obama was only warming up his "killer" powers. He would join with France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more than 25,000 civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Two years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and activists have been murdered by that regime.
The clumsy and stupid Trump has taken the imperial baton from the elegant and silver-tongued "imperial grandmaster" Obama, keeping the superpower's vast global military machine set on kill. As Newsweek reported last fall, in a news item that went far below the national news radar screen in the age of the endless insane Trump clown show:
According to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars ... through the first seven months of the Trump administration, coalition air strikes have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians. ... Researchers also point to another stunning trend--the 'frequent killing of entire families in likely coalition airstrikes.' In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths of at least 57 women and 52 children in Iraq and Syria. ... In Afghanistan, the U.N. reports a 67 percent increase in civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016.
That Trump murders with less sophistication, outward moral restraint and credible claim to embody enlightened Western values and multilateral commitment than Obama did is perhaps preferable to some degree. It is better for empire to be exposed in its full and ugly nakedness, to speed its overdue demise.
The U.S. is not just the top menace only to peace on Earth. It is also the leading threat to personal privacy (as was made clearer than ever by the Edward Snowden revelations), to democracy (the U.S. funds and equips repressive regimes around the world) and to a livable global natural environment (thanks in no small part to its role as headquarters of global greenhouse gassing and petro-capitalist climate denial).
The world can be forgiven, perhaps, if it does not join Eliot Cohen and Karl Vick in bemoaning the end of the "American Era," whatever Trump's contribution to that decline, which was well underway before he entered the Oval Office.
Ordinary Americans, too, can find reasons to welcome the decline of the American empire. As Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: "The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within."
The Pentagon system functions as a great form of domestic corporate welfare for high-tech "defense" (empire) firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon--this while it steals trillions of dollars that might otherwise meet social and environmental needs at home and abroad. It is a significant mode of upward wealth distribution within "the homeland."
The biggest costs have fallen on the many millions killed and maimed by the U.S. military and allied and proxy forces in the last seven decades and before. The victims include the many U.S. military veterans who have killed themselves, many of them haunted by their own participation in sadistic attacks and torture on defenseless people at the distant command of sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce U.S. hegemony by any and all means deemed necessary.
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