NOURNEWS/NORTH CAROLINA - As a long-time observer and with no stash of insider information and no affiliations with Power or powerful interests anywhere but who over 50 years has been on occasion in and out of the Middle East including several Arab countries and Apartheid Israel, one has at this particularly fraught time drawn a few conclusions even if they are not original.
For one, the U.S. now seems to be embedded in an irreversible, self-inflicted decline (from what it has been for decades as the world hegemon) … unless Joe Biden and successors, if any are in future even possible, can manage to ignite positive perceptions of the country by positive deeds and realignments overseas.
The initial mistake after World War 2 was allowing the Military Industrial Complex to expand to dominate the U.S. economy while broad U.S. industrial might narrowed and the economy became financialized. The Vietnam War was the initial gross debacle based on lies, and then along came the failures of Presidents Reagan and Clinton (witnessing the fall of the Soviet Union) to capitalize on its apparent world economic and military hegemony by choosing to attempt to amplify and boost both even further by unnatural, destructive militarism.
In the waning years of the 20th century so-called leaders in the U.S. looking ahead saw that other countries such as China, a resurgent Russia and others, even Iran, were beginning to assert their own economic power and influence and sovereignty. What might far better have occurred was the solidification of U.S. leadership by natural, humanistic, non-military means whereby the U.S. might have become a generous benefactor literally sharing finite leadership with others, especially rivals, in the realization that it did not have to dominate absolutely but could extend the stage to and with other countries in the knowledge that their own prosperity would reflect back on the U.S. and permit a shared world leadership to flourish, too. And where a balanced resolution of disputes dominated generally by order of, say, an empowered United Nations organization capable of enforcing peaceful and mostly positive, healthy relations between diverse nations.
At exactly the time, say around 2000, when the U.S. realized or projected that China and Russia and other countries such as Iran were likely to become bigger competitors for influence by virtue of their own advances and resources, the U.S. government literally began to go wild with paranoia and greed.
The immediate result then was 9/11 as most likely a staged event to justify the so-called War on Terror which itself has fostered a worse terror, particularly in West Asia, and which in fact has been and remains a bloody (and failing) effort by the U.S. to maintain exclusive dominance in world affairs. The U.S. came up with the insane notion, boosted by Zionist demands, that by destroying or trying to destroy a number of other Mideast nations, including Iraq and Libya and of late even Syria and Iran, it might prevail with its belligerent push for further dominance. The U.S. made or boosted alliances, particularly in the Middle East, with bad and equally sorry actors such as Apartheid Israel and Saudi Arabia, neither of which are “democratic” and which, along with some other countries, exhibit the worst of human impulses exactly at odds with alleged (and long unsupported) “American” ideals of fair play and behavioral decency. In Israel for example, B’tselem, that country’s leading human rights group, has unequivocally and just recently labeled Israel a full-blown Apartheid state, not to mention Israel’s continued attacks on its neighbors such as Syria.
Thus we have arrived at 2021 and a world, and a West Asia, but especially a United States, in social and political disarray as it faces deep internal divisions that were embarrassingly unveiled on January 6 with the attempt by insurrectionists around the Capitol to nullify the November elections and ensure Donald Trump’s second term.
Does Washington even understand a tiny bit what a joke the U.S. appears to be overseas a few days before Biden’s inauguration with over 20,000 troops installed around the Capitol to try to obviate civil disorder and violence on January 20th in the wake of Trump’s exit towards a well-deserved oblivion? It must! This and other problems have given the U.S. aspects of a burgeoning Banana republic, not the leader of the so-called “free world”.
Joe Biden, a possibly senile old man with a past checkered by earlier assents for bad decisions as a Senator and as a Vice President (like the wars on Iraq, and Afghanistan and the proxy war on Syria) is not likely to heal the divisions inside the U.S. going forward without the adoption of serious, overt humility, recognition and even apologies for the vast policy errors of the past 20 years along with a wholesale reorientation of the U.S. towards the honest promotion of true justice at home and abroad.
The U.S. has brought itself to a point where it teeters in many ways, including the financial, towards various forms of bankruptcy such that with any further misguided attempts to double down on failed policies to ward off a relative (if not absolute) collapse could make matters quite worse both internally and across the world. Israel, a chief U.S. ally, has been lately threatening that if Biden is successful in resurrecting the JCPOA, it will attack Iran on its own – counter to U.S. interests. Iran would of course attempt to defend itself and it’s unlikely the Biden Administration would have the courage not to join a war on Iran, which has in justifiable defense promised to react to any attack. This is the great danger of the U.S. having a faux ally such as Israel.
Not since World War 2 has humanity at large been so at risk, and one can posit largely because of the manner in which the U.S. has operated with arrogance and military pursuits in the past two decades especially. The historical (and still extant) stains of racism (and ethnic cleansing inside the U.S. in the 19th century) and xenophobia projected abroad has been in effect amplified further to a degree in the past years towards other people, other cultures and other polities, especially during Trump’s disastrous tenure in the White House. Average Americans of good conscience and reasonable intelligence tremble at the current situation. Had wisdom prevailed in recent decades it would not have to be so.
NOURNEWS