But, much of the rest of the world sees the US colossus as the emperor with no clothes, a declining empire that is being challenged economically, where countries trade in their own currency, bypassing the dollar. Examples are the BRICS Development Bank, the AIIB, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the SCO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the EEU, Eurasian Economic Union, OBOR, One Belt, One Road project, a 4000 mile trade route between China and the west.
There's not only the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but other aligned countries such as Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina beginning to trade in their own currencies-outside the dollar which is certainly a challenge to the neo-liberal dollar system of the IMF and World Bank, a system that has brought austerity and misery to countries forced to live under debt obligations that can never be repaid-think Greece now, possibly Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland as possibly next, tethered to faceless, foreign financial overseers.
So is this great colossus about to collapse, sucked into a vortex of its own making? Will it go on limping like some giant elephant-my apologies to the actual elephants in the world-too diseased to carry on and die with a great thud in a bloodless end? We can only hope. Or will it be a nuclear conflagration initiated by it that destroys the world including the great deranged colossus itself?
What is for sure, it can't be redeemed and is beyond reform.
As for hope...it's in the hands of the rest of the world to deal with us at arms length. We're too big to be ignored, but we can't be trusted.
The world needs to go its own way with China and Russia in the lead along with Iran and others mentioned earlier, developing outside the dollar, neo-colonial system letting the US wither under its own unsustainable debt.
As an American it's hard to face this reality. It's my country too. But my country has veered off into complacency, arrogance, hubris and self importance with notions of exceptionalism and being the indispensible country. Who gave us the right to dominate?
What is so hard to reconcile is at the end of WWII, we were the dominant country, whole and intact, unscathed from the destruction of the war.
We could have chosen to be the empathetic, benevolent country, assisting those countries in need that had been devastated by the war. It could have been a worldwide Marshal type Plan helping the world recover from the ravages of the war.
Instead we chose hegemony and world domination. With coups, assassinations, color revolutions, intentionally keeping the world unstable to justify our bloated defense spending and always making sure we had "enemies", first with Communism, now terrorism, to instill fear in the people so they'd support the government against "enemies", real or imagined.
Yeah, that's how I see America folks, my country and yours.
The thing is we weren't vigilant enough to stop the madness especially after IKE warned in his farewell speech be wary of the military/industrial complex.
That was then. Now?
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