I mean, am I wrong, or aren't we living in the mess of a world the sole superpower had a major hand in creating and was, once upon a not-so-distant time, all too eager to take credit for? So I find it strange that no one who matters here seems to feel the slightest responsibility for the planet's dismal state. All the politicians, power players, and pundits in Washington who wouldn't have hesitated to take complete credit, had the U.S. achieved anything like its fantasy of a Pax Americana world, couldn't be quicker these days to place the blame for what's actually happened elsewhere.
You know the tale. When it comes to the world's ills, it's Vlad, the Ukrainian Impaler, or Vlad, the Hacker, who's spoiled so much. Among other things, he had, we're told, the temerity to mess with the sacrosanct electoral system of the most democratic country on the planet, a place so pure that its denizens had never heard of such a shocking act -- except, of course, for the scores of times Washington did exactly that to other countries. (Who in the U.S. these days even remembers "the first 9/11"?) The Russian president now gets much of the blame in Washington for the sorry mess of our world, from Eastern Europe and the unsettled NATO alliance to Syria. As for where the rest of the blame lands: it's the Chinese, of course, who've had the nerve to flex their potential great-power muscles by bulking up their military, building fake "islands" in the South China Sea, and claiming parts of that body of water as their own, while not pressuring the North Koreans harder to stand down. It's the Iranians who somehow are responsible for much of the mess in the Middle East, along with various jihadi successors and spin-offs from the original al-Qaeda. They take the rest of the blame for the world of chaos that continues to spread across the Greater Middle East, parts of Africa, and now the Philippines (not to mention the refugees fleeing embattled and desperate lands who are, we are regularly assured, threatening the continental U.S. with disastrous harm).
I don't mean to say that such a crew (refugees excepted) shouldn't bear some of the blame for our disintegrating world, but just remind me: Wasn't the Islamic State born in an American military prison in Iraq? Weren't the Iranian theocrats, those Great-Satan haters, born in the grim crucible of the Shah's rule (and that of his brutal secret police) after the CIA helped hatch a coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of that country in 1953? Didn't Washington ignore promises made to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and others and do its damnedest to move NATO's line of control into parts of the former Soviet empire and associated satellite states?
Didn't the Bush administration lump North Korea with Iraq, a nation it was eager to invade, and Iran, another it planned to take down sooner or later, in the infamous "axis of evil," even though the North Koreans had nothing to do with either of those countries? In the most public manner possible, in a State of the Union address to the nation, the American president linked all three of those countries to terrorism and evil in what was unmistakably a "regime change" package. (If you were eager to convince the North Korean leadership that possessing a nuclear arsenal was the only way to go, that certainly was a good start.) In the process, didn't George W. Bush and his officials functionally shred the Clinton-negotiated agreement by which the North Koreans had indeed frozen their nuclear program, in part by listing that country in its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review "as one of the states that might become the target of a preventive strike"?
And that's just to begin to explore what it meant to be in the world of the sole superpower from 2001 to 2017. Remind me, for example, which country only recently announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the crucial global architecture for protecting the planetary environment, and so humanity's future, from a grim kind of dismemberment?
Who's Going to Sanction Us?
So here's my next question: If you're parceling out blame on this planet of ours, why just dump it on the evil doers? What about us? What about the sole superpower, its changing leadership, and the finest fighting force in the history of the universe? Don't we have any responsibility for the situation we now face globally, from North Korea to the Greater Middle East, Ukraine to Venezuela? Didn't the actions of America's leaders and its national security state have anything to do with the world that called forth the Trumpian wave, which could now swamp so many ships of state? Maybe President Trump can indeed pardon himself (an issue being debated at the moment by constitutional scholars), but who pardoned everyone else who lent a hand, large or small, to the creation of what increasingly looks like a failed world?
Are there no high crimes and misdemeanors for which we Americans are responsible on a planet of the otherwise guilty?
Here's one thing I think about sometimes on bleak nights. I'm sure you remember the way the Bush administration used fraudulent claims about weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, as an excuse to launch an invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and occupy his country. In fact, there was indeed a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq and no one needed to search for it. I'm talking about the U.S. military.
It was also a weapon of destructive creation. It cracked Iraq open, set Shia and Sunni at each others' throats, loosed a grim process of religious "cleansing" there and across the region, and so provided fertile ground for the worst of the worst. Its "successful" invasion was the crucial factor in preparing the way for the birth of al-Qaeda in Iraq and then of the Islamic State in a country where no such organizations had previously existed.
In truth, in every land across the Greater Middle East and Africa where that military has gotten involved in hostilities, from Libya to Iraq, Yemen to Afghanistan, it has left in its wake shaken or failed states, untold numbers of desperate refugees, and spreading terror movements. It has been a major player in a decade and a half of disaster that has helped destabilize significant parts of the planet. And yet when it comes to apportioning blame, the main people tarred with the disaster that's been the war on terror are those who have been made into refugees in its wake, those who, we are told, would be a mortal danger to us, were we to welcome them here.
And while we're at it, it might be worth mentioning one other weapon of mass destruction in our world: the rise to glory of the 1% and the widening inequality chasm that's accompanied their successes. From Ronald Reagan's presidency on, a series of administrations, Republican and Democratic, have presided over a country and a world growing ever more disastrously unequal, as the rich make staggering gains in income and wealth while the poor and working classes labor ever harder for, relatively speaking, ever less. Consider that but another story of devastation on what reputedly was once an American planet.
In such a global context, our Congress has been eager indeed to sanction the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans for their roles in spreading misery, but who's going to sanction us? Honestly, don't you wonder how we got off the hook so easily for the world we swore that we alone would create? Isn't the U.S. responsible for anything? Doesn't anyone even remember?
We now have a president with the strangest demeanor imaginable, a narcissistic bully spouting a kind of rhetoric that eerily echoes the bellicose threats of North Korea. However, like the spreading terror movements and failed states of the Greater Middle East, he should be seen as a spawn of the actions, programs, and dreams of the sole superpower in its self-proclaimed glory and of its plans for a military-enforced global Pax Americana. By the time he's done, President Trump may be responsible for high crimes, including nuclear ones, of a sort that even impeachment wouldn't cover and who, these days, could ever miss his demeanor?
Blame the evil doers for the devastation visiting this planet? Sure thing. But us? Not for a second.
And while you're at it, welcome to the post-American world.
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