Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to the European Union's foreign affairs chief, recently offered a pertinent historical parallel to consider. She cited the 1956 Suez crisis -- Britain's unsuccessful, if conspiratorial, alliance with France and Israel to militarily topple the nationalist regime of Egypt's President Gamal Abdul Nasser. It is now considered the sunset moment for Britain's imperial power. In the present context, she speculated that the Covid-19 pandemic may prove to be a "Suez moment" for the United States.
Ignoring the warnings of scientists and public-health experts, President Trump threatens to disastrously extend his coronavirus chronology from hell into an increasingly painful future by "reopening" the country too soon. By so doing, he will only accelerate the day when the World Leadership Trophy, held by America since 1946, is handed to the People's Republic of China.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World among many other books. His latest book is Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (Oxford University Press ).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Dilip Hiro
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