If one reads the likes of Robert Parry, Paul Craig Roberts, Mike Whitney and Pepe Escobar they're fully up on the reality that's happening in the world. Unfortunately that's not most Americans.
These writers expose the mad neo-con led deviancy that has captured "official" Washington driving US militarism since the end of the cold war making the US the most dangerous entity in the world.
Don't tell this to most Americans whose acquiescence permits "official" Washington to do anything it wants i.e. initiate wars and occupations, kill innocents in drone strikes and missile attacks, commit torture, initiate coups and false flag operations and now cold war II against Russia and China, two states with nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the US.
To those who see the collusion of the corporate MSM with the government it serves, the neo-cons who appear regularly in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and New York Times as well as appearing regularly as so called "knowledgeable" talking heads on nightly and weekly "news" (propaganda?) programs, all ensconced in beltway think tanks that are underwritten by the large defense contractors who thrive on the endless cycle of war, it's all simply madness; though presented by these propagandists as the truth to the people.
Though not a cabal of conspirators, it is a web of like minded misanthropes whose venal tentacles have reached into every institution in America-Congress, state houses and local governments, public schools, universities and faculties accepting government and corporate grants, phone and internet companies working with the NSA, popular culture with movies like the recent "American Sniper" and earlier "Zero Dark Thirty" et al. It's all part of the indoctrination of everyone from cradle to grave in America, exposed to the incessant cacophony of propaganda that keeps the public compliant and passively indifferent. Hannah Arendt put it succinctly, "A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations with images often dominated by violence and pornography, sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment catering to America's prescient fascination with the tawdry, cruel and deadening sense of self".
It is tyranny but unrecognized as such by most of the people. To them it's still "God bless America".
Think about it; the politicos who took the oath to defend the Constitution have betrayed that trust, are in league with the military/industrial complex-which President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech in 1961-making it a triad that has usurped control of the country.
They have bled the country dry compiling $trillions in debt that can never be repaid with a policy of endless war that feeds the maw of the defense industry and the sycophantic cohorts that genuflect before it.
American's are fed this indoctrination couched and masked in innocent sounding terms, genocide of the native peoples became "Manifest Destiny", the "natural expansion of the country westward to the Pacific, the War Department became the Department of Defense, freedom of the press descended into an un-official organ of the state, unregulated market capitalism revealed itself through its "masters of the universe" speculators as nothing more than perpetrators of financial ruin for those pension funds, cities and countries who trusted them but escaped accountability by taking public tax money through government "bailouts", another innocent sounding term which was no more than "legalized" theft. The rule of law became whatever the "unitary executive" said it was, but kept secret for reasons of national security. These are just a few of the mountain of deceptive lies fed to the people revealing an "official" Washington beyond redemption.
It seems incredible considering their recent totalitarian pasts that Russia and China, who have boldly resisted US hegemony are spearheading the thrust for massive economic development in the world with the SCO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, AIIB, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, EEU, Eurasian Economic Union, The BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Bank, OBOR, one belt, one road project, a 4000 mile high speed rail route between China and the west. It is they, not the US that the world must rely on for peace and stability. Sadly, that's the reality most Americans are oblivious to.
To the rest of the world all the US represents is instability, hegemony and war.