This month, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organized the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
U.S. President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere, "Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela" would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies.
At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning a visit to Saudi-Arabia - a self-described theocracy. Mexico's President Andre's Manuel LÃ ³pez Obrador questioned the legitimacy of Biden's exclusionary stance, and so Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras, refused to come to the event. As it turned out, the summit was a fiasco.
Down the road, over a hundred organizations hosted a People's Summit for Democracy, where thousands of people from across the hemisphere gathered to celebrate the actual democratic spirit which emerges from the struggles of peasants and workers, students and feminists, and all the people who are excluded from the gaze of the powerful.
At this gathering, the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela joined in online to celebrate this festival of democracy and to condemn the weaponization of democratic ideals by the United States and its allies.
Next year, 2023, will be the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. asserted its hegemony over the American hemisphere. The malign spirit of the Monroe Doctrine not only continues but has now been extended by the U.S. government into a kind of Global Monroe Doctrine.
In order to assert this preposterous claim on the entire planet, the United States has pursued a policy to "weaken" what it sees as "near peer rivals," namely China and Russia.
In July, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, along with Monthly Review and No Cold War", will produce a booklet on the reckless military escalation by the U.S. government against those whom it sees as its adversaries, mainly China and Russia. It will include essays by John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, Deborah Veneziale, a journalist based in Italy, and John Ross, a member of the No Cold War collective. In the vein of that booklet, 'No Cold War' has also produced Briefing No. 3, "Is the United States Preparing for War with Russia and China?" on Washington's sabre-rattling and alarming march toward nuclear primacy.
The war in Ukraine demonstrates a qualitative escalation of the United States' willingness to use military force. In recent decades, the U.S. launched wars on developing countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia.
In these campaigns, the U.S. knew it enjoyed overwhelming military superiority and that there was no risk of a nuclear retaliation. However, in threatening to bring Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the U.S. was prepared to risk crossing what it knew to be the "red lines" of the nuclear armed state of Russia. This raises two questions: why has the U.S. undertaken this escalation, and how far is the U.S. now prepared to go in the use of military force against not only the Global South but major powers such as China or Russia?
Military Force to Compensate for Economic Decline
The answer to "why" is clear: the U.S. has lost in peaceful economic competition to developing countries in general, and China in particular.
According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2016 China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest economy. As of 2021, China accounted for 19 percent of the global economy, compared to the U.S. at 16 percent. This gap is only growing wider, and by 2027, the IMF projects that China's economy will outsize the U.S. by nearly 30 percent.
However, the U.S. has maintained unrivalled global military supremacy, it's military expenditure is larger than the next nine highest-spending countries combined. Seeking to maintain unipolar global dominance, the U.S. is increasingly substituting peaceful economic competition with military force.
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