From Palestine Chronicle
Iraq was attacked by all US Presidents since George H. Bush in 1991.
(Image by (Photo: Zoriah.net)) Details DMCA
No matter how hard White House officials try, they cannot construct a coherent "Trump doctrine" that would make sense amid the chaos that has afflicted US foreign policy in recent months.
However, this chaos is not entirely the making of President Donald Trump alone.
Since 1945, the United States has vied for total global leadership. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, gave it complete global hegemony.
The US became the force that stabilized and destabilized any region in the world, as it saw fit -- which always served the interests of the US and its allies.
Political opinions and ideological strands in the US, but also globally, were formulated around this reality. Often unwittingly, we are all pushed into one of two categories: pro- or anti-American.
For decades, many critical voices warned of an uncontested unipolar world. Conformists fought back against the "un-American," and "unpatriotic" few, who dared break rank.
In the late 1980's, Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of history," now that the US and its western allies managed to defeat communism. He prophesized the end of "sociocultural evolution,' where a new form of a single human government can be formed.
It appeared, however fleetingly, that all the obstacles before the American vision of total domination have been subdued. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times imagined such a world in his bestselling book, "The World is Flat."
He wrote, with the wisdom of a sage and the triumphalism of a victorious war general, "Communism was a great system for making people equally poor -- in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich."
But history never ended. It just went through a new cycle of conflicts, problems and alliances of enemies and foes. Unchecked consumerism was hardly a triumph for the neoliberal order, but a defeat of a delicately balanced planet, where global warming emerged as the world's greatest enemy. American military power could hardly wait to rearrange the Arab world, as once promised, by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Since then, the so-called "New Middle East," has become a horrifying nightmare that traversed many countries and destabilized the entire region.
Worse still, the US economy has crashed, taking down with it the global economy and reducing some of the smallest, most vulnerable countries into abject poverty.
The rise of Donald Trump to power is, in fact, an outcome of the chaotic years that preceded his advent.
By the end of his second term, former President Barack Obama spoke of his success in stabilizing the economy and creating more jobs in a process of swift recovery, contrary to real evidence.
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