Who’s in Charge of the World and How?
Just who are the most retrograde elements in the United States government to dictate policy to sovereign countries in the rest of the world? Where does their authority–and it appears to be absolute–come from? Who are they to lay down unilateral trade bans and tariffs, promote “regime change,” grab sovereign funds in American banks, or sponsor false-flag operations, proxy wars, torture venues, and far-right regimes worldwide? Or to propagate their climate-change criminal negligence?
Are they duly empowered to decide who can buy Venezuelan or Iranian oil, or to impose their grim version of “democracy” all over the world by means of armed drones? Of course, they’re not. All of this supposed authority they have simply arrogated to themselves, like greedy children grabbing all the toys in the nursery. They’re having us on, running rampant across the world while at the same time denouncing the very policies they regularly practice themselves. They deplore Russian signals intelligence at the same time the NSA is tapping the telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an important European ally.
All of this bullying is intolerable by any stretch of the imagination, but they think they can get away with it based on their “unique superpower” status the “American exceptionalism,” the “manifest destiny” of the 21st century. They declare their presumed omnipotence to the four winds. Are they presuming too much? Time will tell. In the meantime, not-insubstantial nations around the world are noticing that the United States has become a cancer on the planet, and it’s metastasizing.
World Domination is a Tricky Business, Sooner or Later You Get a Bad Reputation
That “later” has already arrived for the United States. And in historic terms it hasn’t been that long in coming. I would date it from President Truman’s double atomic bombing of Japan. Why double? It was because the Americans had two models of nuclear bombs, the Little Boy, dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the Fat Man, loosed three days later on Nagasaki, and they wanted to try them both. Never mind the inevitable messiness this double-dip would cause. With the Japanese military divided and their government tottering, was it really necessary to nuke Japan? Many authorities think not. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1963 memoir, Mandate for Change, criticized the use of the atomic bombs, saying they weren’t necessary to force the surrender of Japan.
Then came the American-dominated Cold War against the Russians and socialist governments around the world. The Russians had been loyal allies during World War II and assumed the vast majority of human casualties among the Allies, and on their own ground. What made the Americans and the British turn on them? At bottom, it was Truman and Churchill’s infirm fear of Communism or any other political system that smacked of collectivism. Why fear? Because they suspected that a large part of the world would prefer collective solutions for their countries rather than colonialism or predatory capitalism. Both Truman and Churchill are dead but their fear lives on and continues to spread untold grief.
After the CIA and NATO were formed at the end of the 1940s the same team of American intelligence officers who had been responsible for dirty tricks during and immediately after the war was assigned to carry on along the same lines in peacetime, then with a vastly bigger budget and wider remit. They were–and remain–the executive advance of America’s world-takeover initiative with significant actions in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Far East, including, of course, Viet Nam. There, two old men, a brilliant general and a well-loved political and military leader made history.
The former was Vo Nguyen Giap, acknowledged by military historians as one of the 20th century’s most brilliant generals. Though he had no formal military education, he learned from the masters in South China during the Communist revolution there, and his resolve was stiffened by the fact that his wife had died in a French prison. Giap was, and still is, revered by his countryman. He lived to the age of 102, dying in 2013. The latter was Ho Chi Minh, who, in his youth, had been a world traveler, some say including a stint as a cook (or dishwasher) in an English hotel. Ho went on to become a beloved elder statesman and one of history’s most renowned revolutionaries. Together they had led a tiny, primitive, and impoverished nation to victory over two of the 20th century’s most advanced–and most rapacious–colonial powers, both of which were guilty of grossly underestimating their enemies.
The US Geopolitical “Coming Out,” a Clear Statement of Intent
The United States’s next leap forward, their “coming out” in the macabre business of world domination was the rise of the PNAC (Project for the New American Century, 1997-2006), a neoconservative think tank and satellite of the American Enterprise Institute, that focused on US foreign policy. The list of its first 25 signatories reads like a rogue’s gallery of American far-right chicken hawks including Elliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol, and Donald Kagan. (Source: Sourcewatch.org)
Their one-page Statement of Principles (June 3, 1997) responds to the question: ” Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?” Their answers harkened back to the Reagan administration’s get-tough approach to foreign affairs and advocated for openers the invasion of Iraq. The clearest expression of neoconservative pretensions in September, 2000, was a PNAC policy document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, that advocated increases in military spending in order to establish what they called a Pax Americana that would reap the rewards of complete military and commercial control of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. This, they said, would be accomplished by the waging of “multiple simultaneous large-scale wars…” The most ominous line from that paper was this: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” (Source: Antiwar.com) Conveniently, that “new Pearl Harbor” took place a year later on September 11, 2001.
Add One Sociopathic President, a Barbarian Cabinet, a Castrated Congress, and Stir
Today this sinister American plot is thickened by a sociopathic President and a cabinet of barbarian know-nothings who conceive their mission as privatizing or destroying essential American institutions one after the other. What about the United States Congress, the ultimate repository of American sovereignty, can’t they intervene? No, their hands are tied. They have long since been bought off by turbid interests. As for saving American institutions, neither the executive branch nor the Congress is very interested, in any case. Some of them are actually convinced that those institutions will soon be redundant. They believe the Apocalypse is nigh and they and their fellow believers are about to be “raptured” by God directly up into Heaven, leaving the rest of us here below to roast in hell.
Maybe they’re right. Metastasis tends to be terminal.
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Trump and All the Rest 