Will He Take the Cure?
The United States is unwell, and has been for a long time, at least since they lost the Vietnam war in 1975 to a rag-tag army of funny-looking little yellow people who wore black pyjamas and lived in thatched houses. That was a new low point for Uncle Sam, and his last opportunity to clean up his act, to admit his willful errors and to start taking steps toward rectifying them and compensating the victims.
So what did he do? He doubled down on war and continued his pointless bellicose trajectory around the world. It was as if he lacked any hint of common sense or human decency, as if Sam’s doctrinaire exceptionalism—and his military/industrial/congressional complex—had excepted him from the normal standards of behavior on this planet. He was rich and led the world in war technology. He felt he could afford to flaunt the rest of the world’s code of conduct and supplant it with his own self-interested, fictional “rules-based” game plan. The United States has long used some variation on that plan to implement their world hegemony.
They call it “freedom” and “democracy,” and that, supplemented by generous doses of arm twisting, usually worked. In recent years, however, Sam has found it increasingly complicated to sell the program. With everything so “free,” Sam was perplexed to be losing friends around the world rather than gaining them. New solutions have opened up for less-developed nations, notably hand-in-hand with the Chinese, who put a new respect-based twist on international collaboration and development. That, combined with Uncle Sam’s ill-fated military ventures—in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak, Iran, etc.—changed international relations substantially.
The beginning of Sam’s decline coincided with what appeared to be a major victory—the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991. The Russians were down and out, and Sam was finally alone on the top rung. It was a time for relaxing and enjoying the fruits of victory. The Russians didn’t see it that way, however. For them it was a time to buckle down and get to work. Sam, meanwhile, considered the victory over the Soviet Union as definitive, and felt quite comfortable taking it easy. That was a bad mistake, especially when it happened to coincide with the beginning of the resurgence of China as a world power.
Suddenly a chubby, self-satisfied Uncle Sam found himself confronted by something called “the BRICS,” an association of second-class countries that started to grow like a nasty fungus between his toes. The BRICS group now comprises its original five members—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—but has many other countries waiting in line to join. According to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, that line includes Algeria, Argentina, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan and Indonesia, among others.
President Joe Biden, unaccustomed to such effrontery on the part of second-rate countries, decided to pull rank on Saudi Arabia, for daring to flirt with the BRICS. But it turned out to be the wrong time and place—and person—with whom to get high handed. Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud was not like the elegantly-suited bureaucrats whom Biden could bring to heel with a frown. He was—and is—a prince of the Arabian Desert, who got miffed, joined the BRICS, and started working with them to sink the petro-dollar and begin trading petroleum in solid gold and some non-dollar currencies. Uncle Sam’s economic suzerainty, so exquisitely engineered at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, is about to yield. “Malo, malo,” say the Spanish at times like this.
This complicated development coincided with the onset of the Ukrainian War, which the US had been fermenting at least since the 2014 Maidan coup d’etat in Kiev. More than 100 protestors died in that confrontation, which was stage managed by two of Uncle Sam’s regime-change dwarves, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt. Nuland went so far as to pay cash to a great number of the demonstrators to join the “festivities” in the Maidan Square. The net result of the protest was the ousting of an elected Russian-leaning president, Viktor Yanukovych. According to a timeline elaborated by PBS Newshour, Yanukovych was replaced in a later election by Petro Poroshenko, a pro-West oligarch. U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration signaled interest in helping Poroshenko battle corruption and assigned as its chief envoy for Ukraine none other than Vice President Joe Biden .
According to the London-based magazine, The Spectator (20 February, 2023), “President Barack Obama had put him charge of dealing with the Maidan revolution. Back then, he had a more modest aid package of $58 million to offer – as well as a stern warning to ‘fight the cancer of corruption’. There was more than a whiff of hypocrisy in those words, since at the time Biden was attracting scrutiny over Hunter Biden, his son. Hunter, a drug addict, was then being paid ludicrously well to work for Burisma, a mining company run by the Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, a ‘poster child for corruption’, according to one senior State Department official.”
The diminishing of Uncle Sam’s raw power is a novel—and alarming—situation for the world’s greatest country, which is unused to such geopolitical impertinence. All of Sam’s defaults are defaulting, and he’s not the only one who notices. The entire world is watching. This new and unexpected turn of events, the decline of the single Big Boss in favor of a multi-national world, looks to most of the players like a refreshing change. Though it is followed by a long tail. Sam is unaccustomed to having his decisions questioned, and it makes him irate. (And his ire is legendary, as a quick look at the egregious case of Cuba will confirm.) It’s clear to all concerned that he has to respond in an impressive manner. The question is: how impressive? How far is he willing to go?
We know that American leaders live in a world apart, that they consider themselves valid arbiters of everything that goes on in the world. And when something goes wrong—wrong by their reckoning—they are entitled to respond in the manner they see fit. This is the well-known, “We do whatever the fuck we please,” doctrine, and it has worked fairly well for them ever since the end of World War II, until a gringo-hubris-induced tectonic shift took place that encouraged a few “second rate” countries to reassess their places in the world and—most alarming of all—band together in their own collective interest. The result is the advent of a seemingly inexorable multi-polar world.
Will these developments give rise to an orderly changing of the guard? Probably not. Uncle Sam is more petulant than orderly, more willful than collaborative. We can be almost certain that he will overreact. But how far will that overreaction take him? Too far, I fear. Sam is seriously pissed off, and he has never faced a situation quite like this before. He is obliged to break new ground, to accept new realities. Will he be rash and callous enough to respond with nuclear weapons? That would be unthinkable, but Sam is accustomed to wandering in the dark forest of unthinkability. He has already nuked not one city but two, the second one to test the effectiveness of a bigger atom bomb (the playfully-nicknamed “Fat Boy,”) at a cost of more than 100,000 additional lives. That’s a pretty revealing precedent.
Does the world have a future? That’s up to the whim of a sick, deluded, declining superpower.
Trump and All the Rest 