US Foreign Policy Is A War On
Disobedience
Caitlin Johnstone
July 6, 2019
In an excellent new essay titled
“We’re
Not the Good Guys — Why Is American Aggression Missing in Action?“, Tom
Engelhardt criticizes the way western media outlets consistently describe the
behavior of disobedient nations like Iran as “aggressions”, but never use that
label for the (generally antecedent and far more egregious) aggressions of the
United States.
“When it comes to Washington’s
never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that,
in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to
find in such media coverage will be ‘American aggression,'” Engelhardt writes.
He then asks a very fair question:
“So here’s the strange thing,
on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on
which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on
which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned
aerial drones conduct assassination
strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been
fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from
Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it
chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq),
is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an ‘aggressor’ anywhere?”
In other words, does it really
make sense for any nation to be able to take over the world and then look up
with Bambi-eyed innocence saying “I was attacked! Completely out of the blue!”
whenever any government pushes back on this? If you ask the empire’s narrative
makers, the answer is a resounding yes.
The U.S. has military forces
in over a hundred countries. So why won't the mainstream media call us an
aggressor? http://bit.ly/2JghkPk
This important discrepancy is
as close as we’ll ever get to an honest admission from the political/media
class that they consider empire-building and endless war to be normal, and any
opposition to it freakish. All nations are meant to submit to America’s use of
military and economic force upon them, and if they don’t, that’s “aggression”.
The official position of the political/media class is that the US is a normal
nation with the same rights and status as any other, but the unofficial
position is that this is an empire, and nations will either obey or be
destroyed.
It’s a machine with the same
values as Napoleon or Hitler or Genghis Khan or any other imperialist conqueror
from ages past; the only difference is that it pretends not to be the thing
that it is. The US markets itself as an upholder of rules-based liberal
democratic values, even though it consistently flouts international law, wages
imperialist wars of aggression, imprisons journalists, crushes dissent and uses
propaganda just as much as any totalitarian regime. The only difference is that
it does so in a way that enables its supporters to pretend that that’s not
what’s actually happening.
Forget the “war on
terror”. If US foreign policy were honest it would unite all its war
propaganda sloganeering under a single banner: the War on Disobedience.
After the end of the first
cold war there was much celebration. At long last! The USSR was no longer a
threat, so America could finally stop pouring its resources into the nuclear
arms race and finally just relax and start acting like a normal country in the
world. But it didn’t take long after the Berlin Wall fell for the neoconservatives
to find their way into key points of influence and steer US foreign
policy into the agenda of ensuring that America never again risks losing its
status as the world’s only superpower. Which necessarily meant expanding the
use of military and economic force to a level never previously seen.
So now you’ve got this weird
dynamic where the US is constantly working to make sure that no other countries
surpass it and gain the ability to treat America the way America treats other
countries. That’s all US military and economic agendas in a nutshell right now.
The nation that poses the
greatest threat to US hegemony is of course China. Most of the US war machine’s
aggressions right now are ultimately built around securing resource control and
geostrategic dominance to prevent China from surpassing it without attacking
China itself. Any time you see the US ramping up hostilities toward a given
nation, just do a search for that nation’s name plus China (or plus “Belt and Road
Initiative“), and you’ll usually find a strong connection.
So the USSR was simply
replaced with China, and the nuclear arms race was simply replaced with greatly
increased global military expansionism. The plutocrat-owned media and the
plutocrat-owned political class have fallen right in line with this and
normalized the idea of US imperialism around the world. The cold war never
ended, it just shifted its narrative and focus. Neoconservatism never went
away, it just went mainstream.
U.S. Foreign Policy for
Dummies:
But the thing about neocons
and the rest of the increasingly indistinguishable proponents of American
imperialism is that their underlying thesis is actually fundamentally correct:
the US empire does depend on endless war in order to maintain its
dominance over other nations. America doesn’t have the leverage to stay on top
using economic prowess alone; it requires both the carrot of US military
backing and the stick of US military aggressions. War is the only adhesive
holding the US-centralized empire together, and the more its economic dominance
slips away in the face of China’s economic rise, the more ham-fisted and
desperate its warmongering is necessarily going to get.
This is completely
unsustainable, especially in a world where the other major nuclear weapons
force, Russia, is on China’s side of the new cold war dynamic. We’ve all now
found ourselves trapped on a planet made of limited resources with two major
alliances trying to out-consume and out-resource control each other, while
hurtling toward a major military confrontation between nuclear superpowers.
This puts us on a direct trajectory toward either nuclear annihilation or
ecosystemic collapse in the near term. This means the argument that America
needs to maintain its dominance at all cost is no longer a viable one, since
that cost will almost certainly be everything in the world.
So we’ve all got some
important questions to ask ourselves, haven’t we? Do we desire to stay in the
familiar US-controlled world order at the price of omnicide and ecocide, or do
we wish to roll the dice and bet on humanity instead? Do we wish to stay the
course because it preserves a status quo that is all we’ve ever known, or do we
take a leap of faith on the possibility that we can de-escalate all
geopolitical enmity and move into collaboration with each other and with our
ecosystem?
This choice right here is why
I write so much about mankind’s need to transcend its old conditioning patterns
and move into something wildly unprecedented. Our current fear-based mentality
makes a populism-driven leap of faith into transcendence impossible and ensures
that we remain on an oligarch-driven trajectory toward extinction. I firmly
believe that we have the freedom to either pass or fail this test, but we don’t
have the freedom not to take it. We’ll transcend our old conditioning patterns
which we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors who lived in a wildly
different world from the one we’ve created, or we will perish. It’s an A or B
choice, but the choice is ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment