There
are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish,
racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White
House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone
on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline
of U.S. global power—to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and
the emergence of a more multipolar world.
This
criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the
leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush
administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essaytitled “How
Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump
had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He
worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world
stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage.
But it
isn’t just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump
is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the
liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote
in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017
Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and
authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.”
“Could
this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just
72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36
months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?”
I
recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal
American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and
instructive volume, the author finds it “worrisome” that other nations see the
U.S. “abdicating its role as the world’s leading policeman” under Trump—and
that, “given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, U.S.
hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time.”
For the
purposes of this report, I’ll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in
fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly is) and how
he’s doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so
awful about the end of “the American Era”—the seven-plus decades of U.S. global
economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why
should the world mourn the “premature” end of the “American Century”?
It
would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically
cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the U.S.
would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam’s
weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to
world events.
According
to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted
across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research
(WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the
United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted
top threat by a wide margin.
There
is nothing surprising about that vote for anyone who honestly examines the
history of “U.S. foreign affairs,” to use a common elite euphemism for American
imperialism. Still, by far and away world history’s most extensive empire, the
U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread across
more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about
160 foreign countries and territories.” The U.S. accounts for more than 40
percent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic
nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times
over. Last year it increased its “defense” (military empire) spending, which
was already three times higher than China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s.
Think
it’s all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with
the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. presidents, diplomats and senators?
Do you
know any other good jokes?
A Pentagon study released last summer
laments the emergence of a planet on which the U.S. no longer controls events.
Titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World,” the
study warns that competing powers “seek a new distribution of power and
authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S.
dominance” in an increasingly multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller
players like Iran and North Korea have dared to “engage,” the Pentagon study
reports, “in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority,
reach influence and impact.” What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues,
because the endangered U.S.-managed world order was “favorable” to the
interests of U.S. and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational
corporations.
Any
serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it favors any
other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to U.S.
interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from U.S.
control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly its
European NATO partners) must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to the air,
sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite
their security and prosperity.” The report recommends a significant expansion
of U.S. military power. The U.S. must maintain “military advantage” over all
other states and actors to “preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby
“allow U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway
over outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of
unacceptable consequences” for those who defy U.S. wishes.
“America
First” is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that Uncle Sam owns
the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn’t
agree with that (to quote President George H.W. Bushafter the
first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.”
It’s
nothing new. From the start, the “American Century” had nothing to do with
advancing democracy. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and
over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install
governments that “favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital,
production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country,”
according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States’ remarkable possession of
half the world’s capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt
that U.S. investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the
basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the
“liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold
War architect George F. Kennan explained in “Policy Planning Study 23,” a critical 1948
document:
We have
about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this
situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real
task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will
permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to
dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have
to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should
cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the
raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off
when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are
then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
The
harsh necessity of abandoning “human rights” and other “sentimental” and
“unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the global South, what used to
be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast “undeveloped”
periphery of the world capitalist system—Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia
and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East—a less
than flattering role. It was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw
materials and a market” (actual State Department language) for the
great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its
satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of
industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of
U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as
prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on capitalist
principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.
“Democracy”
was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when
it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Since
most people in the “third” or “developing” world had no interest in neocolonial
subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence
officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct
responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what U.S. planners called
“communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad
was strictly qualified, to say the least. “Democracy” was suitable to the U.S.
as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S.
investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. It had to be
abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those
investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any
significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded national security
adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970,
three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew
Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: “I don’t
see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the
irresponsibility of its own people.”
The
U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of
thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington’s approval. The Yankee
superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers
to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a “free market” model and to help Chile
write capitalist oligarchy into its national
constitution.
“Since
1945, by deed and by example,” the great Australian author, commentator and
filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago:
“The U.S. has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30
liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie.” Along the
way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of “sovereign”
nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage
over real or alleged Russian interference in “our” supposedly democratic electoral
process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted
to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons.
If we
“consider only Latin America since the 1950s,” writes the sociologist Howard Waitzkin:
[T]he
United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups
to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile,
Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with
military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua,
and Bolivia. More recently … the United States has spent tax dollars to finance
and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and
Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected
presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State
in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization
in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.
The
death count resulting from “American Era” U.S. foreign policy runs well into
the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and
allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on
Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March
16, 1968, when U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed
civilians—including terrified women holding babies in their arms—in South
Vietnam was no isolated incident in the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia”
(Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was
charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that “every unit of
brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere.”
It is
difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery
Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global
supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an
early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal
three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post
years ago:
The bombing
was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own
leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of
the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command
during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk,
a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States
bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of
another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric
and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and
destroying crops … [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North
Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear
forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.
Gee,
why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam?
This
ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five
years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of
thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to
stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Some
benevolent “world policeman.”
The
ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in “America Era” did not always require direct
U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the
“Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed
dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist
sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations
officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as s
“the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically
elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA
forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean
military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia
in 1965.”
As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the U.S.
embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist
party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. …
The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had
called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in
south-east Asia.’ ”
“No
single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel
Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate
[Suharto’s] massacre.”
Two
years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from
Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of
East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass
rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
Among
the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle
East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the
“Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of
thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27,
1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
U.S. planes
trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear,
and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting
fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway,
Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and
men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was
strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every
truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. …
‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major
Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs
happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs.
… U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were
killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial
traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims
were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of
thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.
The
victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a
dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President
George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to
demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the
post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington.
Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided
imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning
political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S.
troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Noam
Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to
maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance
to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for
Washington sadists.”
But
Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in early
1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton’s U.S. Secretary of State Madeline
Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000
Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first
“Persian Gulf War” (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a “price …
worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
“The
United States,” Secretary Albright explained three years
later, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
In the
years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however,
American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman—an advocate of the
criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia—felt free to openly state that the real purpose
of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of U.S.-centered global
capitalism. “The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in
March 1999, as U.S. bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, “will never work
without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,
the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force,
Navy and Marine Corps.”
In
a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama
gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his
candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity
to say the following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported
“victory” in Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved.
They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of
Fallujah.”
It was
a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site
of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of
thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the
practical leveling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and
November. By one account, “Incoherent Empire,” Michael Mann
wrote:
The U.S.
launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of
2004 … [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S.
casualties. In April … military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted …
insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the
casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly… [reflecting
an] intention to kill civilians generally. … In November … [U.S.] aerial
assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this
time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then
went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like
the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin’s Russian troops had razed it to the
ground.
The
“global policeman’s” deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in
Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and
cancer there.
Fallujah
was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion
that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left
Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called “a disaster
zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” It reflected the
same callous mindset behind the Pentagon’s early computer program name for
ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: “bug-splat.” Uncle Sam’s petro-imperial
occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi “bugs” (human beings).
According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in
December 2007, “Iraq has been killed. … [T]he American occupation has been more
disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth
century.”
Along
with death came the ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled “I Helped Create ISIS,” Vincent Emanuele, a
former U.S. Marine, recalled his enlistment in an operation that gave him
nightmares more than a decade later:
I think
about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift
detention facilities. … I vividly remember the marines telling me about
punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember
the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each
other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing
them with batons. … [T]hose of us in infantry units … round[ed] up Iraqis
during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and
throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids
collapsed to their knees and wailed. … Some of them would hold hands while
marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. … [W]hen they were
released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the
middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes. … After
we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our
more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or
ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis
would run, still crying from their long ordeal.
The
award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of
classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-“global policeman”
soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of
the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “You haven’t begun to see [all the] … evil, horrible
things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras
run,” Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the
summer of 2014.
It
isn’t just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the
Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the U.S. thanks
to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian
Dan Lazare reminds us that:
[Syrian
President Assad’s] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the U.S.,
which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf
and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the
region apart. The U.S. has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its
war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood
by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic
protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove
with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a
once thriving country to ruin.
Chomsky
has called Barack Obama’s targeted drone assassination program“the most
extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” The program
“officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might
someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who happens to be
nearby.” As Chomsky adds, “It is also a terrorism generating campaign—that is
well understood by people in high places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen
village, and maybe a couple of other people who are standing there, the chances
are pretty high that others will want to take revenge.”
“We
lead the world,” presidential candidate Obama explained, “in battling immediate
evils and promoting the ultimate good. … America is the last, best hope of
earth.”
Obama
elaborated in his first inaugural address. “Our security,” the president said,
“emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the
tempering qualities of humility and restraint”—a fascinating commentary on
Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the “Highway of
Death” and more.
Within
less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s rapidly accumulating record
of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk.
Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk
were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to
outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times reported, “the
governor of Farah Province … said that as many as 130 civilians had been
killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, “the villagers
bought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to
prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor’s cried,
watching that shocking scene.” The administration refused to issue an apology
or to acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility.
By
telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired
a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an
ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people
of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full
presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more
than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology.
Reflecting
on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: “Peace
prize? He’s a killer. … Obama has only brought war to our country.” The man
spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the
bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed,
witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.
Obama
was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with France and other
NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more than 25,000
civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on
Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis
since World War II.
Two
years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a
murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and
activists have been murdered by that regime.
The
clumsy and stupid Trump has taken the imperial baton from the elegant and
silver-tongued “imperial grandmaster” Obama, keeping the
superpower’s vast global military machine set on kill. As Newsweek reported last fall, in a news item
that went far below the national news radar screen in the age of the endless
insane Trump clown show:
According
to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars … through the first
seven months of the Trump administration, coalition air strikes have killed
between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians. … Researchers also point to another stunning
trend—the ‘frequent killing of entire families in likely coalition airstrikes.’
In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths of at least 57 women and 52
children in Iraq and Syria. … In Afghanistan, the U.N. reports a 67 percent increase
in civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in the first six months of 2017
compared to the first half of 2016.
That
Trump murders with less sophistication, outward moral restraint and credible
claim to embody enlightened Western values and multilateral commitment than
Obama did is perhaps preferable to some degree. It is better for empire to be
exposed in its full and ugly nakedness, to speed its overdue demise.
The
U.S. is not just the top menace only to peace on Earth. It is also the leading
threat to personal privacy (as was made clearer than ever by the Edward Snowden
revelations), to democracy (the U.S. funds and equips repressive regimes around
the world) and to a livable global natural environment (thanks in no small part
to its role as headquarters of global greenhouse gassing and petro-capitalist
climate denial).
The
world can be forgiven, perhaps, if it does not join Eliot Cohen and Karl Vick
in bemoaning the end of the “American Era,” whatever Trump’s contribution to
that decline, which was well underway before he entered the Oval
Office.Ordinary Americans, too, can find reasons to welcome the decline of the
American empire. As Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: “The costs of
empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its
profits revert to a few within.”
The
Pentagon system functions as a great form of domestic corporate welfare for
high-tech “defense” (empire) firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and
Raytheon—this while it steals trillions of dollars that might otherwise meet
social and environmental needs at home and abroad. It is a significant mode of
upward wealth distribution within “the homeland.”
The biggest costs have fallen
on the many millions killed and maimed by the U.S. military and allied and
proxy forces in the last seven decades and before. The victims include the many
U.S. military veterans who have killed themselves, many of them haunted by
their own participation in sadistic attacks and torture on defenseless people
at the distant command of sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce
U.S. hegemony by any and all means deemed necessary.