Caitlin Johnstone, US FOREIGN POLICY IS A WAR ON DISOBEDIENCE
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.
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.
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 doesdepend
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.
___________________
The
best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the
stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Please follow and like us:
No comments:
Post a Comment