It’s time to call a spade a spade. Australian independent Journalist Caitlin johnstone recently wrote an important truth:
The US empire is responsible for most of our world’s problems. It says so much about the strength of the imperial propaganda machine that this isn’t more obvious to more people.
Because of this propaganda that Western audiences have been subjected to for so long, here is a reminder of numbers that speak for themselves:
America has been in 19 wars since World War II, but we will list the death toll from three of the bloodiest conflicts: The Korean War, The Vietnam War and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The total death toll of people killed by American troops in all these wars put together is over 12 million.
The Iraq war casuality count alone makes one nauseate from the indifference and callousness of the US regime. Not only had the 90s sanctions on Iraq taken the lives of 500,000 children, as Secretary Madeleine “It’s Worth It” Albright admitted, but the war itself left almost 1 million dead, with over 7 million starving children, at a cost of US $8 trillion. This money went mostly to the Military Industrial Complex, though it could have been used to build infrastructure in the US, or it could not have been spent at all, but will now burden future generations of Americans and contribute to a looming debt crisis. As researcher Jeffery S. Kaye writes:
The crime of invading Iraq in 2003 would certainly seem to meet the Nuremberg criteria of waging a war of aggression, one of the worst war crimes. Yet no one in the U.S. was ever charged for this. The same holds true for the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and Korea.
A War-Mongering Rogue State
Such behavior from a sovereign nation should have been enough to completely discredit and disqualify the USA worldwide as an out-of-control war-mongering rogue state driven by an ideology of exceptionalism rooted in base commercial gain. But since the US wields such enormous financial and media power, things are not that simple, especially in the West.
US foreign policy is also largely bipartisan: the often inhumane and thoughtless military attacks on sovereign nations and the economic strangulation of entire societies have gone on regardless of whether Democratic or Republican presidents have been sitting in the Oval Office and regardless of the majority in Congress.
And it is continuing to this day. The US left Afghanistan in 2021 after 20 years of military occupation, only to immediately escalate the Ukraine conflict. Now, Israel is committing genocide with full US support as the following words are being typed. Washington is also trying vainly to isolate China (!) by triggering an economic war against it, and dangerously threatening to bomb Iran, in complete disregard for international law.
This is not even the behavior of a self-appointed “world’s policeman”, which would be bad enough, but rather of a megalomaniac mafia don, trying to set up a global protection racket and lashing out at anyone who simply does not wish to kowtow to Washington and accept US hegemony. Indeed, Steven Miran, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, had the gall to claim that the US actually provides “global public goods” to the world, but that are “costly to us to provide“.
Our military and financial dominance cannot be taken for granted, and the Trump administration is determined to preserve them.
The US government tries to impose its will through legal, commercial and military means, disregarding the UN Charter whenever necessary. Washington D.C. is driven by the idea of the unipolar world since at least the end of the Cold War, but the hegemonic instincts go much deeper.
US Imperialism Has Deep Roots
Many people are seeing only now the true face of Uncle Sam, but it is important to remember that the abhorrent behavior of the US government is nothing new. US territorial expansion was based on the concept of “Manifest Destiny” already in the early 19th century, at the expense first of the Indians and then of other peoples.
The federal government showed at that time the same ambitions of commercial domination by any means, as those expressed today in often self-defeating excess and with such dire consequences worldwide. Notably, the US invented a pretext to attack Mexico (1846-1848), gobbled the independent kingdom of Hawaii (1893), declared war on Spain on another pretext (1898), and whipped the Filipinos into submission (1899-1902). General Smedley Butler’s (1880-1940) famous quote from his autobiography is apt here:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Two Key Events
Considering what has been described above, the question must inevitably be asked : why is this happening? Why is the United States’ government an aggressive, jingoist, corrupt and dysfunctional political entity? How can it be that a nation partially founded on John Locke's principles of liberty and Montesquieu’s concept of separation of powers, today has such a corrupt and oligarchic federal government ?
As the young political union that it was in 1781, based on the Articles of Confederation, the United States was unique; unlike the nation-states of the Old Continent, it was based on the principle of limited government, natural rights of its citizens, and popular sovereignty. Yet, today the federal government in Washington DC is pursuing a policy incompatible with these principles, not only towards Americans themselves but also abroad.
Clearly, Washington D.C. has long pursued a domestic and foreign policy that goes against the founding principles of the United States. This has been possible due to the progressive subjugation of the States to a Federal Government with messianic ambitions of hegemony. There were two critical moments:
Firstly, the Federalists allowed the Federal Government to have more power over the States than before. Different mechanisms were introduced to limit this power, but these were not enough to protect the liberties of the States from the encroachment of the Wasghington DC. Foreign nations were not protected either. It should be remembered, though, that the Constitution does not explicitly authorize the Federal Government to bring new lands into the Republic, either through war or through trade (the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 was controversial for this reason).
Secondly, during the Civil War, Lincoln consciously violated the Constitution, as his letters show, in order to try use the military might of the Yankees to force the seceded Confederate States back into the Union. This proved to be a watershed moment in US political history.
More information regarding these two constitutional moments can be found in the Mises Institute article, “How the US became so Dysfunctional, Oligarchic and Corrupt”.
Culture and Religion as Well
The constitutional events described above, giving the federal government free rein to roam the world for the profit of its companies, are still not reason enough to explain the outrageous US foreign policy. Of course, the lack of personal accountability of office holders and the lac of legal restraints on any state agency are obviously never a good starting point and certainly played a role.
But there is clearly a deep cultural aspect at work, which goes back to the Puritan pilgrim extremist view of the world. This ideology, epithomised by John Winthrop’s speech in 1630, was then confirmed and strengthened with the successes of the American “experiment” during the 19th century.
Most of the Global South understands the true nature of US foreign policy, which is not surprising since they have so often been on the receiving end of it. It is high time that affluent majorities in the West also become aware of it, since that would go a long way to call out the United States and demand changes in its relations with the other nations.
The goal should always be peace. But, as President Kennedy asked in his Peace Speech of June, 1963, “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
It is impossible to disagree with the title, and yes, there is a lot of war mongering.
I have been a neutralist for a war long time as Chairman, CEO and only member of the neutralistassociationofthe.us. and wrote a New York Times worst seller on the subject.
Can anything change?
Don't know. I do know I have watched my country become poorer as the rent-seekers do well.
Maybe we go broke?
Less young people seem to be rushing to the colors, so maybe they get it.
“How the US became so Dysfunctional, Oligarchic and Corrupt”. What? You seriously mean that there’s been a time when the US wasn’t any of that?
To really sustain the point of view that animates this kind of article one has to always be creating or identifying groups, political, ethnic, on which to successfully cast The Shadow. Federalists, Puritans, the British Empire, Israel. In this worldview there is always AMERICA (the real one, the downtrodden, the innocent, The Pure) and then someone who has successfully led HER down the garden path. It’s a fairy tale.
Without any specific knowledge of the relevant history (I’m being bold here, I know, but not so much) I’m going to bet that the shape that the federalisation of the USA ultimately took was a consensual process agreed on by the elites of the states involved and consented to by the masses of immigrant/ settlers, in order to better control the existing resources.
How can anyone really believe that a true functioning political system can arise from a community that at various times spend most of their energy ethnic cleansing the land? It’d be like expecting the present Israel to lead the way for the rest of the world in some near future. Not possible.
The history of the USA has produced millions of victims but Americans themselves (though victims too in the deepest analysis) in the fall squarely in the category of perpetrators from day one when the first French/British/Spanish colonies were founded.
America has no tradition political or humanistic that can reverse the present situation. It’s precisely those traditions that I see lionised in some blogs that led to this mess. It’s payback time. Why tfe surprise?
The US didn’t “become” Dysfunctional, Oligarchic and Corrupt. It was always those things.