US over-reach in Ukraine is plain
to see as Russia and China call America's bluff
By Dave
Lindorff
History is full of empires that crumbled under their own hubris and ambition, and the United States is no different, but it relentlessly keeps pushing its weight around everywhere in the world. At $680bn annually, Obama's military spending outstrips all previous US presidents, including George W Bush. I was shocked to find myself in almost perfect agreement today with a recent column by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer. Usually Krauthammer has me groaning, but yesterday his column nailed it. He was writing about what he correctly
observes as the end of “American hegemony” in the global political sphere.
Krauthammer cites as his main evidence of this “major alternation in the global balance of power” the deal just struck between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who, during a visit to Shanghai last week by the Russian leader, inked an agreement for Russia to tell some $400 billion worth of its natural gas to China over the next 30 years. The deal would include the building of a $70-billion pipeline from Russian gas fields in Siberia to China’s industrial heartland, and would “deflate” a threat made by the US and Europe during the current Ukrainian crisis to end Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. Krauthammer also pointed to President Xi’s call for a new Asian region security system that would link China, Russia and (gasp) Iran — an arrangement which, if implemented, he warns could “mark the end of a quarter-century of unipolarity and … herald a return to a form of bipolarity — two global coalitions: one free, one not — though with communism dead, not as structurally rigid or ideologically dangerous as Cold War bipolarity. Not a fight to the finish, but a struggle nonetheless — for dominion and domination.” Setting aside Krauthammer’s breathless horror at this new “bi-polar” global political environment, and his ideologically-blinded description of the US/NATO “side” as “free” as opposed to the Russia/China “side’s” being “not free” (and adding a note that actually, a $400 billion deal over 30 years is really not that big a thing, working out to just some $13 billion a year), there is much here that does accurately portray what is happening. Missing from Krauthammer’s analysis, of course, is the history behind this development. US global domination, which could
be said to have begun with the collapse in the early 1990s of the former
Soviet Union, was destined to be a short-lived affair. By 1990,
the Soviet Union had been bankrupted by President Reagan’s massive military
spending campaign, and the USSR’s political and economic implosion did
leave the US, by default, as the world’s last and only “superpower,” but
left unremarked was that this country’s massive military spending had also
effectively hollowed out the US economy, too. And instead
of turning inward at the end of the Cold War, and investing in a
revitalization of America’s crumbling physical, social and educational
infrastructure, which might have rectified things, the problem was
made worse by two more decades of continuous war economy, driven
by the very neoconservative ideology that Krauthammer still espouses.
Instead of shrinking the bloated US military, successive presidents — George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and finally Barack Obama — all kept increasing military spending to the point that this country under President Obama has been spending as much on its military as the rest of the world combined. And to make things worse, the US has been losing its wars. that is not the kind of thing designed to instill fear in potential adversaries. At the same time that the US empire was bankrupting itself through extravagant military spending, it has been relentlessly pushing its weight around everywhere in the world, subverting or trying to subvert democratically elected governments in places like Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Haiti and Venezuela, and even seeking to undermine governments in states like Russia, Ukraine and Iran. Something had to give, and as Krauthammer correctly notes, something finally has given. America’s bluff is being called. Fed up with the clumsy bullying of American foreign and economic policy, angered by the imperial over-reach of America’s National Security Agency, and emboldened by the weakness of both the American dollar and America’s bloated, bureaucratic and over-stretched military (as evidenced by its inability to defeat minimally armed and trained patriotic forces in Afghanistan and Iraq), Russia and China, and perhaps Iran too, are realizing that they “don’t have to take it anymore.” While Krauthammer didn’t mention it, even NATO, that Cold War relic that the US had been using as a fig leaf since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 to cover its aggressive policy of encirclement and gradual subversion of Russia, is now showing signs of collapse. The European public and their elected officials are angry at Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive NSA spying on it’s purported “allies,” and the latest effort to enlist Europe in a program of economic sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea have fallen flat, with France refusing to stop selling advanced military equipment to Russia and with Germany balking at any serious economic sanctions against one of its largest trading partners. Increasingly, Russia, China,
Brazil and other large developing economies are separating themselves from
the dollar-based global financial system, undermining the last
mainstay of US hegemony — the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Where he goes wrong is in seeing
this as “Obama’s choice.”
History is replete with empires
that crumbled under their own hubris and ambition, and the United States
is no different.
Source: Counterpunch This is a back-up copy of the article that appeared on the
Go back to Art
in Society # 14, Contents
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www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/recent-trends.
Dave
Lindorff (stopwar.org/uk) on US military and political hegemony and
the prospective decline of the US
Fred Kaplan, "Do We Really Need More Submarines and Aircraft Carriers?
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