The US is the ‘essential nation’, the ‘indispensable nation’, its leadership ‘holds the world together’. This is the boastful humbug that President Biden gave us on his return from Israel, where he again affirmed his complicity with Israel in its decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. The US assumes a moral superiority it denies to others.
And two days days later we had our obedient Prime Minister in Washington tugging his forelock to all that humbug.We are so easily seduced.
He has pledged us, together with the US, to police the Pacific by allowing the US to use our territory at will as the staging platform for a US war on China.
Yet the US is the greatest threat to a peaceful and just world. Malcolm Fraser called the US a ‘dangerous ally’. Almost every day provides further proof of that assertion.
Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost perpetually at war.
Since its founding in 1776, the US has been at war 93 per cent of the time. The US has launched 201 out of 248 armed conflicts since the end of World War II. The US maintains 800 military bases or sites around the world, including in Australia. The US has, in our region, a massive deployment of hardware and troops in Japan, the Republic of Korea and Guam.
The US has been meddling extensively in other countries’ affairs and elections for a century. It tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War. Many foreign leaders were assassinated. In the piece reproduced in this blog (The fatal expense of US Imperialism), Professor Jeffrey Sachs said:
“The scale of US military operations is remarkable … The US has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to the US … Historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of successful US-led regime change for an average of one government overthrow by the US every 28 months for centuries.”
The overthrow or interference in foreign governments is diverse, including Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Haiti, Congo, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently, Syria.
Over two centuries, the US has subverted and overthrown numerous governments. It has a military and business complex that depends on war for influence and enrichment.
The US doesn’t hold the world together, it breaks it apart. It can’t even hold itself together. It is becoming a failed state. The signs of decay are all there in its Administration, Congress, Supreme Court and media. But with its overwhelming military power coupled with its imperial vanity it is extraordinarily dangerous to world peace, as we see in Palestine today.
In his journal Charterbook, Adam Tooze recently wrote about a broken US that dangerously keeps asserting its delusions about how American leadership holds the world together.
The world does not regards the US as a good model of democracy.
Read the article here:
John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.
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