we simply do not give enough attention to the fact that the US is. Shooting itself in the foot at every turn. not in a individual incompetence way, not an an orange idiot in the White House Way, but in a “the US spent a century designing a world order where everyone was either reliant on the US or terrified of the US (often both) and now people at every level of federal government are destroying that system” way. While USAID very much did in fact contribute to like, food and medicine and whatever to people in need around the globe, this was not out of the kindness of American hearts, this is an arm of liberal empire. the carrot so to speak. and as for the stick, the point of having a military the size of the US military is not to use it. It’s to park on peoples lawns until they stand down. when you use it, and then lose, or deliver anything other than immediate and crushing defeat, you illustrate to the people whose lawn you’re parked on that spending billions of dollars isn’t enough to win a war necessarily. Iran could have closed the strait at any point, but they didnt bc the USA would bomb the shit out of them. When they get bombed first, there’s no reason not to close the strait. The US played its hand and it came up wanting. this is to say nothing of the damage to alliances with other liberal democratic countries. the people currently in power swallowed USA propaganda hook line and sinker, believed in it so completely, that theyre shaking the foundation of what lent that propaganda its believability. to say nothing of the fact that their aims are despicable, their methods are just. an embarrassment to empire building. they took a perfectly good empire and started lopping shit off. they’re trying to increase the output of a machine by ripping cogs out of its still-running engine.
For a generation now, every US Presidential administration has been refusing to recognize Stein’s Law (“if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop”) on foreign policy. It has been obvious since the Carter administration (1977-1980, for people who don’t know that history — the last US administration which could have rescinded backing for the bloodthirsty puppet government of the Shah of Iran and thus potentially either avoided the Iranian revolution or had it not result in a new government hostile to the west) that the US-dominated world order which was tied to the petrodollar was going to fail within the foreseeable future — not just at some point in the nebulous future, but most likely within the lifetime of people already alive. Every single President in that period has refused to recognize this and take steps to prevent the inevitable change from being a disaster for the US — Carter himself, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Biden, and of course Trump (who I suspect doesn’t even really realize the problem). US foreign policy does not actually vary that much between our two major parties — both are committed to massive spycraft, “regime change” for any government we don’t like that poses an economic threat, genocide for the dark-skinned (as demonstrated amply by Biden), destabilization of governments regardless of the consequences to the world population, and war for profit. Trump has made the violence worse and more explicit, but he has not really changed anything in the list of long-term goals to be achieved; the destruction of the governments of Iran and Cuba have been things every President has wanted since those two governments were created.
