For a quarter of a century, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US had it all. It had overnight become the “undisputed Champion”, albeit by default. The counterweight had disappeared and everything tipped in the US’s favour.
Let’s examine for a minute how the US used or abused this new-found unchallenged power:
First it proceeded to add one country after another, of the former Soviet Union, to a Military tool that was supposedly created to combat the Soviet Union which no longer existed and therefore this tool (NATO) should have become obsolete. Instead it became “The international community” that US politicians refer to and the “free world” they claim to be the “leaders” of; a bunch of minions that heard and heeded the warning by Washington that “If you are not with us, you are against us.”
Then it started intimidating and attacking country after country in the Middle East and Africa like a schoolyard bully when the teacher is absent.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a great opportunity for the US to demonstrate some of those “American values” we hear so much about and win the world over. Instead it went as crazy as an unsupervised kid in a candy store. Instead of assuming the role of benevolent leader that no one would have objected to, it proceeded to impose its will on much weaker countries by force. Over the last twenty-five years, the US did not make many friends as it should have, instead it created bitter feelings towards it among people who were simply too weak to resist the onslaught of this overgrown child.
Have the American people gained anything from their leaders’ “victories” over third world countries? Did their lot improve with every military gain in resource rich states? The answer to that is clear. The people of the US may even be worse off now than they were back in the Cold War era. So who gained if it wasn’t the American public and it certainly was not the peoples of those countries that US might turned into ruins? The same handful of old men who always profit by trading in human misery and death.
The US had it all; it could have turned itself into what it constantly claims to be “The great beacon of democracy and justice”. It was all hers to lose and that is exactly what she did!
The world is now changing fast; both Russia and China had the time to recover and they are reemerging stronger than ever and ready to claim their rightful place in the world against this spoiled, overgrown child that did not have the maturity to handle and manage its own strength; a strength that has proven to be its weakness.
The US has proclaimed that it does not have friends, only interests. The problem with this philosophy is that you can only apply it either if other people’s interests coincide with yours, or if you can enforce it through strength. Strength is the one thing that the US is rapidly losing or at least it is being matched by those it had written off a quarter century earlier.
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