Although it may seem otherwise, Donald Trump’s attempt to get the natural resources of Ukraine is another symptom of the decline of the power of the United States. Demand half of all income (and not only the benefits) generated by minerals, oil, gas and infrastructure remembers the behavior of a thug, with fanfarería and strength as the only arguments. It is talking about 400,000 million pounds sterling [unos 483.000 millones de euros] and accepting the treatment would reduce Ukraine to the status of economic colony of the United States.
It is the absolute abandonment of one of the three pillars that have sustained American hegemony so far. The first is military superiority, in shatter after the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. The US army has since been associated with atrocities, violence, chaos and humiliating strategic defeats. A list to which Ukraine defense could now be added until recently by the US.
The second base is economic superiority. There is still, but severely weakened by the financial collapse of 2008 and the prolonged inability of the US model to achieve sustained increases in real wages. And the third, whose Trump remains are spreading to the four winds, is moral superiority. It was always a fiction, but it was important as a way to legitimize US domain. Now it is in ruins.
In contrast to old world tyrannies, the United States has always defined itself as a land of freedom, although only two generations make 89% of its black population. When Washington dared to follow the European colonialism model, with the annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, members of the US elite founded the anti-imperialist league to alert the government attempt to “extinguish the spirit of 1776″ and ” transform the republic into an empire. ”
The Philippines turned out to be an aberration. From now on, Washington would look for indirect control means. In 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson took the country to the First World War with the allies, he accused the imperial Germany of leaving “human practices of civilized nations” for the indiscriminate sinking of ships by the German submarines submitted. “The world must be safe for democracies,” he said. “A firm concert for peace can never be maintained if it is not with the Association of Democratic Nations.”
When he entered World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt also spoke from the heights about “the struggle of democracy against the conquest of the world.” President Harry Truman warned at the beginning of the cold war of the risk that the peoples of the world would surrender to “the false security that the totalitarian regimes offer so temptingly, unless we can demonstrate the superiority of democracy.”
In fact, and no matter how deceptive, the United States and the Soviet Union presented their great conflict as a clash of two universalist philosophies that promised the liberation of humanity. “Freedom and democracy,” on the one hand; End capitalism and colonialism to achieve equality, on the other.
Ronald Reagan, a right -wing Republican, said that the United States only freed wars “to defend democracy and freedom”, which was “a strength of peace, not conquest” and that it could “have achieved the domination of the world.” “But that did not correspond to the character of our people.”
Yes, everything was based on a lie. The claims of democracy were fatally committed to the prolonged limitation of rights for southern Africans, who fought hard to conquer them.
Abroad, the United States was responsible for innumerable horrors. In the sixties and seventies, Southeast Asia bombed and intervened to underpin a brutal military dictatorship in South Vietnam. In Cambodia alone, American bombings may kill up to 500,000 civilians. One of those campaigns was called Operation Pact for Freedom, a clear example of Orwellian language to justify a criminal domination.
In Latin America, the United States helped instigate ruthless coups already maintaining dictatorships as cruel as that of the Military Board in Argentina. “I don’t see why we have to stay with a crossed arms and see how a country becomes a communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Henry Kissinger said on one occasion talking about Chile.
In the Middle East, the pact with the tyrants of Saudi Arabia and assemble Sadam Huseín in Iraq, before overthrowing it in the disastrous invasion of the country in 2003, highlight the United States cynicism. In the same way that the constant support for the subjugation of the Palestinians by Israel exposed American hypocrisy, even before facilitating the genocide burying in the rubble of Gaza any claim of moral superiority.
But Trump’s open support for ethnic cleaning in Gaza and his suggestion that the United States should take the enclave with manifest greed; His shameless desire to reduce Ukraine to a colony and even his obviously sincere desire to annexal Canada are simply based on brute force and greed without complexes, without claim of any majestic moral cause.
This represents a problem for the right in the West. This week there was a right -wing meeting in eastern London, called a great alliance for responsible citizenship. The newspaper The Daily Mail Thus summed up the speech of the conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch: “It’s time to get up on your knees and start fighting western values.” What are exactly these “values”, now that the main western nation – directed by a man whom Badenoch considers a political ally – has been stripped of his old pretensions?
That the United States stops annoying to disguise its stark interest as altruistic principles is a serious strategic error. This mythical moral claim served to obtain consent, or at least the acquiescence, of American public opinion in the global projection of American power. The vision Hollywoodiense for which the United States is always “the good” comes from a self -perception that for many Americans is somewhat relevant. An affirmation that also served to seduce a large number of people around the world, building natural allies from the United States on all continents.
All that is over now. The only thing left is a superpower that wobbles, with a diminished military power, a broken economic model, a democracy in crisis and a clearly thug behavior. The fall of American power is everything but worthy.
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