Tag: Empire
EMPIRE IN DECLINE
The Unraveling of the American Empire
Chris Hedges
MintPress News | April 22, 2021
Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — America’s defeat in Afghanistan is one in a string of catastrophic military blunders that herald the death of the American empire. With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely by mechanized units in the open desert that did not – wisely – attempt to occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. While each of these empires decayed with their own peculiarities, they all exhibited patterns of dissolution that characterize the American experiment.Read More »
EMPIRE’S STUPIDITY
On Last Day in Office, Trump Accidentally Sanctioned an Italian Restaurant Instead of an Oil Exporter
Dharna Noor
GIZMODO | April 02, 2021
Former President Donald Trump seems, uh, unadventurous when it comes to food, but I always thought he was down with Italian cuisine, or at least pizza and pasta. Yet his administration slapped sanctions on an Italian restaurant as part of an economic blockade against Venezuela.
April Fool’s Day is over, and this isn’t a joke. On Trump’s last day in office, his Department of Treasury placed sanctions on a restaurant and pizzeria in Verona, Italy called Dolce Gusto, owned by Alessandro Bazzoni. But this week, the Treasury copped to its mistake and removed the restaurant and Bazzoni. Mamma mia, what a mess!Read More »
HYPOCRISY OF U.S. EMPIRE
The Glass was Broken Yesterday in The “Showcase Of Democracy” with Which The U.S. Attempts to Give The World Lessons
Raúl Antonio Capote
Granma | January 07, 2021
The glass was literally broken yesterday in the “showcase of democracy” with which the United States has presumed to give the world lessons, when violent supporters of President Donald Trump invaded and disrupted the Capitol in Washington, the seat of Congress, as Representatives and Senators were preparing to confirm Democrat Joe Biden as the country’s next President.Read More »
EMPIRE’S INSTRUMENTS
NATO, Past and Future
Wolfgang Streeck
New Left Review | December 16, 2020
President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other people must and must not elect, 95 percent rejoice that Trump is gone. Note, however, that while he may be gone as POTUS, there is a good chance, unless he goes to jail, but perhaps even then, that he will continue to be a powerful presence as leader of a powerful United States’ disloyal opposition.
In any case, hoping for the good old days of hyperglobalization to return, and ‘populism’ to vanish into the dark, European politicians are revelling in happy narratives of rule-bound multilateral global governance in the good old liberal international order (LIO), when an incoming American president could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a thank you just for taking office – conjuring up a past that never was, in a desperate effort to turn it into a future that never will be. In the lead are the Germans, in Berlin and Brussels (where Frau von der Leyen is working overtime to express transatlantic enthusiasm). Included in their love letters to Washington is a mysterious morning gift: a promise that ‘the Europeans’ will from now on carry a ‘larger share’ of the ‘common burden’ and accept more ‘responsibility’ for themselves and the ‘West’.Read More »
The Empire, Trump and Intra-Ruling Class Conflict
by Gary Olson
Dissident Voice | November 02, 2019
Over the past few months President Trump has unilaterally by Tweet and telephone begun to dismantle the U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East. The irony is amazing, because in a general overarching narrative sense, this is what the marginalized antiwar movement has been trying to do for decades.1
Prof. Harry Targ, in his important piece “United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” (MR online, October 23, 2919), reminds us of the factional dispute among U.S. foreign policy elites over how to maintain the U.S. empire. On the one hand are the neoliberal global capitalists who favor military intervention, covert operations, regime change, strengthening NATO, thrusting China into the enemy vacuum and re-igniting the Cold War with Russia. All of this is concealed behind lofty rhetoric about humanitarianism, protecting human rights, promoting democracy, fighting terrorism and American exceptionalism. Their mantra is Madeleine Albright’s description of the United States as the world’s “one indispensable nation.”Read More »
The Empire: Now or Never
Empire Exposed Once Again: The Syria Intervention Case
By Farooque Chowdhury
Countercurrents.org | 31 December, 2015
Intervention in Syria once again exposes the Empire. Not only its imperialist policy is exposed; its inner contradictions and limitations are also revealed. As an extra output, once again, the Empire’s trustworthiness is going to be questioned by its allies, and by the broader society. Exposure by Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has done the job.Read More »
Empire or Humanity?
What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire
By Howard Zinn
Courtesy: TomDispatch.com | 04 October, 2015
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the “Good War,” even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American “Empire.”Read More »
Journal of People 