Donald Trump’s attempt to seize Ukraine’s natural resources is another morbid symptom of the decline of US power. This may seem counterintuitive. Demanding half of all the revenues – not simply profit – flowing from Ukraine’s minerals, oil, gas and infrastructure, worth a staggering £400bn, sounds like the behaviour of a bully defined by swagger and brawn. It has rightly been described as reducing Ukraine to the status of an economic colony of the US.
But it epitomises the total discarding of one of the three central pillars of US hegemony. The first was military supremacy. This was shattered by the calamities of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which associated the US military with atrocities, violent chaos and humiliating strategic defeat. The US-backed defence of Ukraine can now be added to that list. The second was economic supremacy, which remains, but which was severely weakened by the 2008 financial crash and the longstanding failure of the US model to deliver a sustained rise in real wages. And the third – the remnants of which Trump is scattering to the four winds – was moral supremacy. This was always a fiction, but an important means of legitimising US dominance. It is now ash.
The US always defined itself as a land of freedom, in contrast to the tyrannies of the Old World, even though it enslaved 89% of its Black population just two lifetimes ago. When the US dabbled with European-style colonialism after the Spanish-American war, annexing the Philippines, members of the US elite founded the American Anti-Imperialist League, warning that the US government sought to “extinguish the spirit of 1776” and “change the republic into an empire”.
It proved an aberration, and the US sought more indirect means of control. When President Woodrow Wilson brought his nation into the first world war on the side of the allies in 1917, he denounced imperial Germany for abandoning the “humane practices of civilised nations” with its indiscriminate sinkings by submarines. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he declared, concluding: “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.”
When President Franklin Roosevelt similarly entered the second world war, he spoke loftily of “democracy’s fight against world conquest”. At the outset of the cold war, President Harry Truman warned that the world’s people “may surrender to the false security offered so temptingly by totalitarian regimes unless we can prove the superiority of democracy”. Indeed, the US and the Soviet Union presented their grand conflict, however misleadingly, as a clash of two universalist philosophies, both of which promised the liberation of all humanity: “freedom and democracy” on the one hand, and the end of capitalism and colonialism in favour of equality on the other.
Ronald Reagan was a rightwing Republican, and yet he proclaimed that the US only fought wars “to defend freedom and democracy”, that it was “a force for peace, not conquest” and “could have achieved world domination, but that was contrary to the character of our people”.
Yes, all of this was founded in deceit. Claims of democracy were fatally compromised by the longstanding restriction of the rights of African Americans in the south, who had to win their rights through arduous struggle. Abroad, the US was guilty of innumerable horrors. In the 1960s and 70s, the US intervened to prop up South Vietnam’s brutal military dictatorship, and carpet-bombed south-east Asia. In Cambodia alone, US bombing may have killed up to 500,000 civilians: one such campaign was named Operation Freedom Deal, underlining the Orwellian use of language to justify murderous domination.
In Latin America, the US helped instigate brutal military coups – “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” said Henry Kissinger of Chile – and maintain vicious dictatorships, such as the Argentine junta.
In the Middle East, the pact with the Saudi tyrants, and the arming of Saddam Hussein, before the ruinous invasion of Iraq underlined US cynicism, and perennial support for Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians exposed US hypocrisy. That was before the US facilitated genocide, leaving its moral claims buried under rubble. Yet note Trump’s open support for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and his suggestion that the US should take the land in aid of naked avarice, his shameless desire to reduce Ukraine to a colony, even his clearly heartfelt desire to annex Canada. This is simply unapologetic brute force and greed, with no pretence to any majestic moral cause.
This leaves the western right with something of a problem. There was a rightwing jamboree in east London this week, grandly named the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The Daily Mail, with its usual reserve, summarised the speech of the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, like so: “It’s time to get off our knees and start fighting for Western values.” What exactly are those “values”, now the lead western state – led by a man Badenoch considers a political ally – has shed its old pretences?
The US no longer bothers to dress up its ruthless perceived self-interest in the garbs of high-minded principles. This is a major strategic mistake. These mythical moral claims helped win consent or at least acquiescence from the US public for the global projection of power: Hollywood’s presentation of the US as “the good guys” taps into a self-perception that is important for many Americans. These claims also beguiled significant numbers of people around the globe, offering up natural allies for the US in each continent.
That is all dead now. And so all we are left with is a floundering superpower with depleted military prowess, a broken economic model, a crisis-ridden democracy and an openly thuggish demeanour. The fall of US power is anything but dignified.
Article by:Source: Owen Jones
