John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY
“US Hybrid War Arrives to Replace Cold War
“The One World of Pax Americana that has existed since the end of the Cold War is already history. US global dominance is still in place, but the peace - "pax" - has been shattered”
This analysis has a great many merits but misses important points.
It certainly isn't just Trump who determined to reassert American global supremacy.
In fact, he could not do that alone. American Presidents simply do not have that much power on their own under the American Constitution.
The entire Washington establishment has been focused on reasserting American global supremacy for years. It reflects a combination of the establishment’s realization that with the growth of other nations abroad into competitors, America is in a relative decline. All the world’s trade statistics point to the fact.
After all, these people and their power flourished in a world where all their competitors were flattened by WWII. Every single one – Britain, France, Germany, Japan, et al. And countries which had not been competitors were destined to become new competitors – China, mainly – also were war-torn. Still other countries were not war-torn, but had yet to explode into modernity, something they are sure doing now – India, Brazil, Vietnam, etc.
America alone suffered no damage at home - even its war dead made the tiniest fraction of those of some other countries, leaving it with no huge unproductive burden of care for the badly injured and plenty of fresh manpower - and it was to enjoy the entire world as its market for industries which had been force-fed and had grown immensely in producing war supplies for itself and others.
The outcome of WWII literally put America on top of the world. But that was a position that absolutely could not be maintained indefinitely because it was based on transitory circumstances.
We have seen now through several presidencies an intense new effort to assert military power and influence. “Nobel Peace Prize winner’ Obama literally was bombing someone every day of his eight years. He once was reported to have said, jokingly, “I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” While now the so-called National Defense Strategy document has been re-written to even more closely focus on Russia and China, it was under Obama that Russia gained the de facto status of pariah state, something Trump has made no effort to halt. So, he has just jumped on the anti-Russian bandwagon, so to speak, while always remaining careful not to speak directly against Putin, who, in my view, does likely hold compromising personal information on Trump.
America’s establishment has even busied itself creating a whole new vocabulary it now uses. We have terms like “strategic rivals” and “revisionist powers” used to describe Russia and China, terms in their vagueness much resembling Israel’s perennial use of “militant” to describe people it has shot. The Pentagon is calling Russia and China enemies in all but name.
The Chinese aptly describe these new Pentagon terms with, “If some people look at the world through a cold war, zero-sum game mindset, then they are destined to see only conflict and confrontation.”
Trump’s chief set of skills include an animal-like instinct for locating where power lies in any situation (almost like a dog immediately recognizing an alpha male) combined with an astonishing, plastic-like ability to quickly adapt to its needs and to gain politically (or economically) from them. Thus, we see all his campaign words versus his actions as President - on Russia, on Syria, on Israel, etc. We have close to a complete turnaround because this previous-non-politician has sniffed-out at close quarters just what the establishment wants.
America’s establishment has fixed on military power – of course, supported by economic, financial, and diplomatic power – as the route to maintaining dominance under all the evolutionary changes taking place in the world. Of course, a more intelligent and less aggressive response would have been to cut military spending drastically. Nothing is more resource-consuming and economically unproductive than the military. A certain amount is needed for genuine defense, of course. But spending seven hundred billion dollars a year, more than the rest of the planet together, is the opposite of what you do if concerned about relative economic decline.
The American establishment’s response is a kind of panic reaction to the changing situation in the world. And it has been happily encouraged, as by someone fanning a fire, by the influential group known as Neocons. They hold, as an article of faith, that America should use its great existing power to dominate and shape the world to its liking. Their primary interest is Israel, and they see an aggressive, massively-armed America as the best promoter of Israel’s interests. They also heavily push the anti-Russia campaign we see because Russia is viewed as standing in the way of their main goals.
This, of course, is just one additional avenue for Israeli influence on American government. America’s money-drenched campaign-financing and lobbying laws encourage huge influence from its home-grown Israel Lobby - perhaps the best organized and financed of all Washington many powerful lobbies. It literally can determine who is elected or not in many Congressional and Senate and even Presidential campaigns because it not only commands money, it commands all of America’s high-end press and broadcasting, which means they can make any candidate look good or bad, and it takes an awful lot of something else for any candidate to overcome that kind of opposition.
Interestingly, most of Trump’s latest appointments are Neocons, some of the most virulent in America. By comparison, in his first days, he tended to avoid such appointments, though even then some got in.
