John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DAVID STOCKMAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“US Entry into WWI Started Her Disastrous March to Empire”
WWII was the revolutionary turning point for America.
It inherited everything. Countries like Russia paid the price, an immense price.
America entered a Golden Era with no competitors left standing and its own industry and homeland safe and booming.
That was the entire explanation behind the nonsense advertising slogan, "the American Dream."
It is fading now as many of the world's nations grow to compete, many of them better at what they do than the US.
And that inevitably is the future.
All statistics show the US in a relative decline in the world, as by share of trade.
That's what the new American aggression is all about. It is the establishment's bristling reaction to new realities they do not like. They will use the great power they have remaining to seize control of as much of the world's affairs as they can, thinking that will enable them to better bend things in America’s favor.
It's actually a pretty primitive approach to a national problem. But just look at Trump's appointments to see the raw ugly faces of primitive aggression – Haley, Pompeo, Bolton, Haspel, and others.
And the same for the chief leaders in the Congress and the Senate. Some amazingly arrogant and hard-boiled faces to be seen and harsh things to be heard. Easy to imagine you are in the last days of Rome with the reek of utter corruption. And, of course, the entire work of the Pentagon and CIA, serving those raw faces, is burning their way through unbelievable amounts of money and people to serve this primitive drive.
America is also cheered along by the influential Neocons who have their own interest in Israel's enjoying the security of a highly aggressive United States.
We live in very dangerous times.
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Response to a comment about it going back further to Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s:
Yes, there's truth in that.
The Spanish-American War was deliberately contrived in Washington to grab some of the creaky old Spanish Empire's assets, like Cuba and the Philippines, but the true world-scale imperial leadership emerges with WWII.
