John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN GLOBAL TIMES
“US is losing leadership, attempt of ‘Western unity’
through G7 hard to tick off: experts”
Who wants the leadership of a lunatic, which is exactly what
the United States offered the world for four years?
But even now, with the lunatic gone, who wants the leadership of a country that simply does not recognize new realities, that insists on fantasies of the past?
That last describes Joe Biden’s America.
On almost every matter, Biden's actions and words demonstrate that he does not see the multi-polar world that is emerging. His America sees itself as central to the planet’s welfare – an impoverished concept to ask others to embrace. It looks backward, not forward. It is selfish, not generous. It is small, not large. It is anti-scientific, almost religious in nature.
Biden doesn’t spit in people’s faces as did Trump, but he is just as small and unrealistic about America’s place in the world. He and his key advisors really think, just as did Trump’s mob, that it can be 1959 again, and the whole world will look gratefully to America for leadership.
Sorry, America, but the world does not need the kind of leadership you offer, leadership which is not cooperative and partnering, but demanding. Leadership which does not see realities, but wishes only to shape reality for its own benefit. Leadership based on a kind of Cult of America.
Many new economic successes have arisen since America had its heyday as “Leader of the Free World.” Still more are coming, and many new international arrangements are underway, plus new great trading blocs have been established. The world’s economic geography has changed and is changing more rapidly still.
None of that great change pre-ordains any country as leader. Rather the opposite, the changes mean new international leadership arrangements must be established. America, your expectations and demands are out-of-date and inappropriate.
No one wants leadership whose goal is to turn the clock back to serve itself. It really is an almost laughable idea. Perhaps the clearest measure of that is your effort to start a new Cold War. Russia and China are both peaceful and cooperative countries today, ready to do business with anyone.
Yet your ceaseless new propaganda and very aggressive military arrangements treat them almost as enemies. This is dangerous and self-serving, self-serving because you want everyone else to follow and do business only with you, even if you are uncompetitive.
You genuinely fear new and efficient competitors, and you try to disguise the fear as fear of potential military aggressors. Well, you have between 800 and 1,000 military bases abroad. China and Russia have a couple. You spend about three times what China spends on its military and about ten times what Russia does.
In fact, the only thing Russia and China are enemies of is your delusional claim to be the center of humanity’s future. It is to be a shared future, whether you like it or not, and a far more prosperous future than can be imagined under your notions. The more trade, the more projects, the more investment, the more competition, the more room for new ideas, the greater is the wealth to be shared by all.
As one example of many, your recent witch-hunt against Huawei cost Western economies tens of billions of dollars and set them all back technologically. Just foolish and destructive, but beneficial to your control of affairs. China has already constructed about 700,000 5G stations and is far ahead of Western countries in its ability to do new things at a distance. Of course, that leads to all kinds of new inventions too.
I say ‘almost laughable” because the relatively declining United States remains, for a while, a military Frankenstein, and it proves, time and time again, that it is willing to use brute force to cripple or crush others who stand in its way.
We see it cruelly treating people in many lands, such as Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen.
We see it interfering in the internal affairs of countries everywhere, even in the affairs of its allies, like Germany or Turkey, telling them, as though they were children, what products or services they may buy and from whom.
And we see America genuinely helping no one, as with the pandemic it mismanaged with its own people.
We see it working to intimidate and insult, effectively flirting with war, countries like China and Russia and Iran on their borders or nearby territories. Each of them peaceful countries at war with no one.
We also see America’s political system in tatters, its social system exposed to international shame and ridicule, its medical system for ordinary people revealed as nonexistent, its public education as poor, and we see the most grotesque poverty widespread across the country. What do you think entitles you to lead anyone, United States?
