In the broadest sense, without all the nuances and other information, this is how things stand very basically regarding the United States.
It all, and by that I mean all the aggression economic or military, has had little to do with any perceived benefit for the US because there is none unless one counts an economy that has become too dependent on the Military Industrial Complex that former President Eisenhower warned against when he left office in 1960. The sole beneficiary and even this is questionable long term, has been the racist, apartheid entity that calls itself Israel.
Meanwhile, the US economy has over the decades been completely financialized, with the top five percent or less of citizens having benefitted while and the middle class and labor have been eviscerated by neoliberal policies. Yes, the US economy has been “growing” since 2009 and the last recession, but this growth has been anemic at best and it also has been dependent on the growth of debt and “money” creation in the trillions that has never in all of history been previously witnessed.
The US political system and the two-party status quo, which remains intact but teetering, is slowly proving unworkable. The system has turned rotten from the appearance of mindless political wannabes and the entrenched hangers on in Congress, many of whom resemble termites, and the partisan US mainstream media can no longer be trusted to report the truth. Not a single foreign policy pursued by the US has been born from goodwill towards other countries, but it is increasingly, in fact, the result of fear and panic that the Empire of Chaos will fall and its oligarchs and the MIC will face at last their well-deserved day of reckoning. That day has not arrived yet. But it will. Goodwill, in the long run, cannot be denied. The world is too intertwined.
Trump, as many know, has reneged on virtually all his campaign promises with regard to foreign policies. He has been thoroughly captured by appointed Neocons like Bolton and Pompeo, which is to say he has been captured almost solely by Netanyahu and the oligarch Jewish/Zionist billionaires in the US How else can one explain the moves Trump has made beginning almost a year ago when he canceled US participation in the JCPOA?
No question Trump and his administrative lackeys want above all for Iran to buckle and leave the JCPOA. Trump wants Iran to provoke a US/Saudi/Israeli military attack, and not just on Iran, but on Iran’s allies, in particular Hezbollah in Lebanon and on the Assad government in Syria. Trump also seems to be pushing, with its demands to kill Iranian oil sales, to provoke Iran to try to block commercial traffic through the Straits of Hormuz, providing yet another reason for war in the Middle East. At the moment, in this almost delirious swarm of bad actions, China reportedly may not obey Trump and may actually be planning to boost oil purchases from Iran. Russia and Turkey, India and Japan and other countries, would be advised to follow suit or at least not cut their purchases of Iranian crude oil. This may be the moment, if ever there was one, to break the stranglehold the US has enjoyed for decades as the world’s number one bully. The sheer arrogance of the US government under Trump acting like the world’s dictator is almost beyond belief. It reeks of desperation, too. As Philip Giraldi, a former CIA employee who visited Iran last year with other notable US citizens writes: the US has “heightening tension with major powers Russia and China while also threatening Iran and Venezuela on an almost daily basis. Now Cuba is in the crosshairs because it is allegedly assisting Venezuela. One might reasonably ask if America in its seemingly enduring role as the world’s most feared bully will ever cease and desist, but the more practical question might be “When will the psychopathic trio of John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams be fired (and replaced) so the United States can begin to behave like a normal nation?”
No question, anyway, that a faltering US “empire” like many previous empires has become more strident, demanding and dangerous exactly at the time when its credibility and popularity are dying. And whoever gave Trump the “right” to hand over (and more) the Syrian Golan to Netanyahu and Israel, breaking international laws and norms as if they simply never existed? Make no mistake, most if not all the world outside of Saudi Arabia and Israel are against this raw power play. But this in not news to Iran nor to anyone else. It’s time Europe stepped up, too, and condemned the Trump regime. South Africa, for one, has already broken off most of its diplomatic relations with the outlaw Zionist state. Others may follow.
What the US has at bottom decreed to the entire world is that the US alone gets to decide who trades with whom. In effect, national sovereignty according to Trump does not exist anywhere. As one commentator has remarked, this goes well beyond a merely aggressive foreign policy. It suggests a global dictatorship enacted by the US Countries like China and Russia and Iran must now and forevermore decide to resist, or else become slaves to US tyranny.
MNA/TT