TomDispatch
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Welcome to the Post-American World
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on August 17, 2017, Printed on August 17, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176319/ ;
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: The next TD post will appear on Tuesday,
August 22nd.]
Pardon Me!
High Crimes and Demeanors in the Age of Trump
By Tom Engelhardt
Let me try to get this straight: from the moment the Soviet Union imploded
in 1991 until recently just about every politician and mainstream pundit in
America assured us that we were the planet's indispensable nation, the only
truly exceptional one on this small orb of ours.
We were the sole superpower, Earth's hyperpower, its designated global
sheriff, the architect of our planetary future. After five centuries of
great power rivalries, in the wake of a two-superpower world that, amid the
threat of nuclear annihilation, seemed to last forever and a day (even if it
didn't quite make it 50 years), the United States was the ultimate survivor,
the victor of victors, the last of the last. It stood triumphantly at the
end of history. In a lottery that had lasted since Europe's wooden ships
first broke out of a periphery of Eurasia and began to colonize much of the
planet, the United States was the chosen one, the country that would leave
every imperial world-maker from the Romans to the British in its shadow.
Who could doubt that this was now our world in a coming American century
beyond compare?
And then, of course, came the attacks of 9/11. A mere $400,000 and 19
suicidal hijackers (mostly Saudis) armed with box cutters and organized from
Afghanistan, a country plunged into an Islamic version of the Middle Ages,
had challenged the greatest power of all time. In the process, they would
bring down iconic structures in what would soon be known to Americans as
"the homeland," while killing almost 3,000 innocent civilians, acts so
shocking that they really did change the world.
Yet even then, a fervor for world-organizing triumphalism only took firmer
hold in Washington. The top officials of President George W. Bush's
administration almost instantly saw the 9/11 attacks as their very own
"Pearl Harbor," the twenty-first-century equivalent of the moment that had
launched the U.S. on the path to post-World War II superpowerdom. As
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld instantly told his aides in the rubble
of the Pentagon, "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
And indeed they would do just that, seizing the moment with alacrity and
promptly launching the "Global War on Terror" -- aka, among the cognoscenti,
World War IV (the third, in their minds, having been the Cold War).
No simple "police action" against the modest al-Qaeda organization and Osama
bin Laden would do (and those who suggested something so pathetically humble
were to be laughed out of the room). At that moment, their newly launched
"war" was to be aimed at no less than 60 countries. The world was to be
swept clean of "terror" and the tool for doing so and for imposing
Washington's version of a world order on much of the planet would be the
U.S. military, a force like none ever seen before. It was, President Bush
would claim, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever
known." It was, as both he and Barack Obama affirmed, as became gospel on
both sides of the aisle in Washington (until Donald Trump arrived in the
presidential race of 2016), "the finest fighting force" in history. It was
so unquestionably powerful that no enemy could conceivably stand in its
path. It would "liberate" not just Afghanistan, but Iraq, a country in the
Middle Eastern oil heartlands that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or
Islamic terror but had a ruler despised in Washington.
And that, mind you, would only be the beginning. Syria and Iran would
undoubtedly follow and soon enough the Greater Middle East would be brought
under the aegis of a Pax Americana. Meanwhile, globally, no country or even
bloc of countries would be capable of rising to challenge the United States
into the imaginable future. As Bush put it in a speech at West Point in
2002, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond
challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras
pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." In
that year, the U.S. National Security Strategy similarly called for the
country to "build and maintain" its military power "beyond challenge."
What a soaring dream it all was! In response to the destruction of part of
the Pentagon and those towers in New York City, a small group of top
officials in Washington, long waiting for just such an opportunity, were
determined to impose their version of order and democracy, military-first,
on significant parts of the planet and no one would be capable of resisting.
Not for long anyway.
Almost 16 years later, you know how that dream of domination turned out, but
to Washington's power players at the time it all seemed so obvious. Except
for a few retrograde Muslim rebels, it was clearly no one else's planet but
ours to organize as we wished. The Soviet Union was already an instant
historical memory, its empire scattered to the winds, and Russia itself
largely immiserated. The Chinese had a capitalist economy of no small means
(even if run by a Communist Party), but as a military force, as a great
power, they were anything but impressive. And if you looked at the rest of
the world, there were no other potential great powers, no less superpowers,
on any imaginable horizon.
Given the history of the Global War on Terror and of the stunning inability
of the U.S. military to impose Washington's will, no less its planetary
dreams, on more or less anyone, it took an awful long time for such thinking
to begin to die. And before it did, the political class, in a fervor of
defensive exaggeration, began insisting in a mantra-like way on the
"indispensability" and "exceptionality" of... well, us. It was as if the
sense of decline most Americans had started feeling in their bones wasn't
happening. Of course, the constant invocation of the country's singular
specialness should itself have signaled just how wrong things were, because
when you're truly indispensable and exceptional you don't need to repeatedly
say so (or even say it at all).
It took a reality TV star with a curious comb-over who had run a set of
casinos into the ground to pick up a Reagan-era slogan, "Make America Great
Again," and bodysurf it into the White House. He did so in part on the
widespread sense in the American heartland that, a quarter-century after the
Soviet Union imploded, the U.S. was indeed in decline, even heading for the
exit at a creep, not a gallop. The "again" in that slogan was the telltale
signal that the billionaire "businessman" (and classic American huckster)
had an intuitive handle on an American world of failed war-making and raging
inequality about which both his Republican opposition and his Democratic
opponent in election 2016, all still priming the pump of indispensability
and exceptionality, seemed clueless.
Who? Us?
Now, here we are on the planet the U.S. was to dominate and run for an
eternity with an embattled president surrounded by generals whose skills
were honed in America's losing wars of the twenty-first century. If you
want a personal gauge of American decline, consider this: barely half a year
into office, Donald J. Trump is already threatening to launch a nuclear war
and exploring whether he has the power not just to pardon aides, friends,
and family, but himself in case of future convictions. With the previous
decade and a half in mind, here's a question for you: Pardon me, but even if
he pardons himself, who's going to pardon the rest of us?
I mean, am I wrong, or aren't we living in the mess of a world the sole
superpower had a major hand in creating and was, once upon a not-so-distant
time, all too eager to take credit for? So I find it strange that no one
who matters here seems to feel the slightest responsibility for the planet's
dismal state. All the politicians, power players, and pundits in Washington
who wouldn't have hesitated to take complete credit, had the U.S. achieved
anything like its fantasy of a Pax Americana world, couldn't be quicker
these days to place the blame for what's actually happened elsewhere.
You know the tale. When it comes to the world's ills, it's Vlad, the
Ukrainian Impaler, or Vlad, the Hacker, who's spoiled so much. Among other
things, he had, we're told, the temerity to mess with the sacrosanct
electoral system of the most democratic country on the planet, a place so
pure that its denizens had never heard of such a shocking act -- except, of
course, for the scores of times Washington did exactly that to other
countries. (Who in the U.S. these days even remembers "the first 9/11"?)
The Russian president now gets much of the blame in Washington for the sorry
mess of our world, from Eastern Europe and the unsettled NATO alliance to
Syria. As for where the rest of the blame lands: it's the Chinese, of
course, who've had the nerve to flex their potential great-power muscles by
bulking up their military, building fake "islands" in the South China Sea,
and claiming parts of that body of water as their own, while not pressuring
the North Koreans harder to stand down. It's the Iranians who somehow are
responsible for much of the mess in the Middle East, along with various
jihadi successors and spin-offs from the original al-Qaeda. They take the
rest of the blame for the world of chaos that continues to spread across the
Greater Middle East, parts of Africa, and now the Philippines (not to
mention the refugees fleeing embattled and desperate lands who are, we are
regularly assured, threatening the continental U.S. with disastrous harm).
I don't mean to say that such a crew (refugees excepted) shouldn't bear some
of the blame for our disintegrating world, but just remind me: Wasn't the
Islamic State born in an American military prison in Iraq? Weren't the
Iranian theocrats, those Great-Satan haters, born in the grim crucible of
the Shah's rule (and that of his brutal secret police) after the CIA helped
hatch a coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of that country in
1953? Didn't Washington ignore promises made to former Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev and others and do its damnedest to move NATO's line of
control into parts of the former Soviet empire and associated satellite
states?
Didn't the Bush administration lump North Korea with Iraq, a nation it was
eager to invade, and Iran, another it planned to take down sooner or later,
in the infamous "axis of evil," even though the North Koreans had nothing to
do with either of those countries? In the most public manner possible, in a
State of the Union address to the nation, the American president linked all
three of those countries to terrorism and evil in what was unmistakably a
"regime change" package. (If you were eager to convince the North Korean
leadership that possessing a nuclear arsenal was the only way to go, that
certainly was a good start.) In the process, didn't George W. Bush and his
officials functionally shred the Clinton-negotiated agreement by which the
North Koreans had indeed frozen their nuclear program, in part by listing
that country in its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review "as one of the states that
might become the target of a preventive strike"?
And that's just to begin to explore what it meant to be in the world of the
sole superpower from 2001 to 2017. Remind me, for example, which country
only recently announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the
crucial global architecture for protecting the planetary environment, and so
humanity's future, from a grim kind of dismemberment?
Who's Going to Sanction Us?
So here's my next question: If you're parceling out blame on this planet of
ours, why just dump it on the evil doers? What about us? What about the
sole superpower, its changing leadership, and the finest fighting force in
the history of the universe? Don't we have any responsibility for the
situation we now face globally, from North Korea to the Greater Middle East,
Ukraine to Venezuela? Didn't the actions of America's leaders and its
national security state have anything to do with the world that called forth
the Trumpian wave, which could now swamp so many ships of state? Maybe
President Trump can indeed pardon himself (an issue being debated at the
moment by constitutional scholars), but who pardoned everyone else who lent
a hand, large or small, to the creation of what increasingly looks like a
failed world?
Are there no high crimes and misdemeanors for which we Americans are
responsible on a planet of the otherwise guilty?
Here's one thing I think about sometimes on bleak nights. I'm sure you
remember the way the Bush administration used fraudulent claims about
weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, as an excuse to launch an invasion of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq and occupy his country. In fact, there was indeed a
weapon of mass destruction in Iraq and no one needed to search for it. I'm
talking about the U.S. military.
It was also a weapon of destructive creation. It cracked Iraq open, set Shia
and Sunni at each others' throats, loosed a grim process of religious
"cleansing" there and across the region, and so provided fertile ground for
the worst of the worst. Its "successful" invasion was the crucial factor in
preparing the way for the birth of al-Qaeda in Iraq and then of the Islamic
State in a country where no such organizations had previously existed.
In truth, in every land across the Greater Middle East and Africa where that
military has gotten involved in hostilities, from Libya to Iraq, Yemen to
Afghanistan, it has left in its wake shaken or failed states, untold numbers
of desperate refugees, and spreading terror movements. It has been a major
player in a decade and a half of disaster that has helped destabilize
significant parts of the planet. And yet when it comes to apportioning
blame, the main people tarred with the disaster that's been the war on
terror are those who have been made into refugees in its wake, those who, we
are told, would be a mortal danger to us, were we to welcome them here.
And while we're at it, it might be worth mentioning one other weapon of mass
destruction in our world: the rise to glory of the 1% and the widening
inequality chasm that's accompanied their successes. From Ronald Reagan's
presidency on, a series of administrations, Republican and Democratic, have
presided over a country and a world growing ever more disastrously unequal,
as the rich make staggering gains in income and wealth while the poor and
working classes labor ever harder for, relatively speaking, ever less.
Consider that but another story of devastation on what reputedly was once an
American planet.
In such a global context, our Congress has been eager indeed to sanction the
Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans for their roles in spreading
misery, but who's going to sanction us? Honestly, don't you wonder how we
got off the hook so easily for the world we swore that we alone would
create? Isn't the U.S. responsible for anything? Doesn't anyone even
remember?
We now have a president with the strangest demeanor imaginable, a
narcissistic bully spouting a kind of rhetoric that eerily echoes the
bellicose threats of North Korea. However, like the spreading terror
movements and failed states of the Greater Middle East, he should be seen as
a spawn of the actions, programs, and dreams of the sole superpower in its
self-proclaimed glory and of its plans for a military-enforced global Pax
Americana. By the time he's done, President Trump may be responsible for
high crimes, including nuclear ones, of a sort that even impeachment
wouldn't cover and who, these days, could ever miss his demeanor?
Blame the evil doers for the devastation visiting this planet? Sure thing.
But us? Not for a second.
And while you're at it, welcome to the post-American world.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror
Since World War II, as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands,
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Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in
a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt
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