Balance of Power Politics Returns

American dominance recedes (long think piece; 1,700 words)

(Note: I’m looking for a new place to stay in Orange County. If you know of anything, please email me: writejohnseiler@gmail.com)

What’s happening now is the return of “Balance of Power Politics.” It’s the end of the U.S.’ “unipolar” era. In the 1990s America was called “the sole-remaining superpower,” the “unipower” and other grandiose monikers. The Neocons especially were prone to exaggeration to advance their warmongering. The U.S. actually has been slipping out of that status for two decades now, ever since Bush had trouble in the early days of the Iraq War. Remember May 1, 2003 and “Mission Accomplished”?

The Ukraine War, however it turns out, catapults the world back into a condition of Balance of Power Politics, where there’s no one major power that can do whatever it wants. The NY Times headlined, “Putin denounces the U.S. as a fading world power.”

The beginning of the story:

The President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on [June 17] reprised his critique of the United States as a declining power that treats its allies as colonies, while declaring itself exceptional and “the messenger of the Lord on Earth.”

“If they are exceptional, then that means that everyone else is second-class,” Mr. Putin said of the United States in an address that the Kremlin had billed as “extremely important” at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum….

“Russia is entering the approaching epoch as a powerful, sovereign country,” Mr. Putin said. “We will certainly use the new, colossal opportunities that this era is opening in front of us and will become even stronger.”

The Russian leader said the European Union had imposed sanctions against Russia on orders from Washington despite the damage to its own economy, saying that “the European Union has completely lost its political sovereignty.”

This development of Balance of Power Politics ought to have happened after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The United States could have led the world as a “first among equals,” using its immense influence deftly to tip the balance where necessary. Instead, we got the awful Clintons bombing Serbia, Somalia, Iraq and other countries. Remember the late Madelene Albright beings asked, when secretary of state, if starving to death 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it”? She replied: “We think the price is worth it.”

After the Clintons came Bush II and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, about which you already know too much. Then Obama destroying Libya in 2011 and tipped Syria into anarchy. Both remain in civil wars today. Amazingly, the first black American president ended up restoring the slave trade in Libya.

Trump didn’t start any wars and only bombed a couple of times. He also probably would have made a deal with Putin that would have brought peace to Ukraine. But the Hillary Clinton-inspired Russia Hoax tied him down. Now the Durham investigation has unveiled Hillary’s instigation of the whole mess, which has led to this awful war in Eastern Europe and possible nuclear annihilation.

Wrote legal scholar Jonathan Turley on May 21:

“The trial of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann crossed a critical threshold Friday when a key witness uttered the name “Hillary Clinton” in conjunction with a plan to spread the false Alfa Bank Russian collusion claim before the 2016 presidential election.

For Democrats and many in the media, Hillary Clinton has long held a Voldemort-like status as “She who must not be named” in scandals. Yet, there was her former campaign manager, Robby Mook, telling a jury that Clinton personally approved a plan to spread the claim of covert communications between the Trump organization and the Russian bank. It was one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in American politics, and Mook implicated Clinton as green-lighting the gas-lighting of the electorate.

Global History

Stepping back for some perspective, Americans notoriously are known for reading little history, even their own. They should read more about the world’s great civilizations. China and India long were among the world’s most powerful civilizations. They were blindsided by the Industrial Revolution that began first in Europe around 1776, then spread to Northern Europe and the rapidly growing United States, then to the rest of Europe, eventually to Japan and everywhere. It vastly cut the cost of manufactured goods. Infant deaths were reduced from 50% to 1%. Imagine a world where half of children died, and large percentages of mothers, too. The industrial revolution’s better hygiene, nutrition and prosperity largely ended that. Populations in turn rose, turning London into the world’s largest, most powerful city.

Alas, the Industrial Revolution also brought industrial-strength wars, killing millions. China, India and the Middle East soon saw European gunboats entering their waters, turning them into colonies or client states. In 1853, the American Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo harbor and in 1854 forced them to make a trade deal on Yankee terms. The Japanese reacted in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration, which launched their own industrialization. They soon reached European-levels of prosperity and joined the major powers, including playing the empire game with their own conquest of Korea and parts of China.

China’s restoration as a world power was delayed by civil war and Maoism. But Deng’s market reforms of the late 1970s, which he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” led to the subsequent boom in the economy. India, seeing that, in the early 1990s dumped the socialist model it had inherited at independence in 1947 from socialist England.

Russia also was down and out after 74 years of communism. It had been down before, after World War I under the first years of communism. But Stalin’s brutal industrialization raised it to superpower status. Had czarism survived, that industrialization would have occurred faster, and without losing 60 million or so lives to the gulag slave camps. In the event, in the late 1990s Russia’s elite, led eventually by Putin, junked the foolish reforms of the drunken Yeltsin, which let the country get looted by the “oligarchs,” and instuted Chinese-style limited market reforms. In both countries, the government allows competition, but controlled by the central government — as in the United States, which also isn’t capitalist.

The horrible Neocons, still running foreign policy today, insisted in the 1990s it was a “unipolar” moment, with the “uni” being the United States, led by them and their hyper-agressive foreign policy. Yet it was clear to some of us in the early 1990s the world soon would be multipolar again. “American exceptionalism” ought to have meant touting our system as an example to the world of a longstanding, functioning republic with a mostly capitalist economy and a Bill of Rights. Instead, American exceptionalism for them meant telling the world, “Shut up and do what you’re told.”

“Indespensible Nation”

The arrogance was shown by two statements. The Democrat Albright again, this time on the Today Show in 1998 concerning a possible second Gulf War:

Let me say that we are doing everything possible so that American men and women in uniform do not have to go out there again. It is the threat of the use of force and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.

The second is attributed to Republican Karl Rove, Bush’s top adviser, in 2004 just after the Iraq invasion; although it’s not clear he said it. Ron Susskind of the NY Times reported it from “a senior adviser to Bush.” In any case, it expresses the Bush people’s attitude at the time:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Reality

Reality is just reality. You don’t “create” it. And all of us don’t just “study what” the ruling elites do, but suffer from it. America’s 60-year decline accelerated rapidly beginning with Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But life gives one many opportunities. Assuming Biden doesn’t get us all glassed, America again will have a chance to lead as the first among equals. But it will have to do so from a position of modesty, and after first having reformed itself from the ongoing insanity.

What’s desperately needed, first, is a peace deal in Ukraine. But Biden either isn’t willing to do it, is unable to do it, or his handlers won’t let him do it. Putin, contrary to the Neocon propaganda, actually is the moderate in the Russian government. So his elite also might not let him make peace until their military occupies more of Ukraine, probably up to the Dnepr River and down to Odessa. Maybe not even then.

Biden and his Neocon advisers are living in the 1990s. But this is 2022. The United States no longer is the world’s biggest economy; China is. Russia has 6,000 nukes, a bit more than we have; although the each side certainly has enough to wipe out the other side. Europe is a joke, a U.S. puppet until it gets tired of being so, maybe after people freeze to death this fall without Russian energy. Japan is a U.S. puppet, but a restless one; and its population is declining fast due to severely low birth rates. India is rising, but has a lot of problems. Other countries — Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia — are not happy with U.S. hegemony. Africa faces mass starvation from the cutoffs of Russian and Ukrainian wheat. A massive recession now is striking the whole world, severity unknown.

But this also finally is a time to throw off the Neocon interventionist yoke and restore America to a realist foreign policy. It’s now the only way.