Bill Maher had an insightful monologue where used a quote from the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” to say that Americans are a silly people. We are a bunch of squabbling tribes who can’t get anything done. Gridlock in Washington, lobbying by oligarchs and corporations, corruption, and incompetence prevent America from fixing its systemic problems. I will add “warmongering” to the silliness.
Comedian George Carlin succinctly put it, “We are very good at war because we have a lot of practice.” However, we haven’t won a real war since WW2. The Chinese and the North Koreans kicked the American butt in the Korean War. (That’s why you don’t see any Hollywood movies about it). The Vietnam War was a fiasco. Thus, the U.S. has since then resorted to proxy wars. America’s first big proxy war involved arming and funding jihadists in Afghanistan. The next big proxy war was using Iraq to attack Iran during the 1980s.
America’s cozy relationship with Islamic terrorism never stopped — the recent example being Syria. And the U.S. is now openly trying to normalize Al Qaeda — have you seen the PBS interview with Al Julani, the leader of Al Qaeda in the Idlib province of Syria? This was the same terrorist guy on whom the US had a $10 million bounty for many years. Just disgusting.
The U.S. will likely try to use Al Qaeda to disrupt China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 1000+ freight trains every month carry goods between China and EU; and most of them go through Uyghur-Xinjiang province. And there are more than 20,000 Uyghur terrorists in Idlib, Syria who have been training with Al Qaeda for the last 7-8 years. Perfect proxy warriors.
Now, the U.S. is trying to use Ukraine as the cannon fodder to start a war with Russia. The real goal is to stop the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline. The bigger goal is to sabotage any cooperation and normalization between Russia and Europe. It’s all about divide and rule. It doesn’t matter how many nations are destroyed and how many people get killed.
The Kryptonite for the American Empire is PEACE. If Europe has a peaceful relationship with Russia (and eventually China), it will lead to a prosperous Eurasia, which will have 70% of the human population and about 70% of world’s GDP. And NATO will become meaningless. All these are terrible prospects for the military-industrial complex.
There’s a reason that Pepe Escobar calls the United States of America the “Empire of Chaos.” But it’s even sadder that, in 2021, the leaders of Europe are falling for this old geopolitical playbook and committing suicide. Or how much are the leaders of Ukraine and Europe getting bribed to destroy their own countries?
The EU’s GDP has grown 0% in the last 13 years — EU’s GDP in 2020 was the same as it was in 2007 (about $14.8 trillion)
How stupid is this world???