The world, we have a problem. It is Houston.
America is out of control, and is the main threat to the world’s peace, security and civilizations.
America is out of control in its prosecution of war. No nation has loved war more, hot or cold. It has waged war in all but 17 years of its existence since 1776. The frequency of its wars have increased since 1989. It then began the New World Order Wars, in which America ‘made its own reality’, ‘bombed countries back into the Stone Age’, and lost its head in its unipolar status.
It is out of control in its petulant diplomacy. Its foreign policy think tanks call to remove world leaders. American diplomats insult countries. Its geopolitical strategists try to bypass the United Nations, and make plans for every corner of the earth on their grand chessboard. Congressional Leaders grandstand with Taiwan, but its President and Secretary of State cannot even book a call with China.
Its political comity has imploded. The Biden Administration celebrated the Oscar for the film Navalny, which mythologised the Russian ‘opposition leader’, by arresting its main political rival and Presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
America has lost its mind in its culture. Its films, universities, newspapers, intellectuals, celebrities, social media and vast ideaplex are travesties of their inheritance. All that is solid transitions into air. The West has been rewilded, with noxious weeds, not natural beauty.
Its society is exploding. Life expectancy is stagnant. Inequality is notorious. Identity hatreds proliferate. Gun violence is licentious. Crime, homelessness, addiction and uncared for mental illness have ruined its cities. Its century-long neglect of basic institutions of social protection is coming home to roost on the streets of San Francisco.
The social crisis will get worse when the American financial bubble bursts. American economic commentators are freaking out that the world would dare to dethrone the dollar empire. But the BRICS have overtaken the G7 in global output, and the world is returning to real economies of commodities and products, not fire sales of finance, insurance and real estate.
Worst of all, America is out of control in its exceptionalism. Its elites believe in their manifest destiny as the universal republic. Its factions may differ on when the empire, that dare not say its name, ascended to this privileged status. But they all imagine the eternal recurrence of the New American Century.
America has bullied the world for too long. The Wolfowitz doctrine of the early 1990’s still stands. Any place on earth that dares to resist American unipolar dominance must be crushed, and their resistance declared the work of the Devil.
The bullies land their punches while screaming ‘democracy’. The world has been gas lit by American democracy for too long. All those 800 military bases around the world are defending democracy. All those intelligence operations, the drones, the assassinations, the puppets from South Vietnam to Ukraine; they are all sacred lies that serve democracy.
For decades now, compliant nations, like Australia, have fought to defend this lie of a bankrupt democracy. The advance of American Glory has been cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy and appeasement. We keep rerunning the Hollywood script of World War Two. You don’t want to appease this dictator, or that authoritarian, or the next incarnation of the Red Menace, do you?
But the world now needs to stand up to the real bully. The world should no longer appease the real threat to world peace. The world should no longer be afraid of Americans. The world must defeat America.
There is no point appealing to reason, dialogue and diplomacy. Americans do not do diplomacy. There is no point appealing to the long-term interests of Americans, as Kishore Mahbubanni has gracefully tried. America does not recognise the interests of other nations. The derangement of the American Mind has gone too far. It has fled reality.
If America refuses to accept the modest status of equality in a multipolar world, then America must be defeated. One hopes that America could change through a peaceful political transition, but the historical record suggests that is unlikely. Defeat may be the only way to end American supremacy, aggression and exceptionalism.
These are difficult words to write for this author who loves peace, dialogue, diplomacy and cultural diversity. But, we have learned America is forever at war with those values. Oswald Spengler wrote, ‘Peace is a desire. War is a fact.’ Prayers of peace are weak desires, when the real warmongers mark the next sacrifice to Mars. Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow. After AUKUS, is Australia so far behind? We, who love peace, must face the facts that American Greatness is founded on war.
The great problem of statecraft facing all world leaders, even the sub-imperial power of Australia, is how to defeat America, without provoking nuclear war and a catastrophic backlash against the rest of the world. Defeat is not destruction. Defeat is not humiliation, nor revenge. Defeat to America is not death to America. Defeat without total war could be America’s rebirth. It could spur America to retrench its over-extended empire, and repair its republic. Defeat offers hope to the American people, but no mercy for the Atlanticist elites.
The only hope for citizens of the West is that the leaders of the BRICS nations display signs that they may solve that problem of how to defeat America, even if it may take ten years. That was what Xi JinPing meant when he told Vladimir Putin that the world is changing in ways not seen for 100 years. Perhaps, Xi Jinping also offered a minor role driving those changes to Emmanuel Macron, when the French President visited Beijing in March, if he would only assert ‘strategic autonomy’.
Sadly, very few Australian political, bureaucratic and cultural elites dare even ask that question or examine the real history of the bloody American Century. We have never known strategic autonomy. Our country then is fated to sink with the defeated Pequod, clinging to the wooden leg of its demented Captain Ahab.
Jeff Rich
Jeff Rich is a writer, historian, and former government official. He writes weekly on world affairs and history at jeffrich.substack.com