Doug Bandow
What could possibly go wrong? The president, now perhaps in name only, reportedly decided to loose American munitions on Russia, a step avoided even during the Cold War. Moscow’s response was to use a nuclear-capable hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine. The American people, more focused on the coming Thanksgiving holiday than the latest eruption in Europe’s deadly proxy war, yawned. Ukraine and its European acolytes, however, held emergency talks and demanded action, meaning a U.S. response.
Never has it been so dangerous to be a great power, for both the dominant great power and the wannabe imperial power. The United States began its history by emphasizing its distance from Europe. The Monroe Doctrine, claiming the Western Hemisphere as America’s own, was arrogant presumption when first issued in 1823. Within a few decades, however, no foreign power could seriously challenge the U.S. in its neighborhood. In reality, America was already one of the most secure nations ever established, in practice vulnerable only to internal conflict.
When World War II ended, the Old World had wrecked itself twice in little more than a generation. America enjoyed global preeminence, which turned into primacy after the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellite system. Then came George H.W. Bush’s infamous “what we say goes,” when the Monroe Doctrine was inverted to mean that Washington expected no challenge when it intervened up to every other nation’s border, and sometimes within those nations as well. U.S. policymakers seemed to believe that America was the eternal unipower.
Yet President George W. Bush and his more arrogant than merry band crashed the glorious bandwagon just a few years later. Manipulated into war on a lie, Uncle Sam destabilized the Mideast, wrecked multiple nations, left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, and loosed deadly new geopolitical viruses upon the world. It was “a heckuva’ job!” by the younger Bush and his successors. We continue to pay the price today.
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