Foreword
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the peak period of US hegemony began. The country was dominant in many spheres of power such as military, economic, political and cultural.
Francis Fukuyama, a bureaucratic functionary at the US Department of State declared, with much pomp and ceremony, that history had ended and US was the triumphant trophy of liberal democracy.
Since the 1990s, Americans have found themselves maintaining the world alone. Almost 8 billion human beings live on the planet today. Holding a planet like this, of this population size, in a hegemonic order is perhaps impossible.
US as an experiment is in fact declining. The greatest country on Earth (or so its leaders still like to believe), the one pouring dollars into a military like no other, the one unable to win any war since 1945, seems to be losing world hegemony.
The US are essentially depressed, deeply depressed. And even more complicated, it is as if there were two Americas that react to the same depression in opposite ways.
Background
On January 17, 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address. Those who expected the military leader and hero of World War II to depart his Presidency with a nostalgic, “old soldier” speech like Gen. Douglas MacArthur's, were surprised at his strong warnings about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” As President of the United States for two terms, Eisenhower had slowed the push for increased defense spending despite pressure to build more military equipment during the Cold War's arms race. His standing as a military leader helped give him the credibility to stand up to the pressures of this new, powerful interest group.
In 1991 President George Bush ordered to launch Operation Desert Storm in Iraq followed by a set of military operations around the globe. At the same time with Russia in tatters and China still a modestly rising power, US continued to pour ever more dollars into US military-industrial complex.
George H. W. Bush's son, would respond to the 9/11 attacks, planned and carried out by Osama bin Laden and his small terror group, al-Qaeda, by launching what quickly came to be known as “the Global War on Terror.” And all too global it would be with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 when it hoped to be able to rebuild the entire Middle East. It would also prove a disaster of the first order for the last superpower, whose military would leave literally millions dead across the planet, destroy countries, decimate economies, and create tens of millions of refugees, with the US military losing wars while terrorism as a phenomenon only grew.
US interference in other countries
The United States has interfered in the affairs of other nations with 251 military interventions between 1991 and 2022. This according to a Report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a US government institution that collects information on behalf of the Congress. The report documents another 218 US military interventions between 1798 and 1990. In total, there have been 469 US military interventions since 1798 recognized by Congress.
This data was published on March 8, 2022, by the CRS, in a paper titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022.” The list of countries targeted by the US military includes the vast majority of nations on the planet, including almost all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and most of the African continent.
It is important to emphasize that all these numbers are conservative estimates, because they do not include US special operations and covert actions.
The CRS Military Intervention Project wrote: “With the end of the Cold War era, we would have expected the United States to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming a decrease in threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite: the US has increased its military commitment abroad.”
America's performances
On May 15, 2023 The Washington Post publishes a study conducted by the Watson Institute at Brown University saying that the US has spent a total of $8 trillion on a 20-year war on terror, which resulted in around 4.5 million deaths (over 940,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, an estimated 3.6 million people have died indirectly in war zones) while 38 million people have been displaced, becoming refugees, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines; those left disabled, mentally traumatized and otherwise affected are not included. At least four times as many active duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide than in combat.
Instead of focusing on human development, the US is busy creating, promoting and fighting imaginary enemies abroad. Also, America is funding, supporting and fighting illegal wars around the globe leaving not enough resources for human development at home.
For decades, the American “ruling class” has turned a blind eye toward wide-ranging issues at home including inflation, rising levels of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, health care, gun shootings, drugs, policing and racism.
This is how a superpower has utterly failed to protect its own people, democracy, and American values including the freedoms and liberties of ordinary people.
Many political pundits, media experts, academics and researchers have offered hundreds of opinion pieces, articles, short films, documentaries and written books that carry a warning shot: “America is on the brink of revolution and breakup”.
Current situation
US continues to organize for a new Cold (verging on Hot) War with China in the Pacific with US special operations forces recently “permanently” assigned to an island only a few kilometers off China’s coast. US is dealing with China as if this were indeed a Cold War moment, and the sort of “containment” of a communist country Biden grew up with was still the order of the day for the globe's greatest power.
The US has exaggerated the effectiveness of its military power to bring about fundamental political change. America is beginning to slide back from the summit rapidly due to the enormous inequalities caused by American-led globalization. In fact, the long term sources of American decline are actually local rather than international. For a long time, the US has been politically and socially divided, its economy has stagnated, and it no longer carries its military power.
The once-lone superpower, and now perhaps the loneliest power of all, could even be heading for previously unimaginable autocratic waters or who knows what else? If only it were otherwise, but unfortunately, in the months to come, an all-American world possibly spins slowly out of control, while the leftovers of the American Century fight it out in a country where all too many seem focused on anything but what matters.
US are depressed
In 2023, an already incredible figure emerged: a third of Americans, 29%, have been diagnosed as clinically depressed at least once in their lives.
Americans are deeply disappointed in the world and in themselves. Since 1990s they remain alone at the top of the planet, messianic people that they are, chosen by the Lord in their opinion, sent to earth to redeem their fellow men. They are genuinely convinced that the rest of humanity was waiting for nothing more than Americanization, humanity's ultimate goal.
The current depression arises from having discovered that it was not true, that human beings have no intention of becoming Americans except, may be, in Western Europe. Americans are genuinely convinced that they have a mission, that they are the beacon of humanity. And if you feel like a beacon of humanity, but humanity spits in your face that it doesn't want to be you, the psychological backlash can be tremendous.
The price paid when you find yourself faced with a cleavage between reality and self-representation can become very stinging and can produce depression. When, in March 2003, US invaded Iraq, they were truly convinced that the Iraqis were waiting for them to escape Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. In reality, the majority of Iraqis, who are Shiites, wanted to eliminate Saddam because he represented a Sunni dictatorship.
They didn't want this dictatorship, they wanted another one: still a despotic regime, which is what they consider intrinsic to their culture, but of Shiite origin. And they do not welcome Americans as liberators. They welcome them as a slightly naive instrument of their final plan. And today, in fact, Iraq, with a Shiite majority, belongs to Iran, not to the US.
American believe that there is always a bad guy, like in all fairy tales, who prevents others from living like them. That the Russians, if they were free, if Putin weren't there, Russians would live like Americans. The merit Russians surely recognize in Putin is that he is anti-Western. And that is more than enough.
Americans are disappointed in having discovered that the world doesn't want them; their malaise is then due to the effort of maintaining a system with too many inhabitants within it who don't want them, and with the need to constantly wage war.
Unrest in the population
The Americans destroyed their industry from the '70s to the '80s, literally. They did this on purpose because they had to import goods from others to create dependency (taking the goods from others make others dependent on US for their well-being).
All this has generated unrest in the population. Entire industries, and therefore entire families, were pushed out of the market, especially in the Midwest, the most important region of the US , what Americans today call the Rust Belt, that is, the rusty belt, because the industrial assembly lines have been at a standstill since they were destroyed. This generates deep bitterness and uneasiness.
Americans feel threatened
Americans feel threatened from immigrants in their home. US has always been a country welcoming immigrants but as a country of assimilation, not a country of integration.
US faces a large immigration which it absolutely needs, but which undermines the dominant canon. Today they are mainly Hispanics, who arrive by the millions and millions every year. There is a sharp increase in the number of Spanish speakers from the Americas and by mid-century they are expected to be a third of the US population. Most of them are Mexican.
What scares Americans most is that once they had immigrants coming from across the ocean: therefore it was easy to sever the link with the mother country, which is the basis of assimilation (which is not integration, typical of the provinces of an empire).
The child of immigrants must become American forgetting any memory of anything, speaking only English, not having any sentimental ties to any original homeland. This is assimilation, and it has always succeeded with immigrants having their mother country on the other side of the ocean.
Mexicans not only have their motherland across the Rio Bravo but they settle hundreds of thousands in the southwestern states of the United States of America, which were Mexican less than two centuries ago. And which the Americans took from Mexico during the war, and which many Mexicans consider to be theirs today and want them back (California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado).
For Mexicans, that is their home. Some Mexican archaeologists have also established that the original homeland of the Aztecs was between Arizona and New Mexico.
The reaction to the depression
All these factors have generated the profound depression of today's America, which, schizophrenic, shoots itself in the foot and attacks the Capitol. And there are two Americas, Democrats and Republicans, that react to the same malaise in a conflicting, antithetical, geometrically reversed way.
The two Americas are the coasts of the US and the interior, which have an opposite reaction to the same depression. The coasts are the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast, basically New York and California. They maintain it's time to abandon the empire: it was a mistake to believe to be able to redeem the world and to save humanity. It was a mistake believing that others were waiting for US, and it was equally a mistake to believe that the world could be held by one power alone and that US should impose itself on others. So: “Let's throw down the statues and let's archive the empire”.
The interior, the hinterland of the country, is the Midwest and the Middle West, what Americans call the heartland. On January 6, 2021 gentlemen from Midwest entered Parliament. They maintain they don't have to apologize to anyone. The blame for what happened, that is, believing that the world was waiting for US, that humanity wanted nothing more than to be American, is from the coasts, from other Americans.
The point is to see if the country will not reach a sort of collapse due to internal conflict, because these two different Americas, which react in such opposite ways to the depression, inevitably do so against each other.
Seeing Americans so busy looking at their own navels and arguing among themselves, has instilled considerable courage in Iran and China. Iranians are facing Israel, which they perceive as a miniature of US in the Middle East and China wants to take back Taiwan while Americans are so distracted by themselves.
Perception is more important than reality and Americans perceive themselves to be in deep decline. Americans feel depressed. So, either an external event will push them to react, or they will continue to implode. Or, again, they will continue to get by, but generating chaos around them.
Conclusion
An increasingly balkanized US is likely to be even more inward-looking, preoccupied with internal divisions over immigration, race, inequality, and sexual and gender identity issues.
US leads the world in the number of firearms in private hands. Although US comprises only 4% of the world's population, it accounts for 40% of the globe's firearms with 393 million privately held firearms, more guns that in the other top 25 countries in the world combined.
Among the most fervent defenders of Second Amendment rights are people who express their desire for a new civil war. The growing racism, antisemitism and xenophobia that has entered the mainstream of political and social discourse in the United States, along with readily accessible weapons, the potential for new acts of domestic, politically-motivated violence cannot be dismissed or ignored.
The recent Trump's assassination attempt may also validate a strong sense among many Trump supporters and many people on the far right that they are being delegitimized, that they are on the defensive and that there are efforts to basically prevent them from competing in the political process and prevent Trump from returning to the White House.
The worst part of this polarization is that the American political system became dysfunctional:
- forcing out any politicians and policymakers who are interested in collaboration with the other side;
- delegitimizing leaders who are willing to collaborate with the other side, hence presenting them as individuals who betrayed their values and political party;
- delegitimizing their political rivals and transforming a political disagreement into a war in which there is no space for working together to address the challenges facing the nation.
By combining these dynamics, a dysfunctional system is created where both sides are convinced that it's a zero-sum game, that it's the end of the country. It's the end of democracy if the other side wins. If both sides are hammering into people again and again that losing an election is the end of the world, then it's not a surprise that eventually people are willing to take the law into their hands and to engage in violence.