A Pox On Pax Americana
29 December 2022 by Larry Johnson 38 Comments
If you ever wondered what it was like to live in the historic time in the aftermath of World War II, when the Cold War started and the United States emerged as the dominant power in the world, wonder no more. You are living in an epochal moment in history. It is fraught with danger, peril and a fundamental realignment of the international order. Gone are the days when the United States could order countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar to do their bidding like an old Uncle Ben on a Southern plantation.
The United States is on the verge of becoming the Hitler portrayed in the movie, Downfall — issuing orders to imaginary armies no longer capable of carrying out those orders.
I am not suggesting that the United States is on the verge of a collapse akin to what happened to the Third Reich in May 1945, but I do believe that the era of the United States invading other countries at will and overthrowing governments not willing to genuflect at the altar of U.S. power is over. The war in Ukraine has laid bare the weakness of the United States to control the international arena.
The year 2022 will be recorded by future historians as the watershed moment when Russia took the red pill and awoke from its delusion that its could be a partner with the West. Since the break up of the former Soviet Union, Russian leaders — not just Putin — naively believed that they could be accepted as a partner in the World order controlled by the United States. Vladimir Putin, in his speech on December 21, 2022 to the collegium of the Ministry of Defense, blamed himself for believing Western promises and announced that Russia would now rely on itself and deal with the West as a hostile threat. I encourage you to watch the video. While the West tries desperately to portray Putin as a madman, the man speaking is calm, intelligent and coherent. What a contrast with the political dwarfs that populate the United States and Europe.
The covert actions of the United States and Europe to try to destabilize Russia have failed. The coming year, 2023, will witness the end of the unipolar world dominated by the U.S. petro dollar and U.S. military intervention. I am frequently attacked as a Putin sycophant. That is a pernicious lie. I simply believe that Russia is not bluffing and recognize that Russia is one of the few countries in the world that can grow and prosper without whoring itself to the West.
The United States has experienced one existential threat in its history — the Civil War in the 1860s. Ironically, Russia played an important role in preventing the British from intervening in that war to aid the South. Russia, by contrast, has faced centuries of existential threats and always has found a way to meet and defeat those threats, such as Napoleon’s invasion in the 1800s and the Nazi invasion in 1941. Short of nuclear war, there is nothing the United States can do to stop Russia from securing its borders. The United States will discover in 2023 that its multi-billion dollar military is impotent when it comes to projecting power in Russia.
Putin and his government understand that the current war with the West is not just going to be fought in the fields of Ukraine. It also is a political and economic battle. To this end Russia is forging important relationships with China, India and the former imperial colonies of Europe and the United States. There is no such understanding among the political leaders in Washington. They still labor under the illusion that they can bully and threaten weaker countries to do their bidding. Joe Biden tried that gambit with Saudi Arabia and those oil rich sheiks told him, in effect, to go pound sand.
While I wish for everyone reading this a Happy and Prosperous New Year, I fear that 2023 will be a period of darkness and suffering for the West. Europe already is being ravaged by inflation and contracting economies. If the dual whammy of inflation and economic deflation hit America, the crisis will be exponentially worse than the 2008 debacle. The apocryphal Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” confronts us. I pray we survive.