The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
8 - What the Future Holds
Barack
Obama’s most consequential international achievement may have been
the triumph of symbolism over substance behind which he expanded and
escalated the so-called “war on terror,” with a vast expansion of
covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the
heaviest U.S. aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.
Obama’s
charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the
U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most
expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.
But
Obama’s expansion of the “war on terror” under cover of his
deceptive global public relations campaign created many more problems
than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped
to solve any of them. Trump’s expressed desire to place America
first and to resist foreign entanglements is hopelessly at odds with
his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.
If
the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of
its international problems, it would have done so already. That is
exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind both
the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of
Clinton and Obama: a “good cop – bad cop” routine that should
no longer fool anyone anywhere.
But
as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big
Muddy in Vietnam, lying to the public about unwinnable wars does not
make them any more winnable. It just gets more people killed and
makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.
In
unwinnable wars based on lies, the “credibility” problem only
gets more complicated, as new lies require new scapegoats and
convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies.
Obama’s cynical global charm offensive bought the “war on terror”
another eight years, but that only allowed the CIA to drag the U.S.
into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the
world.
Meanwhile,
Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals
around the world by calling for a recommitment to the rule of
international law, which prohibits the threat or use of military
force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of
aggression will only make Putin’s case more persuasive, not least
to important U.S. allies like South Korea, Germany and other members
of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until
now helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.
Throughout
history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly
united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have
reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France
under Napoleon and Hitler’s Germany also regarded themselves as
exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their
belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction.
Americans
had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world
will find a diplomatic rather than a military “solution” to its
American problem. Our chances of survival would improve a great deal
if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like
something other than putty in the hands of the CIA.
***
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