The Politics of Power
The United States of America was born out of a strong wish to just not be involved in the Old World's politics and squabbles. One of our earliest international policies, the Monroe Doctrine, even enshrined this idea in cold hard text. You stay out of the Americas, and we'll stay out of your business. We maintained that aggressively non-interventionist stance for the better part of two hundred years. I say aggressively because when Muslim pirates kidnapped our people, we built the biggest and baddest ships on the planet, put the most bloody minded Marines we could find on them, and went out to aggressively teach them why it was a really bad idea to get our attention. That's how the Marines added "To the shores of Tripoli" to their anthem.
After World War II shattered every economy on the planet, sunk a third of the ships on the seas, killed an entire generation of Europeans, and shattered world order as we knew it, we had the largest and most powerful navy and air force in the world. We could have ruled the world if we wanted to. We didn’t want to. So we went back home and helped everybody that got blasted into the stone age rebuild themselves back into the industrial age.
But we grudgingly accepted the position of the world's cop to keep another Hitler from rising and starting World War III. Americans were grudging about it. Politicians were a bit more fond of the idea. We've spent the last eighty years rebuilding other nations, patrolling the oceans, and helping everybody in the world become functional modern societies.
We helped build a good world on the surface, but there were a lot of cracks if you knew where to look. Unfortunately, most of our people didn’t look. We are still fundamentally isolationist in our viewpoints, and most Americans simply don’t see beyond our borders. We have enough space here. What do we need with more? But there are always people who want more, and that is why we are where we are right now.
By the time I was growing up in the 1980s, we were the arsenal of Democracy, protecting Europe and Japan and the rest of the world from the evils of Soviet Communism and burning them to the ground by the simple expedient of producing more than they could ever hope to produce. We just built them into ruin and left them shattered on the side of the road that we built at the same time just to show them we could. Because America, F Yeah.
It could have ended right there. Russia asked to join NATO and be friends. We could have just accepted the peace, helped rebuild Russia like we did the others we defeated, and gone forward as friends like we did with the others. Of course they might have been lying. But we never even gave them a chance to lie or cheat or... gasp... actually maybe even play nice with us.
Some enterprising individuals saw the fall of the Soviet Union as a way to build a New World Order where no one stood against our power. They promised Russia they wouldn’t expand NATO towards them, and then instantly began absorbing former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO. What could Russia do? Protest? They were bankrupt. And the many nations that weren’t Russian and didn’t like being in the Soviet Union really wanted in on that NATO thing. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want a hungry Russia looking at me after fifty years of Soviet rule. I would want friends backing me up, thank you very much.
But if you are the sole unipolar superpower in the world, what do you do when nations don’t want to do what you want them to do? You either shrug and let it go... or you don’t. And the Neocons that infected both parties did not want to let it go. They had power, and they were going to use it to get what they wanted. And any nation that disagreed just ate some bombs. Or some uranium-tipped bullets. Or some USAID-funded street protests. Or a totally-locally-led rebellion that toppled a government in hours. Or maybe they just had a tyrant that needed taking care of. Or maybe they sent a terrorist attack against us. Or maybe we just wanted to buy a friendly politician or five.
Yugoslavia. Georgia. The Country, not the State. Ukraine.
These are the big names. The ones that made the news in America. Care to guess how many other nations we touched with USAID and other fingers of our foreign policy? Go ahead and look. You might be surprised by the names you see. And then ask yourself, how many of those names are better off now than they were in 1990? Or go back to 1980 and look. 1970. 1960. 1950.
That was when Iran was busily trying to drag itself into the modern world of representative parliaments. It succeeded to a lesser or greater amount, though it was spotted by political assassinations. Then they nationalized the British petroleum company pumping oil in their lands and a sudden and unexpected military coup ousted them to put the Shah back into direct command of the country. Britain and America had absolutely nothing to do with this coup of course. And you can believe that all you want.
The Shah ruled with varying degrees of support until a religious revolution kicked off in 1978. He accepted exile to avoid death in 1979, and sought treatment for his cancer in America. The new Iranian government didn’t like that and a random protest of concerned people stormed our embassy and took our diplomats hostage. They of course had absolutely no backing from the government. And you can believe that all you want.
Iran has been at war with us since that whole hostage crisis. They went on to kill American Marines who were trying to stabilize Lebanon against the revolution Iranian-sponsored terrorists started. They’ve killed hundreds, maybe thousands of Americans in the decades since depending on which estimates you look at. They’ve influenced, bought off, or overthrown nations to make them friendly to their cause. And we’ve responded by influencing, buying off, or overthrowing nations to make them friendly to our cause.
Lebanon. Jordan. Libya. Syria. Iraq. Afghanistan. Yemen. Egypt. Sudan. Saudi Arabia. Add in the invasion and liberation of Kuwait, and we’ve got a whole mess of chaos and fighting in the Middle East and North Africa over the last thirty years. And how many of these nations do you think had USAID playing around in them? Check it out. You might be surprised. Or maybe not.
But you know what? Americans are sick and tired of all of this. We don’t want the forever wars anymore. That’s why Americans have gone out three elections in a row to vote for Trump. Because he promised an end to all these forever wars. We want to get back to the Monroe Doctrine. Come back to America and let the rest of the world get on without us. But the politicians in DC like being kings of the worlds. So does the bureaucracy. All the little bureaucrats love being able to go anywhere and cut checks for anybody. Being a middle manager in the country that rules the world is... amazing after all.
But all of their posturing, all of their use of political and military power, has simply split the world more and fractured the dominance that we did have. The nations that used to be happy to let us take the lead, no longer are. And many nations have taken measures to protect themselves from the machinations of our bureaucrats and politicians. We live in a more divided world now, and our own political machines have caused much of that division. We must get them under control, or not only our own influence in the world but our own place in it and our own power in it, may be lost.