Big Picture (1) Geo-political
We are in the middle of a massive geopolitical shift that will affect the future of the entire world. We should not be distracted by Ukraine, as it is just a sideshow in a much greater and more significant transition.
The United States empire has overreached itself, and its weakness is now being exposed to the world.
The invasion of Iraq cost the lives of nearly a million civilians, but that outcome has been a disrupted economy and a government that is hostile to the interests of the United States. It has remained in the country against the will of the Iraqi government, so it can steal the Syrian oil, but this obstinancy makes it look weak.
An attempted regime change in Syria failed. United States efforts to topple the government created and released the forces of ISIS, which has done incredible harm in many places.
After a twenty-year invasion of Afghanistan, the United States has had to admit defeat and withdraw. The retreat was a shambles in which panicked troops fired at civilians trying to escape when a bomb exploded (serious empires don’t panic).
NATO bombing and missile attacks to bring regime change in Libya looked impressive in the first few weeks, but have released a civil war that is recking the country with the best education and health system in Africa. All the United States can do is pretend that they were not there and hope that the flood of refugees that have invaded Europe will go away.
The United States has been unable to stop the cruel Saudi invasion of Yemen, the poorest nation in the world, with weapons it has supplied.
The United States has flipflopped been support and rejection of the JCPOA with Iran, but has been unable to change the Iranian government or prevent it from developing an arsenal of missiles and refining uranium.
Recent attempts to effect colour revolutions in Kazakhstan and Belarus have failed because governments have worked out how to defeat them, no matter how much money the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA throw in.
The Russian military operation in Ukraine is the latest example of the powerlessness of the US/NATO empire. It had trained and equipped the Ukrainian troops and encouraged them to assemble on the easter border, ready to invade the independent republics in the Donbas. When President Putin asked NATO for negotiations about new security agreements for Europe, the United States and the UK mocked him and challenged him to war if he was serious. They assumed that he was like them and too scared to take serious action, but he called their bluff and invaded. The United States has been powerless to prevent this from happening. This is just another example of the United States urging a nation to rely on it for security and then betraying it when the going gets tough.
All the United States has been able to do is to impose sanctions that punish its partner nations in Europe and spread inflation around the world. The full consequences of these actions have not been seen yet.
Attempts to topple the socialist government in Venezuela have failed. Now the United States is pleading with the Venezuelan government to supply oil to the market where prices are shooting up.
China now has sufficient economic and military strength to ignore United States demands and is pushing ahead with its efforts to expand its economic influence through its Belt and Road Initiative. Unlike the United States, which tends to give military aid to its clients, the Chinese build economic infrastructure for the nations it works with.
The United States sails freedom of navigation voyages in the South China Sea, but it knows that China now has sufficient military strength to blow American aircraft carriers and destroyers out of the water if it chooses.
Wasted Opportunity for Peace
When the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO should have been shut down because its reason for existence had gone. It should have been replaced with a security agreement that covered all of Europe and entrenched the peace that had overtaken the continent. The United States should have gone back to America and focussed on blessing the nations of that continent.
Instead, the United States wasted a huge opportunity to release peace in the world by acting like a world hegemon, doing what it liked and expecting all other nations to submit to its dictates. It bullied weaker nations and stirred up troubles in others. Economic resources that were needed elsewhere have been wasted intervening in situations that could not be changed. Successive presidents tried to change governments that they did not like, but their intervention usually made the situation worse. The United States has invaded nations and fought wars in countries for no-ones benefit, except the weapons manufacturers.
The nations of Europe wasted the opportunity to establish peace by expanding their vain efforts to create a United States of Europe into numerous ethnically and religiously diverse nations that cannot be united. This will cause the entire project to fracture and fail (the UK has already gone).
Push Back
Unfortunately, the world has now woken up to United States weakness. Governments everywhere are tired of being pushed around and are thumbing their nose at the United States.
Saudi Arabia has ignored President Biden’s instruction to end the war in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia is doing deals for oil in Yuan.
Russia has decided to push back against the encroaching military force of NATO.
India has decided to continue importing Russian military equipment and oil.
The UAE is inviting Syria back into the Middle Eastern fold, despite United States opposition.
Character Exposed
The United States has always claimed that it is a good nation, and that it would only use its economic and military dominance to enhance democracy and free enterprise. Unfortunately, its actions in the international domain have exposed this as a lie.
In Afghanistan, the United States sided with the Northern Alliance warlords, who were proven murderers and rapists. The government they imposed on the ungrateful people was full of thieves who stole much of the economic aid being supplied.
In Syria, the United States trained and equipped rebels who were aligned with Al Qaeda.
The United States empire has revealed its true character by stealing $9 billion of central bank reserves from the Afghani people and shoving on sanctions that will cause many Afghanis to suffer from starvation and ill health. That looks like sour grapes, not liberality.
In Ukraine, the CIA has trained and equipped the neo-Nazi Azov battalions.
The Saudi government is an ugly autocracy, but it is a United States ally because it is a big buyer of weapons and supplier oil.
The US has used the Kurdish people to fight its wars, but then betrayed them by refusing to allow them to have their own independent state.
The United States cannot help itself. It demanded that China support the economic pressure it is putting on Russia but then slapped sanctions on it in support of the Uyghur people, although there are probably as many black people in United States prisons doing slave labour as there are Uyghurs in Chinese re-education centres. I am sure that the Chinese see the hypocrisy.
The needs of the United States Military Industrial Complex almost always trump any desire for peace.
When push comes to shove, the interests of United States business are put ahead of the efforts to advance liberal democracy. In various parts of the world, corrupt oligarchs and crooked businesspeople are usually the loudest voices in favour of United States involvement. The entreaties of ordinary people are usually ignored.
A recent estimate suggests that the Bush’s War on Terror has displaced 37 million people in various parts of the world. Yet the US has accepted very few of them, probably because they are Arabs and Africans. This is not the response of a compassionate nation.
The United States has funded and provided political protection for Israel to bomb, torment, maim and starve the people of Gaza (half of whom are children), and steal the land of Palestinians on the West Bank.
The United States has imprisoned people without trial at Guantanamo and tortured those who refused to comply.
Journalists like Julian Assange, who have exposed United States war crimes around the world, have been imprisoned without a fair trial.
Large numbers of blacks are imprisoned in the United States without fair trials. Too many innocent prisoners end up spending years on death row.
When nations do things that the United States opposes, it happily imposes economic sanctions that steal their wealth and destroys their trade. The belief in free trade and liberal democracy seems to only apply when the United States will benefit.
Unfortunately, the American people still believe the lie.
Vulnerable
At the same time as the United States weakness is being exposed in the international sphere, division is making it vulnerable at home.
Inequality has increased significantly as rich bankers have been bailed out and protected from prosecution by the federal government, while poor people have been left to survive on what they can scrounge.
The United States seems to be incapable of running a presidential election with universal acceptance of the result. This is the inevitable consequence of the election process being run by political appointees.
When Hillary Clinton lost, she claimed that Russia had stolen the election, despite most of the evidence for Russian interference being manufactured by her supporters and paid for by her election campaign.
Donald Trump claimed that he lost because the votes were incorrectly counted.
We can assume that whoever loses the 2024 election will claim that the election was stolen. This is dangerous because it leaves the United States looking incompetent, and the person elected to be president appear impotent because they only have limited support.
The United States is incredibly divided between regions and across social classes.
Groups on both sides of the political, economic and social divide are now willing to use violence to advance their causes, or when their demands are not met.
Poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction are rife, making a mockery of claims that the United States is a kind and caring nation.
The strength of the United States church is being weakened as clergy scandals, political division, failed eschatologies, and a distorted gospel are undermining willingness to participate in church life.
A massive division exists between the people who see Donald Trump as a political saviour and those who hate him. That will not go away while he is around and will persist after he disappears from the political scene.
In the short term, the United States will continue to be weaker. However, in the longer term, I expect the United States government to become more autocratic and reassert its position of dominance using military force to impose its will on the nations that stand in its way.