John Chuckman

COMMENT ON AMERICA’S ACTIONS AGAINST IRAN AND OTHER STATES

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I can’t imagine better words to describe Trump’s actions against Iran – all of them, from tearing-up the working international nuclear treaty to imposing war-like sanctions, which indeed hurt millions of children and poor people, and  to threatening with warships and nuclear-capable bombers, and now to assassinating the second-most important man in the country, a national hero, a vicious act that demands a response.

Is it even possible to conceive of a more passionately destructive set of actions, unprovoked and without reason except to satisfy an urge to tell others what to do? How on earth can a nation call itself “great,” as America so frequently does, when that is how it behaves?

In what way did any of it make any part of the world’s people better off or safer? It added only pain and suffering and fear to a great many lives and created threats of war that hadn’t existed. And it hugely decreased the future capacity of the world’s nations to trust the word and good faith of the United States.

Of course, that set of acts is only the worst of a bad lot. There was the desperate attempt to topple a twice-elected government in Venezuela, going to such extremes as turning off everyone’s electricity a couple of times, blockading the country including its receipt of medical necessities, working to collapse its major industries, and literally stealing many of the country’s assets abroad.

Almost at the same time, another coup, a successful one, was staged in Bolivia, toppling a popular, elected government, one elected multiple times.

New threats and warnings were issued to Nicaragua and Cuba, both countries which have suffered horribly under past American belligerence.

A number of other horrors from the past decade go right on generating death and misery, too – misery in the broken ruins of Libya, once the best place in Africa to live with all public amenities from good water to education supplied free, misery in the never-recovered catastrophe of Iraq, in poor Yemen, and in the beautiful land of Syria plagued by paid outsiders, mercenaries, supplied with many terrible weapons, who kill and destroy on a large scale.

And everyone in Ukraine and in the rest of Europe pays a price for America’s coup there – a civil war has killed thousands, the country’s economy collapsed under an incompetent installed government, its population has seriously declined as people leave for jobs elsewhere, huge sets of war-like sanctions have cut billions in healthy trade between Europe and Russia, regular threatening military displays and large-scale exercises are conducted right on Russia’s border – these last supposedly over a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine which never occurred.

The press and political speeches are filled with threatening rhetoric and demands for big new spending on the means of destruction – all in the face of no threat and indeed a situation in Russia everyone in the West would have deliriously cheered back in the 1970s, a reasonable, temperate government ready to do business with anyone and call them “partner.” But Europe and Russia can’t do so basic and necessary a thing as buy-and-sell a commodity like natural gas without immense pressures being brought against them by the United States.

We have a vicious trade war with China, predicated on no more principle than that “We think you’ve been far too successful in your stunning rise [the rise of China being the greatest and most important human achievement of our age], and we want different arrangements which take some of that success away from you, and we’ll hit you with every sanction and tariff we can think of until you give them to us.”

That marks greatness being displayed by America?

There is not one of those activities that the world would not be better off without. Safer, more prosperous, more secure, happier, holding more optimism for the future – in other words, virtually all of the activity abroad by the United States for years represents a dead-weight loss for humanity and the community of nations. That’s quite an achievement. And the cost in dollars has been colossal.

Of course, I blame Trump, but, as I’ve said before, it certainly is not the work of just Trump, as hopeless and vicious and ignorant as he is. There have been no efforts by other branches of America’s government to halt or hinder the craziness. They are all complicit.

Please note, the candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination, none of them except one unlikely one, even recognize this terrible problem or how to address it. So, for sure, as is usual in the costly stage shows called American elections, when it’s over, no matter which side wins, you will find the same situation prevailing. Just more rude noise and bellowing with Trump, and less without Trump.

America seeks what is not possible given its relative decline in the face of global growth and change and progress. And it seeks it fired by a burning, fanatical belief that it holds an exceptional place in God’s creation.

I fear that deadly combination of American delusions has the potential to do far greater harm than it already has.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Clive Crook has some astute observations here.

The trouble, however, with all reasonable suggestions for the future improvement of America’s position, such as value-added tax, is that American voters are in large part simply not reasonable.

I believe it truly is the heart of the matter that Americans have an ongoing sense of entitlement like nothing found anywhere else. It is captured in that warped political expression “the American Dream,” a slogan still mouthed by the pathetic workers losing their jobs, and their homes, likely permanently.

America can’t pay for what it imports and expects others to forever hold its debt. It can’t pay for its extreme actions abroad but expects others to help bear the load. And the average American makes no effort to alter the most lunatic expectations, the kind of attitude that created the financial crash.

America is wasting immense amounts on two wars and countless interventions, yet it remains insanely stubborn over the taxes needed to support such excess and ignorant concerning the lack of any economic benefit for the average citizen in these colossal expenditures.

Few people comment on another trend underway, and that is the rise of China (and a couple of other potentially great competitors). The competition China offers is necessarily killing American jobs: you might call it “creative destruction” on an international scale.

Instead of focusing on measures needed to compete in an ever more competitive world, American administrations just repeat economic illiteracies and berate the Chinese for being successful. And they continue to spend like drunken sailors on military waste. And they continue to believe that somehow it is entitled always to end up in first place.

It is not, of course.

I think the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, as others have said, may be seen as something of an allegory for America’s problems. BP, unbelievably, was permitted to drill by American regulatory agencies without having taken basic, needed preparations. Blind stupidity based on the slogan that America needs oil – and it does, so long as the endless march of new three-car garages, beached-whale-sized new houses, meaningless urban sprawl, lumbering vehicles continues – threw sensible regulation overboard. Ironically, this disaster, its magnitude still not widely appreciated, has pretty well destroyed the political possibilities of further offshore drilling as supported by Bush and Obama.

America’s mythology about itself has rendered it literally incapable of governing itself rationally, and I believe, sadly, nothing we can say will turn that stumbling, blind colossus towards enlightenment. We will all pay a price for its stumbling and falling.