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Trump's threats of war, sanctions and promises to make America great again could be dismissed as the ranting of an eccentric politician. But this isn't all about Trump. What he advocates is representative of much of the US elite.
The president and his generation of Americans grew up in a world where the USA was the greatest superpower in human history. It was not just their vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and their war machine but, in 1945,
around 50 percent of the entire world's economy was in the United States of America, with
Britain and the
USSR hobbling along with around 10 percent each. America dwarfed the power that the British empire had in the 19th century.
In the years that followed, America would intervene all over the world, not to spread democracy, but to overthrow governments that were not working in America's commercial interests. Whether it was the coup that removed the government of Iran in 1953 and brought back the dictatorship of the Shah; or the military coup in Brazil in 1964 that overthrew a socialist, democratically elected government; or the dozens of other coups around the world, America crushed any opposition to its economic interests.
Comment: There are loose threads all over Russiagate, begging to be pulled. Stefan Halper is a big one.