© UnknownThe Global Game
Historic shifts in world politics happen very
slowly.
That was not the case however, when the U.S. first stepped onto the world stage. It happened quite suddenly in 1898 - with the invasion of Cuba: Old Europe watched with palpable anxiety ...
The Manchester Guardian, at the time, reported that nearly every American had come to embrace this new expansionist zeitgeist. The few critics were "simply laughed at for their pains".
The Frankfurter Zeitung warned against "the disastrous consequences of their exuberance" but realized that Americans would not listen.
In 1845, an unsigned article already had given birth to the slogan
'Manifest Destiny' - a claim that America had a destiny to expand, and to occupy others' lands. Sheldon Richman, in
America's Counter-Revolution, wrote that this latter vision
clearly had 'Empire on its Mind'.This 'Destiny' ethos marked the turning point away from the former decentralization dynamic, and the start of the American impulse towards an imperial totalising outreach which succeeded it. (Not all, of course, were on board - the early U.S. conservative ethos was Burkean: i.e., suspicious of foreign entanglements).
Today, the picture could not be more different.
Doubts and misgivings are everywhere; the drive and confidence of 'Empire' has faded. The U.S. apes more the exhausted Austro-Hungarian Empire of the pre-WW1 era -
dragging an array of allied nations into a conflict that - at that time - turned into WW1. Now, it is western Europe that has been dragged into another European war - by default - owing to their alliance/ allegiance with Washington.
Then, as today, all states disastrously underestimated the length and severity of the conflict - and misread the nature
and significance of events.
Comment: Rising prices have nothing to do with previous Federal Reserve actions, Biden's sanctions, Covid policies, and so forth. No. It's all Putin's fault. One wonders just how these buffoons can tie their shoes in the morning.