I had been asked to give a keynote speech at a conference at Columbia University’s Journalism School. It was January 2002. Two planes had been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center months earlier and you could still feel how wounded the city felt. You could read it in the faces of New Yorkers you spoke to.
But it was the words of one of his classmates that come back to me now. He had arrived in New York just a few days before 9/11 from his native Pakistan to study at Columbia. He likened the United States to Imperial Rome.
"If you are lucky enough to live within the walls of the Imperial Citadel, which is to say here in the US, you experience American power as something benign. It protects you and your property. It bestows freedom by upholding the rule of law. It is accountable to the people through democratic institutions.
“But if, like me, you live on the Barbarian fringes of Empire, you experience American power as something quite different. It can do anything to you, with impunity… And you can’t stop it or hold it to account.”
We’ll see how much, we’ll see to what extent one nation can subjugate another. Of course, the world will be in flux, of course people will die, but at least it won’t be a collective effort by a select group of people and nations to enslave the whole world but regional differences that might be resolved with the least amount of bloodshed (which can’t be done when war is a racket and you use it for profit, ammo has to be spent!). There’s a revolution going on outside of the West, and good things will come, but of course we have to go through a bit of chaos. What’s the alternative? Allowing the American empire and their vassals to run amok as they have, dropping bombs, droning and raping indiscriminately ?
Trump has made the American Empire caustic to the international order in part because he is leading the charge to discard the international order for something else.
I feel like the issue at hand is that revolutionaries want to promise a better tomorrow without building a non-American world order without acknowledging that the various wars between the world wars are only going to amplify and that many of the intermediate powers don’t share the same political end goals.
? Why would they amplify? Do you know how many wars the American empire started or triggered through regional destabilisation efforts since WW2? From Korea to Ukraine, man, come on. That’s not a reasonable argument to make IMO. We shall see, but I believe other communities won’t go to war the way the West has so easily. And it’s not a “revolutionary promise”, it’s just the reality of the world today, acknowledged even by the White House: we live in a world post American hegemony. This is why Venezuela took place, and Greenland is threatened.
Do you know the deaths that happened post World War I? Do you know the deaths that happened in World War I on the scale compared to what was before?
You seem focused a lot on “America bad” and I can’t argue that an American led international order was bloodless, but the lack of a power is going to lead to increased conflict. After all, if it wasn’t for the USA, why wouldn’t Venezuela invade Guyana?