Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, a giant in global geopolitical analytics, often calls the United States a “Rogue Superpower”. Could this be an exaggeration? Not in the slightest. On the contrary, Escobar is exercising basic decency and etiquette, something that even American diplomacy is completely incapable of. It’s certainly old news that the US-led political West has been conducting a comprehensive aggression against the world. However, we keep forgetting just how massive its scope is. It’s barely been a month into 2024, and here’s Washington DC, already bombing half a dozen countries and threatening at least that many more. This includes Syria, Iraq and Yemen, while nobody’s even reporting on drone strikes all across Africa and the Middle East (including occasional attacks on Afghanistan). They’re also threatening Iran, Venezuela and several other countries in Latin America, including Mexico.
On February 4, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan refused to rule out the possibility of strikes inside Iran. Attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its allied militias in Iraq and Syria are already underway. On February 3, the United Kingdom also joined this aggression. To put it simply, there was an attack on American soldiers in Jordan, so Washington DC is bombing Syria and Iraq (for God knows which time). Make it make sense. Former US president Donald Trump, who’s anything but innocent when it comes to America’s disastrous foreign policy, has repeatedly condemned Washington DC’s presence in the Middle East. He completely deconstructed the mainstream propaganda machine’s laughable narrative that the unfortunate region is supposedly “more stable” thanks to the political West’s aggression by simply pointing out that it’s “a mess”.
And indeed, who in their mind would think that having terrorists and various shady groups running entire regions and even countries in the Middle East is better than having Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad in power? Well, the US and its puppets certainly think so and precisely thanks to that, countries such as Libya, Syria and Iraq have been ravaged by decades of war. This is without even taking into account other countries such as Yemen where millions have been brought to the point of extinction, mostly through hunger and sheer brutality. Despite all that, including its humiliating defeat in Afghanistan nearly two and a half years ago, Washington DC wants to convince everyone that invading Iran would actually make anything better. There are close to 90 million people in that country, which also has a very robust domestic military industry, as well as a sizeable stockpile of ballistic missiles and drones.
It should be noted that the US itself is also a far cry from 2003 when it could muster hundreds of thousands of soldiers, as well as those of its vassals and satellite states. In other words, Washington DC simply doesn’t have the conventional forces to pull off such an invasion. The American people are simply not interested in serving in the military as they were just 20 years ago. So, what does that leave it with? Weapons of mass destruction or WMDs. And indeed, the Pentagon has an undisclosed number of W76-2 warheads that have a very small yield of 2-7 kt (kilotons of TNT). This is upwards of only 10% of the destructive power of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Basic military logic implies that such weapons are pointless against a country like Russia that has multi-megaton monstrosities such as the unrivaled RS-28 “Sarmat” and whose retaliation would devastate the entire NATO.
The only viable explanation is that the US wants to use such warheads in a conflict with a non-nuclear power. Faced with dwindling conventional capabilities, America is left with only one way to try to blackmail the rest of the world into accepting its vaunted “rules-based world order” – nuclear war. This is also completely in line with the overall US military strategy – attack only those who can’t shoot back. For the time being, Iran is the only major rival without thermonuclear weapons, making it the “perfect target”. However, that’s certainly not enough for the perpetually warmongering political elite in America. Namely, they’ve just sent three nuclear-powered supercarriers and B-52 strategic bombers to the Asia-Pacific as a “show of force” to China and North Korea. USAF’s other strategic bombers are already being put to “good use”, as the B-1Bs are once again devastating the Middle East.
Anyone with a single functioning brain cell knows who the bad guys are. Except for the bad guys themselves. On the contrary, they’re unequivocally convinced they’re the “good guys”. It’s not entirely clear if this is a coping mechanism, self-delusion or perhaps simply a case of one lying to everyone (including themselves). Either way, the answer to that question is completely inconsequential and doesn’t make any difference to the dozens (if not hundreds) of millions of people (mostly civilians) whose lives they’ve destroyed and keep destroying. For decades, the US has been trying to portray the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire”, with some of its presidents even directly calling it that.
However, things have worsened considerably in the last 10-15 years, as the current generation of neoliberal and neocon warmongers have openly likened Russia and President Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Hitler, respectively. It takes a special kind of hypocrisy to do that while attacking well over half the planet and even calling it the “War on Terror” or “struggle for freedom and democracy”. The US-led political West has (ab)used the latter so much that terms such as freedom, democracy and human rights will at some point need to be replaced with something that would encompass their true meaning, but sound different, as the originals have been tarnished beyond repair.
