The other day I was talking about the war in Ukraine with a gentleman when it suddenly occurred to me: "Clearly, the United States are the masters of the world." Ouch, I thought. The dear old left and its clichés! How faithful to outdated doctrines!
Do they not see that "Yankee imperialists" are not even the masters of their own country? Do they not realize the chaos they are living within their borders?
OK, if this gentleman had been talking about soft power, he wouldn't be so wrong. Here – in cinema, music, technology, social networks, artificial intelligence, woke anti-intelligence – the United States does prevail.
Its cultural weight in the world is so overwhelming that it is beginning to conquer the last frontier left to them, football. They are the owners of major European clubs such as Milan, Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester United. They even bought Messi. They may end up buying Barça.
But the good gentleman, cultured and intelligent he was, did not mean that. He was referring, like so many who think his way, to geopolitics, to Washington's supposed power to impose war or peace wherever it pleases. That the invasion of Ukraine is not the fault of Russia, but of the United States for its desire to expand NATO; that this war continues and that Israel continues to massacre Palestinians at the express wish of the White House - or Congress or the Pentagon or who knows who - to enrich the United States arms industry. Or something
For believers in Washington's global supremacy it is not always clear exactly why the United States intervenes in the world as it does. Their intentions are sometimes inscrutable. But, according to this old and conspiratorial view, it is unmistakably about the desire to get more money. The Iraq war? For oil, of course.
Let me see. The mistake is starting from the premise that the United States is spreading its tentacles around the world not only logically, but divinely. They know what they are doing. That they are able to see the future and foresee how everything will turn out. Well no America is not God. They are not even a united state, let alone a monolithic state. One day it's up to the human and fallible Joseph Biden to make the decisions, another day to the unpredictable Trump, another to a Bush or a Clinton or a Reagan or a Kennedy. But they are almost always at the mercy of whichever side has the majority in the House of Representatives or the Senate, and they always, always fear the electoral consequences of their actions.
The war in Iraq, like the one in Afghanistan or Vietnam, was a fiasco, proof of how vulnerable and confused "the masters" can become. Baghdad was captured not to steal oil, but as revenge – blind – for the 9/11 attacks, an impulse shared by a large part of the electorate, and for the complex that George Bush Jr. had with his father, who had not never believed in him, poor thing. George Bush senior had won the first war with Iraq, but he did not dare to go ahead and overthrow Saddam Hussein. "Well, you'll see, papa - thought Júnior-. You will see who is determined here, who is a coward."
Anyone who does not add emotional variables to his analysis of the global behavior of the United States, who believes that his interventions abroad obey a calculated strategy of global conquest, is wrong. And he overestimates not only the power but the vision and rationality of those in charge.
Let's go back to the present. In Ukraine. To believe that the expansion of NATO to countries like Estonia or Latvia or Poland was Washington's decision is to over-respect Washington and disrespect Estonians, Latvians and Poles. I know these three countries, all traumatized by the years they lived under the yoke of Moscow in the Soviet era, all on permanent alert given the expansionist intentions of contemporary Russia. The vast majority of its inhabitants fervently wished to fall under the protection of NATO, just as Sweden and Finland do today. It's not like the United States imposed it on them. The worst, cruelest thing would have been for the United States to say no.
As for the irritatingly oft-heard notion that the United States wishes to prolong the war in Ukraine, even as it has sabotaged Vladimir Putin's peace attempts (for God's sake), for the benefit of their arms companies, well... First, what a way to belittle the heroism of the Ukrainians! You will tell me that President Zelenski and his people succumb to the destruction of their country, accept the death and maiming of tens of thousands of young people, because they have the happy consolation of knowing that in return the major shareholders of Lockheed will become gold Martin? Please...
Second, how do you explain that the Republicans in Congress, by tradition the most linked to big capital, are the ones most opposed to continuing to give away (yes, giving away, because the American taxpayer pays) missiles and tanks in Ukraine? Or that, if the Messiah of the Republican Party wins the presidential election next year, almost the first thing he will do is to cut off the flow of arms to Ukraine and pressure Zelenski to give in to Putin's blackmail?
As far as Israel is concerned, the most remarkable thing is Washington's impotence before the Netanyahu Government. They give him weapons, yes, and lots of them. But, despite everything, Netanyahu pays no attention to Biden, who since a couple of days after the killing of Hamas, which triggered the war, has been asking him to be cautious in the military intervention in Gaza. And there the Israelis continue, exterminating Palestinians, ignoring Biden's pleas. Could it be that Biden wants to avoid the death of innocents? More decent than Putin, yes. But even if some believe he doesn't really place any value on Palestinian lives, Biden has a pressing interest in making Israel curb its hunger for revenge.
With every Palestinian child who dies under the bombs, his Democratic Party, increasingly divided by what is happening in Gaza, suffers another hemorrhaging of votes. And what no one can dispute is that Biden's greatest desire is to beat Trump next year. Netanyahu is doing him no favors. So, the United States, "masters of the world"? Bah. Not even in Israel.
