America’s Post World War II Global Dominance Has Just Ended
Here is what has just happened (as reported in German Economic News, and translated by me), which virtually brings down the curtains on America’s dominance of the world — a dominance that started when World War II ended in 1945:
March 21: “GEOPOLITICS: Washington nervous: China, Japan and South Korea forge an Alliance.” This news story reports:
“For the first time in three years, the foreign ministers of the three countries met. They agreed on Saturday in Seoul to work towards a summit of their leaders, and to take on problems with the interpretation of history [which have separated them till now]. They also expressed their intention to continue to work for a free trade agreement and for new multi-party talks on North Korea’s controversial nuclear program.”Here’s the important context of that: The U.S. in WW II conquered Japan, which had invaded China and conquered Korea; but, now, Japan, China and South Korea are moving toward one-another, while China, and indirectly the BRICS group of rising economic powers as a whole — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are making their move past the previous U.S.-European control of the world. Furthermore, these Asian powers are collectively inviting North Korea to move toward them, and to join this group, which would finally bring an end to the stalemated hostilities between South and North Korea. So: welcome to the 21st Century! (For more details on that, see the terrific news reporting in GEN.)
And, in addition: for these three economic powerhouses to “work for a free trade agreement” that’s outside the orbit of Obama’s secret negotiations for his TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership with them, may mean that they all will be less likely to accept the trade-deal that he is trying to negotiate collectively with them. So: this three-party ministerial meeting is, in itself, potentially an extremely important historical event. But it is part of this larger and interconnected whole, which is far more important than any trade-deal.
March 20: “General Motors ends Opel production in Russia.” This news story reports yet another sign of the separation between the Western and the Eastern economic blocs, which, yet again, is both a direct and an indirect result of Obama’s sanctions against Russia, and of his Secretary of State John Kerry’s agreement with the king of Saudi Arabia to increase oil production in order to drive down the oil price and thereby starve Russia of its crucial foreign-exchange earnings from Russia’s huge oil-sales. However, countering Obama’s purpose of harming Russia, GM’s Russian production facilities might now be acquired as abandoned assets by Russia’s oligarchs or the Russian state, and produce new models, the profits from which will remain inside Russia and accrue to Russians. In this regard: Reuters headlined on March 19th “Lada maker’s hopes rise as rival flees Russian car market,” and reported that, “Russian carmaker Avtovaz, producer of the … Lada, expects to grab a bigger share of the shrinking domestic market as its international rivals pull back.” That money will stay in Russia, building up Russia’s economy, instead of Germany’s (Opel) and America’s (GM).
March 23: “Volkswagen Drives Back Russian Production.” Germany’s largest car-maker adds yet further to the opportunities for Russia’s investors, and for investors in other BRICS countries (since they’re not participating in Obama’s anti-Russian sanctions).
March 23: “Spain: Protest party, Podemos, comes third in regional election.” ”The Socialists won the [Andalusian] election, the Conservatives of Premier Mariano Rajoy clearly lost the election.” The conservative party, and its leader of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, which have been strongly pro-American and have supported America’s fascist anti-Russian coup in Ukraine as much as they thought the Spanish public would tolerate (given that Spain’s public are overwhelmingly anti-fascist after the dismal fascist Franco decades), were trounced in regional elections. Spain’s new socialist party, Podemos, was silent on foreign policy because of Spain’s domestic problems, but will likely be less supportive of America’s anti-Russian war than the conservatives have been — which already has not been very supportive (because Rajoy fears a voter-backlash).
March 23: “France: Sarkozy-bloc ahead, National Front strong, Hollande beaten.” The party of the ‘socialist’ Francois Hollande, who has been as cooperative with Obama’s anti-Russian policies as he can be (given the public’s sentiment against those policies), has been beaten in local elections throughout France, by two politicians who have spoken out strongly against Hollande’s kowtowing to American supremacy and his caving to Obama on Ukraine and Russia (such as by defaulting on the Mistral deal): Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen. Nominally, these are ‘right-wing’ politicians, but in this matter they are predominantly against imperialism, they’re progressives here, because the imperialism is being practiced by America against their own country, France; and they are more like Charles DeGaul, who was a French patriot who opposed American domination of French affairs.
Public pressures in Europe are largely behind the breakaway from America of European leaders (the phenomenon which was discussed and documented in my “Why the Western Alliance Is Ending”). However, the signal event isn’t really in Europe; it’s in Asia: “GEOPOLITICS: Washington nervous: China, Japan and South Korea forge an Alliance.” What that indicates, and which is only being supported and reinforced by these European events, is a re-alignment of world-powers, in which, Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s “EurAsian” concept is being endorsed virtually world-wide, except perhaps among the Arabic oil-sheikdoms such as the Saudi, Qatari and Bahraini aristocracies, all of whom are allied with the U.S. aristocracy and crucial to the dollarization of the oil-price and thus of the trading of weapons for oil and gas.
Vladimir Putin’s multipolar world is winning; it’s attracting support from non-fascists in all corners of the globe. Barack Obama’s opposite vision — reflected especially in his often-repeated phrase, in which he refers to the United States as “the one indispensable nation” (meaning that all other nations are “dispensable”) — is the likes of which the world hasn’t even heard, from anyone else, ever since the time of Adolf Hitler’s infamous “Deutschland über alles” in the 1930s and ’40s; and it really means the very same thing, only for a different country: it’s actually nationalism, instead of patriotism; and only a small minority of people, even in today’s nazi Ukraine and in Nazi Germany, have supported it, or sought to impose it. It’s far stronger among aristocrats than among the public.
The shock of the world, to find a President of the United States saying that, and his going so far as to tell America’s military to view America’s economic competitors as being what they will be fighting against, is driving away the publics, and now even the leaders of other nations. For example, Obama told West Point cadets:
“The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.”He thinks our military should be fighting against nations (such as Russia) that have rising economies. For him, it’s about conquest, and not only about national defense. And he’s obsessed with conquering Russia. Even the aristocrats in most other countries are now backing off from that. He has the support for it, at home, of virtually all members of Congress, but even in the U.S., more than two-thirds oppose it. He has over-reached, so very far, that it’s finally beyond his grasp, and it’s only driving the world faster into the multipolar vision that Russia’s leader, much maligned by the Western press, has been championing for the world’s future: a world of free and independent states, which recognize that for any one of them to benefit at the expense of others is wrong and brings no one any good in the final analysis — much less in the present (justwars such as in Ukraine).
Whatever may happen to Vladimir Putin, his vision has actually taken over the world, and he has made clear that Russia itself (and he himself) has no intention or desire to do so. (He even refuses to accept the rebelling region of the former Ukraine into becoming a part of Russia. He had accepted Crimea only because it’s vital to Russia’s national defense and had been a part of Russia until 1954.) This is remarkable. And his contrast to Obama is also remarkable.
Obama’s arrogance is what’s driving the world away. It has brought about the end of The American Century, in world affairs. It has given entirely new meaning to the old phrase “the ugly American.” In its new meaning, this phrase refers not to the American public (who never really deserved such opprobrium anyway), but clearly to the American aristocracy, the billionaire elite whom Obama and the U.S. Congress actually serve. They are America’s problem, but perhaps they won’t become the world’s, after all. That is what is at stake here: whether an overreaching national aristocracy will succeed in imposing its will upon and against the entire world. Other aristocracies are now deciding: no. They won’t. And that’s today’s big news-story.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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