Killers of the Superpower Boom: The Self-Inflicted End of American “Imperialism”

Just like in the similarly sounding movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” we will in part talk about oil and gas, energy, and economic independence but also about deceit and betrayal. We will talk about the unpleasant truth of how the perception of America in the world turned from a ray of hope and beacon of democracy to an international bully that delivers so-called “democracy” by brutal force and betrays its friends and allies.

Why America is losing economic competition with China and others

1991 Soviet Union, rotten from the inside due to the corrosive effect of socialism, fell apart despite it being a natural resource superpower that was sustaining itself by supplying electric power, gas, and oil to the world. After the fall of the USSR and before the rise of China for about 20 years, the U.S. singlehandedly dominated the world stage as the only remaining superpower. 

Unfortunately for us, it didn’t last.  As if infected by touching the contagious and dying corpse of the USSR we got infected with  terminal illness of socialism even before the USSR fell apart. Our industries fled to China under the pressure of socialist unions, socialist government regulations, and socialist taxation. We could no longer compete on the world stage against cheaper labor and ironically the increase of a more capitalist Chinese economy. 

We became dependent on China, but not only China – we started importing almost everything from other countries too replacing domestic production with foreign imports. Republican administrations starting with Nixon abandoned American nationalism and sold out the “made in America” idea to globalist corporations seeking to make a profit in China as the American manufacturing sector was dying. Populist Democrat administrations were tightening the noose of pro–labor laws on the necks of our businesses, unions demanded more and more concessions, and some states declared war on the oil and gas industry and even banned the import of non-electric vehicles. Delusional Democrat administrations intentionally incited panic among the population about climate change pointing a finger at the oil and gas industry solely because that industry is financing Republicans. Rather than drilling more oil and gas to keep us energy independent and supply oil and gas to our allies who reduced consumption of Russian oil and gas due to sanctions against Russia for its war against Ukraine, we are doing everything we can to destroy oil and gas industry and prop up expensive and unsustainable use of so-called “clean energy” at taxpayer expense.

Smaller businesses also came under assault by pro-labor legislatures creating more and more reasons for malicious poorly performing or fired and disgruntled employees to file frivolous lawsuits against the employers. Employee rights became inconsistent with consumer rights, although consumers are very slow to understand that. Before workers’ rights expanded, consumers had a lot more sway in getting the employer to reduce employee’s salaries for misconduct, punish them, fire them, etc. With the expansion of workers’ rights to employees who don’t provide good customer service, it became very difficult to punish negligent workers with bad attitudes or fire them without the risk of getting sued. 

As a result, the quality of service in the service industry is also deteriorating in addition to dependence on foreign imports.

Solar, wind, and electric vehicle industries are not self-sufficient and are being subsidized by the federal government at taxpayer’s expense through ruinous “green new deal” laws which put further strain on taxpayers’ finances and at the same time are not helping the economy.

In addition, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19, the federal government recklessly printed an enormous amount of money causing inflation, devaluing the dollar, and putting us on the verge of default. Rather than downsizing the social safety net benefit spending and encouraging evictions for non-payment of rent to motivate people to go back to work as businesses were reopening after the pandemic, the Democratic administration provided incentives for millions of workers to stay home enjoying eviction moratoriums and getting “free” handouts which created labor shortages, especially among low wage workforce. 

The Bidenomics idea that giving consumers “ free”  money at taxpayers’ expense would lift the economy up through consumer spending caused rampant price hikes across all industries. Despite the Biden administration’s assertions that by creating labor shortages they forced employers to pay higher wages, inflation wiped out whatever gains were made in terms of higher income for employees. As a result of higher interest rates that fed was forced to raise to slow inflation down, consumers could no longer afford to buy a new home or a new car and had to spend a lot more on basic products and services than prior to the pandemic.  

In the high-tech Silicon Valley industry where we used to be the champions of innovation, we are beginning to fall behind as well.  In part, this has to do with allowing foreign nationals especially of Indian and Chinese origin to get access to our trade secrets and acquire professional skills that they took home to develop their own high-tech industries. However, it would be hypocritical to blame Chinese and Indian software engineers or their countries of origin for our own negligence in safeguarding American jobs or American trade secrets! Somehow native-born Americans are not so interested in becoming software engineers or working in another capacity in that industry – they’d rather do something else or do nothing at all  – so the void had to be filled by more motivated foreign nationals!  

To summarize: socialist policies of expanding government control, government bureaucracy, and red tape regulations coupled with the abandonment of American protectionism deprived the U.S of economic growth and economic power that the U.S. used to enjoy before the New Deal. We are losing competition to China and can’t blame China for it because our own policies contributed to our decline. Not all is lost, but in order to make our economy more competitive we must make it a lot more capitalist by downsizing the government and its red tape regulations, reducing the power of labor unions, dropping workplace protections, dropping benefit and pension packages, lowering the cost of labor, making labor laws a lot more consumer and employer-friendly providing incentives for businesses to move back to the U.S., stay here, produce “made in U.S.A.” goods that used to be considered prestigious items all over the world.

Disastrous fall from grace leading to the loss of superpower status.

Turning to U.S. foreign policy and our status as a superpower, things are looking even worse than domestically. 

After World War II the U.S. lost every single war abroad it got itself involved in. 

U.S. lost in Korea allowing China to protect North Korea from unification with capitalist South Korea and allowing N Korea to develop nuclear weapons.  The U.S. lost in Vietnam with massive casualties and upheaval at home caused by the futile attempt to stop the advance of popular socialist nationalism in that country. The U.S. lost in Iran allowing an Islamic fundamentalist regime to replace the pro-American Shah government. The U.S. lost in Iraq despite wasting enormous resources on that war that arose out of fraud by the Bush administration and had no purpose other than enriching the military-industrial complex. We had no business invading the sovereign nation of Iraq solely because we lost the control over Saddam that we previously enjoyed. As a result of the predictable U.S. failure to replace Saddam’s regime with pro-Western democracy in Iraq, we lost our reputation as a fair world leader fighting for justice respecting and supporting the sovereignty of other countries! What was the point of ruining the prosperous and functional Saddam Hussein regime only to replace it with ISIS and the Iranian-controlled Shiite government? All we did was to enhance the reputation of international bullying that we previously earned by intervening in Yugoslavia’s civil war. 

The optics of war in Yugoslavia were awful: The United States, being a Christian nation, took the wrong side by helping Muslims against Christian Serbs, we bombed Belgrade, the capital of a small but sovereign country of Serbia that threatened neither NATO nor the U.S. in any manner. We gained nothing by helping Bosnians – maybe we gained something by helping Croatians but it still was not worth it because going against Serbs triggered Russian resentment and helped propel Putin to power. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin complained about the NATO aggression of Yugoslavia being the first trigger for his aggressive anti-Western stance. We also breached our own promise made to disintegrate the USSR not to expand NATO to the EAST – why didn’t we keep that promise? Would Russia be able to become a true democracy and part of NATO and EU if we did? Or would they invade into Eastern Europe and regain control over it? We could only speculate now!   Yes, we may not necessarily listen to someone like Putin because we consider him a tyrant and because he himself became an international bully by invading Georgia and Ukraine and gaining control of Syria. However, we lost our moral superiority in Yugoslavia and Iraq, possibly in Afghanistan too, and can no longer claim that Russia is the only international bully! 

In our hemisphere, we lost in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

We failed to remove totalitarian regimes in these three countries and it looks like even stopped trying.

Whenever we did get involved in Central America our clumsy insensitive policies left a bitter aftertaste where we paid for death squadrons in El Salvador, assassinated democratically elected but socialist president Aliende in Chile, and meddled in the internal affairs of various Latin American countries including Mexico – all to no avail! We are still dealing with corrupt regimes there that we can’t control and we are still getting a flow of drugs and undocumented migrants at the Southern border.

BETRAYAL OF ALLIES

 We also demonstrated that we betrayed our allies both by allowing Saddam Hussein prior to our 2003 invasion to unleash chemical weapons on Kurds that pledged loyalty to the U.S. and by recently abandoning our allies in Afghanistan after a humiliating defeat by Taliban “savages”. 

We kept whining about concentration camps for Uygurs, the mistreatment of Tibetans, and the suppression of student protests in Hong Kong, but we did nothing effective to help any of them out of fear that China would retaliate. If we felt incapable of doing something meaningful, we should have just kept our mouths shut and not irritated China with threats we could not back up with any action. Alternatively, if we wanted to project the real superpower image effectively we could have supplied sophisticated weapons to Tibetans and Uygurs, and together with the British we could have reoccupied Hong Kong which might have triggered a war with China or forced them to make concessions but in either scenario, we would at least be consistent and credible. Instead, we kept verbally harassing and annoying China while expressing our solidarity with Uygurs, Tibetians, and Hong Kong students and all of them ended up feeling betrayed because our behavior was inconsistent with our statements, and other than empty threats to China we did absolutely nothing. This inconsistency between words and actions still caused enough unnecessary animosity with China that it no longer felt compelled to contain COVID-19 and unleashed it onto the Western world, and at the same time Uygurs, Tibetians, and Hong Kong students and their parents realized that the U.S. is hypocritical and unreliable all talk and no action kind of fake superpower!  

Now we are betraying Ukraine and its heroic president Zelensky who is probably our most loyal ally, even more loyal than some NATO countries that don’t even want to pay for their own defense. We are losing our reputation in Ukraine because when the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, the Biden administration refused to send hundreds of F-16s and long-range artillery units to Ukrainians desperately pleading for an appropriate number of the most advanced weapons.  As a result of the Biden administration’s failure to support Ukraine, which was supposed to be its number one foreign policy priority, Ukraine is now in danger of being defeated by Russia and we are in danger of being defeated by Russia in that proxy war.

It’s too easy to point fingers at Republicans who are opposed to Ukraine aid as the reason why we are not helping Ukraine anymore – but the truth is the Biden administration had the ability to help Ukraine in 2022 by sending them F-16s and long-range artillery and didn’t. Before Republicans took over the House of Representatives democrats had almost a year to pass all kinds of aid packages to Ukraine with bipartisan support, and they did but only limited those aid packages to the bare minimum necessary for Ukraine to temporarily survive but not to win the war!  Even after Republicans took over there were opportunities to send much more sophisticated weapons and a great number of those to Ukraine, but it didn’t happen. Surely, as part of the political struggle for power, Republicans want Biden to fail just like Democrats wanted Trump to fail before and did everything in their power to destroy him.  Even though many Republicans in their hearts feel terrible about sacrificing Ukraine, they do have a bigger fish to fry – Ukraine‘s defeat gives Biden fewer chances of being re-elected than Ukraine’s victory. Therefore it’s understandable why Republicans feel compelled to sabotage Ukraine aid. 

However, this doesn’t relieve the Biden administration of culpability for not helping Ukraine enough prior to the election year! Moreover, even if Republicans relented and passed the $60 billion aid package to Ukraine – all it would do is to keep Ukraine on life support for another 6 months perhaps, but without providing more advanced weapons in sufficient quantities, this $60 billion aid package would not allow Ukraine to launch a successful counteroffensive to actually win back all the territories occupied by Russia and force Russia to negotiate peace. What matters most for that war is what kind of weapons we are sending, which is giving Ukraine a technological edge over Russia, and the Biden administration doesn’t seem interested in doing that. 

Lastly, we are being inconsistent in dealing with the latest crisis between Israelis and Palestinians – rather than taking a side firmly, we keep talking on both sides of our mouth sort of supporting Israel‘s right to defend itself militarily wreaking havoc in Gaza and at the same time we are demanding restraint from Israel to avoid civilian casualties knowing full well its impossible to do in densely populated Gaza. This makes us look insincere in the eyes of the arab world and also annoys Israel which wants to wipe out Hamas without ceasefires that give a break to Hamas terrorists. Had we taken one of the sides already, things would have been a lot less inconsistent and clear and we would have been loved by one of the sides of the conflict instead of being hated by both!

FORMER BEACON OF DEMOCRACY AND LOSS OF INNOCENCE BY INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCES

In the past, both Republican and Democrat administrations managed to convince populations of many countries especially those ruled by authoritarian regimes that America represents some fundamental principles of justice and promotes human rights, and humanism, that America fights for Good against Evil. There was this naïve belief across the globe that the United States l together with NATO could be a world policeman intervening to protect smaller countries from invasion by more powerful neighbors and fighting against persecution of various powerless groups by totalitarian regimes.

There has been so much desperation in the world that America was considered to be the light in the midst of international darkness, a ray of hope for those who suffer, and a beacon of democracy. Our image became almost Messianic. 

On top of that, modern American pop culture spread everywhere so successfully that we became the coolest nation in the world, and generations of young people in many countries even completely culturally different from us, wanted to Americanize themselves as much as they could or were allowed to. 

Other cultures had a hard time competing with ours even when economically, the countries these cultures represented could survive without us.

Unfortunately, this trend seems to be almost over.

First of all, many nations realized that the type of “democracy” we were trying to export was not as perfect as it seemed. As they learned more and more about our internal problems, they began to wonder whether democracy in general is a good thing and a system that is suitable for them.

When “democracy” came to the former USSR – all of a sudden organized crime spread like fire, the government became weak and dysfunctional, some shady characters came to power, and the economy crashed leaving millions struggling to survive in poverty amidst chaos, drug and crime epidemic, and loss of moral values.  In Russia, Putin’s popularity is still largely based upon the Russian population’s memory of the nightmares of the 1990s “democracy” experiment. 

In the Arab world, the Arab Spring was hailed as a revolution for freedom and democracy against the corruption of autocratic regimes inspired by the West and supported by the Obama administration trying to export democracy to the Middle East. What ended up happening was the rise of ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood-type extremist fundamentalist regimes that moved the Middle East much farther from “democracy” than it was under secular autocrats like Mubarak, Assad, or even Kaddafi. 

In Afghanistan, after 10 years of Soviet occupation and some respite of 12 years or so, that poor country got invaded again by yet another Western power, the U.S. under the pretext of bringing democracy to that part of the world and fighting terrorism and/or drug trade. Who knew that we would get stuck there for 20 years forcing “democracy” onto that mountainous multi-ethnic nation so “successfully” that it would take the Taliban just a few days to roll it all back?  Have we ever even asked Afghans if they wanted “democracy” or Western values? Yes, girls could go to school –ok but then where would they work? Afghanistan’s economy had been in ruins, as there was no peace because we could never defeat the popular Taliban for a reason. And whatever money we wasted on “rebuilding” Afghanistan went to corrupt non-profits and our corrupt puppet Afghan government that fell immediately after our escape from there.  What kind of democracy did the Afghans see for 20 years? What kind of democracy did they want or could even handle? Maybe their traditions and religion are inconsistent with democracy and Western values and who are we to try to impose it on them in the first place? 

Secondly, many other nations realized that we were not really sincerely trying to HELP THEM – we always acted in our self-interest using “democracy” as a smoke screen for attempting to overthrow local governments that we could not control and installing new pro-American puppet regimes.

This surely caused bitterness and a sense of being cheated by large chunks of the population in those countries where we were “bringing democracy”

Thirdly, the more woke our culture becomes the more resentment it causes abroad even among populations of our allied countries, some of them Western countries with traditional values, like Poland or Hungary. 

Obviously, the promotion of LGBTQ rights and movements is absolutely inconsistent with the traditional values of almost all countries in the Islamic world and Africa and is looked upon with disgust in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and China. #METOO causes resentment almost everywhere. Cosmopolitanism and the fight against so-called “Islamophobia” doesn’t sit well with the dominant nationalist ideology in India etc. Our environmental hysteria threatens the economies of most of the other countries that are not buying the idea of a “green New Deal’.

As a result, our culture and ideology become not only unpopular abroad,  but also cause concern among other nations about our mental well-being and make them worried about the spread of our ideological mental illnesses to their young generations through social media and otherwise. Countries where traditional values matter are seeking to protect themselves from the harm our “democracy”, our pop culture and our wokeness could cause to them, especially in light of what they see as the overall decline of the West, both mental and cultural decline.

CONCLUSIONS:

We are rapidly losing our superpower status in the world. We are losing the status of economic superpower due to the socialist corrosion of our economy and expansion of the administrative state. 

We are also losing our moral superiority and eligibility for leadership in the world because other nations feel cheated and betrayed by us. We’ve made promises we didn’t intend to keep and didn’t keep, we lied to them that we were helping them to fight totalitarian evil and build democracy while we were simply using and abusing them for our own self-interest and then dumping them when they were no longer needed.

Lastly, our inability to replace traditional values with something more attractive than woke catering to identity politics or environmental alarmism made our previously popular culture a menace to traditional values and stability everywhere else in the world. 

Red light alerts are blinking for us for all intents and purposes, we are descending into abyss domestically and internationally and everyone can see it. However, we still have time to reflect upon what we are doing to ourselves and to others, to learn from our mistakes, to change our policies to practice some common sense and integrity, and prove to the world that we can become the real leader once again. To do that we need to get well domestically first and then to show to other nations that we will no longer interfere in their internal affairs trying to force “democracy” upon them, but if they need help fighting aggression we will follow through to the end. Culturally, we should not be exporting wokeness, even if we like to practice it domestically and we should respect other nations’ desire to preserve their traditional values no matter how backward they may seem to be for us. At the same time, domestically, we should bring back common sense to our ideology and promote a capitalist merit-based system instead of identity-based redistribution of income and socialism.   These will be the first steps towards the restoration of American leadership in the world that will not be based on force or fraud but will derive from our being an actual role model for everyone.