Slow week

Slow week for newspapers, but the *NYT* manages to produce a few choice coproliths, including some saber rattling against China and Iran. As a first-page article says, China is competing in space just as we are unable to afford investing in it as we used to. Iran, the newspaper alleges in its editorial, has a nuclear weapons program that it’s everyone’s interest to destroy or incapacitate. The Iranian government’s recent threat about closing the Ormuz straights should be met with beefed up sanctions, except those that would hurt foreign companies, as foreign states might become disenclined to follow the US lead on sanctions.

No reflection on our role in Afghanistan and Iraq of course, and even less on the history of our long involvement in structuring the oil business in the area without any regard for the interests of the local peoples and nations. No mention either of our long aggressive posture regarding China since WWII, including systematic surveillance.

We are given daily signs now of the weakening of US power: weakening of its institutions, including political structures, education and means for redistribution of goods; vast increase of the financial and legal power of private concerns whose views of their interests are in contradiction with national well-being; lack of control of our military and the enormous interests surrounding it; and finally the rise to power of other nations like China (and Iran on its coattails) who only have to avoid making drastic mistakes to take advantage of our weakness.

This phase of the game will take a long time. Not surprisingly, media like the *NYT* consider primarily the short term. Still, it is shocking to see that its misguided and stupid support of the war against Iraq in 2002-3, which benefited Iran by annihilating Iraq, leads now to this new phase of war-mongering.

One thought on “Slow week”

  1. When thinking about the U.S. I can’t help but think of a saying I heard a few years back, “When a nation has reached its peak, it declines.” At the time it was referencing the fall of the Roman Empire, but doesn’t it pertain to the cyclical nature of all the world’s nations? Or rather, if people in positions of authority were aware of historical patterns of rise and decline in the world’s nations do you think they would take steps to try and stop (or at least gain a better understanding) of why this happens?

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