For the last seventy-two years, Paul Street wrote in a February 2018 article for Truthdig, the United States has used all the tools at its disposal to promote US economic control around the globe. Street’s article addressed the perspective, voiced by many US elites, that President Trump is contributing to “the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.” Far from lamenting this development, Street asked, “What would be so awful about the end of ‘the American Era’—the seven-plus decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the ‘premature’ end of the ‘American Century’?”
Describing the term “U.S. foreign affairs,” as “an elite euphemism for American imperialism,” Street’s article offered a thorough accounting of the United States’ callous approach to international diplomacy, punctuated by a body count that rivals any despotic regime. For example, Street wrote, “The death count resulting from ‘American Era’ U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975.”
While there are “good reasons” for progressives to bemoan “the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House,” Street concluded, people around the world—including ordinary US citizens—ought to “welcome the decline of the American empire.”
Source: Paul Street, “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony,” Truthdig, February 20, 2018, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/world-will-not-mourn-decline-u-s-hegemony/.
Student Researcher: John W. White (College of Western Idaho)
Faculty Evaluator: Michelle Mahoney (College of Western Idaho)
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