If you were to search for a poster boy for the failed supercapitalism of the west, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Anders Åslund fits the bill like no one else. Anytime the liberal world order needs to take a poke at Russia’s Putin, they call up the Swedish economist like a really weasely Captain America. But, just who is this economic superhero who tells everybody about Putin’s billions?
The United States believes that it is so invincible, exceptional and so frightening that no one would ever dare to protest, let alone defend its people against constant humiliation, economic embargos and military threats.
It used to be like this for quite some time. In the past, the West used to bully the world before and after each well-planned assault. Also, well-crafted propaganda used to be applied.
Trump has taken over the Persian Gulf, and by that I don’t mean militarily, but in Trump’s attack method of choice, dominating the media. His 2019 hit list gets longer and longer; his Mexican border wall, then Venezuela, where that issue was broadened to include Cuba and Nicaragua as “threats” to the US, a laughable concept, if it were not so pitiful.
Americans are taught to honor or blame based on “generations.” The “greatest generation,” America, the Soviet Union, Britain and so many other nations banded together during the last century to save mankind from a descent into tyranny and madness. Millions died, and that generation is almost gone, its greatness and failings passed on to what Americans called the “Vietnam generation.”
As of beginning July 2019 prospects look positive for a re-election of Donald Trump as President in November 2020. Headline stock market and GDP figures all look positive…at the present. The huge unanswered question is whether that can be sustained until the fateful elections. We see signs already that spell potential trouble for the Republicans.
No one is talking about it openly, but, let us face it: those U.S.-made planes are crashing; the performance of Apple phones and computers is falling far behind those made by Huawei and other Chinese companies. Lenovo took over IBM and is doing extremely well. NASA is absolutely incapable of building decent rockets that would be able to deliver people or even satellites to space, cheaply and safely.
President Trump’s last minute decision NOT to attack Iran after it shot down an unmanned US drone in what may have been international waters calls to mind an English nursery rhyme that still enchants toddlers: just substitute three fat men arguing over whether to go to war with Iran:
Three blind mice,
Three blind mice
See how they run,
See how they run!
They all ran after
The farmer’s wife
