Turning Points

A good post here on the death of Pax Americana

Suez Has Already Happened | Easily Distracted:

Some good clips....

I’m raising this point because right now it is becoming clear that the post-imperial moment for the United States is not in some relatively imminent future but has already come and gone. It’s becoming clear that the Iraq War, contrary to the dearest wishes of its most lunatic devotees, was the Suez of the Pax Americana, that moment that comes in the life of most empires, however they’re configured, where they are goaded into a florid, expensive attempt to secure a distant frontier and end up proving only that the core no longer has and never will again have the resources or reputation to succeed in such attempts. 

The brash neoconservative ideologues who planned and enacted the war never believed in “soft power” and so never realized the importance of reputation and sincerity, never realized the subtle benefits of international legitimacy, never realized that it actually mattered that the United States at least try to define and adhere to a more moral standard of conduct than its rivals and adversaries. Never realized that if you pull a Reichstag fire with your intelligence and send the guy who people trust the most out to tell lies and exaggerations, you will never be trusted again even when you’re telling the truth.

and

The principal difference is that the American public and its punditry doesn’t know that the end of American dominance has already happened, let alone acknowledge who is to blame for it. Eden’s disgrace began immediately, whereas only the people who opposed the Iraq War in the first place so far seem to hold its planners fully accountable for the permanent damage it caused. So our talking heads continue to talk about what we should do about Egypt, or how we should dictate terms to Syria, and so on. Really that kind of talk was always a mistake, both morally and empirically, but now it’s a delusion

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But empires that don’t know they’re not any more have often managed to thrash their phantom limbs hard enough to either cause enormous suffering

and from the comments

The first thing a battered woman does when the cops arrest her boyfriend is to scream and cry about how they’re a bunch of bastards. The cops, she means, because they’re arresting her boyfriend. Being part of the tribe and attacking the outsider is far more important than anything the other tribe members might be doing to you.

Eventually the whole world will "Hate us for our freedoms"

tnb

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