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DC Scholars: Ukraine Conflict Shows World Has Grown Weary of US Hegemony

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 24.06.2023

Despite having the largest military budget in the world and being the largest operator of military bases abroad, the US is far from being a global hegemon, argues a DC-based think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Over the past decades Washington has demonstrated a capacity for mass destruction – in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere – but “it has won no more than Pyrrhic victories” which led to the erosion of trust in Pax Americana both at home and abroad, according to Responsible Statecraft scholars.

The US military spending reached $876.9 billion in 2022, while the nation also operates a whopping 750 foreign military bases. Still, Washington is incapable of persuading the Global South to join anti-Russia sanctions over the latter’s special military operation in Ukraine, the think tank remarks. “If hegemony means the capacity to get other countries to comply with one’s demands, the United States is far from being a global hegemon,” the report notes.

Judging from the so-called Pentagon leak, even some US allies and partners demonstrated hesitance and unwillingness to provide the Kiev regime with shells, jets and armored vehicles. Meanwhile, most nations of the Global South shrugged off the US calls for slapping sanctions on Moscow as contradicting their national interests.

US political observers emphasize that six nations in the Global South – namely, India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa – are set to decide the future of geopolitics and insist that the Biden administration needs to win their hearts and minds. At the same time, European commentators argue that developing nations have the right to remain neutral and non-aligned.

For instance, in June 2022, India’s External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar shredded the West’s claim that New Delhi was “sitting on the fence.” According to the minister, India is entitled to its opinion when it comes to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

Likewise, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has chosen to collaborate with both the US and China, instead of taking sides. Moreover, ASEAN nations are active participants of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) regardless of Washington’s attempts to maintain its dominance in the region and curb China’s influence in the Asia Pacific.

Per DC scholars, the emerging trend was articulated by Brookings Institution fellow Fiona Hill, former Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States, in May 2023:

“The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of Pax Americana apparent to everyone. … [Other countries] want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest. In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to US domination and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon,” she said at a conference in Tallinn, Estonia
According to Hill, the Global South’s resistance to the US and the EU’s demands to slap sanctions on Moscow is nothing short of “an open rebellion.” She noted that “this is a mutiny against what they see as the collective West dominating the international discourse and foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and debt relief.”

Western observers also acknowledge that the world’s center of gravity is steadily shifting east, adding that the Biden administration has so far sought to avert this trend by trying to establish “a lasting technological lead over China” and beefing up the US military in Western Pacific.

However, “most developing countries, including emerging powers in the Global South, are no longer willing to make zero-sum choices” between Washington and its geopolitical rivals, DC scholars underscore, urging American policymakers to accept the reality that the US is no longer “the indispensable nation.”

June 24, 2023 - Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , , , , ,

1 Comment »

  1. DC scholars probably welcome the demise of America to second-grade status. Following WWII the United States was the most advanced industrial nation on earth. It was looked to for providing the technological expertise that would foster the same results in other nations. The Marshall Plan that Rebuilt Germany did not exceed beyond Germany’s boundaries. What’s more, FDR’s Bretton Woods that was supposed to shape a different world than the one that triggered WWII, was refitted by Londom and Wall Street bankers after FDR died. The Arsenal of Democracy under FDR would have been converted to producing the capital goods necessary to develop the former colonial countries of Britain and France. Instead, the usurous bankers in the City of London and NY used the IMF to loot them and keep them backward and indebted to the Western powers. But Churchill and Whitehall saw to it that a bi-polar world with British geopolitical intrigue was create to keep the East contained as London and Wall Street banksters looted nonComecon nations in the global South.
    New wars of attrition below the threshold of nuclear war were to be fought at the behest of London and Wall St. against Communist countries. Not because they were Communists but in order to keep the world in a state of perpetual war, divided and off balance. This would be necessary if Britain was going to keep the USA from doing what FDR intended, which was the point. N. Korea and Vietnam were chosen for this reason. MacArthur didn’t envision the world in that way and fought the Korean War to end it asap. Sock puppet Truman’s Wall St and British controllers used MacArthur’s “hot pursuit” cross-border air raids into China as an excuse to fire him. And the band played on for several more years.

    The USA supported France’s war on Vietnam because it fit perfectly into the neocolonial psyche of people that populated the think tanks in DC. And when the French were finally defeated and left Vietnam, the US seized the opportunity to launch its beachhead in the South. CIA sent Edward Landsdale to Vietnam to organize political opposition to Ho Chi Minh’s government in the North. The Diem Bros. were flown in from France as window dressing to make it look legitimate. A million Catholic Vietnamese living in N. Vietnam were manipulated by CIA psywar anti-Communist propaganda to migrate South where they would be given land that was owned by S. Vietnamese farmers that had been forced off their land by the CIA’s Diem Bros. The Chinese expats who ran the floating markets where farmers took their crops to sell, were ordered to leave S. Vietnam. The floating market system collapsed. The now starving ex-farmers began raiding the villages they once owned to survive. These were the Vietnamese the CIA branded as “Vietcong”.

    Landsdale took the next step setting up a telecommunications network between the Village Hamlet chiefs and the newly created Air Support Response capability named Strategic Hamlet Program. Hundreds of new tactical use helicopters were to aid the Village Hamlets coming under increasing attack from the starving S. Vietnamese farmers who had been kicked off their land. The actions of these poor farmers was politicized and called Viet Cong. The unpopular soon to be assassinated by CIA Diem Brothers went along with all of it

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    Comment by Thomas Lee Simpson | June 25, 2023 | Reply


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