When Washington’s practices contradict his designs

Washington wanted to chain the world. He chained himself in a trajectory inverted from his own ambitions.

Since 1945, American strategy has rested on a simple principle: containment, strangulation. Containing the USSR yesterday, stifling Russia today, encircling China tomorrow. Muzzling Iran, isolating Pyongyang. This colossal project has mobilized decades of resources, thousands of military bases, and trillions of dollars. And yet, the outcome is undeniable: containment has failed. It has even done worse by accelerating the convergence of its targets.

The CRIC bloc – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – is not simply an alliance of friendship. It is an alliance of survival. Washington created it with its own hands, through sanctions, coups, NATO enlargements, and preemptive wars, and even by proxy.

The empire of desire and its shattered mirrors

Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Washington has behaved not as one power among others, but as the self-proclaimed arbiter of a world order it claimed to have created. The neoconservative doctrine, championed by think tanks like the ‘’Project for the New American Century’’ since 1997, unabashedly asserted the imperial ambitions of the United States. The world was to be managed, shaped, and controlled. NATO, created in 1949 in the context of the Cold War and tensions with the Soviet Union, and expanded eastward in 1990 in violation of the commitments made to Gorbachev, became the instrument of this ambition. Economic sanctions, color revolutions, and preemptive wars – from Iraq to Libya, from Afghanistan to Syria – constituted the toolbox of a hegemon that confused force with legitimacy.

The result is nothing but a graveyard of failed projects. Afghanistan, handed over to the Taliban in 2021 after twenty years of occupation. Iraq, transformed into a Shiite powder keg since........

© New Eastern Outlook