If I don’t find the United States perfect, far from it, I won’t throw myself at the feet of Russia or China. Three countries that want to rule the world in their own way, three autocracies.
When someone says to me “I don’t like the United States, so I support Russia or China as a counterbalance”, it doesn’t work, because these three countries have the same autocratic philosophy: either you are with we or you are against us! There is not much room for open dialogue.
Just look at the use of the right of veto in the United Nations Security Council, on Wikipedia, to understand it: “Since the creation of the UN, the majority of vetoes in the Security Council have been exercised by the Soviet Union . Between 1946 and February 2022, out of 210 resolution proposals blocked by a veto, 117 were vetoed by the USSR then by Russia (including 13 jointly with China); 82 from the United States (including 22 with the United Kingdom and/or France); 29 from the United Kingdom (including 24 with the United States and/or France); 16 from France (including 15 with the United States and/or the United Kingdom); 16 from China (including 8 with Russia), including a use of the veto by the Republic of China (Taiwan), which occupied the seat of China until 1971.
Additionally, what doesn’t help the United States is that it doesn’t learn from its mistakes and keeps making them again. They associate themselves indiscriminately with the enemies of their enemies, as if they were reliable partners and friends.
They have also too often supported authoritarian or dictatorial regimes abroad, going against the wishes of the citizens of these countries. They have even helped overthrow democratically elected governments. For a country that calls itself a great democracy, the United States has not really helped democracy around the world. We can think of the overthrow of Allende in Chile and the Pinochet dictatorship that followed, or, less well known, of the case of Iran, as Wikipedia still reminds us. “In 1951, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). In August 1953, he was removed from power following a plot orchestrated by the British and American secret services, Operation Ajax. After his fall, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi established an autocratic and dictatorial political regime based on American support. »
Often, the United States would have been better off listening and engaging. This would have less often backfired on them. But ideological and economic reasons explain their choices, such as the fear of social progress assimilated to communism in their ideology. They prefer to rely on charity and consider human suffering as a virtue.
Their ideological weakness for often authoritarian regimes outside their country is therefore known to other powers such as Russia and China, to name a few. It is therefore not surprising that they are now attacking democratic regimes, because they know well that the United States has an Achilles heel, if not two: its own democracy, which is imperfect, as well as the shadow of Donald Trump, who flirts with dictatorship and a return to the White House.
Seeing the fall of democracy in the United States therefore becomes a possible dream for some dictators, including the presidents of China and Russia, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, because from that moment on, they would not only talk about superiority of autocracy and dictatorship versus democracy, but they would exult, a great democratic country having crossed over into their camp.
It’s not for nothing, all these threats in the world, because they put pressure on democracies, and in particular on the United States. In reaction, this could lead the United States to vote for a regime that claims to be muscular, that of Trump, which would tip the country into authoritarian, even dictatorial, regimes. China and Russia would have succeeded in their strategic coup.
From there, some countries in Europe and South America that already have right-wing regimes would justify their autocratic system and could even fall into dictatorship. We must never forget that Europe experienced dictatorial regimes until the end of the 1970s, with Spain experiencing a large part of the 20the century under Francoism.
It may seem nice to say that we are against US imperialism, but if we support dictatorships instead, that is certainly not a win for freedom either. It’s called a fool’s bargain and many fall into this trap.
If we are lied to here, as some believe, tell yourself that it is the same elsewhere. So, where do we get the information? If we cannot trust the mainstream media and journalists, who are supposed to have a code of ethics, what are we left with? Nothing.
What are the bases that we can trust? If there are no more, we are in a very bad situation. In fact, we find ourselves faced with dominant individualism: everyone has their own news and their own thoughts, with no common point or convergence. There is no longer society, only the market and advertising to attract us.
Some regimes may benefit from attacking these sources to bring democracies into chaos. Perhaps this is the new world war that we did not see coming, because the real weapons are ideological and involve the control of information and disinformation. We don’t want dead people on our hands, but servile consumers.
That social networks block information networks and let rumors and rumors fake news swarming can only do their business in this program of destabilization of democracies. Unlike the hit movie The world after us (VF of Leave the World Behind), available on Netflix, the chaos does not come from the end of the Internet, but enters through the Internet and social networks in particular. And once the worm of doubt enters the apple of democracy, it eats it from the inside.