Amerika ist jetzt eine abtrünnige Supermacht

Robert Kagan: The Trump administration “has turned America’s long-standing hierarchy of interests upside down. For eight decades, Americans were deeply involved in the greater Middle East not because the region was intrinsically a vital national-security interest but as part of a broader global commitment to the alliances and freedom of navigation that undergirded the American-led liberal world order.

“No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

“The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled …

“America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies … That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of ‘America First’ foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.”

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Ah yes, post #7 of the inevitable 25 that will come up today that amount to little more than „Turnip man bad always“ and „He said no more foreign wars“ rather than an actual discussion on the geopolitical merits of using force to weaken/topple a regime whose motto for decades has been „Death to America“, they’ve been trying to get a nuke, destabilize the rest of the ME and have indirectly killed thousands over the years

In some respects, this is not really a novel phenomenon. The US has invaded other countries which were no active threat to it (Vietnam and Iraq). The only difference is that its behavior towards certain allies was rather predictable for others, it was a mixed bag.

The US lobbied and backed Ho Chi Minh against Japan, but then reversed course during the French Indochina War and then invaded Vietnam on the bogus premise of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. A similar story occurred with Saddam. The CIA supported the Baath Party’s insurrection against Soviet-Aligned Qasim and their purge against Iraqi Communists. Consequently, they even backed Saddam while he committed his worst crimes (Anfal Campaign). Then in 2003, Bush invaded Iraq on a pack of lies. The rest that we know is history.

Geopolitics is an unpredictable game of shifting alliances and irrational behavior.