Disunited State of America: How a superpower is crumbling before our eye




Images often portend the rise and fall of powers even before our minds admit it.

In August 2021, a million memes were launched with visuals of desperate Afghans trying to cling but falling to their deaths from a US Air Force C-17 plane scurrying home from Kabul after a failed war and disastrous diplomatic defeat. Among those killed was Zaki Anwari, a very young local footballer, who knew the Taliban would not spare him. In the Taliban’s eyes, football is unIslamic.

Those visuals sent out to the world a subliminal confirmation that America was longer capable of protecting the world’s most vulnerable beings. With its trillions of dollars worth military might, it cannot win a war against a bunch of barbaric but ragtag desert militia.

Why? Because the US has been steadily losing the will to wield power. It is distracted and deeply internally divided. It is as if it has cultivated its worst enemies within. They are now hollowing out its soul.

Its teachers have started telling students that patriotism is uncool and evil. An English teacher at a California school, Kristin Pitzen, exhorted students to pledge allegiance to the Pride flag instead of the nation’s Star-Spangled Banner. Little, pre-pubescent children are being indoctrinated and herded into embracing sexual identity and gender fluidity in the name of sexual freedom.

American TikTok is flooded with videos of youngsters obsessively parading absurd sexual identities as if a rat has been making them up while running across the keyboard. Almost all of these attention seekers are intolerant towards the majority and often hostile towards their own family or nation. Family values, one of the strongest bonding agents of human societies for centuries, are under severe attack in the world’s most prominent nation.

The Critical Race Theory is being forced into classrooms to gaslight white Americans, paint them as villains, and deepen a divide which was gradually closing since the Civil Rights Movement. That has finally met with parental backlash. Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor election opposing it.

But there are enduring images of Black Lives Matter protesters burning the national flag in Portland, or rioters pulling down a statue of national icon Abraham Lincoln because some of his utterances made two centuries ago does not sit well with the standards of political correctness of today’s mobs.

The whole world watched as stores and supermarkets were gratuitously robbed by the same mobs in the name of protests. Some of the Democrat-ruled states in the US have taken this pandering of the far-Left to such an extreme that California has virtually legalised theft and burglary. It made stealing anything worth less than $950, unless you have a history of violent crimes, a small-time offence. This has led to organised “smash-and-grab” heists, sometimes involving up to 80 people, during the Thanksgiving week. The police in many states have been systemically defunded.

The media have hounded a democratically elected president, Donald Trump, almost obsessively. Big tech like Facebook and Twitter showed the temerity to de-platform the most powerful office of the nation and arguably the world.

Known to be the home of global innovation and talent, some of its finest like Johnny Depp, Joe Rogan, Kanye West, and Kevin Spacey have been sought to be cancelled. Even American creators and Hollywood have become so narcissistic and disconnected that the Japanese and Koreans rule popular culture today. So, not just its military might, but the US’s once-formidable soft power has been waning.

These do not do America’s image and influence overseas any good. The US comes across as a divided, distracted, and dwindling superpower. Its vocal far-Left and liberal elite look delusional.

But can such a profound shift happen on its own? Is American society caving under the weight of its own hyper-liberalism, or are there shadowy forces?

It is a mix of both. Whether it is networks like George Soros’s dedicated to undermining democracies, or China hacking into media, academia, tech, and business, or the Russian internet mafia, America is undoubtedly under attack. It has allowed its enemies to penetrate its core. But it is also true that many of today’s Americans, with their great liberal privilege, are behaving like the Romans in their final, self-destructive days. Narcissistic, decadent, and deeply dismissive of the rooted values which have stood humanity in good stead for ages.

Which is why the US and its NATO look so helpless and vulnerable as Ukraine burns and Vladimir Putin’s tanks annex one city after the other. First, the consummately transactional and whimsical Trump damaged all of America’s friendships. He sacrificed long-term strategic influence for short-term gains.

And now a clueless and spineless Joe Biden has emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine under the US’s nose. His inaction has also probably sent an invitation to China’s Xi Jinping to pounce on little Taiwan soon.

In the last couple of years, the US Air Force and the CIA have lost war games which simulated a scenario of China attacking Taiwan and the US trying to save the island.

Frankly, the world does not trust the United States of America with its safety today. It is hard to take seriously a superpower which has scripted this irony: the Taliban, whose brutality made young Zaki Anwari cling to the wing of a lifting plane, recently issued a statement advising “peace” and “dialogue” in Ukraine.


https://www.firstpost.com/world/disunited-state-of-america-how-a-superpower-is-crumbling-before-our-eye-10410841.html

This is article from Firstpost an indian online news website ,which is 50 percent owned by CNN.

News from China and India are much more balanced with only a slight russian bent.

If USA ends up fighting Russia, both will crumble and China will be the next world power.