The US can stay on top using economic prowess alone; however, in the long run, it requires both the carrot of US military backing and the stick of US military aggression. It is the threat of War that is the only adhesive holding the US-centralized Empire together. With the globalization of economy, the more its economic dominance slips away in the face of China's and other economic rises, the more shouting and desperate warmongering is necessary to get going. This is not stable and internal crisis come out with many faces.
This is completely unsustainable in the long run; especially in a world where the other major nuclear weapons force, Russia, may take the side of China's side of the new cold war. In this scenario, we’ve found ourselves trapped on a planet made of limited resources but with the dramatic growth of electronic technology; in that sense rich and hopeful.
Tentatively with two major alliances trying to out-consume and out-resourced control each other, while apparently hurtling toward a major military confrontation between nuclear superpowers. Some believe this puts us on a direct trajectory toward either nuclear annihilation or ecosystem collapse in the near term. This is conservative negative thinking. As it means the argument that America needs to maintain its dominance at all cost is no longer a viable one since that cost will almost certainly be everything in the world. That is exactly why it is not valid; because such idiotic confrontations never take place.
So we've all got some important questions to ask ourselves, how we change such negative thinking and go towards a civilized world society. Do we desire to stay in the familiar US-controlled world order at the price of homicide and ecocide end of history, or do we work to change and bet on humanity instead? Do we wish to stay the course because it preserves a status quo that is all we've ever known, or do we take a leap of faith on the possibility that we can de-escalate all geopolitical enmity and move into collaboration with each other on the path of wisdom and live with our ecosystem? This choice is right here, as the Buddha has said.
Spiritual thinking
There are no divine powers to save humans from disaster, only the mind and body can save you. This I said recently in all the meetings I addressed. I write so much about mankind's need to transcend traditional spiritual thinking, its old conditioning patterns and move into something wildly unprecedented in the modern world. Our current god devil fear-based mentality makes a driven leap of faith, into transcendence impossible as ISIS ideology; the belief of Swarga with an explosive death in groups. This ensures that we remain on an – intense love driven trajectory toward extinction.
As the Buddha indicated I firmly believe that we have the freedom to either pass or fail this test, but we should not have the freedom not to take it! We must transcend our old conditioning as well as postmodernist patterns which we inherited from our recent history. Modernism gave us faith on evolutionary growth of machines and humans.
The leap into electrotechnology brought us into a different world from the one we've created, or we will perish. It's an A or B choice, but the choice is ours.
The global pundits say that the US is constantly working to make sure that no other countries surpass it and gain the ability to treat America the way America treats other countries. That's all US military and economic agendas in a nutshell right now. The nation that poses the greatest threat to US hegemony is of course China. Most of the US war machine's aggression right now is ultimately built around securing resource control and geostrategic dominance to prevent China from surpassing it without attacking China itself.
US investments and local bourgeoisie
This is the essence of imperialism, the combination of economic development. US is there to protect US investments. So the USSR was simply replaced with China, and the nuclear arms race was simply replaced with greatly increased global military expansionism.
The plutocrat-owned media and the plutocrat-owned political class have fallen right in line with this and normalized the idea of US imperialism around the world. The cold war never ended, it just shifted its narrative and focus.
Neo-conservatism never went away; it just went to be the mainstream. But the thing about neo-cons and the rest of the increasingly indistinguishable proponents of American imperialism is that their underlying thesis is actually fundamentally correct: the US Empire does depend on the endless war in order to maintain its dominance over other nations.
America doesn't have the leverage to move. “When it comes to Washington’s never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to find in such media coverage will be ‘American aggression,'” Engelhardt writes. He then asks a very fair question: “So here’s the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones deliver assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasion investments one of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an ‘aggressor’ anywhere? “No, they are there for the protection of the investor and the participant local plutocrats.”
The question arises does it really make sense for any nation to be able to take over the world and then look up with crying eyed innocence to say they are there for protection to US investments and local bourgeoisie.
