An alternate title could be “The Fall of the West.” Some will find my column this month to be fantasy, even presumptuous; but time will tell whether in fact it is, or whether, as some analysts and I believe, what I describe is real and happening in front of our eyes.
Think of it: when was the last time you heard that a superpower’s plane flying 14 kilometers above earth was targeted by a missile and downed with no meaningful reaction or repercussion? And not just any plane – a flying Pentagon, as someone described it, worth a quarter of a billion dollars. When was the last time you heard that an oil tanker of a major Western power was captured with almost no significant response on the part of that Western power?
After eight years of war on Syria, the scheme to harness that country into submission to Western fiendish plans has failed. The scheme had every resource you can imagine, including insane, even sinful amounts of financing, and hundreds of thousands of mercenaries recruited from all over the world who were trained, regimented, armed, and ushered into Syria. But even with all that, the scheme failed. That failure, according to some analysts, will have major ramifications for every country that conspired against Syria and its allies. Some go as far as to predict the downfall of those countries.
In a speech on January 8, 1918, American President Woodrow Wilson outlined the principles of peace in order to end World War I. The fourteen points he mentioned included free trade, open agreements, democracy, and self-determination. The United States had it right then. By the end of World War II, with Western Europe exhausted and bleeding, the United States became the number one power, by far, in the world. It had essentially inherited all the empires of the Western world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States consolidated its strength and was the world’s sole supreme power. But soon after, something went very wrong.
What went wrong is that the United States started to betray the very principles it held, particularly when it came to democracy and people’s self-determination. The terrible downfall on the moral level climaxed when it sat in one trench together with avowed terrorists, a fact known to all today. In the Korean and the Vietnamese wars, the United States was powerful enough to send a total of one million troops to the battlefields. It was strong enough to withstand the loss of fifty thousand soldiers in each war. Today, the United States is certainly no longer in the same position, and the war on Iraq attests to that. One-tenth the number of troops was sent to Iraq, and the United States lost only 10 percent of what it had lost in its wars in the 1950s, yet society was not ready to accept the loss. Not long ago, Vladimir Putin clearly boasted Russian military superiority over that of the United States, and all economists agree that the Chinese economy is much more robust than the American economy. For one, its national debt is not twenty-some trillion dollars.
I could go on and on with clear signs of the decline of the United States (and its allies), but what I’ve written already is sufficient, along with an interesting observation noted by historians at the dawn of every empire’s downfall: As an empire starts to collapse, a controversial head of state emerges. Boris Yeltsin in the 1980s is a classic example. I believe that Trump and Britain’s Johnson also fit that category.
History has witnessed many downfalls of empires, but it does not mean that their people cannot restore their previous glory. It can be done if people go back to the moral principles upon which that empire was built. Russia is a classic example of that. At some point, the belief was: “If power doesn’t work, then more power will be used.” Then it became: “If power doesn’t work, then sanctions will be imposed.” Today, it’s “If power doesn’t work, then diplomacy is the solution.” You may replace “diplomacy” with “concessions.” If these are not signs of weakness, then I don’t know what is.
Long live Palestine.
