From Our World in Data via a piece in Bloomberg by Niall Ferguson comes the graph above. The spike in 2014 almost undoubtedly represents the combination of the war in Syria/Iraq and the war in Ukraine.
I thought of titling this post “Pax Americana” but it seems to me that’s too self-aggrandizing. I don’t know how to characterize it.
I settled on “you will miss it when it’s gone” and gone it all but certainly is. The deaths in the war in Ukraine alone exceed any year since the 1980s.
There has never been anything approaching a Pax Americana. From the colonial period up to today, the US has engaged in over 400 wars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States
In particular, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has initiated virtually every war that has been fought. That includes the Russo-Georgian war and the current Russo-Ukrainian war. I suppose the Hutus and Tutsi did theirs on their own.
Note also that each of the wars we started was a war against a country formally at peace with us. All our wars were/are wars of aggression. All of them were/are war crimes according to the Nuremberg/UN Charter principles.
Right now the junta in Kiev is concocting some sort of false flag, dirty bomb operation, possibly in the Nikolaev (Mykolaiv) region. This is likely being done with the assistance of the UK intelligence services, who did several false flag chemical attacks in Syria. Such an operation would also require the permission of the US.
But there is yet more fun. Gen. Petraeus has been floating the idea of forming a coalition outside the NATO treaty (and therefore not subject to country vetos) to enter the Ukraine and directly confront the Russian forces. Col. Douglas Macgregor (ousted army reformer) recently stated that his contacts in the White House told him there is active planning for such an intervention, and Petraeus statements are meant to test public opinion for it.
The problem in the world today is American militarism and aggression. We are a rogue terrorist state gone berserker. The World desperately needs American disarmament, and maybe even dismemberment.
Without something approaching the world-wide power of the U S Military hegemony, how long would the dollar remain the world’s reserve currency?
Without that, how would we maintain our immense social safety net on a pay as you go basis? Can’t be done.
By law payments would be reduced to what we could “pay as you goâ€. Changing that would require Congressional action which doesn’t exactly play to Congress’s strengths.