by ASHRAF JEHANGIR QAZI
In a seminal article in the latest issue of the US establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, under the caption ‘The Self-Doubting Superpower’, author and commentator Fareed Zakaria writes “America shouldn’t give up on the world it made” whereas, in truth, despite his impressive array of statistics mankind is inevitably and rightly giving up on a world America made for itself, which is today globally threatening human survival. A 27-page essay can only be summarily reviewed in 1,000 words.
The Zakaria narrative is a continuation of the ‘realpolitik’ and later the ‘liberal-left’ establishment narrative that American crimes cannot render America a criminal entity because they are mere deviations from the norm of American decency, morality and virtue. America may make mistakes.
It does not commit crimes no matter how many ‘mistakes’ it makes, and whatever the scale of injustice and human tragedy they cause. Only “other countries”, including victims of American mistakes, commit crimes.
Accordingly, Zakaria happily reels off all the mistakes of American foreign policy secure in the conviction that none of the devastation visited upon peoples around the world, especially the Muslim world, can call into question America’s “broad, open, generous vision of the world”, unless it gives into “fear and pessimism” caused, in the main, by the policies of Russia and China.
Needless to say, American and by and large Western opinion is primed, manufactured and engineered to receive the Zakaria narrative with acclamation which, of course, is all that matters.
Zakaria challenges the notion of “American dysfunction and decay”, citing a whole range of economic, financial, military, technology, energy, innovation, investment, immigration and demographic data.
It is within this statistical bonanza that Zakaria mentions America’s “many problems”, which it has far more resources to deal with than other countries have to deal with their problems. Unlike its rivals, the US has no “irremediable structural dysfunction that will lead inexorably to collapse”.
While the US no longer presides over a unipolar world and all roads no longer lead to Washington, China still does not share a “bipolar world” with the US as it has far less allies and far more pushback and vulnerabilities than the US. (Many US military experts, however, believe the US cannot win a war in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea, and any escalation beyond would inevitably lead to a nuclear conflict and mutual destruction.)
Putin’s vision of a Great Russia led to his “aggression” in Ukraine. He “miscalculated” that the US was “losing interest in its European allies”. Zakaria disingenuously suggests the invasion was unprovoked when, in fact, it was meticulously designed by the US and its European allies to leave Putin no choice but to respond to Nato’s expansion along the historic invasion route to Russia and be trapped in an unending and debilitating war. Regime change in Moscow was the goal. This does not excuse the invasion of Ukraine but it sure explains it.
Ditto for China, Taiwan and the South China Sea; Iran and the Middle East; Hamas and the Palestinian cause; and “the retreat of the US from Afghanistan’, which has in fact been part of the larger containment of China. Both Xi and Putin sought strategic cooperation with the US, but US insistence on global hegemony as a condition put paid to those possibilities.
Zakaria, nevertheless, speaks of the US reaching out “to build a working relationship with” China. He even goes to the extent of saying “Beijing often talks about ‘win-win cooperation’. Washington has a track record of actually doing it.”
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