First a preface. Basically it comes down to a state looking out for the best interests of its population and signing up to be a vassal state of the US which equals a reduction of benefits to your population. Elites do quite well and the mass of people suffer. Just look at Saudi Arabia and Israel. One, Saudi Arabia, is a vassal that uses beheading as a form of capital punishment. In the tradition of American influence abroad, a wealthy few make the deals and reap the rewards while the majority suffers – The Kingdom may provide a slight exception to this with subsidized housing and oil but this is easily countered – from a western p.o.v. – by the sad state of women’s rights in the kingdom. On the other hand Israel, a state that receives aid and actually drives US foreign policy in the MENA. Regardless of the different relationships between these two states and the US, we are not at war with either state.
What of Russia? I’ll let Dave Smith speak here:
“There are interests that make a ton of money off us dominating parts of the world and Russia is a threat to that. If there is someone in the Middle East who doesn’t want to trade oil in dollars, is there is someone who is not going along with our global hegemony which is brought on by force, Russia will support them. China will support them. Russia and China are the only real geopolitical enemies that the US has. The official story is we like to spread democracy or that there’s human rights violations somewhere. But you realize pretty quickly who we do business with and who we don’t – it’s really not based on human rights violations. If you do business with us you can be a dictator, you can be a kingdom like Saudi Arabia that is just brutally oppressive. When you look around you realize it comes down to who plays ball. And right at the heart of it is the petro-dollar. And all the countries that we demonize and call terrorist nations, rogue nations are threats to stability. It has nothing to do with human rights violations. It has nothing to do with aggression on the part of that state. It’s the ones who don’t want to participate in this kind of US, NATO, EU run world. If you don’t want sell you oil in dollars, if you want to move towards gold you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”
Just some food for thought. It would be nice to move past the idea that we are ideologically opposed with the rulers of whatever foreign country. It would be nice, if painful, to acknowledge the source of conflicts among nations and recognize how we do and don’t benefit from such interactions.
No comments:
Post a Comment