The end of the American hegemony

I write this, with no surprises that we are at the end of an empire. The surprise is that this wasn’t predictable this time a decade ago.

This time a decade ago Britain was part of the EU. Obama was president of a truly United States and Hilary Clinton was going to be president after him. The first woman president of the free world.

Fast forward a decade and the west is now a open target to Iran, the USA started a war that they cannot articulate the reason. I long learnt “Benjamin said so” is not a reason to do anything. Trump seems to be learning that lesson the hard way. The USA not only have no reasons to start it, but also have no means to end it. Because the “why” doesn’t exist.

But also Iran have the moral high ground. Everyone knows this war is BS. And quite literally everyone is suffering for it. Hence the end of the American Hegemony. The 2003 Iraq war was a stretch too far for the British public. We knew that war was illegal. We knew it was George H Bush’s final command to his son. Millions protested. We spent £4.8 billion on a war that wasn’t our problem, creating the next generation of Jhadis, orphaning millions and widowing hundreds of thousands. We carpet bombed the oldest civilisation for no reason.

Many of our politicians will face that “dodgy dossier”  on the day of judgement.

But we did it. We did it because our former colony told us to. Don’t get it twisted. America is nothing more than a former colony. Canada is a current colony, but when Trump threatened them… the King, Canada’s head of state… did nothing. The prime minister who serves the king. Also nothing. But the colony who threw our tea in a harbour two and a half centuries ago wants us to go murder innocent civilians halfway across the world for oil? We say to quote Tony Blair at the time… “we’ll be there”

This my dears… is different. Britain is poorer than it was in 2003. Noticeably. We were on the up back then. Brexit has impoverished us for no reason. The there are the very good reasons for impoverishment such as a pandemic that everyone is still reeling from and a financial crisis from almost 20 years ago that we haven’t fully paid down.

America has had the same challenges as the U.K. other than Brexit. The “hope” Obama poster of 2008 feels almost comical now. A decade of Trump has left the United States in political, moral, and financial disarray. The war in Iran encompasses all 3.

The Democratic Party of the USA lost the political argument. It can be encompassed with one single statement “basket of deplorables”. Just like Gordon Brown lost his election with “Bigoted woman” history is written in a single sentence. This is not a question, it’s a statement of fact. You will be hard pressed to find a modern historian or a political commentator who when describing the 2016 election doesn’t use the words “Basket of deplorables” it was a grave mistake. I wonder if it still haunts her? Almost certainly. Because what the democrats failed to realise is that a country who was used to voting for a straight white man  would take umbrage at you insulting their right to vote for a straight white man. If the democrats had run with Joe Biden in 2016 all this mess would be over. We wouldn’t have watched the tragedy of Biden’s decline in the internet age. And we wouldn’t have Trump. The USA, having just voted a black president, needed a bit to catch its breath, to stop and truly take people with them in this runaway race called globalism. Biden was that man. Him in 2016 would have seen him be a 2 term president and whilst he would have left on a low, the disgrace and fallacy of giving Kamala Harris 107 days to create a presidential campaign wouldn’t have been his. Would she be our president now? No. It would have been someone else who would have gone on to beat Trump. But we’re here because Hilary Rotterdam Clinton felt slighted that she lost to a black man, felt 2016 was “her time” and fumbled it majestically.

We’re also here because Joe Biden believed he could be a 2 term president in his late 70’s. A job that visibly ages men in their 40’s and 50’s.

We’re here because men born in the 1940’s have ruled the political landscape of the worlds largest economy for my entire lifetime. Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, George Bush Jr, Trump and Biden are all age mates. Only Obama was born in the 1960’s. My dears if I failed to inform you it is 2026, and the first millennials should be making their appearance on the global stage. But instead? We have Trump.

It is the failure to pass the baton, first to the Gen X, then to millennials that has partly caused this. (Globally) (Kier Starmer is in his 60’s) ditto Carney (Canada) the Aussies  and the Germans. The running of your country is not the final job you do before retirement. It is not a sinecure.

But outside of the generational lens, the USA thought it was safe because it had tipped the scales so far in their favour. And everyone thought them a benevolent leader so why diversify? They had soft power. “USAID” where the government gave back to (some) of the countries its policies had put in penury, places that the Americans had directly helped destabilise, it was the balm after they’d put a gun to your government’s head and raped them over a barrel (often a barrel of oil)

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a nuclear power… sort of. Why do I say that? Because we own, and pay and maintain the nukes off the coast of Scotland... At great expense. But the technology that runs them is American. So we physically can’t fire them without American say so. So actually we are paying for about 10% of America’s nukes.

France is a nuclear power truly as they can fire independently of the USA. That was a strategy they held that is paying dividends now.

What was a previously unthinkable situation is now important to strategise for. What if America has truly started world war 3 and in the next decade we need to fire on our beloved former colony?

Nuclear war means MAD (mutually assured destruction) but there are far smaller missile strikes that could be made on our former colony.

The USA has gone from a beloved ally and firm friend who we are willing to spend £4.8 billion on to one where we see their nonsense and walk away.

I didn’t vote for Trump, yet his war has a greater impact on my cost of living than anything my government can do to mitigate it. A war, which if you woke Starmer, Merz or Macron up at 4am and asked them why their “greatest ally” went to war last month… they couldn’t tell you.

The Israelis are getting away with murder. Everyone is blaming the Americans for this war. But it wouldn’t exist if Benjamin Netenyahu didn’t have an allergy to minding his own business. He’s murdering the Palestinians on an industrial scale, now he wants the Lebanese. Beirut has always been friendly to the west. What has been their reward? Their people have been murdered and forced to clear large areas of southern Lebanon. Another genocide is coming. This time of an openly western loving nation. When I was a child the BBC Middle East correspondents would live in Beirut. “The Paris of the Middle East” you can’t go from that to a “Hezbollah-ridden nation that deserves to be bombed”

It is a statistical fact that there are Hezbollah units and members in the United Kingdom. Do not argue with numbers, it is a fact. Same with Germany and France. There may be more Hezbollah units in one of these countries than the entire of Lebanon and Yemen, but we don’t get bombed because we’re majority white.

The war in Iran is set to cost 200 billion dollars. In the USA alone. That is just military. That’s not the global recession that will happen when oil hits $150 a barrel. That’s not the tens of millions who will die as a consequence of this man made disaster and only a tiny fraction of those people will die. More people will die to suicide, and poorer health outcomes as a result of this war than the bombs. There is a reason that after the Second World War the west pivoted away from military spending and towards health and education spending. A NATO promise to hit 3% defence spending sounds strong until you realise the opportunity cost is schools and hospitals that give a far stronger rate of return on investment than military spending. Why? Because we largely have to import things we need for defence. That’s why America was pushing for it. 3% on defence means billions to American defence companies. They’d be the main beneficiaries.

The problem with our leadership is that they aren’t leaders. I am not dogmatic. You can be a foe yesterday and repent your actions at noon. At 12:01 I have invited you to my home and by 6pm you are eating dinner at my table. We failed to grasp the opportunity China has presented because we thought the USA would always be our “friend” friendships change. My best friends are the ones I met in adulthood. Not childhood. The west is afraid of China because they know it’s a 5,000 year old civilisation with a memory. Same reason it’s afraid of Iran. They are afraid the Iranians and the Chinese will do to the British and the Americans what they  did to them.  Rape. Murder. Decades of political sabotage. Genocide. Man made famine.

I’ve always said if what you did was cute…experience it yourself and come and beg my forgiveness or not. Because I have never asked forgiveness for being kind or loving towards someone. I have asked for forgiveness for upsetting people. The west is deathly afraid of the consequences of its own actions over the past 250 years. The phrase “you reap what you sow” fills Britain, America, France, Germany, and even “skill issue” colonists such as Portugal, Spain and Italy with terror.

The Ghanaians wanted a UN resolution to say that the transatlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity and 52 countries abstained.

I am a regular at the British museum. I go there for my girl, Sehkmet. The “Africa” exhibit always makes me laugh. Every exhibit goes something like this.

“Stealing is wrong” this is something precious we stole from “insert African nation and tribe here” here is photographic evidence we stole it as you can see either the item in it’s original place or the devastation of the people when we stole their sacred ancestral artefacts. We are committed to global justice and not stealing anymore, but we won’t be handing back all the stuff we stole”

Being fair to the British. We are “equal opportunity war criminals.”  We stole the Pelegrín marbles from the Greeks, the same founders of democracy that we espouse to Iran. We also created both the Irish potato famine and the Bengal famine within the same generation. we created a genocide in North America, for the Native Americans the same way we did in almost the entire continent of Africa.

And this is why this madness needs to end. Everything from the clothes on my back, to the food on my table has been made and sustained with the blood of millions. My own ancestors included. Meanwhile that same “standard of living” is under threat by a degenerate octogenarian across the Atlantic who I cannot depose. Yet he can dictate my domestic policy. (How much is spent on military spending and international aid) and has proven himself to be mentally unstable. The same man who said Kier Starmer is “no Winston Churchill” probably doesn’t know that the same Winston Churchill deliberately started a famine in India to feed the Boer war. We thank God Kier Starmer isn’t willing to sacrifice millions of innocents for a war of aggression across the world. Because instead of Indians it would be kids from  Newcastle he’d be starving out. Those Indians were Gods children and were under Winston Churchill’s protection. And they starved. And their parents had to watch them starve. Despite every possible sacrifice made by those parents.

The West has run out of people to steal from and they aren’t able to do it with the same finesse as “the good old days” so the Yanks have resorted to the barbarism of “the good old days” hoping that the chaos it will bring will benefit them. But he who wields the sword rarely wears the crown. The USA could not have given up their hegemony faster to China if they’d Amazon Prime’d the damn thing to Beijing.

But I feel like we’re also ignoring the real winners of the war. Iran. They have turbo boosted Irans ability to be a terrorist state. And no one is saying anything because it didn’t start this. The US “annihilated” its nuclear capabilities in June of last year. Call me pedantic but one cannot “annihilate” a countries nuclear capabilities twice in 12 months. You had to have failed the first time because it was that failure that necessitated the second time. But the USA won’t admit to failure. “Never complain, never explain” was the motto of the late Queen. Yet America has been using that tactic on if they did or did not destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

On the other hand the diplomatic front it’s going exceptionally badly. Short of Congolese “artisanal” (read bare handed) miners you are hard pressed to find a job harder than a US diplomat to Iran. How do you bring someone back to the table when the last time they negotiated in good faith you bombed them? ? They now have the “straight of Hormuz” which if we are being honest is an area no one knew. Now we are all intimately aquatinted with it. It has 20% of global traffic of oil, natural gas and fertiliser. The first of which we are feeling now, but it’s the last of which will hurt us more. It’s planting season in the northern hemisphere. Did you know that? We’re about to. In September and October when those harvests fail because there’s not enough fertiliser. Hilariously, British farmers voted overwhelmingly for Brexit despite the common agricultural policy paying them £60k a year to just keep the land. The Leave campaign said they’d replace it with a more generous policy. Now farmers earn under minimum wage and supermarkets take over 100 days to pay them… but hey, freedom from those terrible Poles who would come and pick your strawberries at 4am, for poverty wages right?

30 years of mismanagement is about to hit us in one fell swoop. Being fair our forebears didn’t count on quite so many things going wrong.

The fall of the America’s image as a benevolent superpower, the fall of the petrodollar, the fall of the western financial system, the fall of American hegemony.

It’s because the fall one America’s image as benevolent that all these things are happening. No one wants to serve a madman, USAID being axed, the bombing of Venezuela and Iran (the first time) makes the USA look unhinged. This has sped up the fall of the petrodollar, as Iran now will only allow those barrels of oil not traded in USD to go through the straight of Hormuz. This precipitates the fall of the American financial system (SWIFT) now as countries no longer need to play by americas rules to get oil. And sanctions mean less. The world didn’t forget we had to bail out US banks in 2008 and the poorest paid the price, the prudent paid the price and now it’s time to pay the piper.

So America is about to collapse. It’s going to be violent. To quote Abraham Lincoln. “A house divided against itself cannot stand”

They’ll kill each other. The spectacle will be horrendous. When oil hits $150 it will be civil war. They have their precious “2nd amendment” “well armed militia” they said? More like poor, starving white men with guns. The democrats will lose because they are less likely to have guns. And the kinds of levels of gun obsession that is needed to be considered a “militia” a handgun in your car isn’t getting you very far in the purge.

The revolution it seems, will be televised.

Lucky for me I will be a safe distance away, live streaming this madness from my phone.

God help us.

God help all of them.

Pray for the innocent.

Grace and Courage

Annetta Mother Smith