The American Century’s Final Curtain
History will show that the United States, more than a decade after being drawn by rabid neo-conservative war hawks into costly and ill-advised conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, saw the final curtain drawn on its post-Cold War “American Century.” The inauguration of Donald Trump, who acts more like the Roman emperors Caligula or Nero than an American statesman, is hastening the final act in the Pax Americana stage play.
Crafty world leaders are using the dysfunctionality of US foreign policy to push the envelope, while America is pre-occupied with what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called a moron, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Senator Bob Corker called a child in need of adult day care, and the North Korean government called a senile “dotard” in the Oval Office. The final chapter of the American Century has given problematic leaders like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Saudi King Salman, and Moroccan King Mohammed VI encouragement to carry out their own agendas in the absence of America’s past framing of the geo-political map.
Trump has outsourced American policy in the Middle East primarily to Israel, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates acting as cheerleaders for the Israelis. The first clue that Trump would hand Middle East policy to Israel came with his nomination of the anti-Palestinian Zionist David Friedman as US ambassador to Israel. That was followed by Trump’s appointment of his pro-Likud son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a special envoy to the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a friend of the Trump family since the 1980s, has taken advantage of a powerless State Department to annex more Israeli-occupied lands in the West Bank in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions. Netanyahu is also a close friend of Kushner and his father, Charles Kushner.
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