{"id":33460,"date":"2018-04-16T20:07:39","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T01:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33460"},"modified":"2018-04-16T20:07:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T01:07:39","slug":"a-tale-of-american-hubris-or-five-lessons-in-the-history-of-american-defeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33460","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of American Hubris:\u00a0Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Tale of American Hubris<\/strong>:\u00a0Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat <\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n

The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington’s present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let\u2019s take a few moments to think about what some of the lessons of the last years of the previous century and the first years of this one might be for the world\u2019s most exceptional<\/a> and indispensable<\/a>\u00a0nation, the planet\u2019s sole superpower, the globe\u2019s only sheriff<\/a>. Those were, of course, commonplace descriptions from the pre-Trump era and yet, in the age of MAGA, already as moldy and cold as the dust in some pharaonic tomb.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start this way: you could think of the post-Cold War era, the years after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the moment of America\u2019s first opioid crisis. The country\u2019s politicians and would-be politicians were, then, taking street drugs (K-Street and military-industrial-complex ones, to be exact) and having remarkable visions of a planet available for the taking, as well as the keeping, forever and ever, amen.<\/p>\n

On a globe without another superpower — pre-Putin Russia was a shattered, impoverished shell of the former Soviet Union, while China was still entering the capitalist world, Communist party in tow — history\u2019s ultimate opportunity had obviously presented itself. And about to ascend to the holodeck of the USS America<\/em> (beam me up, Dick Cheney!) were history\u2019s ultimate opportunists, the men (and woman<\/a>) who would, in January 2001, occupy the top posts in the administration of President George W. Bush.\u00a0 That, of course, included Cheney who, after overseeing a wide-ranging search for the best candidate for vice president, had appointed himself<\/a>\u00a0to the job. As a group, they couldn\u2019t have been more ready for America\u2019s ultimate moment in the sun.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Tale of American Hubris:\u00a0Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington’s present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let\u2019s take a few moments […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[149,2500,2427,694,12674,7413,827,865],"class_list":["post-33460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-cold-war","tag-history","tag-hubris","tag-russia","tag-tom-engelhardt","tag-tomdispatch","tag-united-states","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33461,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33460\/revisions\/33461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}