{"id":35216,"date":"2018-06-19T05:22:52","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T10:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35216"},"modified":"2018-06-19T05:22:52","modified_gmt":"2018-06-19T10:22:52","slug":"how-the-last-superpower-was-unchained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35216","title":{"rendered":"How the last superpower was unchained"},"content":{"rendered":"

How the last superpower was unchained<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren\u2019t so grim.<\/p>\n

If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0from a piece on the topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. \u201cThe Americans and South Koreans,\u201d\u00a0wrote\u00a0<\/a>reporter Motoko Rich, \u201cwant to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the country\u2019s resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens\u2019 economic well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Think about that for a moment. The US has, of course, embarked on a\u00a0trillion-dollar-plus<\/a>\u00a0upgrade of its already\u00a0massive<\/a>\u00a0nuclear arsenal (and that\u2019s before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proved eager to sink at least a\u00a0trillion dollars annually<\/a>\u00a0into the budget of the national security state (a figure that\u2019s\u00a0still rising<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0outpaces<\/a>\u00a0by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure\u00a0sags<\/a>\u00a0and crumbles. And yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme path.<\/p>\n

\u201cClueless\u201d is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or a government. Yet how applicable it is.<\/p>\n

And when it comes to cluelessness, there\u2019s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W Bush moment that couldn\u2019t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don\u2019t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist\u2019s couch, this might be the place to start.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How the last superpower was unchained Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren\u2019t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about […]<\/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":[15907,259,3020,12674,827],"class_list":["post-35216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-asia-times","tag-empire","tag-superpower","tag-tom-engelhardt","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35216","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=35216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35217,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35216\/revisions\/35217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}