{"id":37717,"date":"2018-09-13T06:19:54","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T11:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37717"},"modified":"2018-09-13T06:19:54","modified_gmt":"2018-09-13T11:19:54","slug":"why-the-u-s-seeks-to-hem-in-russia-china-and-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37717","title":{"rendered":"Why the U.S. Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2018\/09\/13\/why-the-u-s-seeks-to-hem-in-russia-china-and-iran\/\">Why the U.S. Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>America\u2019s three principal adversaries signify the shape of the world to come: a post-Western world of coexistence. But neolibera and neocon ideology is unable to to accept global pluralism and multipolarity, argues Patrick Lawrence.<span id=\"more-30120\"><\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-29528\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Patrick-S-freeport-12-2012-Color-No-3-1-130x130.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"90\" height=\"90\" data-lazy-loaded=\"true\" \/>The Trump administration has brought U.S. foreign policy to the brink of crisis, if it has not already tipped into one. There is little room to argue otherwise. In Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and in Washington\u2019s ever-fraught relations with Russia, U.S. strategy, as reviewed in <a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2018\/08\/30\/the-trump-administrations-spoiler-foreign-policy\/\">my previous column<\/a>, amounts to little more than spoiling the efforts of others to negotiate peaceful solutions to war and dangerous standoffs in the interests of an orderly world.<\/p>\n<p>The bitter reality is that U.S. foreign policy has no definable objective other than blocking the initiatives of others because they stand in the way of the further expansion of U.S. global interests. This impoverished strategy reflects Washington\u2019s refusal to accept the passing of its relatively brief post\u2013Cold War moment of unipolar power.<\/p>\n<p>There is an error all too common in American public opinion. Personalizing Washington\u2019s regression into the role of spoiler by assigning all blame to one man, now Donald Trump, deprives one of deeper understanding. This mistake was made during the steady attack on civil liberties after the Sept. 11 tragedies and then during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: namely that it was all\u00a0 George W. Bush\u2019s fault. It was not so simple then and is not now. The crisis of U.S. foreign policy\u2014a series of radical missteps\u2014are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why the U.S. Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran America\u2019s three principal adversaries signify the shape of the world to come: a post-Western world of coexistence. But neolibera and neocon ideology is unable to to accept global pluralism and multipolarity, argues Patrick Lawrence. The Trump administration has brought U.S. foreign policy to the [&hellip;]<\/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":[130,6963,441,522,21641,21211,694,827,1174,865],"class_list":["post-37717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-consortium-news","tag-iran","tag-middle-east","tag-multi-polar-world","tag-patrick-lawrence","tag-russia","tag-united-states","tag-us-foreign-policy","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37717","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=37717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37718,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37717\/revisions\/37718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}