{"id":53114,"date":"2020-05-09T18:57:57","date_gmt":"2020-05-09T23:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53114"},"modified":"2020-05-09T18:58:03","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T23:58:03","slug":"from-overstretch-to-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53114","title":{"rendered":"From Overstretch to Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From Overstretch to Collapse<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States has gone from the world\u2019s sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the journalist Fintan O\u2019Toole noted recently in the Irish Times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOver more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Quite right. But how and why did this pitiable condition come about? Is it all Donald Trump\u2019s fault as so many now assume? Or did the process begin earlier?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer for any serious student of imperial politics is the latter. Indeed, a fascinating email suggests that the tipping point occurred in early to mid-2014, long before Trump set foot in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sent from U.S. General Wesley Clark to Philip Breedlove, Clark\u2019s successor as NATO commander in Europe, the email is dated Apr. 12, 2014, and concerns events in the Ukraine that had recently begun spinning out of control. A few weeks earlier, the Obama administration had been on top of the world thanks to a nationalist insurrection in Kiev that had chased out a mildly pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. Champagne glasses were no doubt clinking in Washington now that the Ukraine was solidly in the western camp. But then everything went awry. First, Vladimir Putin seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, site of an all-important Russian naval base at Sevastopol. Then a pro-Russian insurgency took off in Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking provinces in the Ukraine\u2019s far east. Suddenly, the country was coming apart at the seams, and the U.S. didn\u2019t know what to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

From Overstretch to Collapse In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States has gone from the world\u2019s sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the journalist […]<\/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":[150,7398,8203,827],"class_list":["post-53114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-collapse","tag-daniel-lazare","tag-strategic-culture-foundation","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53114","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=53114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53115,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53114\/revisions\/53115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}