* US foreign policy has caused scenes of misery and horror around the world and seriously endangered global peace and stability.
* From the end of World War II to 2001, the United States launched 201 armed conflicts in 153 countries, accounting for more than 80 percent of the total number of wars that occurred worldwide at that time.
* Direct military aggression is not the only means of US control. It has also used economic lures, financial sanctions, cultural infiltration, incitement to riots, election rigging and other tricks to covertly overthrow so-called “ideologically hostile countries”.
* The consequences have extended beyond the human losses, economic collapse and social unrest of the targeted states to destroy regional and global stability.
BEIJING, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) — “Intervention is as American as apple pie,” wrote the late American political scientist Robert Jervis in the introduction to a book titled “The New American Intervention.”
Jervis’ words were written 23 years ago and still hold true today. They go to the core of US foreign policy, which is characterized by interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and subverting their governments, with the ultimate goal of securing American hegemony.
Such interventionist foreign policy has caused scenes of disaster and horror around the world and seriously endangered global peace and stability.
Protesters gather in front of the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq on December 31, 2019 to condemn airstrikes by US forces against Hashd Shaabi bases in Iraq. (Xinhua/Khalil Dawood)
THE BLOOD LITTLE
In the spring of 1805, American army officer and diplomatic consul William Eaton, in alliance with Hamet Karamanli, the deposed brother of Yusuf Karamanli, Pasha of present-day Tripolitania or Libya, marched an army to attack Derna. They easily captured the Tripolitan city with the help of three American ships and the pasha was forced to capitulate.
The incident, which led to the end of the First Barbary War and a victorious United States, is seen by many scholars as the United States’ first attempt at a coup d’état against a foreign government through military intervention, prompting the country’s pursuit as a result of global dominance.
Since then, the United States has launched more bloody military interventions overseas, often entering a country and launching deadly attacks until the target is thrown into chaos and its government overthrown.
From the end of World War II to 2001, the United States initiated 201 armed conflicts in 153 countries, accounting for more than 80 percent of the total number of wars that occurred worldwide during that time. Since 2001, Washington and its allies have dropped an average of 46 bombs on other countries every day.
Those wars, mostly in the name of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights,” were instead reckless meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, leaving behind death and destruction in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
For example, US-led NATO forces conducted continuous airstrikes for 78 days against Yugoslavia. Result? More than 8,000 civilians dead or injured and nearly 1 million displaced.
The US-led war in Afghanistan killed an estimated 50,000 Afghan civilians from 2001 to mid-April 2020 and displaced an estimated 11 million refugees. Additionally, years of bloodshed have left more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians dead and drawn Libya into greater turmoil.
The United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” former US President Jimmy Carter said in 2019, adding that his country had enjoyed only 16 years of peace in its 242-year history.
The history of looting in the US “is linked to numerous military interventions and coups organized to eliminate those governments that did not easily accede to their demands,” Gilberto Valdes Gutierrez of the Cuban Institute of Philosophy told Xinhua.
American historian Paul L. Atwood has also summed up this warlike nature of the United States: “War is the American way of life.”
The bombed Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) building is seen in Belgrade, Serbia, March 21, 2022. In Belgrade, there are many scars left by the NATO bombings. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)
SECRET MANIPULATION
Direct military aggression is not the only means of US control. It has also used economic lures, financial sanctions, cultural infiltration, incitement to riots, election rigging and other tricks to covertly overthrow so-called “ideologically hostile countries”.
These covert moves were acknowledged by former US National Security Adviser John Bolton in an interview with CNN in mid-July. “As someone who helped plan the coup, not here but in other countries, a lot of work is needed,” he said.
As Boston College political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke wrote in her book “Secret Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War,” from 1947 to 1989, the United States launched 64 covert coup operations in countries others.
Over the past few decades, the US government has fomented political unrest in Latin America, played a role in the “Arab Spring” and fueled “Color Revolutions” in Europe and Asia. In Latin America, it continues to interfere in the internal affairs of the countries of the region under the “Monroe Doctrine”.
Washington’s sanctions have increased tenfold in the past 20 years. It has long blacklisted Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria and others, deliberately disrupting their economies and harming people’s livelihoods, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. 19.
In an interview with USA Today in September 2020, political scientist Dov H. Levin noted that the United States has interfered in 81 elections between 1946 and 2000, including those in Yugoslavia and Italy.
An article published by Foreign Affairs in June 2020 stated that the first known covert action of the US Central Intelligence Agency was to manipulate the 1948 election in Italy by spreading inflammatory propaganda, financing their preferred candidate and orchestrating grassroots initiatives — “all to benefit Italy’s centrist forces over their leftist. competitors.”
The United States has funded nongovernmental organizations “that are basically there to destabilize countries,” said Alfred de Zayas, a professor of international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy, who, as an American, feels “vicariously responsible” for the wrongdoing. of his country.
Photo taken on September 2, 2021 shows damaged vehicles at the site of a US airstrike in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)
ARROGANCE NEVER DIES
“A modern form of ‘Western arrogance’ is how Greg Cusack, a former member of the Iowa House of Representatives, described his country’s foreign policy in an interview with Xinhua.
He was right: since its founding, the United States has formed a culture of piracy that advocates plunder and conquest. Later, as triumphalism reared its head in the West after the end of the Cold War, the United States, the world’s sole superpower, saw a rare opportunity to reshape the globe as it saw fit and rule supreme.
But his “unipolar moment” was short-lived. As the world is shifting towards a multipolar one, the United States fears that its global supremacy is weakening and is therefore beginning to tighten its grip.
“Washington’s empire” is “built on a foundation of greed and lust for power,” writer and political commentator John Wight wrote in an opinion piece published in July.
Its “imperial arrogance” is the same as that which accompanies any empire, “created in the name not of peace and prosperity but of war and exploitation,” Wight wrote, adding that the United States “seeks to dominate” and ” has a policy of interfering in the internal affairs of other states”.
Indeed, the United States has long undermined international rules, forced others to choose sides, and retaliated against those who refused to comply. The consequences have extended beyond the human losses, economic collapse and social unrest of the targeted states to destroy regional and global stability.
And to justify its interventionist policy, the United States has disguised its misdeeds as “simple war theories” and so-called “democratic experiments.”
Daniel Kovalik, an American expert on international human rights from the University of Pittsburgh, told Xinhua that the United States uses human rights as a “weapon” against targets.
It has nothing to do with human rights, he said. “It concerns US economic and strategic interests.”
“Democracy discourse is the US’s means of pressure on countries… Every region they occupied was completely destroyed both physically and spiritually as they turned their neighbors against each other,” said veteran Turkish journalist Tunc Akkoc.
As an article published last year in the South China Morning Post wrote, the United States “brings all the consequences that a hegemon can inflict on non-compliant states.”
“The various experiences of US interventions” over the past decades “were not in favor of the peoples,” Egyptian political expert Akram Hossam told Xinhua.
(online editor: Peng Yukai, Bianji)
