{"id":205199,"date":"2022-02-21T12:01:19","date_gmt":"2022-02-21T12:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=205199"},"modified":"2022-02-15T05:52:29","modified_gmt":"2022-02-15T05:52:29","slug":"the-us-government-truly-believes-the-entire-planet-is-its-property","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/02\/the-us-government-truly-believes-the-entire-planet-is-its-property\/","title":{"rendered":"The US Government Truly Believes the Entire Planet Is Its Property"},"content":{"rendered":"

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14 Feb 2022 – <\/em>The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled \u201cU.S. Aims to Thwart China\u2019s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa<\/a>\u201c, subtitled \u201cAn American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility\u201d on the Atlantic, and discusses \u201cAmerican concern about China\u2019s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Quincy Institute\u2019s Trita Parsi has discussed<\/a> the irony of WSJ yelling about\u00a0China\u2019s \u201cglobal expansionism\u201d over a\u00a0potential<\/em>\u00a0military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times<\/em><\/strong> the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar\u2019s Daniel Larison wrote an article<\/a> back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.<\/p>\n

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But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political\/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as \u201cAmerica\u2019s backyard\u201d and \u201cwaters the U.S. considers home turf\u201d follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming<\/a> that \u201cEverything south of the Mexican border is America\u2019s front yard.\u201d This provoked many references<\/a> to the so-called \u201cMonroe Doctrine\u201d, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

It also follows another incident<\/a> in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America\u2019s interest to support \u201cour eastern flank countries\u201d, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America\u2019s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.<\/p>\n

The casual way these people say such things reflects a collectively held worldview that you won\u2019t find on any official document or in any schoolchild\u2019s textbook, but which is nonetheless a firmly held perspective among all the drivers of the modern empire: that the entire world is the property of the US government. That the US is not just the most powerful government in the world but also its rightful ruler, in the same way Rome ruled the Christian world.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not something they can come out and directly say<\/em>, because admitting they see themselves as the rulers of the world would make them look tyrannical and megalomaniacal. But it\u2019s certainly something they believe.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re about as obvious about it as could be. They make almost no effort to conceal it. And yet you\u2019ll still get empire apologists like Michael McFaul saying nonsense like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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There was a time, not long ago, when imperial powers like UK, France, Portugal etc claimed their colonies as their "sphere of influence." Thank God we didn't listen o them back then. So why now is it ok to let Russia exercise a sphere of influence over its former colony, Ukraine?<\/p>\n

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 7, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n