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TOMGRAM <https://tomdispatch.com/category/tomgram/>
Alfred McCoy, Whose Planet Are We On?
POSTED ONMARCH 21, 2021
Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that would be genuinely funny, if it
weren’t so grim. You’ve certainly heard about that deal President
Trumpmade
<https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973604904/trumps-deal-to-end-war-in-afghanistan-leaves-biden-with-a-terrible-situation>with
the Taliban ensuring that the last 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan
would be withdrawn by May 21st. It’s beenin the news
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/politics/biden-afghanistan-deadline-looming/index.html>for
weeks now as apotential crisis
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/us/politics/biden-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-taliban.html>for
the Biden administration. Whatever may still be up for grabs there,
however, one thing was a given: that 2,500 figure. After all, the
president signed on to that agreement and who would have had better
information about this country’s troop deployments than the
commander-in-chief? (Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the 700 or more
U.S. troopsleft in Syria
<https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-troop-levels-syria-jeffrey-interview/>after
American officials assured President Trump that almost all of them had
been withdrawn.)
As it happens, only the other day the/New York Times/revealed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/world/asia/us-troops-afghanistan.html>that
there was indeed a tiny counting error (whoops!) when it came to that
number. If you included all the “off the books” special operations
forces and various “transitioning” units in Afghanistan, the total was
actually… hmmm… 3,500 (if that’s even accurate). Not only that, but
stationed in numerous other countries “from Syria to Yemen to Mali,” as
the/Times/reporters put it, are similarly off-the-books and
unacknowledged U.S. military personnel meant to fight America’s
disastrous global war on terror.
In other words, almost two decades after that “war” across much of the
Greater Middle East and ever-expanding parts of Africa was launched by
President George W. Bush with the invasion of Afghanistan (a “war”
theoretically aimed, according to the secretary of defense of that
moment,at 60 countries
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1547561.stm>), presidents may come
and go, but the U.S. military just fights on. Engaged as it is in
imperial conflicts of disaster, its high command is clearly convinced
that it’s in charge and the commander-in-chief be damned.
And yet here may be the strangest thing of all: forget those global
conflicts (one more disastrous than the next), all thosegarrisons
<https://tomdispatch.com/david-vine-our-base-nation/>around the planet,
all the invasions and interventions of this century. In this country,
the United States is essentially never treated as the great imperial
power (or even, at this moment, the faltering one) that it is — not in
the mainstream media, anyway. And yet if you don’t imagine this country
as an/imperial/power of the first order, the history of this planet, of
us, makes little sense. Fortunately, Alfred McCoy is a great historian
of empire as well as a/TomDispatch/regular
<https://tomdispatch.com/while-america-was-sleeping/>. His previous
Dispatch book,/In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and
Decline of U.S. Global Power/
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467732/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>,
followed that most imperial of powers through the last
half-century-plus. In his piece today, McCoy gives us a sneak
introduction to his new book, an imperial history extending from the
1600s into a future in which the very word “imperial” may lose much of
its meaning on a heating planet. That book,/To Govern the Globe: World
Orders and Catastrophic Change
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1642595780/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>/,
will be published by Dispatch Books in October. In the meantime, you
can get your first taste of it below. /Tom/
Washington’s Delusion of Endless World Dominion
China and the U.S. Struggle over Eurasia, the Epicenter of World Power
BYALFRED MCCOY <https://tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy/>
https://tomdispatch.com/washingtons-delusion-of-endless-world-dominion/
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