Signs are too apparent to conclude that’s the case. I personally think the world cannot be at peace without the disintegration of the Unites States. And sooner the better. By the way, the chief executive– President Biden– also appears deeply disturbed by the prospect of the republic’s imminent sundering.
Just two weeks days before the latest massacre in Texas of 19 school kids, Tom Friedman, a star columnist of the New York Times, was invited to have lunch with President Biden at the White House. For a journalist to have this kind of exclusive lunch meeting with the chief executive is a very big deal anywhere in the world. The reason, you can safely assume, was that Biden wanted to share some intimate thoughts with Friedman whom he had known for a long time. Obviously, Americans as well as the rest of the world were eagerly waiting to get a glimpse of Biden’s innermost feelings at a time when America itself is becoming increasingly restive and ungovernable.
Unfortunately, though, the entire meeting was off-the-record and Friedman couldn’t share with his readers about what he heard from the president.
“I left our lunch with a full stomach but a heavy heart,” Friedman wrote, clearly disappointed for not being able to divulge what Biden told him. He did, however, drop a big hint about the deep worries and heartache that most likely keep Biden stay awake at night these days.
“Biden didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He’s worried that while he has reunited the West (in the wake of the Ukraine conflict), he may not be able to reunite America” Friedman wrote.
“But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it’s too late”, the journalist, who won three Pulitzer, wrote.
It’s indeed too late to repair the self-inflicted damage that has put America on the inexorable slide to abyss. And if history is any guide that is how the brutal sway of empires end.
I got a taste of what’s in store for the neo-imperialist from an authoritative book, The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan, a history professor at Oxford. In the well- researched book, the author described in vivid details about how and why the previous empires collapsed, including the last one—Great Britain– ending its 200-plus years of hegemony.
The reasons, sadly, are the same we’re now witnessing in the United States—reckless spending, senseless wars, kowtowing to special interests (corporations, defense industry, Wall Street) at the cost of ordinary folks; and deep-seated hatred of the country from folks around the world for its arrogance, heavy-handedness and exploitation of their resources through overt and covert means.
To be sure, Britain, in the waning days of its riches and influence during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, became nearly bankrupt, forcing its then prime minister Anthony Eden to scout around for the desperately-needed financial assistance from whoever was willing to lend. Unfortunately, no one showed interest. As the last resort, he went to the International Monetary Fund, which also turned him down. Broken and devastated, Eden resigned in 1957 and his resignation “simply served as another paragraph in the final chapter in the death of an empire”. In barely four decades, Frankopan wrote, Britain had gone from world mastery to holding out its cap and begging for help. Its military might weakened as a result. During the Suez canal crisis, which erupted under Eden, British troops were withdrawn from Egypt without having accomplished their mission—taking control of the canal from Nasser. Their recall home, in the glare of the world’s media, was deeply humiliating for the prime minister, which also was too much for him to cling to office.
Of course, the financial situation is not at all dire in the United States and it can perhaps carry on riding on the back of the greenback—the mighty and widely sought-after dollar.
But things can go badly wrong in these trying, uncertain times caused by the endless mass shootings, internecine turf war between the Republicans and the Democrats; and the ongoing Ukraine war.
What’s more unnerving, even chilling. is the menacing radicalization of the American right and they’re making no secrets about how far they’re willing to go to protect and preserve the white privileges and the guns that ensure that. If that means taking down the president of the republic, so be it.
“I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Randy Fine, a state lawmaker in Florida, tweeted last week.
These threats are no longer confined to the fringes but have found echoes among majority Republicans. And that’s perhaps what prompted Biden to share his deep worries with journalist Friedman about the possible break of America.
The upshot—a looming civil war that is bound to fracture the mighty neo-colonialist masquerading as a champion of freedom, democracy and rule of law. And the unraveling could begin as early 2024.
