The World Rebuilt! It can't be postponed anymore...
It has been decades now, that the system we live in, is built upon values that do not represent the qualities and the necessities of the modern context we currently live in. The only problem is that great powers tend to avoid re-evaluation of their policies, if the policies they have, once led to success.
And that exactly is the case with the United States currently, and the reason why it should totally head to a new policy model as a country, for the sake of Americans and the rest of the world. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, which permitted stable exchange rates, and ofcourse the collapse of the Soviet Union which led to a bankruptcy of international communism, currencies started to float again and the global markets started to become integrated. That meant subsequently, that United States' greatest investment, which was its military strength, started to be detached from the international financial order, as all these systems before the collapse of Bretton Woods, assured the expansion of the dollar and ofcourse the fact that all the other currencies were attached to it.
We all know that military strength means things, when a currency is strong enough to tie all others on itself. When free fluctuation of currencies started to take place, the role of all this military presence around the world, should have been re-assessed.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States, freed from their Cold War foe, had a unique chance to form the scenery of international politics exactly as they wanted and wished. The expected scenarios that all the world would wish from a superpower who has no foe-challenge anymore, would be global peace and environmental policies, that would protect the earth from climate changes that lead currently our planet to overheating, with no obvious tools to reverse this condition.
Instead, what the United States did, was to pay attention only on military investments, pursued wars in Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, thus creating a huge number of unwanted enemies around the world, protecting its own interests as a country craving for military dominance around the world, and this way it sacrificed the interests of the many...
Even though China, is the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide, the United States' emissions of carbon dioxide per capita are twice higher compared to China.
Trump is very often proud of himself, that his policies differentiated him from his predecessors. But the truth is that Donald Trump, followed exactly and with no deviation at all, the agenda of the U.S. Presidents of the post-Cold War era. He gave it all, to ensure the military hegemony of the U.S. and he gave lesser than less, to protect the climate, or the poor countries. Ofcourse, all this led with years to the accumulation of so many complaints firstly by Americans, who found themselves tied to policies they didn't even have the time to think if they agree or not. They were easily also carried away by demagogues, who made them think of other countries as foes and rogue states...
Currently as these lines are being written, it is a fact that the U.S. military consumes more oil and produces more gases than any other institution on this earth, exceeding even the emissions of hugely industrialised countries such as Sweden and Denmark, according to a reasearch made back in 2017 according to Brown University's Costs of War Project.
This primacy inclination of the U.S. superpower is an obsolete tool that leads nowhere. In fact, it created a vicious circle of unwanted enemies, and it also led to a kind of retirement from the Middle East war zone recently, leaving thus, a taste of a severe loss of money, of time and human lives, after more than two decades of war. If two decades of war were not enough for the U.S. to "impose" their messages, then they probably shouldn't struggle anymore to do so.
On the other hand, it would be better to leave behind completely the primacy obsession, and pay attention on averting the most severe climate impacts, by raisng taxes on producers and importers of carbon emitting-fuels, by adopting strict green regulatory standards on which its market would be accessible, expand the credits for electric vehicles, and follow the lines of the emissions requirements posed by Obama governance on imported vehicles. Further, it should be assured that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, support only the projects that would lead to fewer emissions, as the climate issue, is number one factor of a future potential policy with meaning worldwide.
This war machine which is U.S., should stop the endless wars it has started and avoid new ones, as it proved it made nothing out of it, except of causing anger, fear, resentment, loss of money, huge emissions and despair. Now the U.S., leaves the war zones step by step, leaving also behind a desert and a huge question mark for all those years and lives that were thrown in the garbage. Europe, is not in a position to handle this lack of a "balancing" superpower and will not be able to leverage this "exit of the game" of such a major player.
China is right now a major player, and the U.S. should put behind any fear of an agressive peer and quickly and without any further loss of time prioritize the danger of a planet under extinction, by cooperating with Beijing on issues that cannot be postponed. Who is going to be the leader in this, is surely out of the context. One thing is for sure, the military hegemony of the U.S. is more than obsolete and it totally failed, and the world we live in must be rebuilt with tools applicable for the current necessities of this planet...
written by Themis Panagiotopoulou, PhD in Political Science