Pax Americana

Emir Sader

23/01/2015

Opinión

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The journal The Economist predicts that the next “failed state” will be Libya. The next? If they themselves admit that there is no State in the country, there are two governments, two parliaments, a dispute over who runs the central bank, the oil company; that there is no police, no national army, while various groups of militiamen dispute areas of the national territory; the infrastructure of the country is ruined, the oil wells, being fought over by militias, risk a destructive explosion; tortures and executions are rife. For all this, the country is sometimes known as Lycia. Turkey, Qatar and the Sudan support one band, while the United Arab Emirates and Egypt support the other. If this is not a failed state, what more is needed to make it one?

Who is responsible for the destruction of another country in the region? Is what is going on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Yemen not enough?

We should not forget that the bombardments that have destroyed Libya were authorized by the United Nations’ Security Council, in order to “protect the civil population”, when generalized combats for power had already been unleashed in the country. Based on this decision and interpreting it in their own way, NATO bombarded the country, not to provide any protection for the civil population – who could be protected from the bombardments of NATO? – but to overthrow the Gadhafi government. This is so much the case that, as soon as the regime fell and the person who was then head of state was shamefully murdered, brutally assassinated in public by militiamen, NATO assumed that their mission of “protection of the civil population” of Libya was completed; they suspended the bombardments, and the United Nations apparently followed suit. Libya was then surrendered to a brutal civil war between armed militiamen. Meanwhile, other bands appropriated the weapons of these militiamen in order to perpetrate terrorist attacks on other countries – such as those that took place in Algeria and Yemen – and to organize new fundamentalist groups across the region. Libya not only failed to be stabilized, but has become an active nucleus for the destabilization of other countries in the region.

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In the “cold war” period there were zones of influence of the two superpowers, and even when there were serious conflicts – such as the bloody war between Iraq and Iran – the conflict was never generalized across the whole region, as could well happen today, if there were to be a face-off between what were then two of the strongest powers in the region. With the end of the cold war, with the victory of the West under the leadership of the United States, the conditions were established for the imposition of the Pax Americana, now without limits. We have moved from a bipolar world to a unipolar world, under the imperial US hegemony.

From that time onwards there has been a pattern of invasion and destruction of countries, of which Afghanistan and Iraq were the beginning, but whose destructive impact has spread to countries such as Libya, Syria, Yemen, with the potential to extend itself to the whole region. The panorama has never been so confused and out of control in the whole region, with perspectives of further damage, as the military and political action of the United States intensifies, dragging in their allies – from Europe, North American, Oceania – into new military adventures.

As a consequence of the disastrous militaristic interventions led by the United States, the Taliban has been strengthened as never before in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has returned in strength, the Islamic State is moving forward in Iraq and Syria. As a response, the United States brings its allies to engage in a new military offensive, that among its effects includes terrorist attacks in Canada, Australia, now in France, like a powder trail spreading its risks across the whole world.

This is the Pax Americana, the world promised by the US, victorious in the cold war, a world formed in the image and likeness of the US. This is a world, more than ever before, the victim of imperialist tentacles and increasingly at risk because of the multiplication of the epicenters of war.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Emir Sader, Brazilian sociologist and political scientist, is coordinator of the Laboratorio de Politicas Públicas of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj).

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/167013