In its wars since World War II alone, America is estimated to have killed more than 20 million people in the 37 nations that it’s illegally invaded during this time. Since 1945, the U.S. has interfered in the affairs of at least 85 countries. These acts of aggression have been started through the deliberately false attribution of blame for provocations, the fabrication of evidence for atrocities, unprovoked attacks against multiple countries which are supposedly meant to “fight terrorism” but which mainly kill civilians, and the covert training and arming of terrorist groups in order to destabilize the targeted countries.
Being the “world’s policeman” and the largest empire in history, the United States has needed to commit historically monumental acts of violence to maintain its hegemony. And it continues to be by far the most aggressive country on the planet. As over 40 active wars are currently happening around the globe, America is perpetuating a fourth of them. The U.S. has bombed Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya, and Niger in the last two years alone. And as part of America’s shadow wars in Africa, the U.S. has admitted it now has troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Uganda, and South Sudan.
When we expand the definition of war to include economic sabotage-which from a humanitarian perspective is a completely appropriate position to take-America’s aggressions extend to many other countries. The U.S. is currently imposing economic sanctions against Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Syria, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and it stopped its deeply damaging sanctions against Sudan only over a year ago. Even if the U.S.’ basis for sanctioning many of these countries didn’t come from fabricated claims of foreign transgressions (with Russia being a prime victim), all economic sanctions are war crimes because they harm civilian populations.
This means that America is behind war operations in at least nineteen countries, including the war in Yemen-which is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world and would not be able to continue if the U.S. were to stop backing the Saudis’ genocide against the Yemeni people. This list gets even bigger when we consider Israel’s war/genocide against the Palestinian people, which is enabled by American support. All of the other aggressions that Israel has committed throughout its history can also be blamed on the U.S./NATO empire as a whole, since propping up Israel has long been a strategic goal of the empire.
And many of the world’s terrorist organizations, which the U.S. and its allies often use as pretenses for military involvement, have been created by the U.S./NATO countries themselves. Israel’s aggressions throughout the last few decades have lead to the rise of Hamas. Saudi Arabia is the largest sponsor of terrorism, and 9/11 victims are currently trying to sue the country for its involvement in the 2001 attacks. The U.S. created Al-Qaeda with its backing of Osama Bin Laden’s organization in the 1980’s, and ISIS received similar support from the U.S. during its rise. The U.S. and its allies have also deliberately provided training and arms for terrorist groups as part of their eight-year campaign against the Syrian government, and last year President Trump effectively came out in support of Idlib’s terrorists by refusing to counter their occupation of the region.
Add all of this to America’s support for violent anti-government groups in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran, then consider the over 100 countries overall that America is to some level involved in, and it appears that the bulk of the violence in the world originates from the U.S./NATO empire. The U.S. government is the largest and most successful terrorist entity in the history of the world, with its partners in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other countries being comparable. If this network of imperialist aggressors were to be stopped and their leaders were to be held accountable for their war crimes, we would come much closer to world peace.
As this empire declines in its influence, and loses its ground to countries like Russia and Iran, the West’s political and media class are trying to justify continued Western imperialist domination by claiming that these countries pose an immediate threat of aggression. But this is just more Western war propaganda. Trump and Netanyahu’s sabotage last year of the Iran deal was based in completely unsupported claims that Iran plans to develop nuclear weapons, and Trump has lied when he’s claimed that Iran is the “leading sponsor of terrorism.” And the notion that Putin will start a campaign of aggression if he’s not restrained by NATO is baseless. Russia’s involvements in Georgia and Ukraine have merely been responses to NATO’s aggressive expansionism. The Western hysteria around Russian election involvement is also highly alarmist, and most of it is not based in real evidence.
Still, knowing human history, some new imperialist presence will no doubt emerge after the current dominator is gone. This is why the social movements that are emerging around the world right now must oppose imperialism, with strong anti-imperialist sentiment needing to eventually exist all throughout the world after the U.S. empire is vanquished.
I don’t know when or if the global political situation will look like this. But what’s certain is that as Americans, it’s our duty to work to stop the aggressions of our government before they instigate a third world war.
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