The American Dream: Americans must wake up from the illusion they live in a democracy - by Hamid Dabashi

The US is a failed experiment. It is a political culture that is not compatible with democracy, for Americans, both conservative and liberal, are trapped in a vicious cycle exacerbating the worst in their respective characters.

I look at Mike Pompeo, the repugnant evangelical crusader who is now the US secretary of state - the country’s “top diplomat,” as they say, the face and figure that represents it around the world - and I think he is worse in his fanaticism, and infinitely more dangerous in his zealotry, than Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi put together.

And Pompeo did not fall from the sky: he and the entire cabinet that President Donald Trump selected and enabled are definitive to US politics.

Read more: Americans must wake up from the illusion they live in a democracy | Middle East Eye

USA: Trump has ‘discredited the American experiment:’ Robert Kennedy Jr.

In a newly released interview with Yahoo Finance, activist and environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr. asserted that President Donald Trump has tarnished the reputation of the U.S. around the world.

The criticism from Kennedy Jr., a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, came in response to a question from Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer regarding his view on whether it’s a “good or bad thing” that Trump has so many family members working with him.

Kennedy Jr. belongs to another notable American family deeply involved in politics — his father, Robert Kennedy, served as attorney general under his brother, JFK, before Lyndon Johnson signed a law interpreted as barring presidents from appointing relatives to their Cabinet.

While Trump doesn’t have any family members in his Cabinet, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, both serve as senior advisers. Kennedy Jr., however, says it’s not a “good thing or a bad thing” that Trump has family members with him in the White House.

“I don’t think that’s the problem with the president,” he said. “I think the problem is, number one, he is a bully. And you know, I don't like bullies. And I don't think ... that that's part of America's tradition. I think, in many ways, he's discredited the American experiment with self-governance.”

Kennedy Jr. made the comments during a conversation that aired in an episode of Yahoo Finance’s “Influencers with Andy Serwer,” a weekly interview series with leaders in business, politics, and entertainment.

Read more at: Trump has ‘discredited the American experiment:’ Robert Kennedy Jr.

Global Power Shift - an indepth overview: is a global power shift in the making ?

Even before Trump’s belligerent foreign policy positions, America had been gradually losing its dominant role in world affairs.

A power shift among the nations of the world began at the end of the Cold War and has been accelerating this century.

It is not as simple as saying “America is in decline,” since America remains a powerful country. But American global power has been eroding for some time while the power of other countries has grown, giving them both the ability and the desire to effect global affairs independently of U.S. desires.

Since the end of WWII, the U.S. has been the central player in the international system, leading in the creation of new international organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

American diplomacy has been essential to multinational agreements on trade, climate, regional security and arms control. Americans could and did claim to be at the center of a “rules-based international order.”

Those days are gone.

Not only do China and Russia contest America’s global role, a growing number of other countries are asserting an independent and increasingly influential role in regional economic and security developments.

Neither American political party has come to grips with this sea change. Until they do, U.S. global actions are likely to be less effective, even counterproductive.

The power shifts are increasingly visible. In the Middle East, the U.S. hoped for decades to isolate Iran as a pariah and weaken the regime until it fell.

Today, that goal is unimaginable, though national security adviser John Bolton continues to imagine it.

Iran is and will remain an increasingly assertive and influential power in the region, defending and promoting its interests and competing with the Saudi regime.

The Russians are in the Middle East region for good, building on their long-standing relationship with the family of Syria’s dictator.

Turkey, a rising regional power, acts increasingly independent of the preferences of the U.S., its NATO ally, playing its own hand in the regional power game.

The U.S. helped unleash these trends with the strategically fatal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – fatal, because it permanently removed a regional leader who balanced the power of Iran. The failure to create a stable Iraq stimulated regional religious and political conflicts and rendered ineffective subsequent U.S. efforts to influence current trends in the region, as the continually ineffective policies in Syria show.

In Asia, decades of U.S. condemnation and efforts to contain the rise of Chinese power have failed. An assertive China has risen.

China now plays almost as powerful a role in the global economy as the U.S. It has defended an authoritarian model for economic growth, armed artificial islands in the South China Sea, and built a military base in Djibouti. China has created new multilateral organizations for security discussions and one for infrastructure loans, which the U.S. declined to join. It has developed a global lending program – the Belt and Road Initiative – and has stepped into a stronger global role on climate change. And China is spreading its political and economic influence into Africa and Latin America.

The U.S. cannot slow Chinese economic growth nor contain its power. China is changing the rules, whether the U.S. likes it or not.

Elsewhere in Asia, Japan moves toward a renewed nationalism and has removed restrictions on its defense spending and the deployment of its military in the face of growing Chinese power.

North Korea behaves more and more like a regional power, winning a direct meeting with the U.S. president while making only a general commitment to denuclearize. The prospect of a unified Korea would bring into being another major regional power center in the Northern Pacific.

Other countries, like the Philippines and Australia, hedge their bets by improving bilateral relations with China. And India is a growing economic and military presence in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.

Nor will the U.S. contain the rise of Russia, whose government poisons its citizens overseas and kills dissenters at home. At the same time, Russia is rebuilding its military and intruding in others’ elections. The Russian regime is threatening its near neighbors and actively engaging in the Middle East.

President Vladimir Putin asserts Russia’s interests and role in the world, like any other great power. Russia is consciously and actively rebalancing the power of the United States, with some success.

Military power, the American global trump card, is not as useful a tool as it once was.

While the U.S. continues to have the world’s only global military capability, able to deploy anywhere, it is no longer evident that this capability effectively sustains U.S. leadership. Clear military victories are few – the Gulf War in 1991 being an exception. The endless U.S. deployment in Afghanistan carries the whiff of Vietnam in its inability to resolve that country’s civil war.

Meanwhile, the military's of other countries, acting independently of the U.S., are proving effective, as both Turkish and Iranian operations in Syria suggest.

The transition to this new era is proving difficult for American policy-makers.

The Trump “America First” foreign policy is based on the view that the U.S. needs to defend its interests by acting alone, eschewing or withdrawing from multilateral arrangements for trade, economics, diplomacy or security.

Trump praises “strong” nationalistic leadership in authoritarian countries, while democratic leadership in allied countries is criticized as weak.

In response, allies distance themselves from the United States. Others are emboldened to act in an equally nationalistic and assertive way.

Liberals and many Democrats criticize Trump for alienating traditional allies like Canada, France and Germany while befriending dictators. Policy-makers once critical of confrontational policies now condemn Trump for failing to confront Russia and China.

A different president in Washington, D.C., will not restore the “rules-based” international order. The underlying changes in global power relations have already undermined that order.

A neo-conservative foreign policy, featuring unilateral American military intervention, as favored by John Bolton, will only accelerate the global shift. Liberal internationalists like Hillary Clinton would fail as well, because the rest of the world rejects the assumption that the U.S. is “indispensable” and “exceptional.” Barack Obama appeared to recognize the changing reality, but continued to argue that only the U.S. could lead the international system.

America will need to learn new rules and play differently in the new balance-of-power world, where others have assets and policies the U.S. does not and cannot control.

EU-Digest