 "Democrat candidate, US President Joe Biden, speaks during a presidential debate with Republican candidate, former US President Donald Trump, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., June 27, 2024. Reuters")
Oedipus, the mythical Greek king of Thebes, was consumed by hubris, which brought his downfall. “The cause of the pleasure for those committing hubris is that by harming people”, according to Aristotle’s treatise Rhetoric, “they think themselves superior.”
Hubris is followed by nemesis.
Since 2016, the United States (US) has been caught in a vortex of polarisation, the gradual loss of its image as the sole superpower with a resurgent China and Russia and a decrease in credibility as the mistrust of its allies grows.
The first 2024 presidential debate showed that America has got its comeuppance.
Joe Biden fumbled and mumbled and was incoherent. Donald Trump lied 30 times, including his infamous and unsubstantiated 2020 election ‘Big Lie’. While top Democrats, including Texas representative Lloyd Doggett and Illinois representative Mike Quigley, want Biden to quit the race, Trump’s replay of his playbook of falsehoods raises concerns about a more turbulent second term.
America is left with a Hobson’s choice: choose a geriatric and blathering incumbent or a habitual liar and a convicted felon. Global leaders, especially American allies, are worried about either taking charge—Biden because of his compounding frailty and incoherence and Trump due to his aggrandisement and proclivity for upending the world order.
US façade of restoring democracy
The US staged coups in foreign countries, reduced others to rubble and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders with its expanding military footprint in the name of restoring democracy, fighting the war against terror or targeting drug cartels.
The US acted as a self-proclaimed global cop on a nefarious mission to discipline and lecture nations, especially in West and South Asia, falling out of the line. America uprooted several democratic governments for its self-interest, especially oil, and to counter the Soviets and Chinese.
From the military interference in Samoa (South Pacific Ocean), which triggered the Second Samoa Civil War in 1898, to the attempted coup in Venezuela (Latin America) in 2019, Uncle Sam, posing as the beacon of hope for the oppressed under dictatorial/authoritarian regimes and rebels under democratic regimes, was the biggest reason for world disorder.
After the Allied victory in World War II and Adolf Hitler’s death, the US had the big illusion of being the symbol of virtue and the protector of freedom and democracy.
“… there is the danger that America may be tempted to exert all the terrible power she possesses to compel history to conform to her illusions,” writes the late historian C Vann Woodward in The Burden of Southern History (1960), a collection of essays.
In Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated, the first part of his best-selling trilogy, the late famous US playwright, historian, novelist and intellectual Gore Vidal mentions that the US had been involved in more than 200 military operations since World War II.
“Wars against Communism, terrorism, drugs, or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday, September 11, 2001, we tended to strike the first blow. But then we’re the good guys, right? Right,” Vidal writes.
Expounding the American theory of “We are the good guys”, Vidal explains why al-Qaeda struck the US.
“Once we meditate upon the unremitting violence of the United States against the rest of the world, while relying upon pretexts that, for sheer flimsiness, might have given Hitler pause when justifying some of his baroque lies, one begins to understand why Osama struck at us from abroad in the name of one billion Muslims whom we have encouraged, through our own pre-emptive acts of war as well as relentless demonization of them through media, to regard us in—how shall I put it?—less than amiable light,” he writes.
In the second part of the trilogy, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Vidal writes how Osama bin Laden, “the personification of evil”, was “abruptly replaced” with Saddam Hussein. “This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, ‘evidence’ is now being invented” to invade Iraq.
In the last part, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, Vidal writes that the US “wrecked Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that had done us no harm” in “wars of aggression”.
“Where there is no known Al Qaeda sort of threat, we create one, as in Iraq, whose leader, Saddam Hussein, had no connection with 9/11 or any other proven terrorism against the United States, making it necessary for a President to invent the lawless as well as evil (to use his Bible-based language) doctrine of pre-emptive war based on a sort of hunch that maybe one day some country might attack us, so, meanwhile, as he and his business associates covet their oil, we go to war, levelling their cities to be rebuilt by other business associates. Thus was our perpetual cold war turned hot.”
In Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Vidal explains how America is “the largest rogue state of all” yet “regularly stigmatises other societies as rogue states”.
“We honour no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally whenever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states.”
Similarly, the CIA instigated the 1953 Iran coup, which overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, for oil and to prevent Soviet ‘influence’. After he nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (now BP), Britain and America hatched a conspiracy to overthrow him. President Dwight D Eisenhower authorised the CIA to help the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, rule for the next 26 years.
Therefore, the US was responsible for the subsequent turmoil and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The puppet Shah was ultimately overthrown by the mullahs, led by hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, turning the nation into a permanent theocracy that still despises the US as the “Great Satan”.
In his private diary, Eisenhower admitted that the coup was a “covert” CIA operation. “The things we did were ‘covert’. If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.”
George W Bush conveniently named Iran as a member of the “Axis of evil” in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, but the US was responsible for turning Iran into a permanent enemy.
The Vietnam War is another example of the US imperialistic ambitions and lies told to Americans in the name of democracy. The leak of the Pentagon Papers, a compilation of the US political and military involvement in Vietnam ordered by then-defence secretary Robert S McNamara, in 1971 by the late military analyst Daniel Ellsberg showed that the aim was to “contain China” in Asia, not to secure an “independent, non-Communist South Vietnam” as claimed by then-President Lyndon B Johnson.
The papers also revealed that the Johnson administration had “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance”, according to a 1996 article in The New York Times (NYT).
The US overthrew, at least, seven governments—Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973).
In his book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, former NYT bureau chief Stephen Kinzer writes that “regime change” is an integral part of American foreign policy, which toppled 14 governments through coups, revolutions and invasions.
In a July 2022 interview with CNN, Iraq War advocate and Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said that he had “helped plan coups d’etat”, including in Venezuela in 2019.
According to The Washington Post, more than 350 coup attempts had taken place after Bolon joined the Ronald Reagan administration as assistant administrator of USAID for programme and policy coordination in August 1982. Of those, 191 occurred while Bolton was part of the administration, excluding his roles in the Department of Justice and the USAID.
A 2019 study titled ‘The Strategic Logic of Covert Regime Change: US-Backed Regime Change Campaigns during the Cold War’ reveals that the US tried to covertly change governments 64 times and overtly 6 times.
In 2016, the US intelligence community accused Russia of launching a “hacking and disinformation campaign” called Project Lakhta to damage Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s chances and boost her rival Trump.
However, a 2019 study titled ‘Partisan electoral interventions by the great powers: Introducing the PEIG Dataset’ shows that America interfered 81 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000.
America’s moment of reckoning
As the title of Vidal’s last part of the trilogy suggests, the US is still in a state of “amnesia”. Successive administrations haven’t realised that decades of staging coups, sowing discord, turning democracies into mobocracies and dictatorships and instigating populations to rebel against their governments have come back to haunt America.
The public’s support for military misadventures has been gradually decreasing. A Pew survey conducted a few weeks before Bush’s State of the Union address found that 73 per cent favoured military action in Iraq and only 16 per cent opposed it. Twenty years down the line in March 2023 , 162 per cent said that it was not worth fighting.
A YouGov survey in November-December 2023 found that 52 per cent Americans think military intervention in Vietnam was wrong, Afghanistan 38 per cent, Iraq 45 per cent, Syria 33 per cent and Yemen 32 per cent.
Ironically, the ‘King of Coups’ now finds itself in a worrying situation with several Americans supporting the idea of a coup or military rule.
One year before Trump won the election, 29 per cent of Americans said that they could imagine a situation in which they would support the military seizing control of the federal government, meaning a coup, a YouGov poll found.
The biggest jolt to America was on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to stop a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College votes to formalise Biden’s victory.
LAPOP Lab, at Vanderbilt University (Tennessee, US), has been studying democratic attitudes across the Americas. Researchers had been asking US citizens since 2010 whether they would support a coup if corruption drastically increased.
The research found that the percentage of Americans willing to tolerate a coup increased from 28 in 2017 to 40 in 2021, when the US Capitol insurrection happened—around a 43 per cent increase, the highest since 2010. The US ranked higher than Brazil and Mexico, which have relatively recent histories of authoritarian rule.
In fact, 32 per cent of Americans prefer (38 per cent under 30, 29 per cent in the 50-64 age group and 26 per cent above 65 and older) an authoritarian leader or the military, according a February Pew Research Center survey. Among high-income countries, the US ranked first and Sweden last at 8 per cent.
The biggest shocker is that the population of the world’s oldest democracy hardly trusts its governmental and political institutions.
Only 16 per cent Americans trust the federal government always or most of the time, a July 2023 Pew survey shows. Onlyfour per cent say that the political system is working extremely or very well and 63 per cent have not too much or no confidence at all in the future of the US political system. Moreover, 28 per cent have unfavourable views of both the Republican and Democratic parties, the highest in three decades of polling.
In the last seven decades, public trust in the federal government has tanked from around 75 per cent (in 1958) to 22 per cent as of April 2024, per another Pew survey.
The US claims to be the bastion of democracy and preaches other nations, especially ruled by dictators and autocrats.
However, the country was added for the first time to a list of “backsliding democracies” by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).
The US “fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale”, according to the International IDEA 2021 report.
“In our analysis of the United States (one of seven backsliding countries in 2020), we show that while the country performs very well across many indicators of democracy, there are significant and serious declines in these vital parts of the democratic system, and there is reason to be worried about the trajectory of the country.”
Referring to the “inability of the US Congress to check the executive or investigate the actions of former-President Trump”, the report states that one of the most notable trends in America in the last five years “has been a decline in what we call Effective Parliament”.
Mentioning the US Capitol riot, the report states: “A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.”
While the US has targeted other countries over holding free and fair elections, the report found that “research indicates that some states’ voter registration and voting laws end up disproportionately affecting minorities in a negative way”.
In the institute’s annual global rankings of countries for democratic performance in representation, rights, rule of law, and participation, the US slipped from the 10th position in 2021 to 12th in 2022.
The 2023 report found that “entrenched disagreements over partisan lines contribute to a culture of mistrust” in the US. “And both fragmentation of traditional party systems and new, algorithm-driven, personalised information streams have contributed to citizens’ increasingly polarised views”.
Racism-induced inequality is also rampant in the US, which often lectures other nations on equality and race. Around 80 per cent of black adults feel much more action is needed to ensure equal rights for Americans of races and ethnicities—58 per cent of such black adults laws and major institutions are fundamentally biased.
Moreover, only 19 per cent of black adults feel that America has made progress on racial equality as against 56 per cent of white adults who feel otherwise.
According to a [UC%20Berkeley]June 2021 report by the Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley, out of every metropolitan region in the US with more than 200,000 residents, 81 per cent (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990.
Neighbourhood poverty rates are highest in segregated communities of colour (21 per cent), which is three times higher than in segregated white neighbourhoods (7 per cent)
Black children raised in integrated neighbourhoods earn nearly $1,000 more as adults per year and $4,000 more when raised in white neighbourhoods than those raised in highly segregated communities of colour.
Household incomes and home values in white neighbourhoods are nearly twice as high as those in segregated communities of colour. Homeownership is 77 per cent in highly segregated white neighbourhoods and only 46 per cent in highly segregated communities of colour.
As Vidal once said, “The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country—and we haven’t seen them since.”
The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.