American Ignorance Keeps American Power in Check

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_ignorance_keeps_american_power_in_check_20110315/

The history of the American relationship with the other major powers of the world during the United States’ first century of existence was that of deliberate isolation. The colonies’ revolt against Britain was an episode in a Franco-British rivalry that in some respects has never really ended. As early as 1823, President James Monroe told European governments that the American continent was now closed to empire-building, and the British navy enforced this assertion, since Britain already had its overseas possessions in North America, so the Monroe Doctrine suited London very well.

Certainly the U.S. refrained from meddling in European affairs for the rest of the century, and then put an abrupt end to the Spanish empire by stealing the empire’s possessions, leaving only European Spain. Washington’s relations with Britain were fairly consistently hostile until Woodrow Wilson decided that God had commissioned him to intervene in the First World War—and British-American relations soured again shortly after the Versailles treaty and the American refusal to join the League of Nations.

The U.S. Navy had contingency plans for war with Britain until shortly before it found itself at war with Japan. Franklin Roosevelt then decided that it was time for the U.S. to dismantle the British Empire and found in Winston Churchill someone willing to trade winning the war against Hitler in exchange for surrendering that empire to the Americans—an empire which was coming apart anyway. Harold Macmillan’s observation that Britain could play Greeks to the uncouth (American) Romans implied that the British were smart enough to go on running it anyway—but of course it didn’t really work out that way, ending in Tony Blair’s fetching George Bush’s car for him at international conferences (“Yo, Blair! ...” ).

All this is preliminary to saying that the U.S., without really realizing, is now back to where it was, an isolated nation. That is the conclusion imposed by recent events in the Middle East. While the U.S. government, the most powerful government on Earth, etc., as we say, was a hapless bystander, revolutions swept from one end of the Muslim world to the other: Shiites defying the police of beleaguered Sunni monarchs, Israel helping itself to still more of Palestine while no one in Washington was looking, and America’s supposed friends in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus innocent bystanders, regularly being blown up. America’s closest surviving Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, sends paramilitary troops to conduct an armed and violent intervention in Bahrain despite desperate American efforts to dissuade the Saudis.

More at the link --

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. Good read!

Thanks for posting!
Cheers!