Geopathology and the Econopathology Behind it |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Geopathology and the Econopathology Behind it
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
America’s 2025 National Security Strategy calls for gaining control of the world’s oil trade. Toward this end, Donald Trump’s Oil War aims at depriving Iran, Iraq and its neighboring OPEC countries of their sovereignty over whom they may sell their oil to, just as he has done to Venezuela. There is no remorse for the collateral damage being caused by the disruption in energy trade that is plunging most of the world’s economies into depression.
Such reckless (and wreckful) behavior conforms to the letter of what psychologists call a sociopath. The Mayo Clinic applies this term to “a person [who] consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.” To cap matters, “people with antisocial personality disorder [who] often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively …” This diagnosis can readily be applied to any nation aspiring to empire by conquest. But U.S. foreign policy has carried it to new extremes.
Just as sociopaths lack a sense of right and wrong (and fight against any such moral values constraining their abusive behavior), U.S. diplomats have rejected the United Nations Charter’s body of international laws of war that ban attacks on civilians. American weaponry and missile guidance systems are serving religious and ethnic genocide from Ukraine to the Middle East as Ukrainian, Israeli and various Wahabi al-Qaeda client armies have been recruited to serve as America’s foreign legions.
Trump’s impulsive, aggressive and manipulative demands, accompanied by bullying violence, violate the most fundamental laws of international behavior that formerly were considered to be the essence of civilization. The UN Charter’s rule not to interfere with the sovereignty of foreign countries is the legacy of Europe’s 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended its Thirty Years’ War. The United States has overthrown foreign governments and tried to bring about regime change from Russia to Iran by bombing civilians, especially young students and doctors, schools and hospitals, in the hope that such terrorism will lead populations to replace their governments with U.S. client oligarchies to stop the bombings that have become the hallmark of U.S. policy.
U.S. diplomacy also violates international maritime law, bombing fishing boats from Venezuela and Colombia in Latin America to the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf, without warning or probable cause, simply to demonstrate its immunity from the constraint of international law and the inability of the United Nations or any other international body to prevent piracy and murder on the seas.
Insisting that other countries obey its own sanctions aimed at isolated........