The US empire is addicted to a belief in its exceptionalism, grounded in aggression both at home and abroad, and finding it hard to admit mistakes.

This article was first published on December 30, 2021 and now slightly updated.

Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost perpetually at war. The greatest military risk we run is acting as a proxy for the US in its dispute with China. China is not a threat to Australia but the US is as we have locked ourselves into the US war machine. The Deputy Secretary of the US State Department boasts that we are locked in for the next 40 years.

The record is clear. Time and time again we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into the imperial wars of the UK and then the US. We have forfeited our strategic autonomy.

Over two centuries, the US has subverted and overthrown numerous governments. It has a military and business complex that depends on war for influence and enrichment. It funds our War Memorial and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and many other fronts for US military and business interests.

The US assumes a moral superiority it denies to others.

Many of our political, bureaucratic, business and media elites have been on an American drip feed for so long they find it hard to think of the world without American global hegemony. They have been groomed by Washington for decades.

We had a similar and dependant view of the UK in the past. That ended in tears in Singapore. It will be much worse for us now that so much of our country has been colonised by the US military.

In this blog (Is war in the American DNA?), I have drawn attention repeatedly to the risks we run in being “joined at the hip” to a country that is almost always at war. The facts are clear. The US has never had a decade without war. Since its founding in 1776, the US has been at war 93 per cent of the time. These wars have extended from its own hemisphere to the Pacific, to Europe and most recently to the Middle East. The US has launched 201 out of 248 armed conflicts since the end of World War II. In recent decades most of these wars have been unsuccessful. The US maintains 800 military bases or sites around the world, including in Australia. The US has in our region a massive deployment of hardware and troops in Japan, the Republic of Korea and Guam. China has one off shore naval base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to combat pirates.

Just think of the US frenzy if China had a string of bases in the Caribbean or its ships patrolled the Florida Keys.

The US has been meddling extensively in other countries’ affairs and elections for a century. It tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War. Many foreign leaders were assassinated. In the piece reproduced in this blog (The fatal expense of US Imperialism), Professor Jeffrey Sachs said:

“The scale of US military operations is remarkable … The US has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to the US … Historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of successful US-led regime change for an average of one government overthrow by the US every 28 months for centuries.”

The overthrow or interference in foreign governments is diverse, including Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Haiti, Congo, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently, Syria. Assassination of opponents who disagree is normalised both by the US and rogue states like Israel.

And this interference continued with the undermining of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine by the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014. Gorbachev and Reagan agreed that in allowing the reunification of Germany, NATO would not extend eastwards.........

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