West in Decline, Says Lavrov
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
I believe he’s right, but change that monumental takes lots of time, evolving slowly over decades.
America and the West are on a permanent war footing, pursing hegemonic aims.
Prioritizing militarism and warmaking takes precedence over essential homeland needs.
Deindustrialization characterizes US development during the post-WW II era, shifting production abroad, decimating communities and working Americans, thirdworldizing the nation, reflecting decline.
Since the 1950s, America has been perpetually at war or preparing for conflict to come – on a large or smaller scale, along with stoking unrest, staging coups, and color revolutions to replace sovereign governance with pro-Western puppet rule.
The world’s richest country is one of the most unequal – beset with high unemployment and underemployment, growing poverty, hunger, homelessness, and the hardships of countless millions of working households struggling to make ends meet.
The inconceivable is reality. America is a society of growing millions of poor, disadvantaged, and uneducated people.
State capitalism defines how the nation is run – government partnering with business, waging permanent wars for greater wealth and power.
It comes at the expense of a nation in decline, corrupted leadership, lost industrialization, crumbling infrastructure, and suffering millions increasingly on their own – uncared for, unwanted, ignored, and forgotten to assure steady funding for militarism and endless wars, no matter the cost to ordinary people.
In his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower explained that “(e)very gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed.”
Eisenhower likely never could have imagined the deplorable state of today’s America. Bipartisan government, the Pentagon, and war industry run things.
Militarism and warmaking are parasitic, inefficient, ineffective, self-destructive, immoral, and illegal in all US wars since WW II.
Its hugely unequal distribution of wealth undermines physical and human capital, increases internal vulnerability to natural disasters, is too costly to be sustained, erodes civil liberties and spurns democratic values, the nation headed toward for full-blown tyranny and ruin.
America’s greatest enemy is itself, facing economic and political decline, making more adversaries than allies, spending as much on militarism and warmaking (including black budgets and other related categories) as most of the rest of the world combined – a shocking, wrongheaded, self-destructive use of the nation’s resources.
Washington’s addiction to war in the nuclear age could destroy life on earth. Disdaining peace to prioritize staying on a permanent war footing reflects a nation in decline.
Interviewed on Russia’s Channel 4, Sergey Lavrov said “we are in the post-West world order, but this order is being shaped, and it will take a long time. It is a historical epoch(al)” slow-moving inevitable change.
Russia wants to be part of the new order, remaining “an independent world player. History is shaping world order change, not the Russian Federation, Lavrov explained.
As long as EU countries remain subservient to US interests, they’re in decline – allied with Washington’s permanent war agenda instead of devoting their resources to economic growth and development, serving all their people, not just their privileged class, the way America operates.
Moscow champions peace and stability. Washington prioritizes endless wars of aggression.
Russia wants to help shape the new world order, Lavrov explained.
Its government “must be one of the players on the equal basis, discussing how the objective reality of multipolarity, being developed in front of our eyes, could be managed the way, which would be acceptable to all,” he stressed.
Russophobic Western policy is “diametrically” opposite this agenda.
“(I)t is very painful to lose a half millennium of domination in the world affairs” that’s coming.
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