Tom Engelhardt: The Great Fragmentation – America Impotent

Cultural Intelligence
0Shares
Tom Englehardt
Tom Englehardt

The Great Concentration or the Great Fragmentation?

Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch, 18 September 2014

EXTRACTS

Could there be any question that dominance, or even as the U.S. military liked to put it, “full-spectrum dominance,” was the obvious, uncontested, and only possible result?

A Jihadist Paradise on Earth

As the present chaos across large swathes of our world indicates, however, it didn’t turn out to be so.  The planet was telling quite a different story, one focused not on the concentration of power but on a radical form of power drain.  In that story, the one for which the evidence kept piling up regularly in the post-9/11 years, no application of power seemed to work for Washington.  No enemy, no matter how minor, weak, ill armed, or unpopular could be defeated.  No jihadist group wiped out.  Not one.

. . . . . . .

Nowhere is there a hint of Washington’s Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, no less globally.  In fact, across a vast and growing swath of the planet, stretching from South Asia to Africa, from Iraq to Ukraine, the main force at work seems not to be the concentration of power, but its fragmentation, its disintegration, before which Washington has proven remarkably helpless.

. . . . . . .

Nowhere, at home or abroad, does the obvious might of the United States translate into expected results, or much of anything else except a kind of roiling chaos.  On much of the planet, Latin America (but not Central America) excepted, power vacuums, power breakdowns, power drains, and fragmentation are increasingly part of everyday life.  And one thing is remarkably clear: each and every application of American military power globally since 9/11 has furthered the fragmentation process, destabilizing whole regions.

In the twenty-first century, the U.S. military has been neither a nation- nor an army-builder, nor has it found victory, no matter how hard it’s searched.

. . . . . . .

But for the sake of discussion, let’s call it the Great Fragmentation. Perhaps it started in the twentieth century with the decolonization movements that swept across so much of the globe and took down a series of already weakening European empires.  One of its latest manifestations might have been the Arab Spring and the chaos and disintegration that seemed to follow from it.  The undermining or neutralizing of imperial power and the systems of alliance and dependency it builds seems at its heart.

Read full article.

Financial Liberty at Risk-728x90




liberty-risk-dark