Overreach and arrogance are the curses of every empire

By Martin Love

I have an acquaintance and occasional correspondent who was a famed U.S. Marine Corps pilot during the Vietnam War. At age 20 he began two years in Nam and logged over 800 combat missions in F-4B Phantoms and other aircraft. He won Distinguished Flying Crosses.

 A few years later he got back, after a lapse working elsewhere, into aviation and began ferrying aircraft of all kinds across oceans to countries all over the world. He holds a number of aviation records and a little over three decades ago he was the second (and last) pilot to fly an aircraft under and through the legs of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

He wrote me not long ago: “I delivered the last F-227 aircraft in November 1979 to Tehran. I was there for a week and while the natives were restless, they were really nice people. The aircraft was going to the Shah’s sister. She paid for each plane in her fleet every month. But Iranians were wonderful. They just did not like what the CIA did to them in 1953.

 By not responding now, the Iranians are winning. The world is not blind. The U.S. Empire is going to crumble far faster than anyone realizes. If Iran keeps standing, they will win. Iran is doing the right thing and Europe is waking up to the realization that they have a choice. They can honor their agreements like the JCPOA for mutual benefit, or they can let the neighborhood bully push them around. One day they will realize who their friend is and who is not.”

This man has called wars the U.S. has gotten involved in, including Vietnam, “stupid”. He is correct, of course. And even if many Iranians don’t think right now that they are “winning” anything under harsh U.S. sanctions, I agree with this former Marine pilot’s views.

 He has a firm grasp of geopolitics, and he is a real American patriot condemning many U.S. actions in recent decades. He would advise Iran to “cool it”, or stay cool. He is everything as a pilot and a real patriot dead Senator John McCain was not.

It is, in any case, hard for anyone not in Iran to know what’s happening there now. Some Iranian leaders are suggesting that the current economic problems are not so much the result of U.S. sanctions, but rather in part at least the result of internal problems (that can eventually be addressed) inside Iran with economic adjustments of some sort.

 This may be the case. One would hope so. But what about my pilot friend’s outright assertion that the US empire will “crumble” sooner rather than later? We know of no “empire” in all of human history that has not eventually “crumbled”, including even Persia’s vast Achaemenid Empire more than 2000 years ago. And what caused that? Over reach. The Persians, for one thing, were defeated by the Greek city states, particularly Athens.

Currently, we are witnessing the Zionist state going hog wild against the Palestinians, apparently greenlighted by the subservient Trump Administration. Part of this aggression is Israel cheering on Trump’s evisceration of funding for UNWRA, which has been supporting Palestinians with basic human necessities since 1950.

 But guess what? Even some Zionist commentators in the Israeli press are now saying this is a huge mistake, because SOMEONE is going to have to continue provide millions of Palestinians with the means to survive, and the burden may well fall more on Israel going forward.

 Sure, the Zionists would like to see the Palestinians disappear and have been trying to make them disappear since 1948, but if the Zionists literally make conditions even worse in the West Bank, Gaza and beyond, and the world knows now how bad conditions are, they will be fast tracked to the ICC in The Hague for crimes against humanity. And BDS is working. Just this week a music festival in Israel lost almost all its foreign performers, to cite just one example of BDS success. The Zionists are now overreaching on steroids, to their eventual downfall.

And the same might be said about the U.S., which has been in overreach mode since the Vietnam War. And quite much more since the Iraq invasion in 2003, to the point where about $7 trillion in debt back then has grown to $22 trillion since, not to mention an estimated $200 trillion by one economist’s estimates in unfunded liabilities. Never before in history has any country amassed so much debt.

 The ONLY reason the U.S. dollar has not become mostly worthless is because it remains the world “reserve” currency and to date most all petroleum has been priced in dollars, the so-called “Petrodollar”. President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s suspended all spending discipline when he cut the U.S. dollar’s ties to any gold standard. And now the world is moving away from the dollar, led by Russia, and this trend is irreversible.

But monetary issues are not necessarily the primary problem facing the U.S. Negative world public opinion is, particularly since Trump abandoned the JCPOA. Over reach is what has and will cause the “crumbling” of the U.S. “empire”, and good riddance the sooner the better, even for a majority of U.S. citizens if not for the entrenched, blind denizens of Washington.