Trump’s Brinkmanship Accelerating End of American Empire

By: Kayhan Int’l 

"Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
"And we are here as on a darkling plain
"Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight
"Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

When the British poet Mathew Arnold composed these verses as part of his poem "Dover Beach” a century-and-a-half ago (1867), he might have been referring to the endless wars between Britain and France for control of colonials possessions and world trade routes.

Today, when the wheel of history has reduced both the British and the French to mere shadows of their rapacious colonial past – as was the case with all empires that rose, fell and vanished – the blind bat of our times is disturbing the peace of the planet through its ignorantly wild military misadventures on the international scene to plunge people of various climes into pains and sufferings.

The vampire called the US – also known as the Great Satan for its contempt for humanitarian values – is picking up fights with emerging world powers, oblivious of the fact that it is fast going down the drain.

Isolated on the world level, even by its West European allies because of the suicidal policies of the deranged President Donald Trump, the other day the US indulged in a near disaster in the South China Sea when its warship almost collided with a Russian naval vessel – in frustration, of course, at the failure of economic terrorism against Tehran, as well as the trade war with Beijing, at a time when President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are making world headlines with their warm meetings in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

It was a case of unsafe and unprofessional interaction by the guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville with the Russian warship Admiral Vinogradov.

According to reliable reports, while moving on parallel courses of a detachment of ships of Russia’s Pacific Fleet operating on a regular mission in regional waters, an intruding carrier group of the US Navy, suddenly ordered its cruiser to change its direction and come within 50 meters of the Russian destroyer, which was forced to take emergency evasive action in order to avoid possible collision.

International maritime law requires ships to maintain a safe distance, normally of at least a thousand meters when passing another, which the US clearly violated, and is now resorting to lies that it was the fault of the Russian vessel. 

Trump and his team of thugs seem intent on provocations against both Russia and China – and against all and sundry, especially Iran – as was obvious last Tuesday when Russia was accused of intercepting a US aircraft flying in international airspace over the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea three times in just under three hours.

The Russian Ministry of Defence nailed the US lie, when it said: "All flights of Russian aircraft were carried out in accordance with the international rules for the use of airspace. There were no questions or complaints from the American center of flight deconfliction line in Syria to the Russian command.”

Interestingly, evidence is slowly emerging that that the last month’s mysterious blasts off the coast of the UAE state of Fujairah jar that damaged at least four vessels in the Gulf of Oman, is dirty work of the US and its agents, in a futile bid to implicate Iran and its allies in this act of sabotage.

First the blame was cast at the Ansrallah Movement of Yemen, which responded by saying that whenever it carries out retaliatory operations against the invader countries of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it manly announces the targets chosen even when Riyadh and Abu Dhabi censor such news and try to hide the damages. 

Then without a shred of evidence, the warmonger in Washington, John Bolton, while on a visit to the UAE, accused Iran for the Fujairah attacks without any shred of evidence, in a bid to deflect attention from US-Israeli terrorism in the region.

Now, following frequent violation of Syria’s sovereignty by the illegal Zionist regime, reports are emerging that the Fujairah blasts were the results of the mines left over by the US after its recent naval maneuvers in the Gulf of Oman.

It all means, the US is indulging in acts of provocations all over the world, in the false belief that its over-inflated military might would browbeat nations into submission, especially Russia, China and Iran. 

Trump might be living in a fool’s paradise, and better for him because such a paradise is the shortest cut to the eternal flames of hell. In real life, however, he is speeding up the end of the evil American Empire, which seems all set to receive severe drubbings all over the world, as its ignorant armies continue to clash by night and by the day as the twilight sets in for them.