Why Doesn’t America Learn Its Lesson?

The military leader of the Vietnamese Revolution, General Vo Nguyen Giap, died a few weeks ago, decades after the death of its political leader, Ho Chi Minh. The two led their people in a revolution that inflicted defeat on two aggressive imperialist powers: France in 1954, and the United States in 1975. Thus, it was natural for the sons of the Vietnamese people to scramble to say goodbye to Gen. Giap. In terms of the crowd, it was second only to Ho Chi Minh’s funeral, and no wonder. Giap became an inspiring symbol to his people, rather, to all the colonized peoples who won freedom and independence under the leadership of the great and noble men who founded and led the Bandung Conference of Nonaligned Nations. They are: Ho Chi Minh, Gandhi, Nehru, Abdulnasser, Sukarno, Mao Zedong, Tito, Castro and Guevara. The national liberation movements for the peoples Great Britain had colonized were over before Vietnam’s full independence … Great Britain, the empire where the sun never set, forced to withdraw from the pearl on its crown, India, and then its central Arab country, Egypt, and arriving at Indonesia’s independence under Sukarno’s hands. What is the meaning of all this?

With the fall of the British colonial empire, direct colonial regimes left history, and everything became an effort to restore them, though in a different form. Not reaping the ideological dream led to frustration and failure. However, the leaders of the United States, which emerged from the womb of Great Britain and replaced it as the Western colonial power, did not learn the lesson from the experience of others and not even from its own experience. They reaped more of their own tragedies and got the opposite of what they wanted more than once. There is a lot of evidence of this. Perhaps the most important of it includes:

– First: In 1945, the U.S. was overbearing and directed its nuclear strike at Japan. What was the result? Today, Japan is a power that not only does not compete with the United States, but also agrees with it on all subjects, like technology for instance.

– Second: In 1948, the U.S. was overbearing, and it intervened in the Korean War, not aiming at dividing Korea, but controlling it on the border zone with Russia and China, specifically. What was the result? It is true that the U.S. won over what became known as South Korea, but the area that it wanted to reach is within what became North Korea, which still remains in China’s sphere. Despite all American efforts at containment, in recent years, China has become an international pole, seeking to develop its enormous economic and military capability into a political status by joining the BRICS axis, which also includes Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa. It is this axis that restored balance to the international order and ended, in practice, America’s unipolarity and that of its strategic ally, the European Union, which became merely the continuance of the United States — rather, the tail.

– Third: In 1958, American ambition exceeded its level of control over the Middle East and its core of Arab states to the degree of calling for the formation of the Baghdad Pact, in which it wanted to include Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. What was the result? Iraq’s opinion of Abdel Nasser’s leadership in the alliance at the time was a disaster, so the Arab masses overthrew him. Rather, the Nuri Said regime in Iraq fell with him at the hands of the movement that Abdul Karim Qasim and Abdul Salam Aref led.

– Fourth: In 1968, American arrogance in Vietnam reached to such a degree that the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, Robert McNamara, said, “I will make a screen roll from North Vietnam to the south without it colliding with anything.”* What was the result? After seven years, such as in the year 1975, American forces suffered one of the greatest military defeats and humiliations in history, to the degree that the American ambassador in Saigon was forced to climb to the roof of his embassy, in his underclothes and barefoot, where a military helicopter retrieved him.

– Fifth: In 2001, with the participation of NATO’s allied forces, American forces invaded Afghanistan, aiming to eliminate al-Qaida and topple the Taliban regime. What was the result? Al-Qaida is no longer limited to Afghanistan; rather, it has spread, under different appellations, to many countries in the world, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, here is the American administration today, negotiating with the “Taliban” movement and some of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries in order to secure a safe exit for its forces, which have suffered human, material and morale losses.

– Sixth: In 2003, under the leadership of Bush Jr., the American administration was overconfident and invaded Iraq, occupied and destroyed it, under the pretext — rather the lie — of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. What was the result? The exit of the defeated occupying American forces after great human, material and morale losses, which led to the transfer of influence to Iran or to the U.S. sharing influence equally with it.

– Seventh: In the beginning of the 1990s, the U.S. won the Cold War and became the singular pole of the international order. Its confidence reached to the degree of believing in “the end of history” and the transformation of Russia’s power into a “third-world” state. What was the result? After about a decade and a half, here is Russia returning as an internationally competitive pole, with the power of the U.S. over the leadership of the world.

– Eighth: Throughout its history, especially after its uniqueness in the international order and the desertion of its neoliberal regime, the American administration has dealt with the countries of Latin America like a backyard and nothing more. What was the result? The U.S. lost those countries, one after the other, arriving at the loss of Brazil, which makes up half the Latin American continent, in size and population. Today, Brazil is no longer just a milk farm, like successive American administrations wanted it to be. Rather, it has become a developing industrial country, and milk is no longer the primary factor in its economy.

In short, all the American wars for control over basic centers of the world have turned into escapades. The U.S. has either failed and suffered defeat or won temporarily. However, in the final analysis, it has gotten the opposite of what it willed and wanted. Why? Because U.S. leadership does not learn the lessons of history and their necessary consequences. To be precise, it is not possible for it to learn because it was originally born out of the womb of a racist, imperialist, European, regime settlement that it destroyed, also destroying tens of millions of native inhabitants in the American continents after their discovery.

*Editor’s note: This quote, correctly translated, could not be verified.