US heg bad—the LIO perpetuates endless wars because it collapses without enemies

Carnelos 21- former Italian diplomat who served in the foreign policy staff of three Italian prime ministers between 1995 and 2011.

Marco Carnelos, "America's exceptionalism will ultimately be its downfall," Middle East Eye, 9-13-2021, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/america-exceptionalism-ultimately-downfall-- 嘉玮

If what has happened to America during the past 20 years - the "war on terror", the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, Donald Trump’s election, the Covid-19 pandemic, the assault on the US Capitol and, ultimately, the humiliating exit from Kabul - feels like deja vu, that's because it is.

The fall of Kabul to the Taliban takes the mind back to Saigon and the 1970s, another difficult decade for America.

Back then, as now, the US had been polarised by widespread protests and had been humiliated after the Vietnam war, with America's European and Asian allies puzzled by its behaviour. The US's unilateral decision to remove the dollar from the gold standard hugely disrupted the global financial system.

The decade after the turbulent 1970s saw America preside over the most transformational event of the 20th-century’s second half: the end of the Cold War

The Watergate scandal put an abrupt end to Richard Nixon’s so-called imperial presidency. Two oil shocks, at the beginning and end of the decade - partly attributed to US mishandling of the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian revolution, including the humiliating US hostage crisis - set in motion a global recession and widespread concerns and anxieties about American power.

Yet in the decade following the turbulent 1970s, America reinvented itself, presiding over the single most transformational event of the 20th-century’s second half: the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union (only hastened by the USSR's fatal mistake of invading Afghanistan in 1979). America's unipolar era had arrived.

A few years later, radical Islam and 9/11 offered America another challenge. What followed is well known: an era of US hyperpower that may have just symbolically ended in Kabul.

China is now replacing radical Islam as America’s enemy number one; a chilling reminder of another die-hard attitude of western (American) liberal interventionism: its pathological need for an enemy to justify and protect its way of life, identity and hegemony.