Without US democracy takes the back seat. Even if the US isn’t perfect, alternatives like Russia and China are far worse, they will resort to genocide
Simon Tisdall 23, Editor for Foreign News in the Guardian and assistant editor of the Guardian, 2/26/2023, “The world still needs a policeman. Let’s hope the US doesn’t quit the job,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/mar/26/us-world-policeman-american-isolationism \\am
In Moscow, meanwhile, Xi Jinping, stringing along his Russian puppet, Vladimir Putin, proposed a new global order to replace the post-1945 US-led model. China’s de facto dictator is generously offering to “stand guard” over the planet. In Xi’s brave new world, subservience and surveillance replace shock and awe. Democracy takes a back seat.
That Iraq was a catastrophic, avoidable own goal is no longer plausibly disputed. Numerous prior warnings went unheeded. Yet similarly shortsighted are present-day attempts, from the far right and left, to use that debacle to discredit US-led interventionism in general and celebrate the consequent decline of American influence.
The Middle East shows what happens when the US disengages or drops its guard. The 2011 Iraq withdrawal foreshadowed a decade of terror and civil war in Syria, Iranian hardliners running riot, erstwhile Saudi allies on a killing spree in Yemen, Afghanistan sunk in betrayal and misery and Israel-Palestine in rudderless chaos.
“What would have happened if the US had failed to act after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990?” asked veteran analyst Bill Schneider recently. “Most likely, nothing.” After Europe froze in horror, it fell to the US to lead a coalition to end the Bosnian war.
“When atrocities occurred in Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo and Darfur, the whole world – including the US – looked away. So nothing was done. The result was genocide,” Schneider argued.
To this list may be added Syria, where Barack Obama, burned by Iraq, failed to intervene in 2013 to stop the Assad regime’s use of weapons of mass destruction. How ironic is that?
Evidently, the US often messes up. Yet do critics of American “hegemony”, deeply flawed, self-serving and arrogant though it undoubtedly is, really believe autocratic bullies such as Xi or war criminals such as Putin would do a better job as global policeman? Pull the other one, it has bells on.
Ideally, of course, a policeman should not be needed. But that, sadly, is not how the world is. An eternally divided UN security council cannot enforce its own rules and treaties. Regional organisations such as the EU, the African Union and Asean lack hard power when things fall apart.