I have just happened upon an excellent analysis of the whole ball of wax, by Alfred McCoy, at the UNZ Review: The Geopolitics of American Global Decline: Washington Versus China in the Twenty-First Century
Alfred W. McCoy, who writes in TomDispatch, holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current work, linked here above, is a serious and lengthy essay of political-social criticism and historical analysis.
I add my own, much less complete analysis, which hardly deserves to be taken too seriously, runs like this, below the fold:
Looks like the USA's NSC neocon toadies of global capital are biding time, treading water - except that the worst of them seem to be filled with passionate intensity ... while the best appear, of course, to lack all conviction.
Maybe it's like when Kennedy locked USA into a holding pattern on Cuba, having granted Miami Cubans leave to do their durndest - but stopping short of providing or even promising air support for any actual invasion run. Maybe the Eurocentric Ukraine-connected neocons have managed to put themselves into a policy as carved in stone as the policy of the old China lobby of the KMT Republic of China days, or, as unchangeable as the political standoff that even today prevents USA from taking up Vietnam on its offer to go partners with the US Navy in a real 'pivot-to-Asia' containment policy for the PRC. Maybe the USA has turned over the NSC to professional apparatchiks who have built themselves into, and who perpetuate, the erstwhile neocon 'anti-Communist' delusional system - people who are as powerful as, or more powerful, in terms of USA domestic politics than the anti-Castro neocons that have long been committed to the dream of overthrowing the Castro government. Why not? Wouldn't that fit in nicely with the dysfunctional government of the USA in the 21st Century?
We seem to be a nation that talks a good game, but cannot act consistently in any kind of credible 'global security' policy ... not unlike Great Britain or France in their decades of decline before World War II.
Obama? He has been so undercut by the polarized domestic politics of the current decade, he has no ability to do anything more than hold on and try to look good like Jackie Chan in one of his comedies, catlike, smiling as he miraculously lands repeatedly on his feet, maximally hoping to eke out a peace-keeping arrangement with Iran, but not able to take the steps necessary to lend any such arrangement credible in the least. What really are his options?
And we the people ... what could/would/should we do? USA has too long been a province of a global capitalist empire ...wouldn't it be fine to be a NATION ONCE AGAIN! (link to YouTube)