Hillary Clinton made a speech at Stanford about her plans for fighting terrorism, and although it was a logical and detailed explanation that compares favorably with the rantings of Trump and Cruz, it rested on a highly questionable assumption: America is the indispensable, exceptional nation that has the right to run the world. But let’s grant that assumption. Let’s assume that everyone except a few hard heads agrees that we deserve to tell every nation what to do and who to trade with and what weapons they can have. There is a further problem: how well are we running the world? How well has TEAM AMERICA: THE WORLD POLICE performed? Because if we have done a shitty job of policing the world, a politician stressing her qualifications to be Commander of the glorious World Police will face some problems.
Hillary Clinton has decided to run on the record of Team America and to represent herself as the most worthy successor to the illustrious former commanders. Unfortunately, Team America, the World Police (TAWP) has a lot of explaining to do. It started during WWII, when America first became a contender for the World Police role. Our shining ideals as the champion of democracy and defender of freedom ended with us burning all the cities of Japan to the ground and dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations. The American public was persuaded that our exceptional nation could inflict any level of violence on an enemy, because if we are good, our enemies can only be evil, and evil must be punished.
After WWII, there were two contenders for the World Police role: the Soviet Union (evil) and the USA (good). We decided that threatening to kill every living thing in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons was the best way to keep the peace, and the Soviets reached the same conclusion regarding America. Although mutual destruction almost occurred about a half dozen times, this was considered a great success, particularly after the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of the arms race. During the Cold War, we killed millions of people directly or through proxies in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and installed brutal dictators in Latin America, Asia, and the Mideast who tortured and oppressed their people.
After the end of the Cold War, there was a period of terrible anxiety when America felt that the world no longer needed a superpower policeman. Fortunately TERROR became a new global adversary requiring not only the full order of battle of the Cold War, but a vast new apparatus of Homeland Security. Because TERROR is an abstract concept, like boredom, there is no possibility of defeating it, and this means no danger of retiring TAWP. In fact TAWP learned that by handing out weapons and money in bad neighborhoods, the level of threat could be adjusted to assure steady work. Fighting a proxy war in Afghanistan led to Al Qaeda. Combating Al Qaeda led to wrecking Iraq. Wrecking Iraq led to ISIS. Combatting ISIS will involve wrecking Syria, and so on, and so forth, with steady work for TAWP. (By the way, lots of money is made by selling equipment to TAWP.)
What HRC is counting on to support her job campaign for Supreme Commander of TAWP is the most powerful force affecting the American public: amnesia. In order to protect its collective sanity, our public has learned to forget every bungled campaign of TAWP. We have no recollection of Vietnam, the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the murder of Allende, the coup in Honduras, or the fiasco in Iraq. We are eager to prove, over and over, that we are the indispensable nation. We will pay any price and bear any burden to defend “freedom,” and we will kill anyone who gets in our way.