There’s truth in this. It applies in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine as well. The US and NATO are doing the right thing politically and morally in helping Ukraine. It is right for not just Ukraine but for Europe and the world. This generation of human beings had better stand up to Putin’s naked aggression of an independent country, because if we don’t, we will be creating a world in which countries with greater firepower will be invading their neighbors for any number of concocted, false, crazy reasons, and following up on those lies with social media and online propaganda. The Naga people are familiar with the history of being subjected by military force. So, opposing Putin’s vision of the world is a no brainer for reducing conflicts in the world. This is now, the world in 2022.
For perspective on the current world, we must also recall what happened before — the Cold War era (WWII to 1989). The US’s role in the world was far more complicated and controversial throughout the period than its current role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Only a person ignorant of that period (or ideologically committed to a partisan view) would say that the US’s leadership of post-WWII was entirely beneficent for the world, because it wasn’t.
It’s common knowledge that the narrative of the US and its allies as the advancers of freedom and democracy in the world pitted against the forces of communist inspired totalitarianism of the Soviet Union was only half true. We know how the binary geopolitics of the 20 century world ended – the breakup of the Soviet Union and the spread of Western free-market capitalism and its culmination in the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, as we know it now, American style.
Even within the United States itself, the narrative of American freedom, civil rights, economic wellbeing was true mostly for the higher middle class and up, not for the disadvantaged minorities and the working poor whites. In other words, democracy and the American Dream were real for some but not for the vast majority of Americans. More or less the same was true in the rest of the First World, the Global North. Countries of the Global South on the other hand often found themselves exploited for their oil and other extractive natural resources and cheap labor in the name of freedom, democracy, and economic development. Turned out the promises of Pax Americana were available mostly in the global North, the First World, which prompted many of the better-prepared professionals of the global South to migrate to countries like USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, further postponing the gains of Pax Americana in the global South.
Interestingly, astonishingly, in the 21 century, a new Superpower has appeared on the global stage. China’s culturally paternalistic and authoritarian system took hold of the levers of western free-market capitalism and put them to use in a way that is proving to be more efficient and productive than the Western model has been and promises to be, and is offering a different model of the global economy, a revised version of neo-liberal capitalist geopolitics. So that we now have a world which, contrary to the Western arrogance of “the end of history,” looks like a serious invitation to both Western and Chinese political and economic leaders (indeed all world leaders) to come together and negotiate a new beneficent model of global geopolitics for a world in which democracy, economic wellbeing, environmental health, and human rights are universally available throughout the world. This is the challenge facing the human race in the 21 century.
Author: Paul Pimomo, Professor Emeritus at Central Washington University, WA USA. View all post by the author.
Featured Image: International Council of Naga Affairs (ICNA).
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