Capitol riot, imperial decline, white supremacy, guns and hate. Welcome to America

Watching the Capitol riot congressional hearings, one cannot but be struck by how close Trump’s supporters came to succeeding in interfering with the peaceful transfer of power on 6 January 2021. One also cannot but be reminded that what Trump and his supporters attempted in Washington, Washington has done all over the world for decades — namely overthrowing governments.

Trump’s elevation to the office of president in 2016 was not the aberration his liberal detractors tried to argue at the time. Rather it was a symptom of US imperial decline, the first seeds of which were planted with the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975, setting in train a process that was deferred by the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, after Moscow’s own Vietnam in Afghanistan in the 1980s ended in similar fashion.

The invasion of Iraq by US military forces and its UK ally in 2003 came over a decade into America’s unipolar moment, when imbued with triumphalism and End of History hubris, the Bush administration set about shaping the world in its own image with the objective of establishing a Pax Americana.

Iraq was intended as the first of what was envisaged would be a domino effect to assert complete dominance over the strategically vital Middle East in…