To US, with love: A dying empire
It pains me to admit it, but my favourite empire is dying. It’s slowly descending into a valley where its founding values are being lost. The very values that made it the empire I have grown to love and admire for most of my life.
Let’s face it, everyone has a hero state they are obsessed about, and mine growing up here in Bangladesh was United States of America. I loved their style of democracy. I used to love their politicians. I still love a big portion of their people who possess a unique kindness for the rest of the world and contribute the highest in donations for charity for any one nation on this planet.
America was my favourite superhero. My Batman to the world’s Joker, my Superman to the world’s General Zod. There was no pre-requisite to loving them. America loved us back too. Those were less cynical times around the mid to late 1990s to give you an idea of the era I refer to. The powers that be, who ran the Empire were fair to their own people and the world. They were fair and protective of the health and state of this planet. They were just and kind. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought that their foreign policy was for anyone else’s benefit but their own, but I believed that they cared about the state of the world because it mattered to their well being.
They were as powerful then as they are now but that is not why I loved them. As is the case in matters of the heart, I fell in love with America for their principles and values. I can list each of them here, which would be tedious and boring, so I won’t. I loved that America stood up for the weak when it made sense to and didn’t care about cost, cast, creed or alliances they had to do so. Please spare me lessons regarding the Middle East. I am well aware of that aspect but even factoring that in, on balance they were the team I cheered for. If we fast-forward from when President Clinton left office, America, for me, lost its political character. Its values were buried somewhere dark. The very principles that made it great were overshadowed by fear. Politicians from all sides of the aisle leveraged that fear into dividing the country, for the sake of consolidating power in the long run. The world caught the US government essentially lying, and fighting a war that almost everyone in the world opposed. It cost them everything from their financial strength being lost, to its moral leadership being questioned, to losing credibility both domestically and internationally as a fair leader of the world.
Even today the Obama administration continues to use Bush era tools to limit and deny civil liberties in the name of national security. The recent Guardian newspaper exclusive based on the leak that exposed the PRISM program highlighting NSA acquisition of all user data from mainstream providers such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Verizon and others online to target citizens of other countries demonstrates this character of “all is fair” rather well. And I haven’t even spoken of the drone attacks at will against many who have nothing to do with the war on terror except that they are, in the crudest terms, collateral damage in an unnecessary war. However, their unpopularity in the world today doesn’t impede their nature to interfere in the business of others from Brazil to Bangladesh and make things worse around the world. They get away with it because they have power in every sense of the word and everyone is scared of them. Therein lies the problem. The world allows the US to lead the world now, not because they love them, but essentially because they fear them. If that was the idea for those shaping the US story for the coming generations, they have succeeded. If protecting your country means giving up on everything that made it great, then they have paid that price. Ruling through fear never allows an empire to exist in the long term; instead like in the case of many other empires in history, it hastens its demise.
It also doesn’t help when you are openly unfair to your friends either. The US has traded with us for years on end, attracted by low prices, and today, instead of helping us cope and get better in how we do business, citing a handful of unfortunate incidents, it now threatens to make it harder for us to trade with them.
A few congressman have even gone as far as meeting the Obama administration officials to advocate a drastic reduction of trade facilities with Bangladesh without realising what the impact of such a decision would be on the millions of poor workers who help produce export products.
The old USA would do what the EU is doing now, in that they recognise that they have benefitted from this broken system and therefore are funding and sharing ideas as to how we can make export products that remain beneficial to the producers, manufacturers and buyers without making it unsafe and unfair to the workers who make all these products.
The threat and negative posturing of trade officials in the US, core diplomats and congressman of not renewing GSP facilities and the continuance of other trade barriers that have existed between the two countries is most unfortunate and counter-productive.
It’s also disingenuous that this threat emanates not from wanting to make our workers’ lives better but to protect one single product manufactured in the US that due to lobbying has now put the bill to renew GSP facilities at risk of further delay. This is one example of why the US is no longer the same. They exploited our market knowing of the problems that existed for many years and now when inconvenient, many have advocated punishment through reduction of trade ties with us. That is just unfair.
The US may be superior to us in many respects but they are deliberately acting like arrogant kings in this modern era of foreign policy leading to friction with our government and people that will eventually cost them a friend and ally in the region especially because the exploitation is very open and visible.
They say, never bet against the US but it is quite apparent that if they continue on this path, they won’t be a good investment going forward. Its arrogant attitude is not isolated to Bangladesh only or in respect of trade issues generally and these are tell tale signs unfortunately of why my favourite empire is dying and losing its grip on reality and the world.
Originally published at www.dhakatribune.com on June 21, 2013.
