As the Empire Ends, Its Security Architecture Cracks
The US global security architecture since 1991 has been exogenous. US lackeys and beneficiaries are cultivated to deal with threats to the US on their own lands – no matter the cost to their national politics, economies and neighborhoods. The agreeable, consenting states serve as US tools to weaken, stress, or destroy potential enemies, and as markets for overpriced, over-advertised, and over-sold US defense and security exports.
This is no secret. Unlike leaders around the world, American policy makers cannot imagine an endogenous approach to national and regional security. Elsewhere, new endogenous security systems are emerging and evolving, far beyond BRICS. The most striking example – and a direct result of our most recent act of war against Iran – is the formalization of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. This shift toward decentralization and local ownership of security, and into a more lived sovereignty, is happening because despite its massive military spending, the US military demonstrates the tactical precision of a blind toad, the logistical substance of a puffer fish, and the strategic vision of a mayfly.
Existing US security architecture was designed to oppose Russia via NATO, to oppose most of the Middle East via the Carter Doctrine and Zionist expansionism, and to oppose China globally. The entire world economy is a battlefield, and the battles are expected to be fought in other people’s countries, by design.
Instead of collapsing NATO in 1991, the US and leading European dependencies sought to expand it, creating the ridiculous First Humanitarian War in the former Yugoslavia to justify NATO expansion and US domination into Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Scott Horton, author of several books on exactly this topic, recently addressed the LP Convention to explain a long series of US propagandized and initiated wars and coups. His damning reminder of the true nature of US war play, always in the name of freedom and democracy, was not wholly welcomed by the libertarian audience.
Another example of an American exogenous security project is Trump’s first-term Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and more recently, the Isaac Accords, barely off the ground in Argentina. The Accords – largely of product of Jared Kushner and other Zionists – seek a joining together of mostly Sunni-ruled nations to defend against any threat to US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and North Africa. Signatories are offered a kind of US caretakery, with an implied suggestion that member countries would not attack each other. When Morocco joined, the tradeoff was the US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the long contested Western Sahara, and more US arms sales to Morocco. Israel’s standing violations of numerous UN resolutions, its genocide in Gaza, its nascent genocide and forced relocation in south Lebanon, and its undeclared nuclear weapons inventory are all made acceptable via Abraham Accords signatures. In fact, that’s the point.
Incidentally, Abraham signatories UAE and Bahrain recently discovered the true value of being a member of the US-Israel club. Left out of the planning in the attacks on Iran, they were also left undefended by Israel and the US, and even more recently, were publicly undermined by Washington and Tel Aviv.
Most the world is intentionally and intellectually moving away from US-directed exogenous security compacts and towards endogenous, neighborhood understandings that war should be avoided, and most certainly should not be initiated by outside powers driven by their own interests. The Israeli-US initiated war against Iran is only the latest example; the US and NATO proxy war against Russia has caused a similar rethink in parts of Europe and throughout Asia.
It is in this environment we find President Trump suddenly declaring that it should be mandatory that regional countries sign the Abraham Accords immediately, and Iran should also sign on. His TruthSocial post included:
Therefore, I am mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords, and that, if Iran signs its Agreement with me, as President of the United States of America, it would be an Honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled World Coalition. The Middle East would be United, Powerful, and Economically Strong, like perhaps no other area, anywhere in the World! By copy of this TRUTH, I am asking my Representatives to begin, and successfully complete, the process of signing these Countries into the already Historic Abraham Accords.
Of course! Why would any country NOT want to be part of the Abraham Accords, in a world of US imperial decline? Israel’s desperation parallels the US decline, with a depleted and demoralized army, and a state-dependent ethno-supremicist society losing citizens by the day to emigration in search of a peace and a job. The other major US club is equally un-inviting. NATO membership benefits the national agenda of the United States, while impoverishing and isolating member states.
Trump’s enthusiasm for this kind of nuttery is understandable. Like his predecessors, he has done his part to demonstrate how arrogant, weak, short-sighted and wasteful the US empire can be in its ongoing decline. When emperors preside over the exsanguination of their charter and their significance, the tendency is to deny the losses and overstate the power of paper alliances.
It’s the Abraham Accords for everyone, or we destroy the Middle East. Trump and Netanyahu intend to pursue war because there is nothing else in their wheelhouse. Trump puts the word TRUTH in all caps, but it’s a day late and 40 trillion dollars short. Negotiations are impossible for lack of US and Israeli interest, and a lack of diplomats. This losing side stupidly portrays itself as winning despite objective reality, and the wails of the world economy.
When Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant in Appomattox on April 9th, 1865, the two generals dealt directly with a recognized victory and an acknowledged loss. The terms of the surrender were detailed, and they included protections for the losing side and a soldier’s interest in never repeating that kind of war again. Modern US wars ended after massive destruction of other countries, but without fair and thoughtful treaties of peace to which the US felt bound. Hundreds of wars – conducted extra-constitutionally by US presidents and their elite advisors, and in Israel’s case, by a European tradition and culture that requires constant war and state murder – and not an honorable treaty among them.
The “diplomacy” of the empire and its Israeli appendage has long proven foul and untrustworthy. Fake accords and agreements themselves caused, and have extended, the Ukraine and Iran wars.
All around the world, nations and regions are developing alternative security architectures with their neighbors, and they are doing so more and more confidently. Trump – like some libertarians upon hearing Scott Horton’s critique of the International Alliance of Libertarian Parties – is reluctant to recognize that to be authentically patriotic is to end the US wars overseas, and abandon alliances that exist solely to rationalize our fading militaristic empire, and Israel’s.
The good news is the rest of the world is well on its way to withdrawing their consent to US dictates and flawed security architectures. Americans should do the same, and soon.
https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/p/as-the-empire-ends-its-security-architecture