Secretary of State Antony Blinken looks on while President Joe Biden delivers remarks about the situation in Afghanistan, Friday, August. 20, 2021, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Erin Scott)
Outside of former congressman and presidential candidate, Dr. Ron Paul, few Americans are willing to stand up and call out the oddities of the nation’s foreign policy. It often props up dictators abroad despite championing “democracy,” at home. Sometimes the perspective of an outsider looking in is valuable. Frenchman, and founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference, Thierry Meyssan details his views of American foreign policy at LewRockwell.com, writing (abridged):
If we take ’democracy’ to mean ’popular sovereignty’ everywhere else, then we must recognise that the US Constitution is not democratic at all; that the US has never been a democracy. The Constitution grants sovereignty to state governors and to them alone. Elections by universal suffrage may exist at the state level, but are optional at the federal level.
Let us remember equally that political parties in the United States are not citizens’ associations as in Russia, but are institutions of the federated states as was the single party in the Soviet Union. Thus the primary elections, which allow the selection of a party’s candidate, are not organised by the political parties themselves, but by the federal states that finance them.
Given that the United States is not a ’democracy’ in the common sense, but an oligarchy, that it fights only for ’civil rights’, it is natural that abroad it fights against ’popular sovereignty’ through coups d’état, ’coloured revolutions’ and wars. In doing so, their values are diametrically opposed to those of continental Europeans, including Russia.
However, American thinking has a positive consequence. Fighting for civil rights means fighting against certain forms of corruption. Washington considers it perfectly normal to secretly pay salaries to foreign politicians and finance their election campaigns. The State Department draws up lists of personalities to support with a good conscience and does not understand that these leaders are considered corrupt in their countries. In contrast, the United States fights kleptocracy, i.e. the theft of public assets by foreign leaders (not by US leaders who are exempt from their crimes by virtue of ’American exceptionalism’). In doing so, they sometimes help “democracy” in the continental European sense.
By Thierry Meyssan, Voltairenet.org
French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian.
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