Kevin Duffy on the American exceptionalism bubble

The U.S. is leading the world towards chaos, divisiveness and aggression while China is the leading it towards stability, openness and restraint. 

This is obvious to most of the world yet 95% of Americans remain deluded by the fog of "U.S. exceptionalism."

~ Kevin Duffy, X post, March 16, 2026

 

Kevin Duffy on Trump's ambitions to annex Greenland

Here's a novel idea: stop making enemies. Stop expanding NATO on Russia's doorstep. Stop vilifying China for being economically successful. Stop bullying everyone with tariffs. Stop economic sanctions and embargoes on countries you don't like, e.g. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela. Stop aiding and abetting the genocide in Gaza.  

Why not try this approach? I guarantee, the world would be a more prosperous, peaceful place. The big loser in such a world, of course, would be the military industrial complex, whose budget would be easily cut to under $500B (which is precisely why they are fighting so desperately to prevent such a cataclysm).

No, instead we're going to double down on our current path. These people are now pining for a $1.5T annual military budget!! Meanwhile, total debt clocks in at $39T and counting, our growing list of enemies is selling US treasuries, and the dollar is imploding vs. gold (having lost 75% of its value since Trump first stepped into office in January, 2017).

As WWI critic Randolph Bourne famously said, "War is the health of the state." But ultimately, the war machine brings about a destruction of the currency and bankruptcy of the state. We are now accelerating towards that day.

~ Kevin Duffy, Twitter/X post, January 21, 2026

 

Stephen Kinzer on the racist roots of American imperialism

The first wave of American "regime change" operations, which lasted from 1893 to 1911, was propelled largely by the search for resources, markets, and commercial opportunities.  Not all of the early imperialists, however, were the tools of big business.  Roosevelt, Lodge, and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan were moved by what they considered to be the transcendent imperatives of history.  Expanding, they believed, was simply what great nations did.  In their minds, promoting commerce and defending national security fused into what one historian has called "an aggressive national egoism and a romantic attachment to national power."  They considered themselves nothing less than instruments of destiny and Providence.

The missionary instinct was already deeply ingrained in the American psyche.  From the time John Winthrop proclaimed his dream of building a "city upon the hill" to which the world would look for inspiration, Americans have considered themselves a special people.  At the end of the nineteenth century, many came to believe they had a duty to civilize needy savages and rescue exploited masses from oppression.  Rudyard Kipling encouraged their missionary spirit with a famous poem published in McClure's Magazine as the debate over annexing the Philippines began.

Take up the White Man's burden

Send forth the best ye breed,

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild,

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child

Americans have a profoundly compassionate side.  Many not only appreciate the freedom and prosperity with which they have been blessed but fervently wish to share their good fortune with others.  Time and again, they have proved willing to support foreign interventions that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate people.

When President McKinley said he was going to war in Cuba to stop "oppression at our very doors," Americans cheered.  They did so again a decade later, when the Taft administration declared that it was deposing the government of Nicaragua in order to impose "republican institutions" and promote "real patriotism."  Since then, every time the United States has set out to overthrow a foreign government, its leaders have insisted that they are acting not to expand American power but to help people who are suffering.

This paternalism was often mixed with racism.  Many Americans considered Latin Americans and Pacific islanders to be "colored" natives in need of guidance from whites.  In a nation whose black population was systematically repressed, and where racial prejudice was widespread, this view helped many people accept the need for the United States to dominate foreign countries.

Speeches justifying American expansionism on the grounds of the white race's presumed superiority were staples of political discourse in the 1890s.  Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana described expansion as part of a natural process, "the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man."  Representative Charles Cochrane of Mississippi spoke of "the onward march of the indomitable race that founded this Republic" and predicted "the conquest of the world by the Aryan races."  When he finished his speech, the House burst into applause.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, pp. 83-84

Jeffrey Sachs on why the U.S. opposes Russia and China

What do we have against Russia?  The fact of the matter is, Russia is big.  Russia is powerful.  And for that reason and that reason alone, or sufficiently, the U.S. would oppose Russia, just like the U.S. opposes China.  Now of course, maybe people listening to this would say, "That's crazy.  We oppose China because all of the terrible things they do."  Or "We oppose Russia because all of the terrible things they do."  I would take a different view of this which is, we make up stories about why we oppose big powers, but the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big.  They are an afront to our desire for what the political scientists in a fancy word call "primacy," or call "hegemony," or call "full spectrum dominance."  In other words, Russia is an afront to our ability to dictate circumstances.  China certainly is an afront to the U.S. ability to dictate circumstances in Asia.  For that reason alone, for the powers that be in Washington, that's completely antithetical to the American strategic purpose, which explicitly, for many, many years has been full spectrum dominance...  In other words, our purpose, as stated by the establishment, by the military industrial complex, is "We must be the unrivaled #1."

Jeffrey Sachs, "Jeffrey Sachs: The Dark Forces Pushing Trump Into War With Iran, & Ukraine/Russia New Escalation," Tucker Carlson, 7:15 mark, June 11, 2025

Jeffrey Sachs on the end of American exceptionalism and rise of Asia

Most of the world population lives in Asia, about 60%.  For most of history, that means that roughly 60% of the world economy, world output, was produced in Asia, as best as one can tell when historians look back and try to recreate economic estimates.  In recent centuries, that changed decisively with the rise of Europe and of the north Atlantic because in the 19th and 20th centuries, of course, the United States rose to become the largest economy in the world.  Asia was eclipsed in this.  Not only eclipsed, of course, it was dominated by European imperial powers.

If you look around 1820 or so, Asia was still more than half of the world economy, but by 1950, after 150 years of the industrial age, dominated by Europe and the United States, the whole Asian economy had declined to around 20% of world output from what had been roughly 60%.  This meant China completely being eclipsed and of course in fact attacked and losing many wars, first to the West in the first and second Opium Wars to chaos during the so-called Taiping Rebellion in the middle of the 19th century to the extraterritorial privileges or rights or dominance of European powers in China at the end of the 19th century and then to Japanese invasion in several episodes, starting with the Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95 and then several Japanese invasions, in fact, in the 20th century and the massive invasions of the 1930s.  Civil war in China in the 1940s.  And this meant that by the time of the establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China in 1949, China had gone through about 110 years of devastating defeats of what China calls the "century of humiliation."  China's share of the world economy was estimated to be maybe 2% of world output and roughly 20% world population as of the 1950s.  In other words, China was completely eclipsed from its long historical role in the world for at least a millennium, by the way, from 500 to 1500 AD.  Before the beginning of the European ascendancy, China clearly dominated the world across many technologies: gunpowder, steam engine, paper currency, the compass, large scale ocean navigation, and one could go on and on, in fact.

So, the story that we see today, taken from a very, very long-term perspective in history is the return of China to the front ranks of power in the world and economic productivity and technology.  In a sense, China has returned to its more traditional role in the world, which one could see for much of the last 2,000 years, in fact.  The rise of China, in this sense, should be understood as a rebalancing of what was absolutely unbalanced, and that is a European-dominated world.

Of course, it's very hard for Europeans and Americans to understand that the idea of European dominance in the world had become an absolute natural standby, and that's been true for several hundred years actually where as Europe rose in power, as European empires dominated the other parts of the world, full ideologies, belief systems, rewriting of history, a lot of racism one can add, even by the leading thinkers of world history in the West, came to say, "Well, Europe's dominance is natural.  European cultural superiority, maybe racial superiority," but whatever the argument was, "European superiority is natural."

Of course, now we're at the end of that phase of history.  And one should understand, it's not only the return of China.  It's also the rapid development of India, it's the rapid development of southeast Asia, the so-called ASEAN countries, it's the rapid development of parts of west Asia in the Gulf countries, for example.  All of this is rather fundamentally ending the Euro-centric view of the world or what in the late 19th century to the early 21st century became the north Atlantic, NATO-centered vision of the world, and by the end of the 20th century became the American-centered vision of the world.

And when you have these temporary imbalances of economy and power...  The tendency is to put a bulwark under them in ideological or religious or some other philosophical sense to say, "That imbalance is natural."  In the United States, the idea of American exceptionalism is very deep.  The idea that, "Yes, of course, America rules the world" is a deep part of the belief system, not a superficial item.  

So the rise of China is viewed with alarm, it's viewed with disdain, it's viewed with fear.  It's not viewed with equanimity.  I don't know any American leaders that say, "Well, of course China's a big power that's had a long history of civilizational greatness so it's natural that China's doing well."  What you hear is, "China's the great threat to the world.  China's rise must be stopped.  We must contain China.  We must prepare for war.  China cheated and stole its way to economic recovery...  It's artificial; China will collapse."  In other words, many erroneous, superficial, biased, sometimes blatantly racist views to undergird this sense of superiority in the U.S. that built up over two centuries.

~ Jeffrey Sach, "Jeffrey Sachs: Chinese Statecraft and a New World Order," Glenn Diesen, 1:10 mark, May 2, 2025

Joseph Quinlan and Lauren Sanfilippo on American exceptionalism vs. isolationism

Globalization is in remission, while its opposite, isolationism, is being rekindled by nationalists around the world, including in the U.S. 

[...]

Most at risk will be open, trade-dependent economies across Europe, Asia, and much of the emerging market universe. These states are the most exposed to an inward-looking world losing its appetite for cross-border commerce. This is a key reason investors remain lukewarm on the export-oriented markets of Europe among the developed markets and on China and Mexico in the emerging world. 

In contrast, the preference for—and outperformance of—U.S. equities remains in place in part due to the simple fact that no country is better disposed toward economic autocracy and isolationism than the U.S. 

[...]

If there were ever an economy built for isolation, it is the United States. If the nation does become a global dropout and opts for retrenchment, the world will become a messier place, but with the U.S. still on top. Stay long America.

~ Joseph Quinlan and Lauren Sanfilippo, "U.S. Exceptionalism Will Thrive in a World in Retreat," Barron's, January 4, 2025

The Economist on the U.S. economy

In the history of modern economics America's three-decade outperformance is remarkable.  Can it continue?  Throughout this report we will consider reasons for pessimism, from poisonous politics to fiscal frailties.  Set against these are a relentless dynamism, the essential characteristic of the American economy and the ultimate force propelling it forward.

~ "The envy of the world: The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust. Expect that to continue...," The Economist, October 19, 2024

Sheldon Richman on the early days of American imperialism

Unfortunately, even many critics of the American empire think it is relatively new.  Some do understand that its origins preceded the 20th century and that the empire did not begin with the Cold War or U.S. entry into the world wars.  They would likely see the Spanish-American War in 1898 as the beginning, when America acquired territory as far away as the Philippines.  But I would look even further back than that.  How far back?  The second half of the 18th century.  The earliest days of American empire-building shed light on how America's earliest rulers perceived their constitutional powers and hence on the Constitution itself...

Even the government's schools teach, or at least taught during my 12-year sentence, that America's founders had - let us say - an expansive vision for the country they were establishing.  The historian William Appleman Williams's extended essay, Empire as a Way of Life (1980), provides many details.  Clearly, these men had empire on their minds.

Before he became an evangelical for independence from Great Britain, Benjamin Franklin proposed a partnership between Great Britain and the American colonists to help spread enlightened empire throughout the Americas.  His proposal was rejected as impractical, so he embraced independence from Britain - without giving up the dream of empire in the New World.  George Washington would have shared the vision; he spoke of the "rising American empire" and described himself as living in an "infant empire."

Thomas Jefferson - "the most expansion-minded president in American history," (writes Gordon S. Wood in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789-1815 - set out a vision of an "Empire of Liberty," later revised as an "Empire for Libery," and left the presidency believing that "no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government."  Before leaving office, of course, he acquired the gigantic Louisiana territory from France (828,000 square miles) without constitutional authority, a violation he was fully aware of.

[...]

Indeed, in the eyes of the founders, the American Revolution was largely a war between a mature, exhausted empire and a nascent one.  Many - but assuredly not all - Americans of the time would have cheerfully agreed...

The Indian Wars were among the first steps in empire building.  The unspeakable brutality and duplicity - the acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as we say today - were crimes, not merely against individuals, but also against whole societies and nations.  "Imperialism" was not yet a word in use, but that's what this was, as were the designs and moves on Canada (one of the objects of James Madison's War of 1812), Mexico, Cuba, Florida, the Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana, the Northwest, and the Pacific coast (the gateway to Asia).  The wishes of the inhabitants - who were "as yet incapable of self-government as children," as Jefferson said of Louisiana's residents - didn't count.  (Lincoln's war is thus understood as an exercise in empire preservation.)

~ Sheldon Richman, America's Counter-Revolution, "Empire on Their Minds," pp. 101-102

Kim Iversen on poking the Russian dog

The dog barked and barked and growled and growled.  People even pointed year after year that the dog is growling and dangerous, yet we kept taunting the dog, and now the dog is attacking.  And we're sitting here acting shocked, claiming there was no provocation on our end. 

~ Kim Iversen, "Kim Iversen: ”Ukraine Will Be Wrecked." OMINOUS Warnings Of NATO-Provoked War Given For DECADES," The Hill, 7:00 mark, March 2, 2022