How Did I End Up Living in Donald Trump’s Suicidal America?
As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise in Ukraine (as is Donald Trump in his own strange fashion in the Caribbean Sea and Venezuela). No less curiously, the country visibly on the rise, China, is distinctly not acting like a typical imperial power of history (at least the history I’ve known). In a world where the United States still has 750 or so military bases around the world, China, as far as I can tell, has at most just one (in Djibouti, Africa). While its economy has become significant globally (imperially significant, you might say), unlike essentially every imperial power from the Portuguese and Spanish in the 15th and 16th centuries on, it has no colonies and only the most minimal military presence abroad, though it does continue to build up its military power (and its nuclear arsenal) at home.
Of course, it’s worth remembering that we are distinctly on a different planet than the one any of those older powers inhabited. And even if America’s great man (my joke!), President Donald J. Trump, doesn’t seem to know it, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, certainly does.
Vladimir Putin’s version of imperial aggression is, at present, aimed at Ukraine in a war that will in the — and yes, I can hardly avoid the word! — end undoubtedly prove a disaster, not just for Ukraine but for Russia and the rest of the planet, too. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s version of imperial aggression, which is likely (again, in the end) to prove disastrous, is for the time being (and, with him, you always have to add a qualifier) aimed at the Caribbean Sea, the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and Venezuela (which he now seems intent on turning into an oil colony), even as he prepares to build his own “golden fleet,” including “Trump-class” (old-fashioned) battleships. On the other hand, China’s major “aggression” (and indeed, that word does have to be put in quotation marks!) is aimed — setting aside the island of Taiwan (which it claims not as a colony but as a part of China itself) — at the conquest of the future global green economy.
Or put another way, to give credit where it’s due, despite the fact that China continues to open coal plants in an unnerving fashion, its great-power desires are at least aimed at something — in fact, the thing — that truly matters on this distinctly beleaguered planet of ours. It is intent on becoming the Earth’s global powerhouse when it comes to the sale of green energy and the ways to produce it. Consider that its imperial target, one unlike any other in history (though perhaps a comparison could be made to the industrialization of what became imperial Great Britain in the nineteenth century). Moreover, it’s already selling and delivering green energy production units to countries globally, while far outpacing anyplace else on this planet in producing electric vehicles (EVs)….
https://tomdispatch.com/what-planet-are-we-on
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Against the crime of silence: Bertrand Russell’s War Crimes in Vietnam (1967)
Donald Trump’s Cultural Revolution
The Billionaire Frenzy Over Zohran Mamdani
Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
The violent new world being born is going to horrify you
Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
From colonialism to Covid: Viet Thanh Nguyen on the rise of anti-Asian violence
Seyla Benhabib: Breaking Silence, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King
After the truth-shower 