The negligible rest
The USA is sticking to its unipolar claim and pursuing a long-term strategy to marginalize all other countries.

Most countries do not dare to openly pursue world domination. Except the USA. In their language, they simply call it "global leadership", which sounds a little milder. The "only indispensable nation" (Barack Obama) is increasingly allowing itself to flex its muscles against the dispensable, including us Germans. As recently as July 2024, Joe Biden, the future ex-president of the USA, was able to declare openly: "I rule the world." Those who attribute this to the darkening state of consciousness of an elderly gentleman are making it too easy for themselves. Arrogance is part of the political DNA of "God's own country". For many in this very religious country, acting as a teacher of democracy and ruler of the world is a divine mission. The USA has also called itself the "land of the free". For the rest of the world, which the global hegemon is increasingly leading by the hand, there is not much freedom left. The author's historical review also shows what part the submissive attitude of countries like Germany has played in the misery.

by Wolfgang Bittner

[This article posted on 8/2/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/der-vernachlassigbare-rest.]

In the opinion of its power elites, the United States of America is "the land of the free and the home of the brave", as the national anthem proclaims. And "God's Own Country" is destined to rule the world. To enforce this unipolar claim, they have developed a long-term strategy since the 19th century, which includes maintaining an excessively well-equipped army and establishing about 1,000 military bases around the world.
It cannot be overlooked that large parts of US society, including Congress, are fanatically religious and fundamentalist. The affinity between Puritanism and capitalism, an "economic doctrine of predestination" — if God loves you, he will make you rich — is deeply rooted here to this day. Furthermore, many of the hardliners apparently believe that everything that benefits the USA ultimately benefits the whole world, which is the basis for their claim to global supremacy.

Continuity for more than 200 years
This unjustified hubris was also followed by the policies of President Barack Obama, who came along with a winning smile, waged seven wars and, in a speech at the military academy in West Point, described the United States as the "only indispensable nation", the linchpin of all alliances from Europe to Asia, "unparalleled in the history of nations." (1)
In doing so, Obama was stating what had long been the policy of the United States, which since the 20th century had also been able to assert its imperial claim against Europe, in particular Germany.

This power politics had its beginnings in 1823 at the latest, when President James Monroe presented the US Congress with the basic outlines of a long-term foreign policy for the United States: no tolerance of interference by other countries on the American continent, while at the same time the USA claimed the right to protect and intervene in Latin America (2). In doing so, the USA laid its hands on Central and South America.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919, President 1901–1909) authorized the USA to exercise "international police power" and to uncompromisingly enforce economic and strategic interests. His motto was: "Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will get far." (3) After all the treaties with the Native Americans had been broken and the last devastating battle had been fought at Wounded Knee in 1890, this applied primarily to the Latin American countries in the "backyard of the USA", but also to Morocco and Korea, and a little later to the rest of the world.
This was fully in line with a statement by the next president, Woodrow Wilson:

"Since commerce knows no national boundaries and the entrepreneur claims the world as his market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the closed doors of nations must be broken open. (...) The concessions acquired by financiers must be guaranteed by the ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of recalcitrant nations is thereby violated." (4)

Barack Obama put it this way in an interview with the US TV channel Vox on February 11, 2016:
"We occasionally have to twist the arm of countries that don't do what we want them to do. If it were not for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military means of pressure that we have, if we did not have this dose of realism, we would not get anything done either (...) the American leadership comes partly from our hands-on mentality. We are the largest, most powerful country on earth (...) we have no equal in terms of states that could attack or provoke the United States." (5)

The influence of the world's number one power
The USA finally achieved its goal of becoming the world's number one power after the Second World War, when President Harry S. Truman announced to both houses of Congress on March 12, 1947:
"I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who resist the subjugation imposed upon them by armed minorities or by foreign pressures. I believe that we must help all free peoples to determine their own destiny in their own way. (...) In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States is realizing the principles of the United Nations. The free peoples of the world are counting on our support in their struggle for freedom. If we falter in our leadership role, we endanger the peace of the world – and we certainly harm the welfare of our own nation." (6)
According to Truman's altruistic words, this "support" of free peoples by the USA should include "above all economic and financial assistance", "which forms the basis for economic stability and orderly political conditions", but realpolitik went the usual way in the interests and to the advantage of the USA and mostly at the expense and to the disadvantage of the "free peoples", as a look at history up to the present day proves (7).

The journalist Werner Rügemer has analyzed the influence and influence of the USA on the European, and in particular the German economy, and comes to startling conclusions:

"The most important entrepreneurial capital ownership in Western capitalism is now organized by various types of financial actors. The largest in terms of capital employed are BlackRock & Co. Then come Blackstone & Co, the private equity investors, popularly known as 'locusts'. Since the end of the 1990s, they have bought up, exploited, resold or floated on the stock exchange around 10,000 medium-sized companies in Germany. Then there are the hedge funds, the venture capital investors – they bring the start-ups into the race – , the elitist investment banks such as Macquarie and Rothschild, the private banks such as Metzler, Pictet, the traditional banks such as Deutsche Bank. The USA is the largest capital center and the most important military, intelligence and media power bloc for securing this system. The most important global financial service providers are also linked to the USA: the big three rating agencies, the business law firms such as Freshfields, the management consultants such as McKinsey, the auditors such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, the PR agencies such as Soros' Renaissance – I call them the civilian private army of Western capitalism." (8)

Preventing Germany from cooperating with Russia

Russia has no place in the economic and military strategy of the United States. The former director of the influential think tank Stratfor, George Friedman, made a remarkable statement about this egocentric, peace-endangering policy in his speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on February 4, 2015:

"The main interest of US foreign policy during the last century, in the First and Second World Wars and in the Cold War, was the relationship between Germany and Russia. Because together they are the only power that can threaten our supremacy. Our main goal was to ensure that this did not happen." (9)

Friedman explains why this policy has been continued to the present day as follows:
"The main concern of the United States is that (...) German capital and German technology combine with Russian raw materials and Russian labor to form a unique combination that the United States has been trying to prevent for a century. So how can we achieve this, that this German-Russian combination is prevented? The USA is prepared to use its card to beat this combination: that is the line between the Baltic and the Black Sea. (...) The point of the whole thing is that the USA is building a 'cordon sanitaire', a security belt, around Russia."
This has basically been worked on consistently in secret since the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.
Friedman goes on to say:

"The United States controls all the oceans of the world out of its fundamental interest. No other power has ever done that. That is why we intervene in the peoples of the world, but they cannot attack us."
Many peoples are also unable to defend themselves, as has been shown recently. Those who oppose them are ruined or bombed.

Friedman's "confession" only caused a stir in the so-called alternative media. The same applies to the statements of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who saw Eurasia as the "chessboard of the USA", on which it made its moves in the struggle for global supremacy. In his book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives", in which he developed the geopolitical strategy of the USA after the fall of the Soviet Union, Brzezinski wrote:

"The extent to which the United States can assert its global supremacy depends on how a globally engaged America deals with the complex power relations on the Eurasian continent – and whether it can prevent the emergence of a dominant, opposing power there." (10)

Henry Kissinger's statement of February 2, 2014, should also be seen in this context, according to which the regime change in Kiev is, so to speak, the dress rehearsal for "what we want to do in Moscow". (11)
Joseph Biden: "I rule the world"

President Joseph Biden demonstrated the self-image of the US government in an interview with the US broadcaster ABC on July 6, 2024, when he was asked about his physical and mental condition after a disastrous election campaign duel with Donald Trump. He explained in front of the camera:

"I take a cognitive test every day. You know, I'm not just campaigning, I'm governing the world. It sounds like an exaggeration, but we are the most important nation in the world." (12)
This statement was accepted by Western politicians and journalists with almost no comment, which in turn allows conclusions to be drawn about the depravity of these actors.

In a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 2, 2014, Biden, who was still US Vice President at the time, boasted:
"We gave Putin a simple choice: respect Ukraine's sovereignty or face increasing consequences. This allowed us to get the world's largest developed nations to impose real costs on Russia. It is true that they (the EU) did not want to do that. But again, it was America's leadership and the fact that the President of the United States insisted, yes, had to embarrass Europe on many occasions to force it to get up and take economic hits to be able to impose costs (on Russia). And the consequences were a massive flight of capital from Russia, a virtual freeze on foreign direct investment, the ruble at an all-time low against the dollar and the Russian economy on the brink of recession." (13)

The fact that the Berlin government has continued to follow this policy, which is diametrically opposed to German interests, to the present day, as can be seen from statements by Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, is a disgrace and cannot be explained solely by Germany's lack of sovereignty.

The statements of US leaders, repeated over more than a century, paint a picture of the US's monopolar imperial policy, which the former chief of staff of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, characterized with the words:
"To hell with the rest of the world." (14)

Editorial note: This text was first published under the title "'To hell with the rest of the world' — Long-term strategy and unipolar claim of the USA" at NachDenkSeiten

(1) www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/28/remarks-president-united-states-military-academy-commencement-ceremony
(2) The so-called Monroe Doctrine. See also: https://amerika21.de/analyse/239008/monroe-doktrin-totgesagte-leben-laenger
(3) See Theodore Roosevelt: The strenuous Life. Essays and Addresses, New York 1906, and Theodore Roosevelt typed letter signed as governor of New York, January 26, 1900, https://historical.ha.com/itm/autographs/u.s.-presidents/theodore-roosevelt-typ ed-letter-signed-as-governor-of-new-york-two-pages-9-x-115-albany-new-york-january-26-190/a/6054-34087.s
(4) as Wilfried Röhrich: Politik als Wissenschaft — Ein Überblick, Opladen 1986
(5) as RT Deutsch, February 12, 2015, https://deutsch.rt.com/11745/international/obamas-diplomatie-verstaendnis-wir-muessen-gewalt-anwenden-wenn-laender-nicht-das-machen-was-wir-wollen/. See also: der Freitag, 15 February 2015, www.freitag.de/autoren/hans-springstein/der-us-praesident-hat-wieder-klartext-geredet
(6) The so-called Truman Doctrine, as described by Manfred Görtemaker, among others: Das Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts? (The End of the East-West Conflict?), page 58
(7) At the end of the 1940s, the USA withdrew a large part of its troops from Germany to deploy them in the Korean War in 1950, in which around four million people died and the country was divided.
(8) Werner Rügemer: Die Wahrheit ist auf unserer Seite, Neue Rheinische Zeitung Online, November 21, 2018, www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=25399
(9) AntikriegTV: US-Strategie, YouTube, March 17, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln_ApfoFgw
(10) Zbigniew Brzezinski: The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York 2003, page 15
(11) www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=20079
(12) www.n-tv.de/politik/Widerstand-bei-Demokraten-gegen-Kandidatur-formiert-sich-US-Praesident-Biden-ballt-die-Faust-und-gibt-skurriles-Interview-article25067731.html
(13) newscan, Zeitdokument: Wir zwangen die EU zu Sanktionen gegen Russland, January 5, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLO7uKVarB8
(14) Florian Linse, NachDenkSeiten, August 8, 2018, www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=45368


Wolfgang Bittner, born in 1941, grew up in East Frisia and lives as a freelance writer in Göttingen. After graduating from high school, he studied law, sociology and philosophy in Göttingen and Munich. Until 1974, he pursued various professional and gainful activities, including as a welfare officer, administrative officer and lawyer. Extensive travels took him to the Middle East, Mexico, Canada and New Zealand. He writes for adults, young people and children, has been translated into numerous languages and has received several literary awards. He has worked for newspapers, magazines, radio and television and sat on the WDR Broadcasting Council from 1996 to 1998. He has taught in Germany and abroad.

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