Alfred McCoy: The Epic Struggle over the Epicenter of Global Power
Great Britain’s dominion over the oceans began with an historic naval triumph over a combined French-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar in 1805 and only ended when, in 1942, a British garrison of 80,000 men surrendered their seemingly impregnable naval bastion at Singapore to the Japanese — a defeat Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”
Like all past imperial
hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over
Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the
Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land
mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John
Darwin put
it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,”
becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at
both ends of Eurasia.”
In the early 1950s,
Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong forged a Sino-Soviet alliance that threatened to
dominate the continent. Washington, however, countered with a deft geopolitical
gambit that, for the next 40 years, succeeded in “containing” those two powers
behind an “Iron Curtain” stretching 5,000 miles across the vast Eurasian land
mass.
As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam….
https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/17/the-epic-struggle-over-the-epicenter-of-u-s-global-power/
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Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the coup in Iran that changed
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Pentagon Papers and time when media was
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The
knights of Bushido : a history of Japanese war crimes during World War II
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Robert Fisk: Sinister efforts to minimise Japanese
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Book review: The origins of Christianity - An
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Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the coup in Iran that changed
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