To find out what’s really going on in the world, you can’t just switch on the TV news, pick up a newspaper or scroll down the international pages of your favoured website – unless it’s The Left Lane of course! You usually have to dig a bit deeper, a lot deeper actually, to get at the truth and discover a more accurate analysis of world events.
In that vein, the Substack article, The Rise of the Global South, by the author, journalist and former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges (how many former employees of the mainstream media, freed from their controlling editorial shackles, end up writing their own Substacks?) is an excellent piece that is well worth reading.
In his latest post on The Chris Hedges Report, he says: “The end of the US Empire, led by an impetuous and clueless Donald Trump, is irreversible. The US has lost its sixth war in the Middle East in 25 years. Iran’s power has been enhanced not only because it – along with Oman – controls the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly 25% of the world’s seaborne oil and 20% of the world’s seaborne liquified natural gas pass through, but because it has delivered a stark message, with its drones and missiles, to US allies and bases in the region, while sending the global economy into a tailspin.”
Hedges argues very persuasively that Israel and the US’s defeat in their war on Iran, along with the savagery of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are ushering in a new world order. He makes the very valid (and correct) point that: “Empires, blinded by the myth of their own omnipotence and military superiority, blunder at the final stages into conflicts with little understanding of where they are headed. They alienate their allies. They stumble from one military fiasco to the next, as the US has done for over two decades in the Middle East.”
According to Hedges, there are some key parallels with the humiliation of the British Empire in 1956 when, along with France and Israel, it tried to seize the Suez Canal, which Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised. Back then, it was the US that forced all three countries to halt the invasion. As a result, the British pound gave way to the petrodollar, signalling the last chapter of the British Empire.
The war on Iran is Washington’s Suez Crisis, says Hedges and although it might not be the end of the American Empire, it is certainly the beginning of the end.
Click here to read the full article, The Rise of the Global South on The Chris Hedges Report.
