What U.S. Hegemony Is, How It Started, and When

Illustrative Image

Written by Eric Zuesse

An unquestioned assumption amongst America’s Establishment is that the global dominance that America inherited from having been the last of the major world powers to enter World War II, and from having suffered (by far) the least damage from that War, needs to continue in perpetuity, and that it needs to become total U.S. dominance over the entire planet, and especially dominance over the world’s largest nation, Russia, which is 1.77 times larger than America (the world’s third-largest country) is.

(Russia is 1.74 times larger than Canada, the world’s second-largest country, is; and is 1.78 times larger than China, which is the world’s fourth-largest. It is 2.01 times larger than the 5th-largest, Brazil; and is 2.20 times larger than the 6th-largest, Australia. It is 5.20 times larger than the 7th-largest, India. So, there are only 6 giant countries: Russia, Canada, America, China, Brazil, and Australia.) The term that many scholars use to refer to this belief — this objective, that America’s dominance over the entire world would be good instead of bad — is “hegemony”. Here, this belief will be explained.

Historically, any nation’s Establishment (its aristocracy and their employees and other agents) seeks to control as much of the world’s natural resources as possible, and this craving by them is the leading cause of wars. Russia, as the world’s largest nation, is also the world’s richest in natural resources. That is the main reason why the thousand-or-so people who control America (who mainly are America’s billionaires, America’s richest and best-connected individuals) want, more than anything else, to control Russia, which they don’t YET control. Their top mutually shared (virtually unanimous, if not 100% unanimous) assumption is that, however this is to be done, America needs to achieve control over Russia — that it is a good, instead of a bad, objective to pursue. If any member of America’s Establishment does NOT hold this objective, then that person would be shunned by all of his or her colleagues, and would consequently become targeted by all of them for defeat or conquest, destroying that person’s reputation and/or enterprises. Consequently, none comes forth publicly in opposition to this objective, which is called “U.S. hegemony” when it is not being labelled instead by benign-sounding ideological terms or phrases such as “democracy,” “freedom,” “the American way,” “the liberal international order,” or “the rules-based international order,” all of which presume that America’s continued and increased control over the world will help, instead of hinder, such alleged “values” — which really are global conquest, however that is to be achieved. So, the public join in: they (as workers for, or other agents of, those extremely wealthy individuals), likewise favor continued, and increased, U.S. global rule, hegemony. This goal is accepted by America’s public, as-if it were the very meaning of being an American ‘patriot’, and to oppose it is thus ‘unpatriotic’. This belief, in the virtuousness of extending yet further the American empire, is also the reason why the highest-respected of all institutions in America is “the military.”

Prior to 1898, America had been only a confused but largely democratic country, and not yet an imperialistic capitalist, or “fascist,” country, such as it has been ever since then, except during the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945), when America was — for only that brief time-span — the most fully democratic country that it has ever been. Almost immediately after WW II, America became, even more than it ever had been, an imperialistic capitalist country, effectively controlled by its military-industrial complex, which never before even had existed. This is the reason why U.S. President Harry S. Truman (inspired by the advice that he had received from his hero, Dwight David Eisenhower — “Ike” — the most gifted liar of anyone who became America’s President, except for Barack Obama) created, in 1947, both the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’ (America’s first-ever standing army — which had been condemned by America’s Founders, but Truman and the U.S. Congress dismissed that concern) and the CIA (for producing coups, which America started doing in 1948 Thailand).

Ever since 25 July 1945 (only months after FDR’s 12 April 1945 death), America has been a fascist-imperialist country, under the ideological guise of being ‘anti-communist’ until 1991, when communism ended in Russia and President G.H.W. Bush committed the U.S. and its allies secretly on 24 February 1990 to being simply anti-Russian, even without any continuing ideological excuse, at all, remaining. This new America is today’s version of Nazi Germany, hyper-militaristic, a nation with global ambitions of conquest: aspiring for control over all countries.

Here is a good list of this new, fascist-imperialist, America’s, invasions, ever since the end of WW II — ever since, actually, 25 July 1945 (when the decision was first made for the U.S. Government to take over the entire planet). Few, if any, of those 161 foreign deployments of U.S. troops served U.S. national security (such as the U.S. regime claimed), but all served U.S. billionaires and were propagandized-for by U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, at the time, so as to fool the public into believing that this was being done for “national defense” and “democracy” and “human rights” and “freedom,” when it was actually being done for imperialism to benefit America’s billionaires — to increase their access to the least expensive natural resources. As can be seen from that list, the U.S. Government is, now, and long has been (ever since 25 July 1945), controlled by its Military-Industrial Complex, or, more precisely, by America’s hundreds of billionaires who own control over America’s top 100 ‘defense’ (aggression) firms. Those are the only people who gain from U.S. imperialism. Everybody else loses from it, and many millions of people lose their lives because of it — because of these billionaires, who hide their identities behind fronts such as “BlackRock” and “Vanguard” and “State Street”, so that their guilt won’t become known, for what they do, and how they do it.

In addition to conquests by means of invasions, the hegemoniacal President Truman also initiated the long and continuing string of U.S. coups by the CIA, which he created in 1947 as an adjunct to the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department, in order to do dirty work for both that Department and the State Department. The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists — blocks from linking to — sites that aren’t CIA-approved) has a (probably intentionally) incomplete list of “U.S. coups” that excludes both the earliest one, which overthrew and replaced Thailand’s Government in 1948, and the latest one, which overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s Government in 2014, and the Wikipedia article is (likewise probably intentionally) mis-titled “United States involvement in regime change” (a title that few people will Web-search for), instead of “U.S. coups” (a title that many people Web-search for). Obviously, the CIA doesn’t want people to be able easily to find the list of U.S. coups that it contains. However, that list of 45 U.S. coups (all of which occurred, of course, after 1947) is the most-nearly-complete one that is presently on the Web, and you can see that list here. All of the instances of “United States involvement in regime change” that pre-date the CIA’s creation in 1947 were of a fundamentally different type, not U.S. coups, because there didn’t even exist, prior to the CIA, a U.S. agency to plan and carry out coups. So, there have been at least 47 U.S. coups since 1947 (those 45, plus the 1948 one in Thailand, and the 2014 one in Ukraine).

So: after WW II, the U.S. regime perpetrated at least 130+ U.S. invasions (out of 161 foreign military deployments of U.S. troops during 1945-2021, not even including The U.S. Government’s usage of proxy-forces instead of U.S. troops, such as is now the U.S. regime’s standard way of invading, because it’s far cheaper to do).

After World War II ended, the U.S. regime slaughtered or assisted in slaughtering, between 1945 and 2007 (and not even counting more recently, such as in Syria and Yemen), “between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world”. (This count also doesn’t include the numbers, such as in Iraq after the 1990 war, which died as a result of U.S.-initiated sanctions against countries that America’s billionaires wanted to bring under their control that weren’t yet under their control.)

There is every indication that the U.S. regime is even planning to ‘win’ a nuclear war against Russia if America’s preparation of a U.S.-led NATO Operation Barbarossa II (successor to Hitler’s plan) against Russia fails to materialize like they hope it will.

As a consequence of the reality of post-1944 America’s being fascist-imperialist (and its consequent record of doing far more invasions, coups, and sanctions, than any other country does), overwhelmingly the highest percentage of people polled throughout the world on questions of which country poses the greatest or biggest threat to peace in the world say that that country is the United States. No other country comes even close. Soon after Hitler left off, Trumanite America continued on, and far more successfully, but for America’s billionaires, instead of for Germany’s.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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