Afghanistan's Armageddon 20 Years After 9/11 Offers Foreign Policy Choices: Groundhog Day or Imperial Reckoning? - CounterPunch.org

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : In the People's Republic, capitalism was embraced; in 1992 Deng gushed "it is glorious to be rich," although China remained a one-party state ruled by the (putatively) Communist Party.
55% : But since then, about 10 former Warsaw Pact countries that had played buffer roles between East and West have joined the transatlantic alliance, as well as the European Union.
55% : Washington spent more than the next 10 nations combined, with only a single country accounting for about "40% of global military spending" (Mapped: The World's Top Countries for Military Spending (visualcapitalist.com)).
49% : If Russia has completely scrapped socialism and China has an increasingly capitalistic economy and is an ever-expanding consumer society, what, precisely, is the main beef Washington and its coterie persist in having with Moscow and Beijing?
48% : However, as in the Middle East, in the end, it doesn't matter what market reforms and "liberalizations" Russia and China enact, or international entities they are allowed to join - the United Nations, WTO, G8, and so on.
43% : But since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the widespread penetration of capitalism in the PRC, socialism and communism are no longer the main issues.
43% : This is not "American First-ism" or isolationism - it is, instead, anti-interventionism.
42% : Rummy's handshake with Saddam was yet another blink-in-the-eye blip on the radar screen of US realpolitik, of Washington's ceaseless sticking its nose into the Middle East, that extends at least as far back as 1953's CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government in Iran.
35% : On Dec. 23, 1983, as a Reagan administration special envoy, Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad where he shook hands with the Iraqi despot, which was captured in an infamous photo, and extended support to Iraq in its war against Iran.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.