The Achaemenid Persian Empire. Byzantium. The Ottomans. Ancient Rome. All these regimes wielded immense power relative to their contemporaries. They dominated militarily, economically, culturally and globally in ways comparable to the United States’ current superpower status. All collapsed or were destroyed.
We Americans often forget that nothing lasts forever. And we always ignore the playwright Wilson Mizner’s advice to be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet them on your way down.
I am terrified of what will happen to us on the way down.
Whether or not you approve of U.S. actions overseas, there’s little dispute that our policymakers routinely flout international norms, violate treaty obligations and ignore the law—our own and those of other countries. We have provided billions in military aid and weapons to Israel despite its documented violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza, making us complicit in war crimes and violating the Leahy Laws, which prohibit aid to entities guilty of gross human rights violations. Detainees, including some cleared for release, have been held for years without trial at Guantánamo in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights obligations on due process and arbitrary detention. American presidents often disregard the War Powers Resolution when they deploy combat troops overseas.
With the world’s most advanced and expansive military presence, technological superiority in cyber and space, control over the global reserve currency, no state or entity can credibly hold the U.S. accountable when, for example, it repeatedly bombs Venezuelan boats, killing scores of unidentified civilians who have never been charged with a crime, on extraordinarily flimsy reasoning. Of course, these extrajudicial drone assassinations follow thousands of similar U.S. killings of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. No one has ever been arrested for the killings. No American drone killer has faced charges at the Hague. But whistleblowers have faced prosecution. Air Force analyst Daniel Hale was sent to prison for nearly four years for exposing drone murders.
62% of voters tell Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll they oppose Trump’s bombing campaign in the southern Caribbean. However, the number of Americans for whom droning is a major political issue (like immigration and inflation) is negligible. We disapprove. But we don’t really care. So the U.S. government keeps killing people it can’t identify. It reclassifies them as terrorists. It invents fictional terrorist organizations. It lies about what they’re doing and where they’re going and the fact that they represent no threat to us.
As noted above, America’s protected status cannot and will not last. In the future, Americans will no longer be the ones doing the killing.
Americans will become the targets.
Something else we don’t like to think about: the people and countries we are attacking now may seek revenge after we weaken and they strengthen. Motivated partly by betrayal and unpaid promises, the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome in 410. The Ottomans, descendants of Seljuk Turks who viewed the Byzantines as oppressors, conquered and ravaged Constantinople in 1453—an act partly seen as revenge for prior sackings by Crusaders.
Another country—a new superpower, one we’re no longer able to resist—may circle its drones over American cities, scanning faces and license plates on the streets of New York and Miami and Los Angeles and Birmingham, Alabama before blowing them to bits along with everyone and everything around them. They could launch “signature strikes,” as we do against males “of military age” and/or “behaving suspiciously” in places like Pakistan and men who happen to wear a certain color of scarf, against dozens of commuters who fit a category of their designated target profile. The dead may be someone you know. It might be you.
Liberals in that new superpower country may criticize their government for killing us without just cause. But most of their citizens won’t care. We’ll be The Other. We will have been accused of criminality. We will have it coming because, after all, we did it first. When Osama bin Laden confirmed that Al Qaeda was seeking nuclear weapons, he said that the U.S. had opened Pandora’s box, that it “was the one that had bombed people in the Far East, in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
Who will be able to stop them?
(Imagine the history of the last half of the 20th century had the U.S. leveraged its head start on nuclear weapons technology to push for a global ban on atomic weapons—something other, poorer nations like the USSR, would have welcomed. Or, imagine the next few decades if we exploited our dominance of drone tech to get our rivals to agree not to further develop or deploy them.)
Your son may get blown up on a fishing boat by a drone missile he never sees coming. Your neighbor may get bombed on an interstate highway. Your spouse may be slaughtered alongside you at your wedding. Adding insult to atrocity, a foreign political leader might appear on the news to smear your loved ones as “terrorists.”
There will be no one to report to the police.
There will be no one to sue.
There will be nothing you can do but seethe and cry and mourn and hurt and, depending on who and how you are, swear to exact revenge should you ever get the chance.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)
