The US is a failing state

 So Joe Biden was sworn in as President, and the previous guy flew off to Florida in a sulk. All well and good, and frankly, very relieving. But the US has serious problems that aren't going away nearly as easily.

**

I wrote about the Forever War a couple of years ago, but it's not like anything has changed. American troops have spent 30 years in the Middle East and achieved absolutely nothing. They're still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, there's still a civil war in Syria even though nobody cares about it any more, and so on. What I want to highlight here is the total ineptitude of the Forever War. The USians have spent three decades fighting and have learned nothing.

Take Syria, for instance. When the country collapsed into civil war, the US couldn't decide whether or not to actually intervene. The Obama administration drew several "red lines" and then dithered over them, while the next guy was more than happy to order airstrikes that accomplished nothing. The point is not to debate what the Americans should or shouldn't have done in Syria. It's that two consecutive administrations were unable to formulate or execute any kind of coherent national policy, or use military force to achieve national political goals. This is how a failing state acts.

US policy toward Iran is similarly senseless. Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, seemingly for no reason except that Obama signed it and therefore it must be bad -- only to then turn around and insist, in a ridiculous and failed diplomatic maneuver, that even though the US withdrew from the treaty, they're still a "participant" in it. Trump then had Qasem Soleimani murdered, again seemingly for no particular reason. At the time, it looked like the US was trying to provoke Iran into a war, but when the Iranians retaliated by striking US bases in Iraq, Trump lied that they hadn't and nothing came of it. You tell me: is this a superpower executing a strategy of regional dominance, or an empire as decrepit as the idiot con man who pretended to lead it?

This January marks the 30-year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Over those three decades, the US has taken a sledgehammer to the Middle East and achieved nothing at all, except killing untold thousands of people and destabilizing the entire region. And they're not done yet: US forces are still stuck in Afghanistan with no end in sight, and no-one even expects the new administration to do anything different. There's no exit strategy and there never was. In Vietnam, they had to leave when the other guys kicked them out, but US military supremacy is now so overwhelming that this is very unlikely, but they won't leave of their own accord. Nobody can define an end state, let alone a victory condition, for the Forever War, and because it's constantly spun as somehow a patriotic defensive effort protecting American liberties, it can't be stopped.

In other words, the supposedly greatest country in the world can't figure out how to stop spending literally trillions of dollars murdering innocent people in the Middle East.

**

Speaking of people dying, as I write this in early January, the death rate to the coronavirus pandemic in the US is a little over 1 000 per million (Statista). At that rate, over five thousand Finns would have died. The actual number was under six hundred when I wrote this. So despite spending over twice as much per person on health care, the US system is delivering an outcome that's ten times worse. They also can't get people vaccinated: the US government set a target of 20 million vaccinations by the end of 2020; they managed two million.

Now, it's easy to say that this is because of the idiot who's been in charge, and obviously he's to blame. You don't want a vacuous populist with stupid hair in charge of your country during a pandemic; just ask the Brits. But Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

The Forever War has turbocharged American racism. Most obviously through the massive islamophobia constantly incited in its name, but also in indirect ways. The ongoing police brutality in the US, for example, and the militarization of US policing, long predate the "war on terror" but are being accelerated by it. Veterans are strongly overrepresented in US police departments, and according to at least one study, are more likely to shoot people than non-veterans. Law enforcement agencies across the US gained massive, intrusive new powers of surveillance in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the flood of military equipment to police departments only increased. A more militarized police force with more veterans is then more likely to brutalize and murder minorities, which leads to protests, which justifies more policing.

As with the Forever War, there's no end in sight for the rampant police violence in the US either. One party openly cheers for it, with the unwavering support of the police unions, but the other one can't figure it out either. I'd like to say it's unbelievable that Biden's response to the police riots against the Black Lives Matter movements is to increase police funding, but it isn't. His position didn't change when off-duty cops stormed the Capitol and on-duty cops let them.

**

Trump himself, as a politician, is obviously a product of the Forever War. His racism, crude even by American standards, is boosted and justified by the rampant islamophobia of the "war on terror", and is key to his popularity among his overwhelmingly white, mostly well-off supporters.

But I think there's another way in which the Forever War ties into Trumpism. The supposedly constant threat of terrorism lets white Americans pretend that they're being victimized. White people living in the middle of rural nowhere, USA, can profess to be terrified that any moment now, an ISIS technical will pull up on their main street and shoot out the only traffic light in the name of the Caliphate. This doesn't just excuse white USians' racism, but it lets them play-act being oppressed, and there's nothing Trump supporters love more than pretending they're being oppressed. It's why Trump's repellent and ridiculous mix of bombast and self-pitying whining appeals to them: they want to both revel in their privilege and pretend it doesn't exist. The "war on terror" provides a way to get there. And, of course, once you've convinced yourself that ISIS is coming, you'll find it a lot easier to believe that buses full of Antifa are on their way to your hometown, as so many USian conservatives at one point claimed to believe.

This impossible idea, by the way, of simultaneously being the privileged and invaluable backbone of society, and a persecuted minority, has historically been the position of Christian churches. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that white Christians overwhelmingly support Trump.

Even though the most deranged conspiracists were bitterly disappointed when Biden was sworn in, the conservative persecution complex is carrying on as if nothing had happened. Moments after voting to overthrow the results of a democratic election, various Republican politicians were on the usual platforms whining about how mean the Democrats were being. Fox News and their ilk have spent the past year telling their viewers Joe Biden is a communist who is going to take their guns, ban cars and beef and whatever, just like they told everyone Obama was going to do. When none of that happened, it didn't put so much as a dent in the hysterical screeching, nor will it now.

Of course, in the dying days of the Trump regime, a huge number of these people convinced themselves that any election they lose isn't legitimate. Their elected representatives voted to overturn election results, and incited an armed mob to storm the Capitol, trying to stop the election result from being confirmed. Nearly half of all Republicans supported the attack.

A strong faction of Republicans now openly oppose democracy. If they took back the House and Senate in the midterms, judging on their behavior so far, they would vote to throw out a presidential election result that didn't go their way.

It's one thing for a party to elect someone lile Trump, who openly opposes democracy. It's another for some politicians, like the Zodiac, to support him and echo his rhetoric. But when a large part of the supporters of the party start opposing democracy and believing that only they are entitled to rule, it becomes a serious problem.

This mentality is being driven by the brutalizing racism of the Forever War. It's being driven by the constant police brutality and racism. It's being turbocharged by the radicalization engines of the right-wing media, Facebook and Youtube. It isn't going away. If anything, it's going to get worse, because the structural forces driving it aren't going anywhere.

**

This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Of course, they didn't create problems like American racism and militarism, or the fascist contempt so much of the USian right has for democracy. We can't know what the 21st century would have been like without the War on Terror. But it would be very difficult to argue that that Forever War hasn't made all of these problems so much worse, and so much more difficult to solve.

The US has been in mortal peril before. It survived the Civil War, even though the subsequent efforts to fix some of these deep-rooted inequalities was sabotaged. Now, real structural change seems even harder, and the saboteurs are legion.

No-one knows what will happen. In one of the more spectacularly silly journalistic outpourings in my country, someone compared Joe Biden to FDR. I can't help thinking that's spectacularly wrong. To stay in that context, I'm afraid Biden isn't the great reformer who will actually grapple with the great problems of US society that FDR was. Instead, he's Herbert Hoover: the studious technocrat who won't address the actual issues, and is overwhelmed by them. I suppose in 2024 we'll see if he's succeeded by an FDR - or a Buzz Windrip.

I can't say I'm very optimistic.