Geneva, December 8 (Xinhua): The United States has not learned the proper lesson from its failed wars, Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University, told Xinhua in a recent interview via video link.
Falk had first-hand experience visiting wartime Vietnam in 1968, which led him to question the lawfulness and the legitimacy of U.S. wars abroad.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel for the latest updates from around the world
“When I had the opportunity to visit Hanoi and meet some of the leaders there and see the effects of a high technology war machine being used against a peasant society that was trying to establish its own right of self-determination, it changed my understanding fundamentally,” he recalled.
The United States, rather than learning the lesson of the Vietnam War, has repeated the mistake time and again, according to Falk.
“The U.S., ever since its defeat in Vietnam, despite having overwhelming military superiority, has failed to learn the basic lesson that military intervention is not an effective geopolitical tool,” the renowned scholar explained, adding that the U.S. military adventures in the Middle East have further discredited “regime-changing interventions followed by prolonged occupations and state-building undertakings in the post-colonial period.”
READ: Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris in lead for 2024 if Biden decides not to run, poll says
The empirical record, Falk stressed, “suggests that excessive reliance of American foreign policy on the military instrument was a consequence of retaining a quasi-war posture ever since World War II.”
“The U.S. became a very militarized state bureaucracy with a high peacetime military budget, and this led it to consistently exaggerate security threats, coupled with the related claim that military approaches to foreign policy challenges continued to be effective,” he commented.
Despite the preaching of the virtues of a “rules-based international order” in the current U.S. administration’s foreign policy prescriptions, such an affirmation “certainly doesn’t seem to mean respect for international law,” Falk pointed out.
READ: The politics of Biden’s Democracy Summit
“It seems to mean that others will be held accountable if they depart from U.S. perceptions of what rules should govern,” he added. “But it leaves the U.S. itself in a position of pursuing its geopolitical ambitions without any kind of visible respect for the limits set by international law or the UN (United Nations) Charter.” Enditem
READ: US announces diplomatic boycott of 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas is a Cuban-born American lawyer, writer, historian, expert in the field of human rights and international law and retired high-ranking United Nations official. He was United Nations Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order (2012–2018).
Acording to de Zayas, the United States has spent too much on wars and arms, a disgrace given that there are still so many people in the world suffering from hunger and poverty, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, former United Nations (UN) independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, has said recently.
READ: US not to mix South Asian countries with India
“It’s really a disgrace considering that there are millions of people dying of hunger in the world, and we’re doing very little to eradicate hunger, we’re doing very little to eradicate extreme poverty,” he told Xinhua during an interview outside the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
“We are burning our money in new nuclear submarines, and procurement of new missiles, and in research and development into artificial intelligence, and the so-called lethal autonomous weapon systems, the killer robots, etc.,” de Zayas continued. “That’s where our money goes.”
Much of the profit, according to the American-Swiss historian, has gone into pockets of major defense contractors as part of America’s military-industrial complex, a network of individuals and institutions involved in the production of weapons and military technologies.
“They are very happy with their profits,” he said, referring to American’s weapon manufacturers. “Every war that we unleash brings profits to them, and misery to millions and millions of people.”
De Zayas recalled the remarks by Dwight Eisenhower in his final address from the White House as U.S. president in early 1961, when the retired five-star Army general warned against what he described as “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
“He was absolutely right,” the historian said of Eisenhower’s insight. “The only problem is the situation is much much worse today than it was in 1961, and God knows how many wars we have unleashed since 1961, how many millions of people we killed in the name of bringing democracy and human rights to them.”
Citing the invasion of oil-rich Iraq in 2003, De Zayas said the United States, in order to launch the war, lied to the world with senior government officials, including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, going extreme lengths to sell what turned out to be false claims that the Saddam Hussein government was possessing weapons of mass destruction.
“I mean here you have the U.S. lying to the world, to the UN Security Council, the late Colin Powell holding a little vial and convincing people,” the author of multiple books on legal and historical issues pointed out. “What happens here is that we are interested geopolitically in our presence in Iraq … we were also interested economically in the oil, and Saddam Hussein was not playing our game, so he has to go.”
In addition, the United States is good at creating division and instability in targeted countries, de Zayas observed, calling out U.S. intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and non-governmental organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, as well as the media, in what he called “an information war.”
“The National Endowment for Democracy does overtly what the CIA does covertly, so it subverts countries by financing the opposition, by financing non-governmental organizations that are going to disseminate fake news, that are going to create an atmosphere of confusion, in some cases, consternation,” the expert explained.
“You’re trying to destabilize countries through fake news,” he said. “You’re trying to destabilize countries by inventing situations that do not exist, and by giving a false narrative, the idea is to anesthetize the population so that they accept regime change, so that they accept a military intervention to achieve regime change.”
De Zayas also slammed the concept of American exceptionalism, which assumes that the country’s values and political system are worthy of universal admiration and has been used to excuse and whitewash its interventionism.
“I mean to claim exceptionalism is laughable … the mainstream media writes about exceptionalism as if it was something legitimate,” he added. “It is all part of the indoctrination, all part also of the epistemological game, that is being played.”
Enditem
For similar articles, join our Telegram channel for the latest updates. – click here
