Atul Singh: Welcome to FO° Talks. With me is John Feffer — a friend, an author, a spokesman and a nature lover. He’s written many articles for Fair Observer. He has a great understanding of international affairs, and he’s indeed a citizen of the world. Today, we will speak to John about Why US Soft Power Is Now Declining Dramatically. Now, welcome, John, and let’s get cracking.
John Feffer: Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Atul Singh: Great to have you, John. John, before we crack on, please explain to our viewers and our listeners — I’m sure most of them know about soft power already — but lay out: What do you mean by soft power?
John Feffer: So generally, the contrast is between hard power or military power — the use of military force to achieve objectives — and soft power. Soft power being non-military, could be political, could be economic. It’s often grouped together with cultural efforts to promote a country’s cultural offerings. But there is also the same objective. The objective is to get other countries to do what you want them to do. With the United States, the idea was, well, if we introduce these kinds of soft power mechanisms, such as sending US jazz bands around the world or providing consultancies on how to build democratic institutions, that countries would gradually converge towards US values and ultimately do the kinds of policies that the US wants other countries to do — make it easier for the United States to negotiate with these countries to achieve trade deals, ultimately, perhaps military deals as well. But soft power was a key tool in the toolbox in the arts of persuasion, the arts of what might be called hegemony. In other words, the effort to get countries to do what you want to do not by forcing them to do so, but by convincing them that it is in their own interest to do so, to such a degree that they may not even think that they’re doing what, say, the United States wants them to do. They just think that they’re doing what they want to do. That’s the ultimate victory of soft power. For the United States, of course, this was birthed in the competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, of course, had its Communist International. It was promoting its version of soft power — in other words, the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perhaps also the works of Stalin — sending those books around, sending movies around that embodied communist ideals, the Bolshoi Ballet, Shostakovich music. So the Soviets had their version of soft power as well. But of course, the United States was a wealthier country and had things that a lot of people around the world wanted to see or hear, i.e., jazz, Hollywood movies, even food products that the United States produced, like Spam. So this was our effort to win hearts and minds around the world in our competition with the Soviet Union. Of course, it still existed post-Soviet Union, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but we could argue that perhaps soft power no longer had the singular focus that it had during the Cold War. The goals, the ambitions somewhat constrained when they were no longer within the context of US–Soviet competition.
Atul Singh: Brilliant, John. My old lecturer at Oxford — now quite famous — Niall Ferguson, called it “blue jeans and rock and roll.” And I call it the Harvard and Hollywood Effect. (Laughs) Of course, Joseph Nye — whom I’ve met and who has very kindly been a donor to Fair Observer, too — came up with this idea of soft power a while ago, and you explained it very well. And America’s great ability to have that attractiveness in terms of its economy, its technology, its entertainment industry, its educational institutions and its values held sway. And one could go back to the Atlantic Charter under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We could go back earlier to Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations idea. And the US has had this earnest, moral, “city on the hill” element to it. But — and there’s always been a but — Vietnam dented it. Before that, the 1953 coup in Tehran — MI6-inspired, largely conducted by the CIA — dented it. And in recent years, the Iraq War really dented it. Torture dented it. The flouting of the UN and international treaties dented it. And we have seen soft power a bit damaged. And yet, thousands of students have still come to Harvard and Stanford and MIT. I’m sitting in Silicon Valley, and I was at Stanford yesterday, and it’s still full of foreigners. And so the attraction still persists.
Erosion of US soft power
Atul Singh: So what is this talk about decline, and particularly dramatic decline, that we are seeing in some quarters and that we’ve got together to discuss today?
John Feffer: Well, you’re right that the moral leadership that the United States purported to show to the rest of the world has been damaged — damaged not only by events like the Iraq War but damaged by historical revelations of US involvement in a variety of immoral activities. But increasingly, you saw soft power be separated from the US government itself in the minds of many people. In other words, they could consume Hollywood movies, many of which were critical of US government actions, and imagine that they are consuming an American product without necessarily consuming an American government operation, shall we say; that they could buy blue jeans and not be complicit, say, in US government wars around the world; that they could go and study in US institutions, and that they would be studying at Harvard — they wouldn’t necessarily be studying at the center of CIA recruiting in the United States. (Laughs) So there was plausible deniability, shall we say, in the consumption of the products of soft power and their connection to the US government itself. But increasingly — and this begins before the Trump administration — the US government begins to question the validity of or the value of its soft power operations. Again, in part because it’s no longer advanced in the service of a specific effort or campaign to win hearts and minds — hearts and minds, in this case, against the Soviet Union. For a period of time, obviously in the wars on terrorism, this substituted for the goal of American soft power. We have to somehow convince people around the world that terrorism — or the objectives of al-Qaeda and Boko Haram and other groups around the world — that those are morally bankrupt or instrumentally not competent or whatever, and that US values still should hold sway in this sphere. But it’s really with Donald Trump coming to power in his first administration, and then even more unsettlingly in his second administration, that the assault on soft power begins in earnest. And the attacks are across the board: Soft power and institutions like USAID — the Agency for International Development — that they’re corrupt themselves or that they encourage corruption in other countries by basically shoveling money into the pockets of corrupt leaders; that they’re ineffectual; that they don’t produce either the results that they themselves say that they’re trying to produce, i.e., lifting people out of poverty when, in fact, it seems that no country has been lifted out of poverty by the efforts at least of these humanitarian or development programs; that these institutions simply support failings of well-paid NGO people in the United States or in the UN or in a variety of different organizations. So the critiques are across the board, and Trump comes in and says, “Well, let’s just get rid of them! Let’s not even discuss whether this program or that program is useful or not. Let’s just get rid of USAID,” without realizing — this is par for the course for Donald Trump — that USAID is not just supporting the efforts of finding a better approach to fighting AIDS in Africa or addressing famine around the world or helping people out after a humanitarian disaster. But USAID was a cornerstone of helping the US itself. USAID used to boast on its website that 80% of USAID dollars were spent inside the United States. In other words, a lot of the food aid that went out was, of course, purchased from US farmers. A lot of economic development went into the pockets of US consultants or US businesses. It was a projection, not just of US moral leadership in the world — i.e., “We believe in the importance of humanitarianism” — but it was a bottom-line-oriented effort to help out US businesses. So Trump really wasn’t thinking through that and thus has undermined a lot of US business activity around the world. Not only that, but he has undermined the cornerstone of the research and development complex here in the United States. So much of the money that has been dedicated to scientific research and the like in US universities and research centers has come from the federal government, and Trump has come in and slashed at that as well. And this, of course, has eroded the US educational position around the world. But again, as I said, it was eroding before Trump took office. According to a recent survey, out of the top ten research institutions around the world, only one of them is American. Only Harvard makes the top ten, and the rest, basically, are Chinese. So what Trump is doing is attacking an already weakened edifice of research and development, educational achievement. And so when we’re talking about the erosion of American soft power, you could say that Trump is dealing it a death blow, but he certainly was not the first one to wield an axe against this particular complex.
Tariffs and global backlash
Atul Singh: So, question for you: You just said 80% of the money was being spent in the US, which means that actually the money being spent overseas was not that high. But more importantly, it was creating this loop, which — okay, you want to send food aid, but you purchase it from US farmers. You save people from famine, you also help US farmers. There’s a multiplier effect. And of course, you increase goodwill, so you show that the US is more than missiles and drones, bombs and bullets. It’s also about winning hearts and minds. So basically, is the wheel now off? Is it now largely the US coercive power which will rely more on strong-arm military or economic leverage — tariffs being a classic example? And I can tell you that — and I’m sure you have friends in Europe and Asia, of course you do, you speak many languages, including Russian — many of my friends in the diplomatic circuit, in the business circuit, in the political circuit in countries like Japan and Switzerland, Germany and France and the special ally, UK, are apoplectic at this new indiscriminate levy of tariffs on friend and foe alike. How do you explain this? What will transpire? What will happen because of this?
John Feffer: Yeah, well, there are two aspects of US soft power we haven’t really talked about. One is managerial competence. In addition to the exporting of democracy and the exporting of blue jeans, there was also the exporting of technical expertise. And the United States was a center for that — developing new scientific methods, like during the Green Revolution, for instance, promoting golden rice and sending the scientists around the world to India.
Atul Singh: India benefited greatly from US help in the Green Revolution. There’s a tremendous input. Norman Borlaug, if I remember the name correctly, played a great role.
John Feffer: Yes, but it wasn’t just scientists. It was also folks who specialized in representative democracy. And if a country was emerging from 40, 50 years of martial law, or 500 years of colonialism, then the United States could be expected to send competent managers in the political realm to show folks how to draft a constitution, how to put together checks and balances. Well, obviously managerial competence is not a strong point for the Trump administration. And it has no interest in showing people how to replicate the model that it is currently destroying — i.e., representative democracy and checks and balances in the United States. So that’s off the table right now. The second key element of soft power was participation in global institutions and the establishment of global norms. And here we get closer to your question about tariffs. Because, of course, the United States was instrumental in the establishment, first and foremost, of the United Nations and various international institutions and agreements around such things as human rights and conduct during wartime. And with the United States now withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council under the Trump administration, that kind of participation in the establishment of those kinds of norms is off the table. But it wasn’t just in the political realm — of course, it was in the economic realm as well, with the United States being instrumental in the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and so forth — and the creation of the rules and regulations, if you will, the traffic laws governing the global economy. And that held sway, arguably, until — well, relatively recently. You could even say it held sway until Liberation Day, when Donald Trump instituted these across-the-board tariffs, which was a throwback far before World War II, to a time when, for instance, in the lead-up to World War I or the lead-up to World War II, there were efforts by various countries to protect their economies from globalization. What was globalization at that time? Globalization 1.0 — and grow their economies within tariff barriers. Now, that strategy didn’t disappear. It was employed by other countries during this ascendant period of a globalized economy. South Korea, for instance, uses tariff walls in order to build up its steel industry and then its shipbuilding industry. But it does so within the context of globalization. In other words, South Korea is doing this in order to participate as a stronger actor in the global economy. North Korea is the opposite example. It closes off its economy, uses, effectively, tariff walls — (laughs) along with all sorts of other walls — but not in order to join the global economy; in order to create an autarkic, or what they call Juche, system of self-reliance. So you have those two models just on the Korean Peninsula of approaches to the global economy. What’s unusual, though, is for a dominant country like the United States to use tariff walls, because ordinarily it’s a smaller country that’s going to say, “Well, we can’t compete against these major economies unless we protect our infant industries — help them grow, help them develop — so that one day they can grow up and compete.” Well, the United States has had a fully mature economy for decades and decades. So one might ask, why does the United States exactly need tariff walls to protect what are no longer infant industries? These are completely mature car-making industries or machine-building. And of course, globalization has had a problematic impact on the US economy as well, and the erosion of manufacturing. We’ve compensated with services and financial economic approaches, but a lot of people have suffered. A lot of blue-collar workers have been left behind in this transformation, and these are the folks who voted for Donald Trump, imagining that the United States could return to its position as a manufacturing center of the world and that tariffs would allow that to happen. A little hard to imagine how that’s going to happen, because unfortunately, the United States is indulging in very erratic and unpredictable economic activity at the moment. Trump says, I’m going to impose these tariffs, and then the next day says, well, I’m going to carve out these exceptions, or I’m going to make an exception for an entire country because they’ve been nice to me and kissed my ring. But what that means is that a country outside the United States, as well as businesspeople inside the United States, are trying to make predictions about where they’re going to invest money. They’re not likely going to invest a lot of money in, say, a manufacturing plant in the United States if Trump is going to change his policies the very next day and you’re suddenly left with a stranded asset — an enormous factory that’s designed to produce component parts for a US-made, US-manufactured auto. Previously, those component parts came from Canada, Mexico, China. And you’ve built this plant because you’ve been following Donald Trump’s recommendation to revitalize American manufacturing. And then — boom — he makes a decision: “Ah, well, we’ll let those components come in from Canada or Mexico.” And you’re basically out of luck with this big investment you’ve just made in this manufacturing plant. So it’s very, very difficult to expect the tariff walls will produce in the United States the same kind of results that they produced in South Korea during its major growth phase, because in South Korea they were accompanied by an industrial policy that provided predictability in economic planning. And here in the United States, the tariff walls have not just not been associated with industrial policy, but the Trump administration has been actively cutting out the legs from whatever industrial policy the Biden administration was beginning to establish during its four years in office.
Fairness, decolonization and geopolitical fallout
Atul Singh: That was a very insightful analysis of the Trump tariff effect. But here’s an argument that I hear a lot from people in the administration: that, look, the dollar is overvalued because too many foreigners want to keep assets in the dollar. We are the reserve currency of the world. It is the world’s currency. But our problem — reversing the statement of Nixon’s man who said, “The dollar is our currency and your problem” — they say that manufacturing has hollowed out because other countries have cheated in the global trading system. South Korea, for instance — South Korea keeps tariffs, supports its industry, and then, once its industry has advantages including government subsidies, and once it has been protected under the infant industry argument through tariff and non-tariff barriers, then South Korea basically eats the global shipbuilding industry for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And so you don’t have shipyards anymore in the US, or for that matter in the UK, in Glasgow or elsewhere. So this is not fair, and tariffs are a way to even the playing field. And the Trump administration wants to use tariffs and a devalued dollar to bring back manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt. And they say something needed to be done, and we are the only people who are willing to act. And the others simply were not. The others were happy to sell the American working class down the river for the interests of American consumers and American shareholders. So what do you say to that, John?
John Feffer: Yeah. Well, there are two arguments. One, the Trump administration could care less about blue-collar workers — except when it comes to election time and they need their votes. But the record of the first Trump administration demonstrated that they enacted policies that tilted the playing field even more in favor of the wealthy. And there was no return of manufacturing jobs or better salaries for blue-collar workers during the Trump administration. Number two — Trump administration number two — it’s unlikely that we’ll see any substantive changes in American policy that will benefit the working class. An industrial policy — if these tariffs were associated with an industrial policy, well, maybe we would see that. But there is no industrial policy. We saw something of the like under the Biden administration — an industrial policy to emphasize and protect US green energy production and jobs and manufacturing. So an industrial policy plus tariffs, selectively, against the major players, primarily China. So of course, the Biden administration maintained significant trade barriers, though nothing like the 145% that the Trump administration has levied against China. So that’s one argument. Second argument is that the Trump administration is, in fact, not interested in leveling the playing field. It wants to go back to a time when the United States was king of the hill — when it could say that US business interests and US manufacturing interests trump all the interests of everyone else in the world. Yeah, the United States helped create the global economy. It also structurally ensured that that global economy would benefit the United States — at least initially, until, say, the 1980s or 1990s, when globalization became turbocharged. So the United States, of course, has dominant control over — not control necessarily, but more control than other countries — in institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. So much so that China has said, “Well, forget it. We’re going to create our own parallel institutions, because we’re sick and tired of trying to have a fair distribution of votes within these institutions.” In fact, you could say that South Korea, China, all these other countries were cheating in order to build up their infant industries. And that’s absolutely correct. Another way of putting it is that they deliberately got prices wrong. This is the argument from Alice Amsden — that they looked around at the global economy, and in 1960, South Korea was basically GDP of Ghana per capita. And they said, “Well, there’s really no way out of this unless we stopped listening to the consultants” — who come largely from the United States, on delegations sent by USAID and other organizations. “If we stop listening to them” — and their advice was, you should go with your comparative advantage. What is your comparative advantage, South Korea, at this point? Wigs — which was a major export for South Korea in the early 1960s — and later rice, raw materials, in other words. But if South Korea was ever going to rise higher in the development index, it was going to have to produce finished goods. And in order to do that, it had to basically deny the advice coming from outside economists and basically establish these tariff walls and encourage their own industries in this protected space. You could argue that what South Korea did was not just for South Korea’s benefit, but was really a signal to the rest of the world that this is how development can take place. That “It’s not going to happen out of the largesse of the United States and other great economic powers. It’s not going to come from receiving rice shipments from USAID. It’s not going to come from feeding hungry people with food grown in the United States. It’s going to come from our own efforts to create a manufacturing sector, to have our own industrial policy.” So the question of fairness? Well, you could argue that these efforts by South Korea and other countries really met the test of fairness. If we establish fairness as “every country has a chance to develop and achieve the kinds of sustainable advances that the United States has achieved over the years,” that’s fair. The United States trying to get back to its position of “first among equals,” so to speak, in the global economy? No, that’s fundamentally unfair. And the United States has to get used to this distribution of economic power around the world in the same way that colonial countries in Europe had to get used to the distribution of political power during decolonization. This is a form of decolonization in the economic sphere, if you will. And the Trump administration absolutely does not want to see that happen.
Collapse of trust and the future of US power
Atul Singh: So let’s go back to soft power. You now have a US president who says he’ll take over Greenland, who says Canada should be the 51st state. Says Panama, of course, should be controlled by the US. And actually, it is now, and they’ve managed to put pressure on Panama, which had joined the Belt and Road Initiative, and they now have pressured Hutchison Whampoa to sell its ports — which is a Hong Kong company run by Li Ka-shing — and the US has also talked about Europe raising its defense funding not just to 2% of the GDP, but to 5% of the GDP. The speech by JD Vance in the Munich Security Conference, shall we say, didn’t go down swimmingly well (laughs). It might be fair to say that. And his performance vis-à-vis Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wasn’t construed all that beautifully by any of the allies. And so what are the consequences of this newfound aggression against neighbors and allies?
John Feffer: Yeah, it is shocking to a lot of people, because the expectation was that many of the cornerstones of the American national security enterprise would remain intact. And in fact, the only one that really has remained intact is the desire to spend more on the military — and that Trump is boasting of his trillion-dollar Pentagon budget — and the desire to send and sell those arms overseas, in part as a way to offset the costs of domestic production for our war machine. Everything else has been under question — US involvement in NATO, its respect for sovereignty. Here’s a guy who insists upon sovereignty in the US context: the United States must defend its borders. But he has little concern for the sovereignty of other countries. And sovereignty being, of course, a cornerstone of the global system. The United Nations is a system of nations that will all respect each other’s sovereignty. And they have arguments about where sovereignty begins and ends — how far from the border, the coastline? How do we deal with contested territory — an island here or sliver of territory there? But that’s all handled within a UN system. When Russia invades Ukraine — boom — that’s beyond the pale. That should not exist within the UN system. When Israel commits war crimes on a daily basis in Gaza, that too should not exist within the UN system. Of course, these are not isolated examples. We’ve had plenty of examples of atrocities and the violation of sovereignty in the past. But what’s different today is that you have many major leaders not saying very much in protest to these violations. So you have a country like India, which you might expect to be very firm in its defense of the principle of sovereignty — at least in the abstract — has, of course, said some negative things about Russia’s invasion, but hasn’t really effectively observed sanctions, and indeed has taken advantage of trade with Russia to get cheaper energy imports. The United States now too, led by someone who cares little about the violation of sovereignty — and so, no surprise then that he doesn’t really care about Canada’s sovereignty and doesn’t care that Greenland wants a measure of independence from Denmark — he wants to absorb it into the United States. I think that this is an inflection point. I suppose it’s a common phrase used these days — an inflection point in the international system. Either we head back into a period of anarchy, essentially, in which countries have thrown out the principle of sovereignty, and there’s no longer an international system that establishes again the traffic laws about where one stops and where one goes in the international system. Or people realize before it’s too late, “Hmm, anarchy is not such a great arrangement for the international system,” and we’ll see the resumption of, say, pre-1815 Europe before the Concert of Europe. Or we’ll see World War I, World War II, when the international system also suffered a breakdown. And short of that catastrophe happening again, one might hope that countries will come to their senses and say, “Okay, yeah, we have to make certain compromises in terms of our own sovereignty in order to live in a community of nations with other countries.”
Atul Singh: And where do you think we are headed on current trends? Do you think the pendulum can swing back, or do you think the loss of US soft power now is perhaps permanent? And also, a follow-up question: Does Donald Trump represent — and because I’m sitting in Silicon Valley, I’ll use the Silicon Valley lingo — a feature or a bug?
John Feffer: Yeah. Well, definitely he was a bug in his first administration. And the Biden team did everything it could to resume the status quo. It absorbed some of the changes that Trump had made — of course, they kept the sanctions against China, for instance, or the tariffs against China and some of the export controls. But in general, they tried to reassure the international community that the United States is back. In other words, it is going to play a cooperative role. I’m not so sure that a subsequent administration — if voters turn Trump out of office and put someone else in from a different party — I’m not so sure that it will be possible to persuade the international community that the United States is back again. I think there’s just a fear that the United States can’t be depended upon by anybody, frankly. Even if you’re a far-right leader, the United States can’t be depended upon. You might have a personal relationship with Trump, but obviously, if he decides he doesn’t like you anymore, as he decided with a number of leaders, then all bets are off. So that means that countries are going to look either to their own resources — Europe, of course, spending more on their military; Canada, beginning to look for other places to export their products to; Mexico, the same — and a lot of countries, especially in the Global South, are going to look to China. And China has — if you look at some of the speeches that Xi Jinping made during his recent trip to Southeast Asia — what did he emphasize? He emphasized stability, security, predictability — everything that the United States is not. These countries are going to say, “Hey, why should we hitch our wagon to a country like the United States that is so volatile, that it changes completely every four years, when we could hitch our wagon to China, which fundamentally hasn’t changed?” Of course, China has changed — its economy has changed rather dramatically — but at least for the last ten or 15 years, China has consistently promoted its Belt and Road Initiative and various infrastructure deals with countries. So my guess is that, at least in terms of the US role in any stable international community, people are just not going to look to the United States any longer for leadership. The role of the United States as a research hub — a hub of soft power, if you will — I think that that era also is over. Hollywood is now but one of many film industries, including Bollywood, including the film industry in Nigeria, the European film industry, the Mexican film industry. Yes, Hollywood obviously still has a lot of cachet, a lot of power, a lot of money. But I think it is now operating in a multipolar world. The same, obviously, for educational institutions. When it comes to scientists, they’re looking at — and I have friends who are in universities around here in western Massachusetts who are on tenterhooks because their grant focus for scientific research either has been canceled or they don’t know what the status of them are. They don’t know what the future is. They don’t know if their graduate students will be able to continue their research. Everything is up in the air. And a lot of scientists, at least I hear, are asking this fundamental question: Should I stay in the United States if I cannot expect in the next several years to have my research funded? And I’m getting these offers from institutions in Europe and around the world that promise me not just funding for a year, but funding for the entire life cycle of my research project. So let’s put it this way: When it comes to soft power, the United States, over the last ten years especially, has seen a significant decline. And the Trump administration, thinking that it’s restoring the greatness of America, has in fact done the opposite by destroying the very foundations of what made American hegemony so powerful, especially its soft power elements. Military power — that’s all that’s going to be left to the United States. It will increasingly resemble Russia — a country that is militarily powerful because it has nuclear weapons and has invested a lot of money in its military. Russia, of course, 6% of its GDP recently, the United States aspiring to increase it to 5% here—
Atul Singh: With a much bigger denominator, John.
John Feffer: Yes, absolutely.
Atul Singh: Really big denominator. The American military is extraordinary. The American Navy basically is much more powerful than the British Navy ever was. It’s a colossus.
John Feffer: Absolutely. And this commitment to military power, but also old-fashioned fossil fuel power, which is, again, something it would share with Russia. And abandoning the efforts to go beyond the fossil fuel era. So the United States under Trump, yes, it’s going back to the 1950s. And the world is not going to go back to the 1950s with it.
Atul Singh: I see. Again, do you think it’s irredeemable, or do you think the political climate can change, will change, and the pendulum will swing?
John Feffer: The political climate will change, there’s no question about it — unless Trump short-circuits the democratic process and runs “for a third term” or declares martial law and takes over all institutions of society, which is — alas — not a completely unknown possibility. But yes, I think it’s very likely that, if democracy continues to exist here in the United States, there will be a pendulum shift. But I don’t think that is sufficient to restore US soft power. The boulder is rolling down the hill. We, the next party, could set up brigades to arrest the motion of that boulder downhill, but it’s going to be tough. Again, this is a powerful country, so it’s not going to be overnight. We’re not going to see the United States turn into Easter Island, or the Mayan civilization, from one day to the next.
Atul Singh: Or even Great Britain.
John Feffer: Or even Great Britain, yes. But we could become a nation of shopkeepers (laughs) within a generation, within 20 to 25 years — a well-armed nation of shopkeepers, to be sure — but still, not the power that we were previously, i.e., a power that was projecting — was holding together in many ways — the international community. Not through its actual moral leadership — because, as you say, there are lots of reasons why the US was immoral in its leadership around the world — but at least in theory, the United States was acting in this fashion. And now the mask is off, and there’s no pretense that the United States has any moral leadership left in it.
Atul Singh: On that somber note, John Feffer, thank you so much for your time, and we’ll have you back very shortly for a number of other discussions.
John Feffer: I look forward to it, thank you.
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
