Does US global responsibility deserve another chance?

The US has seized on what it regards as Russia's breach of international peace and stability to reassert its mantle of responsibility over a just world. Why did America lose this mantle, and is there reason to support this country having another try at some form of global order?

The question isn't really one for European governments or other American client states, but for humanity as a whole. What good would it do, if a country with butterfingers is given another chance to remake the world in its image?

Their own worst enemy

The US has had such free rein for so long that it is the source of most of the security threats in the world today, like some capricious deity responsible for unleashing evil into our world. Remember that the US played a major role in creating the Afghan insurgency that gave rise to al-Qaeda, it armed Saddam Hussein, it sponsored coups, and it inflamed civil wars. It caused chaos in a number of countries such as Syria, giving rise to ISIS.

Just about everywhere the US is able to act freely to make the world a better place, it makes it a worse place. Then, promptly, all media coverage of whatever troubled region we were talking about ends, leaving suffering people behind as the US eyes the next region it intends to operate on - like some mad surgeon with a hundred percent death rate behind him.

Rules-based disorder

At present, we are faced with the apparent collapse of an international "rules-based order", the favoured term of America and its allies when they arbitrarily moralise about international affairs and declare through various media platforms "what must be done" about some problem they happen to find offensive to them. American leaders presume to define good and evil (the current Ukraine narrative), and assign the former label to themselves or US clients in all cases, although in practice good and evil are not typically good assessments of the behaviour of states. The result of this mindset is hardly order but disorder, enmity and the inflammation of crisis everywhere across the world.

There are two big reasons that would compel one to decline America's pleas to be given a second chance as the world's moral arbiter and sole superpower. The first is that of its failures being rooted in its own core identity, such that it is doomed to continue failing and repeating itself indefinitely, because it creates all the alleged problems it hopes to address. The second is that of the character of those who currently guide American foreign policy.

Agents of chaos

America keeps failing to establish "order" because its identity is chaos. Americans are always most glad when they are destroying governments and handing out guns to bandits around the world, in keeping with their own ideas about guns belonging in the hands of random citizens. As a country born from sedition and criminal secession from Britain, the Americans can't help thinking like criminals at the international level and coveting scenes of disorder rather than order.

It is a fundamental part of American liberalism, whether handled from a progressive or conservative angle, that America sides with gun-toting rebels and contras rather than those who maintain the peace. They fail to govern the world because their ideological reverence is not for a body of laws but for chaos and banditry. The romantic urge to recreate the Wild West overpowers their reason, compelling them away from the path of responsibility even if they try to plan otherwise, like some dog unable to resist scratching its flea-ridden hide, no matter the wishes of its owner.

Serial failures

The current American foreign policy establishment is especially underserving of a second chance at creating the "American Century", as they used to call their dream. Every single foreign policy idea they have presented, from the insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the occupation of Afghanistan of 2001-2021, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003, backfired spectacularly and endangered their own country.

The Americans are all too eager to give themselves a second chance at governing the world and creating a stable order. Others should not be so keen to see that.