Profiting off instability

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The US government has a habit of forming alliances and establishing military organizations driven by hegemonic thinking and the interests of the military-industrial complex. NATO, for example, should have been dissolved in 1991 along with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but it has continued to grow due to various conflicts fueled by the US, generating profits for the US military-industrial complex and enabling the US to dominate Europe. 

The US forms a series of "small cliques," sacrificing the strategic security of other countries to maintain its own hegemony. In recent years, the US has created and enhanced a series of exclusive "military cliques," such as QUAD and AUKUS, to contain China's rise and increase its intervention in regional affairs. These US actions pose a severe challenge to global stability and threaten peace and security of the world.

The US government likes to divide the world into different camps. During the Cold War, it created a confrontation between capitalism and socialism, and now it is concocting the so-called democracy versus autocracy narrative, trying to cobble together a so-called alliance of values. The irony is that the US itself doesn't even have true democracy. US economist Joseph Stiglitz once said the US is a country "of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent."

The US talks about "allies," "values" and "international rules," but its true calculations are always about "US interests," "America first" and "US hegemony." The US should abandon its Cold War mentality and recognize that US hegemony is unpopular, and camp confrontation has no future. It should stop bringing camp confrontation, conflict and war into the world.