Crimea River
Trump’s reckless folly on Ukraine exposes not just his ignorance, but America’s broader collapse into violence, corruption, and global irrelevance.
There’s not much Americans must be proud of. For decades, they’ve lived under the lie the US is the greatest country. Rather they’ve been sold delusion and disappointment - every US President since the assassination of JFK has echoed the delusion and deepened the decline. Instead of vision, wars have been delivered, and victory has been a reality of failure, markets without fairness, and politics without truth.
Washington has sold Americans a myth of freedom while stripping away their rights, a myth of prosperity while hollowing out the middle class, and a myth of leadership while turning the country into a global despotic State.
Tuesday this week, the foundation of that myth was reinforced by Trump as he’s consistently done since taking office in January. Whatever hope Trump promised pre his election was a lie. It can’t be described as anything else.
The US Presidency has been devalued by ignorance, geopolitical folly, terrorism, murder, and corruption. Today this is America in free fall, and Trump is carrying the relay baton to its finality.
America’s narrative of exceptionalism is nothing more than a empty slogan - a self-deluding myth masking decline, disguises failure as destiny, and leaves it clinging to past glory while accelerating toward irrelevance.
In front of a packed White House press conference Trump alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, highlighted in abundance of geopolitically folly the ignorance that enshrines him.
Discussing the Ukraine-Russia war, Trump insisted Ukraine had every chance of winning with the possibility of taking certain parts of Russia and reclaiming Crimea. It’s inconceivable Ukraine could ever reclaim Crimea – exemplifying Trump’s lack of current world affairs. But Trump suggested it, and in his world it’s a fictional fact. Crimea was part of the Russian Federation before it became Ukraine after 1954. Crimea. is now Russia’s forever.
Describing Russia as a “Paper Tiger, Trump also said 7000 Ukrainians were dying every week - it’s bizarre contradiction to think a paper tiger can kill that many Ukrainians on a weekly basis.
Trump’s ignorance of geopolitics can’t be more damning. His comments show how a President of limited knowledge of global affairs and ignorant to the realities of the truth is dangerous to humanity’s existence.
Openly flagging support for Ukraine but shifting the responsibility back to NATO, Trump reduced the war to a business model. His proposal was blunt: the US will sell arms to Europe, and Europe will pass them on to Ukraine. It’s not strategy - but profiteering dressed up as policy. For Washington, war isn’t a moral question but a commercial opportunity.
Such a grotesque commodification of conflict isn’t new. The US has built its global dominance on perpetual war. Every administration since World War II has kept America at war somewhere throughout the world, often under false pretences. Trump isn’t an aberration but the continuation of a machine where human suffering fuels the military-industrial complex and the Israeli Lobby.
The US has long been the greatest purveyor of terror. From the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, to the illegal invasion of Iraq, to decades of covert coups in Latin America and Africa, Washington has repeatedly used fear and force to impose its will. Drone strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan incinerated civilians with impunity. Guantánamo Bay became a global symbol of lawless detention and torture.
Today, America’s unwavering support for Israel’s campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon extends that legacy. Billions in weapons and diplomatic cover flow unimpeded, even as hospitals are bombed, children starved, and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. What the US denounces as “terrorism” when committed by others is the very practice it funds and enables on an industrial scale.
The rot isn’t only abroad. America is a nation collapsing under its own contradictions. Its healthcare system leaves millions uninsured and bankrupt. Infrastructure is crumbling, schools are failing, and life expectancy lags behind other developed nations. Gun massacres occur so frequently that they no longer shock the public. The opioid epidemic has hollowed out entire communities, leaving despair in its wake.
Meanwhile, the middle class has been stripped bare. Wages stagnate as the cost-of-living soars. Billionaires thrive while ordinary Americans drown in debt. The promise of the American Dream is dead, replaced by a reality where survival itself has become the measure of success.
America’s political system mirrors its social collapse. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the archaic electoral college have corroded democracy. Twice in two decades, the presidency was awarded to the loser of the popular vote. The Supreme Court is politicised beyond repair. Congress is paralysed by tribal warfare. Governance itself has been reduced to spectacle.
Trump didn’t break this system; he’s its product. His rise was the inevitable consequence of decades of decline — the final expression of a system where ignorance and arrogance outweigh truth and competence.
The US for decades, cast itself as the indispensable nation. Now it’s a destabiliser, exporting chaos and importing despair. Allies hedge their bets elsewhere. Rivals grow stronger. Trust in Washington has evaporated.
As Trump doubles down on vengeance, nationalism, and war profiteering, America accelerates toward irrelevance. History will not remember it as the “shining city on a hill” but as an empire that mistook terror for leadership, propaganda for truth, and Trump for salvation — and in doing so, hastened its own collapse.
Geprge Hazim, every open-minded person of even minimal intellect and ability to reason ought to read this succinct, clear, accurate and apposite assessment of the current state of the USA and how it got here.
In my mind, it is very much the case, as George implies, that Trump is not the cause of this cancer but simply an unscrupulous beneficiary and contributor to it.
As someone born in the first benevolent English summer after the end of WWII but whilst the results of that catastrophe were still very apparent and were so throughout my childhood; I find it almost impossible to accept that a nation that fought, (although somewhat tardily), against the tyrannical threat of a new World order under a demented dictator, now supports with funds, armaments and political protection, yet another hateful, prejudiced and perverted 'leader' who seeks to save himself by the killing, maiming or dispossession of millions of other human beings.
I grew next door to a family of Jews who had escaped the horror of 1930s and 1940s Germany and I well understand the sympathy of most of the World's population for the Jews, which resulted from the exposure of concentration camps and the Holocaust. It is with no pleasure that I suggest that sympathy for the Israeli's is now misplaced. The fact cannot be ignored that Israel is now committing genocide and atrocities that match those that they themselves suffered. Indeed, as clear and visible as it is that Israel has become a Pariah State and that Netanyahu and his colleagues in malevolence are criminals who need to be brought to account, I still struggle to understand how a nation whose ancestors experienced what they did, can then turn around and repeat such atrocities.
As bad as that is and as much as it haunts me, I am also disappointed, even frightened, by the reality that other nations in the World have done nothing of real significance to intervene and stop the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and the West Bank and the impunity with which Israel is attacking other neighbouring nations. It bothers me greatly that one of the best things to come out of the disaster of WWII - the United Nations, is continually being attacked and denigrated for not doing enough when, as any reasonably intelligent person knows, it has done all that it can and continues to do so. What it can't do is amass a military force to stop the Israeli onslaught - it can only provide the forum for its member nations to do that.
Sadly, the major mistake in the United Nations foundation that has been exposed with the current events, is the veto powers given to the permanent members of the Security Council. I can well understand why that provision may have seemed legitimate and even desirable when the UN was in its infancy but what time has shown, without any doubt, is that those vetos have too often been used for the benefit only of the nation exercising them, not as I believe was intended, to prevent some malevolent block from misusing the UN to achieve its own ends.
I don't know how things will turn out. What I do know is that if the World learns nothing else from this genocide, and the US exercise of its veto to protect that genocide whilst hypocritcally providing the very armaments and funding that allow it to proceed, it ought to be obvious that this provision needs to be amended or removed. Unless that happens, in my view, the UN will indeed have past its use-by date, despite all its great work over the last 70+ years.
Thank you for your support once again A Skeptic. Greatly appreciate it!!