The United States, a nation that progressed rapidly by capitalizing on its power and advanced technology, has managed to manipulate the world’s dynamics purely to suit its own interests. While Americans are deeply engaged in a democratic dynamic, they balance this with brutal behavior. This duality of brightness and darkness is comparable to the yin and yang of Chinese cosmology.
The US is, certainly, an innovative, entrepreneurial nation that is continuously offering the world new ideas and advanced technology developed by its universities, which dominate the international educational arena. But power and technology, the factors that have made the United States a superpower, are not subject to the free-world dynamic that may constrain the use of either one. Both attributes serve the United States best by going through the brutality of military interventions, espionage, or the use of its veto power in the United Nations Security Council.
Being a superpower brings both challenges and enjoyment to American citizens, which creates a false belief that the United States has a global responsibility to fulfill when, in fact, most of its foreign encounters have nothing to do with its national security.
Along with the initiation of each new invention, the United States imposes legal and financial conditions that are perfectly designed to serve its own economy at the expense of the rest of the world. Charging a fee for novelty is fair; however, when the United States begins to lose ground to other nations or to non-US companies, its cruel side emerges in its attempts to slow down its rivals’ successes – as in the current attempts to ban Huawei and the overall trade war with China.
Furthermore, the freedom to sell assault weapons for domestic use to ordinary American citizens portrays a brutal behavioral aspect that leads to frequent mass shootings without truly addressing the cause of the problem: giving everyone the right to possess semiautomatic weapons that are also used by volatile people has resulted in the loss of numerous innocent lives. The acceptance of “weaponizing” American citizens domestically might correlate with the implicit endorsement of American military troops’ interference in other nations, especially since the casualty rate among American soldiers is minimal given today’s military technology.
Simultaneously, the “Me Too” movement demonstrates that the US democratic mechanism, along with its rule of law, has not been sufficient to immunize American women against being forced to accept cruel sexual harassment by powerful superiors in order to keep their jobs. Meanwhile the caging of immigrants’ kids at the American borders to satisfy the cruel desire of its president is a clear symbol of national brutality that should not happen in a nation that claims to be ruled democratically.
Many American scholars and politicians refuse to recognize Trump as a product of the United States’ political defectiveness. They decline to acknowledge that the seeds of brutality that the US has been planting abroad have managed to find their way to American soil, to be harvested by American citizens
Moreover, President Donald Trump, who was brought into the White House through fair and free elections, is soundly denounced by many American scholars and politicians who nevertheless refuse to recognize him as a product of the United States’ political defectiveness. They decline to acknowledge that the seeds of brutality that the US has been planting abroad have managed to find their way to American soil, to be harvested by American citizens.
Meanwhile, America’s international rivals are nowadays more intelligent in reaching out to the rest of the world than the United States. Russia works to strengthen its relationship with nations that are exposed to America’s brutalities, although Russia has little political leverage to offer to the world. However, political sympathy is always valued by autocratic rulers for domestic purposes. Meanwhile, China is smoothly expanding its infrastructure projects to many nations, which will eventually strengthen that country’s political role in various parts of the world.
The US has successfully managed to develop a tiny segment of beneficiaries in each foreign nation, but lost many of its genuine friends because of its destructive foreign policy. For example, the US privileges some of its undemocratic allied nations by allowing more of their products to enter the United States, a policy that benefits a few cronies, whereas it turns a blind eye toward the same nations’ human-rights misconduct. This is a clearly cruel policy that is currently being highlighted by President Trump, but which had somehow been eclipsed under his predecessors who were applying similar policy, but acted hypocritically.
In my résumé, I tend to emphasize my American educational credentials that certainly advanced my knowledge and sharpened my powers of critical thinking, and I am still eager to learn more; however, when it comes to ethical values, I distance myself from what the United States often stands for.
Being a superpower and the largest economy in the world should naturally advance a country’s foreign policy. Conversely, however, America’s diplomacy tends to move from one failure to another in the knowledge that it can easily back up its position with its cruel actions – many of those flops have caused irreversible damage in the relationship of the United States with Middle Eastern citizens who have lost trust in the United States. The United States certainly won’t give up its power or its privileged position in universal institutions that naturally expand America’s brutal egotistical behavior and concurrently result in intensifying its ignorance of world dynamics.
According to Chinese philosophy, everything in life has its yin and yang aspect – a shadow cannot exist without light or dark. The United States’ democracy and brutality are naturally chasing one another, opposing forces rising in a perfectly complementary approach. What the US has been applying for decades is the democratization of its cruelty that might be even advanced by its system of “checks and balances,” which is demonstrated best by the Iraq invasion in 2003 that was endorsed by the US Congress, for example – Trump has reversed this process by brutalizing US democracy with the withdrawal of troops from Syria, a move that is widely opposed by American lawmakers and political experts.
American scholars nowadays are talking about the decay of democracy in their nation; however, the internal pattern of brutality and democracy still suits their society perfectly. Meanwhile, when it comes to foreign policy, the US is certainly a nation in which its cruelty is culturally rooted, not a political aberration. Furnishing the Middle East with more brutality and less freedom has made the US a completely distasteful nation in the eyes of many Middle Eastern citizens. The answer to the long-lasting question, “Why do they hate us?” could be better understood by digesting the United States’ foreign policy, which is better perceived from outside.