U.S.S. Maine. The Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam’s WMDs. Throughout its history, the United States has left no stone unturned in chasing opportunities for war. Manipulating military intelligence, attempting to censor the press (thank God for the First Amendment) and planning and staging false flag operations have all been part of the United States’ playbook for foreign policy. After all, what can one expect from a nation that’s been in a state of war for most of its existence? A lucrative military-industrial complex relies on constant military intervention, the never-ending sale of war machines. But perhaps the bloody path of American neo-imperialism isn’t even the worst part. The hypocrisy of the United States’ hollow call-to-actions—State of The Union speeches on spreading “democracy” abroad, empty gestures of empathy—is the vital step in maintaining America’s war industry. When America’s rival nations, such as Iran, don’t submit to such hollow ideals, the use of military force is normalized and the warmongers profit. 

This is exactly what happened on Sunday, May 9, in the Arabian Sea, when the United States Navy seized a vessel that was transporting a cache of thousands of weapons, allegedly sent from Iran to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are fighting against the Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia. Preventing weapons from flowing into existing regional conflicts certainly seems like a heroic action—until one realizes that this seizure is not about peacekeeping at all. For the past many years, the United States itself has been funding billions of dollars of weaponry and military technology to Saudi Arabia—weapons that have created the world’s most devastating humanitarian crisis. Several human rights organizations have reported on Saudi Arabia’s absolute disregard for civilian life in Yemen, and videos revealed that American-built weapons have killed hundreds of Yemenis. But no one in the international community bats an eye, because it’s the United States. America has hijacked the world order.

After the Second World War, proxy warfare became the most common structure of global conflict, and the United States adopted a new playbook for foreign policy. What began as an effort of containing Soviet imperialism soon distorted into neo-imperialism itself, with America’s war industry aching to find new opportunities to establish dominance in all parts of the world, from Korea to Vietnam to South America. These efforts, successful or not, led to an extreme drop in social and political conditions in already developing nations, breeding racial tensions, religious extremism and economic authoritarianism.

“The rise of socialist and nationalist leaders in the Global South after WWII threatened the interests of the capital class, which prompted the American empire to intervene,” senior Seun Adekunle said. “The brutality of this intervention has led to the destabilization of many regions, caused the deaths of millions and left countless more without basic necessities and under authoritarian rule to this day.” 

The United States maintains its diplomatic dominance in institutions such as the UN by playing a “game of exceptions”, using gaslighting and paving moral superiority to defend its national exceptionalism. When the United States funds weapons to genocidal states such as Saudi Arabia, it’s done in the name of “national security” and “peacekeeping” (how morbidly ironic). But when rival nations fund similar causes, they are almost always labeled as “threatening” and “terroristic” by Western media. This is the machine that works to weaponize the world order, to align the cards in favor of the United States and leave no opportunities for other nations to compete. Such manipulation does not yield peace nor prosperity for the world nor American citizens; it merely generates billions of dollars of profit for unnamed men and women in a “deep state” composed of weapons lobbyists, military generals, politicians and intelligence leaders. These profits all come at the cost of human lives abroad.

“The United States government has done a lot of damage by intervening in Latin America and the Middle East for decades,” senior Eshaan Basu said. “It’s time that we end such aggressive intervention”. 

The most effective way for American citizens to resist America’s powerful network of lies is to recognize that it exists. They must become aware of the media biases, government cover-ups and other forms of deception that shape a shield against accountability. The people’s voice now has the power to be amplified through the Internet, and when used effectively, it can shatter any system that fails to serve the American people.