By Zhong Sheng
What is security? How can people guarantee safety?
Martin Luther King Jr., the American civil rights icon, had actually provided an answer to the questions long ago.
“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe,” he said.
However, some U.S. officials have obviously abandoned their conscience. Under the guise of safeguarding national safety, they have left no stone unturned to defame China and taken great delight in spreading rumors and deluding other countries into misunderstanding China.
Lately, the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced the so-called China Task Force Act, shamelessly propagandizing the “China threat” theory and grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs.
Before that, the U.S. also peddled malicious lies against China in terms of international security issues at the 75th session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.
The chaos and mess stirred up by such political manipulations will never cover up the fact that the U.S. is trying to gain hegemonic control of other countries.
Numerous hard facts have proved that the U.S. is the main culprit threatening global political security as it has frequently interfered in and subverted other countries’ regimes, regarding such misdeeds as tools of foreign policy and causing a large number of tragedies that plunged people into great misery and suffering.
Throughout its over 200 years of history, the U.S. has created a disgraceful record of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter once referred to the U.S. as “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”, a result of the U.S. forcing other countries to “adopt our American principles”.
The world will never forget that the U.S. put forward the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, openly claiming the Americas its sphere of influence and wantonly engaging in takeover and expansion.
Although the international community has already seen through the hegemony nature of the Monroe Doctrine, some U.S. politicians today are still brazenly prettifying it, packaging it as a new version of the Monroe Doctrine and intensifying interference in other countries.
The unceasing wars in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have shown the world that the U.S. is still manipulating the internal affairs of other countries from behind the scenes and stirring up troubles.
It has been clear to everyone that the U.S. was responsible for the turmoil in West Asia and North Africa and directed the Color Revolutions, causing long-time insecurity and turbulence in many countries.
Under the guise of humanitarianism, the U.S. has wielded the stick of hegemony and caused disorder and humanitarian disasters around the world.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has conducted counterterror activities in 80 countries, and has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $6.4 trillion on counterterrorism efforts through Fiscal Year 2020, according to a survey on the costs of war conducted by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University in the U.S.
At least 800,000 people have died due to direct war violence. Over 335,000 civilians have been killed in direct violence of the wars and several times as many have died as an indirect result of the wars.
The survey also found that 21 million Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Syrian people are living as war refugees and internally displaced persons, in grossly inadequate conditions.
The question for some U.S. politicians is how should they pay for such a huge loss of life and property?
While arrogantly claiming the U.S. “a city upon a hill”, some American officials have frequently interfered in other countries’ internal affairs and exported wars to meet the need of domestic politics, and fantasized about maintaining hegemony by intervening in and transforming other countries, becoming the biggest source of instability for global political security.
After the Cold War, the U.S. adopted a grand strategy that gave pride of place to military threats and methods; at worst, they turned the U.S. into a destructive actor in the world, said Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of policy and research at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Brutally interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, the U.S. has incurred growing public outrage.
More than 70 percent of the Arabs surveyed had negative views of U.S. policy toward Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Libya, according to a poll carried out by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies headquartered in Doha, capital city of Qatar.
81 percent of the respondents believe that the U.S. poses a threat to the security and stability of the region, the results suggested.
The past 30 years saw a string of moral, diplomatic and military failures of the U.S., pointed out Constanze Stelzenmuller, a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings Institution
In fact, nearly 50 years ago, General Maxwell Taylor of the U.S. Army already noted that the U.S. was facing a serious risk of allowing its democratic system to be destroyed by its own brutality in his memoirs Swords and Plowshares.
The general trend of history and the times is unstoppable and can never be reversed. The rash and unrealistic actions of some U.S. politicians made out of arrogance and prejudice are doomed to failure.
Justice naturally inhabits people’s heart, and peaceful development and win-win cooperation are the only right way in the world.
No attempt that goes against the general trend will find support; any misdeeds that undermine global political security will surely backfire; anyone that is obsessed with hegemony, bullying, or manipulation will only end up harming themselves.
(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People’s Daily to express its views on foreign policy.)
