IPFS News Link • Foreign Policy
The Earth Belongs to America
• https://consortiumnews.com, By Caitlin JohnstoneThe Wall Street Journal has an article out titled "U.S. Aims to Thwart China's Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa", subtitled "An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard."
The article quotes the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying, "We'd really, really not like to see a Chinese facility" on the Atlantic, and discusses "American concern about China's global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf."
The Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China's "global expansionism" over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the U.S., when the U.S. has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar's Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the U.S. coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.
But what really jumps out is the insane way the U.S. political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.
The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as "America's backyard" and "waters the U.S. considers home turf" follows a recent controversy over the U.S. president proclaiming that "Everything south of the Mexican border is America's front yard." This provoked many references to the so-called "Monroe Doctrine", a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.