"In the early 21st century, if any power sought world domination, coercing others and flouting rules, it was the United States," said an opinion piece by The New York Times in October 2020.

Since the declaration of independence in 1776, the United States has been bent on expanding its territory and influence. Since the end of World War II, the United States has spared no effort to chase and maintain global hegemony. Capitalizing on its absolute superiority in the sectors of military, economy, science and technology, and culture, the United States frequently interfered in other countries' internal affairs, and bullied, plundered and controlled other countries under the banner of "freedom, democracy and human rights."

In the post-war era, successive US administrations have pursued hegemonistic strategies. From the Truman Doctrine, also known as the policy of containment, to foreign policies of recent US administrations, including Barack Obama's "smart power" strategy, Donald Trump's "America First "policy, and Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" plan, the ultimate purpose is always to secure US hegemony.

The United States has hyped tensions all around the world by launching wars, provoking confrontations, and overthrowing foreign governments with armed forces, bringing warfare and turmoil to many countries and regions; by upholding so-called "American exceptionalism," the country has wantonly employed double standards with no regard to international laws and rules, as it has severely obstructed international cooperation by making use of international organizations, accords, and agreements to fit in with its needs but abandoning those going against its interests; by rigging the international finance system, the United States has grabbed enormous wealth while turning a blind eye to greed and speculation, giving rise to the global financial crisis; blatantly imposing long-arm jurisdiction, the country has initiated trade disputes with many others and stopped at nothing to crack down those it sees as opponents; and it has also tried manipulating the international public opinions, while exporting its values and launching cultural invasions in other countries.

It is the biggest saboteur of international rules and order, and the source of growing uncertainty and instability in the world. America's hegemonism and power politics have undermined world order, threatened human peace, and caused serious consequences for the world, thus becoming the biggest challenge for the progress of human society and civilization, as well as peaceful development.

A BELLIGERENT NATION

The United States has always been a belligerent nation. After announcing its independence on July 4, 1776, in its history of more than 240 years, the country has not been at war for less than 20 years.

Dakota Wood, senior research fellow for defense programs in the Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense, noted in October 2018 that in "every 15 years or so," the United States would get involved in a conflict.

To maintain its hegemony, the United States has blatantly violated the principles of the United Nations (UN) Charter and the norms of international law many times.

Relying on its military strength, the United States has interfered in other countries' domestic affairs and created conflicts by waging wars, implementing containment strategies and plotting so-called "peaceful evolutions" and "color revolutions," severely threatening world peace.

Since World War II, the United States has waged or participated in wars in the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and other places, which not only killed many soldiers, but also caused extremely serious civilian casualties and property losses, resulting in terrible humanitarian disasters.

In 2003, despite widespread opposition from the international community, the United States launched the Iraq War on unwarranted charges, which has killed 180,000 to 200,000 Iraqi civilians, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. The coalition forces also used depleted uranium and white phosphorus munitions in Iraq, which seriously endangered the local environment and people's health.

According to a report released in March 2021 by Code Pink, a US anti-war group, the United States and its allies have consistently bombed other countries over the past 20 years, dropping an average of more than 40 bombs a day. In late February 2021, just over a month after the Biden administration took office, the US military launched air strikes against eastern Syria, drawing strong condemnation from many sides.

Behind the US military's indiscriminate bombings overseas is the country's continuously high military spending.

"In 2020, US military expenditure reached an estimated 778 billion US dollars, representing an increase of 4.4 percent over 2019," said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in a report published in April.

"As the world's largest military spender, the United States accounted for 39 percent of total military expenditure in 2020. This was the third consecutive year of growth in US military spending," it said.

Stephen Walt, Harvard University professor of international relations, wrote on the website of Foreign Policy magazine: "Endless campaigns abroad unleash a host of political forces－militarism, secrecy, enhanced executive authority, xenophobia, faux patriotism, demagoguery, etc.－all of them contrary to the civic virtues on which a healthy democracy depends."

According to an article published by The Center for American Progress, a US public policy research and advocacy organization, earlier this year, America's defense budget today is higher, when adjusted for inflation, than what it spent at the peak of the Cold War, and is currently more than the defense budgets of the next 10 largest countries in the world combined while consuming more than half of the total discretionary budget of the entire federal government. However, "no matter how much the United States spends on defense, it cannot buy perfect security," the article argued.

'WAR ON TERROR'

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan under the banner of anti-terrorism. Biden announced on April 14 that the US troops would be completely withdrawn from Afghanistan before Sept 11, and on July 8 advanced the deadline to Aug 31.

The United States claimed to have fought extremism and brought stability to the war-torn country, but failed on both fronts, said former Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, anti-terrorism has become the focus of America's national security and foreign policy. Since then, with double standards and the Cold War mentality, the United States has carried out the "War on Terror" across the world in the name of "national security" and "defending freedom," divided countries into different camps, and even overthrown the governments of other countries under the guise of fighting terrorism.

US-led anti-terrorism operations have become a tool to maintain its hegemony and promote the so-called American democracy and values overseas, hurting many civilians, worsening the refugee issue, throwing affected regions into chaos, and making security threats spill over.

Apart from the so-called "anti-terrorism" operations, the United States has also grossly trampled on the human rights and freedom of other countries, as evidenced by the shocking scandals of prisoner abuses by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Since 2001, "contrary to what most Americans believe, the war on terror is not winding down－it has spread to more than 40 percent of the world's countries," the US Smithsonian Magazine wrote in an article published in early 2019.

According to a report released in November 2019 by the Costs of War project based at US Brown University, between 770,000 and 801,000 people have died in post-9/11 wars.

The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) has long engaged in anti-China separatist, radical and violent activities inside and outside China, causing huge casualties and property losses to the Chinese people, and was added to the sanctions list under the UN Security Council Resolution 1267, of which the United States was a co-sponsor.

In recent years, the ETIM has been on the move in Afghanistan, Syria and other places, plotting and carrying out a series of violent terrorist activities, including the car bomb attack against the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan in 2016.

However, the United States unilaterally removed the ETIM from its list of terrorist organizations in late 2020, claiming that for more than a decade, there had been no reliable evidence that the ETIM continued to exist. Such a move has clearly revealed the United States's sinister intention to contain China with terrorism.

The United States has also cultivated many anti-government forces around the world, many of which later became terrorist organizations and perpetrators of terrorist activities worldwide.

For example, after the Cuban Revolution, the United States sheltered several armed groups opposing the Cuban government, and even allowed them to set up training camps in southern Florida. In October 1976, a Cuban passenger airliner exploded over Barbados, killing all 73 people on board. Luis Posada Carriles, originally from Cuba and in exile in the United States, was suspected of causing the crash and was wanted by Cuba, but the US government always refused to extradite him to Cuba.

In the 1980s, the United States strongly supported Nicaraguan anti-government guerrillas. Stansfield Turner, former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, once testified before Congress: "I think many of the guerrilla actions are terrorist in nature and are terrorist acts supported by the United States, which is irrefutable."

More ironically, the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in the name of anti-terrorism, but has in fact nurtured terrorism. During the Cold War, the United States used Afghanistan as a pawn against the Soviet Union, providing large amounts of weapons and money for extremist groups, including Osama bin Laden's forces, to encourage them to fight the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, the United States immediately abandoned those useless "friends," making Afghanistan a haven for global terrorism and extremism.

Code Pink's co-founder Medea Benjamin and the group's researcher Nicholas Davis wrote in an article that if the Biden administration continues to accumulate more lies and atrocities on the basis of previous administrations, "it will not be able to regain the world's respect for American leadership, nor will it win the American public's support for its foreign policy."

ADDICTION TO INTERVENTIONISM

To maintain and consolidate its hegemony, the United States has resorted to all means, from hatching "peaceful evolutions," instigating "color revolutions," to even directly subverting the governments of other countries.

This July, anti-government demonstrations broke out in parts of Cuba. Evidence released by the Cuban government shows that since mid-June, some anti-Cuba forces in the United States, funded by the US government, have deliberately spread the lie through social networks that the Cuban medical system, attacked by COVID-19, has collapsed, and used it as a pretext for instigating military intervention in Cuba to subvert the Cuban government. US sanctions ensued against some Cuban military officials and entities on the grounds of the so-called "governmental suppression" of the demonstrators.

This year, local media in Cuba revealed that in the last two decades, agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have allotted nearly 250 million US dollars to a series of subversive programs targeting Cuba.

At a high-level meeting on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the UN, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said the irresponsible behavior of the United States is the biggest threat to global peace and security.

The United States has an addiction to interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

US author William Blum said in his book America's Deadliest Export: Democracy that since the end of World War II, the United States has endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected, grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries, and attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

During the Cold War, the United States launched activities of infiltration, instigating rebellion, disruption and destruction against the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

After the end of the Cold War, the United States even more brazenly promoted interventionism and frequently exported "color revolutions." At the end of 2003, it forced the resignation of then President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze for the so-called "fraud" in vote counting in the parliamentary elections. The incident is known as "Rose Revolution." In October 2004, it concocted the scandal of "fraud" in the Ukrainian elections, incited young people in the country to march in the streets and supported Viktor Yushchenko's rise to power. This is the so-called "Orange Revolution." In March 2005, it incited Kyrgyzstan's opposition to protest against the results of the parliamentary elections, which eventually led to riots. Then President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akayev was forced to flee and announce his resignation in this so-called "Tulip Revolution." In the past decade, the United States has repeatedly intervened or manipulated "color revolutions" in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and West Asia, and North Africa.

Behind the series of "color revolutions" orchestrated by the United States, a self-proclaimed unofficial and non-profit organization has come under the spotlight: the NED, known as "the largest sponsor for global color revolutions. "Founded in 1983, it has close ties with the US Department of State, the USAID, the Central Intelligence Agency and the like.

Each year, it offers more than 1,600 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups in more than 90 countries. The foundation is also a funding source behind some separatist forces against China, supporting dozens of China-related schemes every year. It has so far provided about 100 million dollars for more than 100 anti-China groups, including the groups clearly identified as terrorist organizations by China such as the so-called "Tibetan Youth Congress" and "World Uyghur Congress." A lot of funds for "Hong Kong independence" activities have also come from the foundation.

DOLLAR HEGEMONY

After World War II, the United States has been taking advantage of the hegemony of the US dollar to wring gains from the creation and flow of the world's wealth.

It has used the dollar hegemony to increase the financial risk of developing countries, plunder their wealth, including resources and real estates, and obtain the monopoly rights of such public service industries in these countries as water, electricity and transportation.

In those Latin American countries that adopted the Washington Consensus, the economic growth rate in the 1990s decreased by 50 percent on average from that in the 1980s.

American "economic killers," covered with the legal cloak of economists, bankers and international financial advisors, manipulate other countries by economic means, trick developing countries into falling into preset economic traps, control the economic lifeline and natural resources of these countries, let funds flow into the United States continuously, and consolidate and expand the economic, political and military hegemony of the United States in the world, said American economist John Perkins in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man published in 2004.

This has long been the case in international trade: The United States prints dollars, and other countries of the world turn resources and goods for dollars in global trade, and then buy US treasury bonds and corporate securities as their foreign exchange reserves, thus enabling US dollars to flow back to the United States and prop up its economy. Niall Ferguson, an American historian, once called the phenomenon "the biggest free lunch in modern economic history."

Despite ballooning fiscal deficits and government debt, US debts can still enjoy low interest rates due to the hegemony of the US dollar, allowing the United States to gather funds from around the world at extremely low costs.

Relying on the hegemony of the dollar, the United States has been enjoying the privilege of printing money with virtually no restrictions.

After the financial crisis in 2008, the Federal Reserve launched three rounds of quantitative easing policies from the end of 2008 to October 2014, transferring the crisis to the whole world through excessive issuance of dollars.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, in order to stimulate the US economy and its stock market, the Federal Reserve has once again resorted to the "super easing" mode featuring zero interest rate and unlimited quantitative easing. After the Biden administration came to power, it quickly rolled out a 1.9-trillion-dollar economic stimulus plan.

What is more noteworthy is that every time the Federal Reserve salvages the US market, the beneficiaries are not ordinary Americans, but the top 1 percent American elites, who receive almost all of the profits the United States extracted from around the world. Most of the top 1 percent elites are the most powerful and well-funded interest groups, including Internet giants, Wall Street, the health insurance industry, drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex.

The US financial and high-tech industries have expanded rapidly during the pandemic, and big US companies have received huge subsidies through various economic stimulus packages. At the same time, most of the excess dollars flowed into the US stock market, which further inflated the wealth of the wealthy. According to data from US Forbes website in January this year, although tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, the total wealth of the more than 650 US billionaires has increased 1.3 trillion dollars, up 38.6 percent, while the five richest Americans' wealth increased from 358 billion dollars to 661 billion dollars in total, up 85 percent.

Frenzied money printing created the illusion of temporary prosperity in the United States, but great dangers lie behind it. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet now exceeds 8 trillion dollars, and the US national debt stands at 28.5 trillion dollars. Fitch, an international rating agency, lowered its outlook on the US sovereign credit rating to "Negative" in July 2020, saying that soaring debts and deficits were eroding the US sovereign credit.

The US practice of printing money to make other countries "pay" for its deficits will eventually endanger the dominance of the dollar. In recent years, in order to get rid of the hegemony of the dollar, Russia, the European Union, China and other countries have accelerated their efforts to de-dollarize. George Soros once said in 2018 that the dollar would lose its status as the world's main reserve currency and medium of exchange in the next few years.

LONG-ARM JURISDICTION

In his book titled The American Trap published in 2019, Frederic Pierucci, former executive of Alstom, gave a first-hand account of Washington's cracking down on Alstom in the name of fighting corruption.

He noted in the book that for more than a decade, the United States has managed to dismantle many large European multinationals under the guise of fighting corruption.

Washington has over the years exploited such means as long-arm jurisdiction and economic sanctions to contain its enemies and rival countries, thwarting their development to maintain its own hegemony.

For example, the United States enacted the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act to expand its sanctions against Russia, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and Iran. It activated Title III of the Helms-Burton Act to step up its embargo against Cuba and unilaterally slap heavy economic sanctions on foreign businesses which have economic ties with Cuba.

The United States has continued to expand the extraterritorial application of its domestic laws, and has forcibly placed foreign individuals and entities under its jurisdiction, regardless of the rules of jurisdiction in international law.

Under its domestic laws, the United States has access to user data and transfer information from many European banks through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system. In recent years, European enterprises have been constantly attacked by the US Department of Justice and relevant financial regulators, and some enterprises accused of "corruption" or violating the US ban in trade with Cuba, Libya, the DPRK, Iran and other countries have been fined hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, said Ali Laidi, a researcher at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs.

These moves have inflicted upon some countries dreadful hardship and even humanitarian crises, which have been no less destructive than wars. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Venezuela, Syria and Iran, long subjected to US sanctions, have seen deteriorating economic and medical situations, as well as a severe epidemic situation at home. Nevertheless, Washington has gone further on its sanctions, making the situations even worse in these countries.

"With their illegal and inhuman sanctions, and terrorist actions, the Americans have inflicted 150 billion dollars of damage on the people of Iran," said then Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in September 2020.

The United States rigged economic rules, using them when they are compatible with its interests.

Under the Trump administration, to undermine China's security and stability and curb China's development, the United States formally rejected China's market economy status in documents submitted to the WTO, provoked trade disputes with China, and imposed a series of unilateral sanctions on Chinese high-tech enterprises. After taking office, the Biden administration continued to abuse the power of the state, introducing a series of bills and executive orders to suppress and restrict Huawei and other Chinese companies by all means.

The United States has even cracked down on its allies. After World War II, the rapid economic rise of Japan drew ruthless repression from the United States, as evidenced by the Plaza Accord. During the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, the United States assumed that the project was detrimental to its interests in the region, and imposed multiple rounds of sanctions to obstruct the progress of the project, provoking strong dissatisfaction of its European allies including Germany.

DISRUPTION TO INTERNATIONAL ORDER

With its great power, the United States has been using "American exceptionalism" as the theoretical basis to wantonly trample on international relations.

While requiring other countries to abide by the rules-based international order, it has long put its own interests above the international system with the UN at its core and above the international order underpinned by international law.

Although the United States led the establishment of international systems and rules for global political and economic governance after World War II, the country has habitually broken rules and withdrawn from international organizations as long as they do not satisfy US requirements. Since the 1980s, the United States has refused to ratify or unilaterally withdrawn from many international treaties and organizations, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the World Conference against Racism, and the Kyoto Protocol.

The Trump administration was particularly willful, under which the United States withdrew from more than 10 international organizations and agreements in four years, such as the UN Human Rights Council, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

The United States has been the only country to oppose the negotiation on a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, hindering the efforts of the international community to verify biological activities in various countries, and becoming a stumbling block to biological arms control.

The United States has not only frequently withdrawn from international groups, but also punished any group that dared to challenge it. In 2020, the Trump administration announced that it would impose economic sanctions and travel restrictions on the officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC) involved in the investigation into US actions in the Afghan war－a move even worse than its earlier refusal to recognize and enforce the ICC's rulings, or to cooperate with the ICC's investigation. This once again showed that the United States would rather destroy "public weapons" if they cannot be used for its private purposes.

The Biden administration has rejoined some international organizations and agreements only to serve its national strategies, and has stayed out of the agreements that it believes would hurt its interests, such as the Open Skies Treaty. As the Biden administration promoted the "selective multilateralism," it has been commented by some European media as "America First 2.0".

In fact, the United States has never shown kindness to other countries, opponents or allies, if they do not serve the US interests. In recent years, the United States has been asking NATO as well as its Asian allies to increase their military spending and pay the United States more "protection fees" for dispatching troops.

Just before Biden's Europe trip in June, it was revealed that the United States had spied on politicians of its European allies, which came as yet another US surveillance scandal after the PRISM Project in 2013. It once again showed the United States has been conducting large-scale cyber surveillance and attacks globally for a long time, and that it, a real empire of hackers, has become the biggest threat to global cybersecurity.

The COVID-19 pandemic is like a magical mirror that has exposed the ugliness of the "America First" policy. The United States has been engaged in unilateralism since the onset of the pandemic: It seized anti-pandemic supplies destined for other countries, issued embargoes on its medical supplies, and bought up production capacity of the drugs that may be used to treat the disease.

Its selfish acts shocked the world and severely damaged global anti-pandemic cooperation. While vaccines have offered hope for the global fight against COVID-19, the United States has upheld "vaccine nationalism", rushing to order and procure vaccines, even those still undergoing clinical trials, and putting some underdeveloped countries and regions in a desperate situation with no access to vaccines.

In the meantime, the United States has been attaching political strings to its vaccine assistance. The Spanish El Mundo website said in an editorial that Washington lent vaccines to Mexico in exchange for a heightened control of the illegal immigrants on the border of Guatemala. US bimonthly magazine Foreign Policy commented on its website that the Biden administration is still pursuing American interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world.

The United States has secretly established biological laboratories in many places around the world to carry out biological militarization activities. The mystery of the link between Fort Detrick and the spread of COVID-19 has not yet been cleared up.

Hume Field, a science and policy advisor for China and Southeast Asia of EcoHealth Alliance in New York, said politicizing origins tracing just generates "doubt" and "mistrust", and fundamentally undermines the united global efforts needed to prevail against this virus and this pandemic.

IDEOLOGICAL MANIPULATION

In August, the White House announced that in December Biden will convene leaders from "the world's democracies" at a virtual Summit for Democracy, to be followed "in roughly a year's time by a second, in-person summit".

Ironically, a recent poll commissioned by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation among 50,000 respondents in more than 50 countries has found that nearly half of the respondents see the United States as a threat to democracy.

For a long time, the United States has been identifying itself as a "city upon a hill" and advocating American values such as "democracy, freedom and human rights" as so-called "universal values," and it believes that the United States has the responsibility to promote its values across the globe.

However, such "universal values" in essence are an ideological tool for the United States to maintain global hegemony.

On the one hand, the United States takes advantage of its strong position in the fields of culture and media to forcibly promote American democracy and values in the world, particularly in developing countries. On the other hand, under the guise of the so-called "universal values," the United States attempts to take the moral high ground to manipulate international public opinion, wantonly attack countries and entities that it regards as threats and rivals, and deliberately create divisions and confrontations.

In 2010, marked by the submission of the "National Framework for Strategic Communication" by then US President Barack Obama to US Congress, the national propaganda system led by the US government entered a stage where it became more capable of conducting interagency operations.

In 2014, a report by the Guardian revealed a secret program run by the US Agency for International Development to infiltrate Cuba's hip-hop scene and launch a movement against the Cuban government.

According to the British media outlet, the agency recruited scores of Cuban musicians for projects disguised as cultural initiatives but in actual fact aimed at boosting their visibility and stoking a movement of fans to challenge the government.

The United States has also linked its economic aid to the political system, pressuring African countries into following Western political models through US-led international financial institutions.

Since the 1980s, US presidents have made the promotion of "democratization" in recipient countries a top goal of US foreign aid. But such moves often brought disasters to the recipient countries. Rapid political "democratization" and economic privatization in many African countries led to large-scale political crises and even bloody conflicts, with some countries still in political turmoil today.

The Biden administration has been promoting its idea of "embracing multilateralism again" ever since assuming office, but in practice, it still lingers on the small clique politics, obsessed with ideological differences and wantonly suppressing other countries to serve its own interests in the name of safeguarding "the rules-based international order."

US hegemonic control lies behind the Quad, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, the Group of Seven, and all other similar cliques, which could in no way represent the international community.

For example, the Biden administration has pulled together Britain, Canada and other allies to repeatedly hype up at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) their false accusations against China's human rights progress, including the allegation of the so-called "forced labor" in Xinjiang.

Meanwhile, those countries' deplorable history of genocide and cultural extinction, as well as the tragedies of racial discrimination happening nowadays in their own backyards, have been continuously exposed to the general public.

At the 47th session of the UNHRC, more than 90 countries made the appeal for justice, voicing their support for China and saying "no" to anti-China cliques.

US magazine Foreign Affairs said in an article published on July 9 that "From the COVID-19 pandemic to global trade rules, from climate change to economic development, the United States is actively frustrating the priorities of most of the world's democracies. In the process, US foreign policy is－in the name of democracy－compounding the global crisis of democracy and delegitimizing US power."

"The world's liberal democracies have lost their monopoly to define what democracy is," Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev said in an opinion piece published on The New York Times in May. Citing a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center a few months earlier, Krastev said a vast majority of Americans "are deeply disappointed with their own political system," and that "some are unconvinced they even still live in a democracy." This is also true for many European countries, the study showed.

Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard University and American political scientist who popularized the term "Thucydides trap," has previously said in an article on Foreign Policy that "Unipolarity is over, and with it the illusion that other nations would simply take their assigned place in a US-led international order."

Xinhua