DOES THE USA HAVE THE MOST MISTRUSTED POLITICIANS ON THE PLANET?

 

Politicians in general are held in very low esteem by the voting public worldwide. This of course is an understatement. They are often actively loathed and despised. There are no doubt many reasons for this perennial view of the political class however, trust, or better said lack of trust is surely the number one reason.

Politicians these days can rarely be trusted to give their honest to goodness views. People sense this. The strong impression is that every statement by a politician is designed to suit rather than to express an honest opinion. Hard questions are circumvented through use of various semantic tricks and even the most straightforward questions receive answers that hide as much or more than they reveal.

This is the general view of politicians worldwide. In the USA however the black arts of politics has long been taken to an entirely new level. Issues tend not to be discussed in anything approaching meaningful detail. Buzzwords, sound bytes and rhetorical flourishes, usually via some form of whataboutism where an opponent is accused as a gambit to avoid any culpability of the party the politician belongs to… on any issue whatsoever. It is always someone else’s fault. No culpability is ever admitted, no matter how obvious it is that guilt lies with whatever politician is being questioned.

Even the responsibility for catastrophic mistakes that have lost a great many lives can be avoided as we have seen in the serious disaster scenarios that have prevailed amid and after the USA’s regime change wars in recent years. No one is held responsible when they go wrong and apparently no lessons are learned. Soon enough we are off to the next war of choice where tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands die and no one wins but the corporations of America’s military industrial complex. The next promoters of war arrive in Washington in almost unbroken succession and the whole spiral toward death and destruction somewhere in the world far from U.S. shores continues.

Having said all of the above there is now a new dimension to the dislike and indeed loathing for western politicians and for U.S. politicians in particular. Nations across the Global South are now turning their backs upon them. The latest case of this which is producing great angst in Washington apparently is the non-appearance of Xi JinPing, president of China at the forthcoming G20 meeting. He is also, like President Putin of Russia, refusing all calls from the USA and its allies currently. All trust has collapsed. Jinping even expressed this to Biden’s face when he still agreed to talk with him. In essence what he said to Biden is this: You tell me one thing when we speak and then the opposite happens when the call is over. How can you trust someone like that?

Then there are the acts of disguised war that the U.S. and its allies direct toward China and they are numerous, usually masquerading as sanctions. The strong impression is given that the political hierarchy in both the USA and UK believe they can wage war by other means against China and still be able to convince the Chinese that there is something to be gained by talking with them. The old colonial mindset is clearly alive and well in Washington and London, that innate sense of superiority and exceptionalism whereby they are eminently worth listening to despite their word counting for nothing where their actions speak far, far louder than their words.

It would be bad enough that Russia and China now disdain all approaches by a western world they regard as completely untrustworthy but now they are rapidly being joined by ever more nations. Those same nations in many cases who now wish to get onboard eastern institutions by the name of BRICS or Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) rather than continue to be abused, threatened, blackmailed and lied to within eminently untrustworthy western institutions, such as the G20. For far too long these nations have had to suffer humiliation at the hands of western leaders. Now that they have found more trustworthy partners who they can rely upon as stable backers, investors and partners without strings attached and an absence of threat against them they are escaping in droves from the western net.

Trust is key in all that is happening on the geopolitical map currently. Unexpressed mistrust, hidden out of fear of economic, financial and potentially military reprisals by the West built up over decades can now be freely stated with impunity. More importantly these nations can now ACT with impunity, snub their collective noses at the western leaders who they maintained highly dysfunctional and uneasy relationships with out of fear, and regain their full sovereignty and all the independent decision making that comes with full sovereignty. The era of western imperialism and colonialism has essentially ended. We can see this most obviously in Africa where the colonial power France is being told to find the exit door. But also too and on an even grander scale where six new nations have joined BRICS (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Ethiopia Egypt and Iran) and 34 others wait in the wings.

Every now and then a poll is run globally which attempts to assess which nation the world’s population trusts least. The question is always pretty much the same: Which country in your estimation poses the greatest danger to humanity? The answer to this poll each year it is run is invariably the same. The country that interminable heads this poll is the United States of America.

Never were politicians mistrusted more, and clearly the most mistrusted of all reside in the western world and those that are without question trusted least of all are those of the USA. This has quite obviously, by polling results, been the case for a very long time. But it is only now, with the rise of China and Russia that this view can be expressed and acted upon without fear by entire governments. And that, if you think about it for a while, will make all the difference in the world.