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Flashmag March 2020 www.flashmag.net
American protectionism with the economic war against China and the unilateral measures of Washington which one allots to the lack of common sense of Donald Trump, when in fact it translates the current fray of the deep state, faced with the challenge of China, has struck sensitivities including its immediate allies. The unilateral dismantling of the Iranian deal, the abrogation of the NAFTA agreements with Canada and Mexico, or the tariffs imposed on Western Europe, by the United States, reinforce the idea according to which the leader of the free world has entered a phase of open dictatorship which even strikes its supposed friends. This attitude is causing some discomfort among the leaders of Western countries who are reluctant to be seen as valets of the American empire.
The Heritage Foundation in the economic freedom index of 2019 does not mention the leader of the free world that is the United States, in the top 10 of a list where one can find in the first spot Hong Kong, followed by, Singapore, New Zealand , Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and Taiwan.
The soap opera Huawei and the so called 5G espionage scheme, is just the tree that hides a forest of measures discouraging foreign investors in the United States, where state harassment has become a norm.
While freedom of the press has long been praised as a pledge of democracy, the first democracy in the so-called free world and its traditional allies such as France, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom is not included in the top 10 of Reporters Without Borders' 2019 report on press freedom. In a list that contains Norway, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Jamaica, Belgium, and Costa Rica.
Under the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said speaking of her country that; the United States is "the indispensable nation" today it would be logical to ask the question, what order the United States is essential for? That of the progress of peoples of the world, by illuminating them with its brave freedom loving lantern, or the ordo ab chaos of its personal profit, towards and against all.
Time always tests people choices, only sincere ideals resist it.
Hubert Marlin
Journalist