Illustration: Xia Qing/GT

The US over-militarizes everything. The expression is, if your only tool is a hammer, you think every problem is a nail. The US basically has one giant hammer, which is our military, which we spend $1 trillion a year on and have 800 to 900 military bases around the world. The US views most problems as something that can be dealt with militarily. 

It really is the first solution that the US goes to, which is horrifying on a bunch of levels, not to mention the innocent civilians that die in any military conflict, but it's horrifying on the level that any military conflict puts us closer to nuclear war, and, even if it's accidental, an accidental nuclear exchange where the world becomes unlivable. Everyone dies in a nuclear exchange, essentially. 

So, the idea that that is the only way to solve things is just psychotic and sad and just completely uninvolved. It's a very simple brained response to every problem. 

Now, the US kind of has a second smaller hammer which we can describe as "economic warfare," that we have been using a lot of recently. But unfortunately, we don't use it usually to pressure countries. We use it in a way that often kills a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have died from our economic wars on Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iran and Syria. Right now, Syria is dealing with this horrible earthquake. Why is the earthquake so horrible? Part of it is that they have no infrastructure and no ability to deal with a disaster like that. 

Why is that? Well, the US has put crushing economic sanctions on Syria. That doesn't mean that Syria doesn't have plenty of its own internal problems, but this crushing economic war means that 90 percent of Syrians are what the US rapporteur recently said are below the international poverty line. 

If you have so many people who are poor in a country and they're dealing with a horrifying earthquake, they don't have the ability to deal with it. And part of that is America's fault.

Many people talk about sanctions as if they're not a form of war; but in reality they really are a form of war. And another UN rapporteur found that around 100,000 Venezuelans have died from our economic war on them, because the people who are harmed first and worst by economic war are the babies, the elderly, the ill, the very poor. The rich and the upper class tend to be fine. They may lose some of their money, but they tend to be fine. 

Now as the Russia-Ukraine conflict drags on, China must have realized that the US is trying to pick off pieces of a Russian influence. Ukraine is not owned by Russia, but it is a former Soviet bloc country. The US has long for many years now been trying to pick away Ukraine so that Ukraine would be fully US and NATO supportive. And by doing that, they then have NATO even closer onto Russia's border. 

The US military complex is trying to do the same thing. It is trying to pick off pieces of China, find pieces of China that are vulnerable, and either get them to turn against China or get them to at least be something that China has to spend a lot of effort, maybe even use its military to deal with. 

They're trying to do it with Xinjiang. They're trying to do it with Taiwan. This is how the US works. It will be kind of like someone going into Texas in the US and trying to get Texas to decide its own country, which by the way some Texans believe they are. 

If someone gets Texas to declare it's a separate country and they want their independence, the US would then have to spend a lot of effort dealing with the fact that Texas wanted to be its own country. 

It's a tactic designed to weaken what our ruling class views as the enemy. We need to spend a lot more time on cooperation if we are going to maintain a spaceship earth that is livable, peaceful and sustainable for everyone, rather than just a tiny, incredibly rich group of human beings.

The article was compiled by Global Times reporter Wang Wenwen based on an interview with Lee Camp, a former RT America host who was laid off not long after the Russia-Ukraine conflict started. wangwenwen@globaltimes.com.cn