“The Empire of Hypocrisy”
For nearly eighty years, since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy has been less the strategy of a superpower than the selfishness of a spoiled empire. It cloaks itself in slogans of freedom and human rights while cutting deals with tyrants, monarchs, and fundamentalists. America is not the guardian of democracy; it is the world’s best-paid confidence man, selling principles when convenient, pawning them when not.
The Cold War exposed the template. America claimed to defend liberty against Soviet communism, yet it allied with regimes that made the Kremlin look progressive by comparison. Washington embraced Saudi Arabia, a medieval monarchy where women remain second-class citizens, non-Muslims are persecuted, and slavery has only recently been renamed “guest labor.” America denounces India over religious freedom, yet says nothing about Saudi Arabia where minorities live as hunted prey. Freedom is a sermon for enemies, never for clients.
Indonesia revealed the moral bankruptcy in its purest form. In 1965, General Suharto’s coup unleashed the slaughter of nearly one million communists and suspected sympathizers. Rivers clogged with corpses, ferries jammed with human remains, entire villages erased from the earth. Islamist militias joined in the carnage. Washington did not mourn—it applauded, providing lists of names for execution. Genocide, in the American playbook, was acceptable so long as it painted the map in Washington’s colors. When America talks of human rights today, the ghosts of Indonesia rise and laugh.
The contradictions multiplied. Nixon and Kissinger’s 1971 opening to Beijing meant that America, while railing against Soviet gulags, embraced Mao’s China—a regime whose Great Leap Forward had starved tens of millions, whose Cultural Revolution devoured its own children. Today the hypocrisy repeats: America crushes Venezuela and Cuba under sanctions in the name of freedom, but stuffs its Walmart shelves with goods from Communist China, and deepens ties with the Communist Party of Vietnam. Anti-communism, it turns out, is a principle only when directed at small states too weak to retaliate.
And then there are the Gulf States, America’s pet monarchies. The Gulf Cooperation Council presides over a labor system that is slavery in all but name. Millions of workers from Asia and Africa toil without rights, their passports confiscated, their wages withheld, their bodies broken in desert heat. The World Cup stadiums in Qatar were built on bones. And yet, because oil flows and contracts are signed, Washington keeps its silence. America, which denounced apartheid in South Africa, underwrites a far larger apartheid of labor in the Gulf. Human rights are a flag to wave, not a standard to live by.
And then Pakistan, the most absurd alliance of all. A state that gave birth to the Taliban, sheltered Osama bin Laden, murdered Daniel Pearl, and incubated the architects of September 11 is called an American partner. Washington lectures the world on terrorism even as it bankrolls its breeding grounds. It is as though a fire brigade were secretly financing the arsonists. The war on terror has been less about defeating jihad than about subsidizing it.
America talks about democracy, but embraces monarchs.
America talks about peace, but arms jihadists.
America talks about human rights, but bankrolls genocide.
The pattern is consistent. America is loudest where its enemies are weakest, and silent where its allies are strongest. It condemns Moscow but courts Riyadh. It sanctions Havana but trades with Beijing. It denounces India’s imperfections while ignoring Saudi Arabia’s medievalism. Its principles are a traveling circus—packed up, moved around, and sold to the highest bidder.
To be fair, America has sometimes lived up to its rhetoric: the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe, NATO deterred Soviet aggression, civil rights laws reshaped its own democracy. But these moments are the exception, not the rule. For every Marshall Plan there has been an Indonesia; for every NATO, a Pakistan; for every sermon about democracy, a silence over Saudi Arabia. Hypocrisy is not the crack in America’s foundation—it is the foundation.
The cost is visible everywhere. The jihadists armed in Afghanistan in the 1980s became the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers. The dictators propped up for “stability” became the detonators of revolutions. The indulgence of Saudi extremism became the export of Wahhabi fundamentalism worldwide. Tomorrow it will repeat in Africa, in Asia, in whatever corner of the world promises cheap resources and obedient rulers. America has been hoisted not by its enemies but by its own contradictions.
A true superpower needs coherence and principle. America has neither. Its foreign policy is not strategy—it is infantile selfishness institutionalized. A merchant of contradictions, a peddler of double standards, a superpower that acts less like Rome and more like a casino dealer—tossing chips to whichever thug sits across the table.
This is the essence of American hypocrisy: it talks like Lincoln, but it bargains like a bazaar merchant. It calls itself the leader of the free world while serving as bodyguard to monarchs, midwife to jihadists, and accomplice to genocide. The tragedy is not that America has lost its way. The tragedy is that hypocrisy has been its way all along.
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