If you’ve every been told “you’re one to talk,” then you understand the importance of moral authority in giving advice and offering leadership.
What the Senate Report on the CIA’s Detainment and Interrogation Policies of the last decade told me is that the United States of America has gone to extreme measures to protect its security, and that these extreme measures have irreparably damaged the U.S.’s moral authority.
The kind of soft power that moral authority offers is not very cheap and takes decades to build up. It’s about trust. It’s about consistency of word and deed. America has failed to live up to its obligations to its own citizens, and to its international partners.
Soon, China will become the global hegemon. The interests of the Chinese will direct the world’s stance on many issues, including trade, political dissonance suppression, and war. America will continue to fall into obscurity, and other countries will continue distancing themselves from us. The weight of the United States will no longer matter nearly as much as it did in the last 90 years. This could have been avoided if we had not been so quick to erode our moral authority. Unfortunately, since Vietnam, our moral authority has been eroding, slowly but surely. Now, it is at its lowest point in the last 150 years.
I, for one, am disgusted by most of what our government does, what it stands for, and the double-standard it lives by. If you follow the news, the tyranny in it all is plain to see: the big bucks political donors have even more control over the government than they did yesterday, the police forces around the country continue to brutalize the citizens they purport to protect, the NSA reads and retains our every online communication especially if it is encrypted, and the CIA gets away with the most despicable, deplorable acts any human can convey upon another. It should be apparent to any onlooker that the moral legitimacy of the U.S. has collapsed.
Much of the world regards America with resentment unparalleled. If anyone were curious as to the reason, I believe the aforementioned does indeed shed some light on that matter.
The behaviour is inexcusable, and I am pleased that these actions will be met with contempt by the international community.