I DON’T understand the meltdown many non-Americans are having following the US presidential election. I’ve read that this is a “dark day for America but also for the rest of the world”, blah, blah, blah.

Is it? The rest of the world won’t be affected by US domestic policy, so perhaps they’re referring to US foreign policy. That does affect them.

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But how much worse can it get? Four years of Biden foreign policy run by lunatic neocons like Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland have yielded:

• A devastating proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that the West is losing. More than 600,000 Ukrainians are dead, more than a million are wounded, and the country is destroyed. America wanted to weaken Russia and the EU, which it feared was becoming too reliant on cheap Russian gas. Russia is stronger than ever but the EU is an economic basket case. This failed effort has cost the US nearly $200 billion but has gifted billions to the military industrial complex.

• A genocide in Gaza committed by a Zionist Israeli regime which is financed and armed by the US, UK and EU, that has murdered more than 200,000 and traumatised and displaced more than two million Palestinians.

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On top of that, in the “collective West” we’ve had:

• Aggressive and widespread censorship and persecution of those who express opinions that differ from official narratives.

• The concealment of the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2, and the imposition of government mandates for a vaccine that didn’t undergo sufficient safety trials but has enriched Big Pharma.

• The active promotion of so-called "gender-affirming care" for minors that has systematically butchered and mutilated children, but made billions for the medical industrial complex and Big Pharma.

Throughout, we’ve had an ailing US president and a coterie of European leaders of such poor quality that they’ve allowed the US to lead them by the nose into a cul-de-sac where they are now well and truly stuck.

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The reality is that the American people (the same holds true for people here) – have been short-changed for decades by both political parties. I’ve no illusions about Donald Trump. I don’t think he’ll make a huge difference to the litany of foreign policy problems because he’s funded by the same billionaire special interests. Will he really be that much worse? Like it or not, Trump didn’t start any new wars during his last tenure as president.

What Americans long to see are solutions to the many problems they face:

• No national health service. Medical expenses are the chief cause of personal bankruptcy.

• 80,000 a year die from opioid overdoses.

• More than 50,000 a year die from gun violence.

• Homelessness is increasing 6% a year.

• Child poverty has more than doubled since 2021.

• Inequality is the highest of all G7 nations.

• Nearly half the water supply is contaminated with forever chemicals.

• 11 out of 17 infrastructure categories received a grade of D.

• Life expectancy has fallen to 76.4 years, the shortest in more than two decades, more than three years below that of the UK and the lowest among peer countries.

• 60-90% of the standard American diet contains highly processed food.

• 1.8 million Americans are incarcerated in the prison industrial complex, the largest number of prisoners worldwide.

• 66% of all adults are on prescription drugs and nearly half the population suffers from at least one chronic disease.

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Meanwhile, the US spends $877 billion a year on its military, more than any nation on earth; and that doesn’t include the billions spent on Ukraine and Israel.

The last four years have been awful but the US has been going downhill since at least 1980. If the US government can finally begin to focus on its own problems for a change and stop its warmongering, bullying and constant interference in the affairs of other nations, perhaps the European poodles will follow suit.

The first US President, George Washington, in his farewell address, had some advice for America (and any nation that wishes its people to prosper):

“Avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty ... your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other ... observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct, and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?”

I hope we have the wisdom to heed his words today, but I’m probably being naive.

Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh