NORTH CAROLINA - One has to speculate: What is America’s overseas cause now? In World War II it was the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and also of Japan, which had attacked Pearl Harbor.

 Later, it was the defeat of Communism and the USSR, and a victory in the Cold War. Now? Hard to imagine there is a cause at all but maintenance of an “empire” of sorts with a misguided toolbox of military threats, economic sanctions, aspersions against foreign cultures, breast beating and crude assertions of “democracy” at a time when in fact it has faded significantly inside the U.S.

 The U.S. is a “police state” more or less now, and Washington a vast bureaucracy of surveillance of citizens and corporate control hiding behind a huge façade of alleged democratic values as thin as rice paper and bolstered by mainstream media propaganda. Policy lies are hidden by false advertising and bizarre, misleading names. If anything, it seems Orwellian and much of it remains unbeknownst to “average” persons, saddled with debt like never before and trying to maintain some semblance of a “middle class” lifestyle. The military holds sway, and easily, with the recent budget allocation of well over $700 billion annually.

Take something as minor but popular and seemingly innocuous as sports in the U.S., in particular NFL football, where many players are Black and some in recent years have refused to remain standing on the field for the national anthem before a game, sensitive to racial discrimination, never completely abolished despite decades of struggle. It used to be that players stayed in the locker rooms during the national anthem, but no longer since 2010.

 They have been forced onto the field, and taking a knee has been essentially forbidden while the government is spending many millions of taxpayer dollars to put on grandiose, “patriotic” displays inside stadiums and other sports venues. It’s all one big “as if”: as if the government gives a damn, as if it is really defending the interests of the multitude, as if it really cares…when it patently does not., or not much.

The U.S., supposedly the most “developed” country on earth, and unlike many other Western countries in Europe, sports a third world infrastructure, the absence of affordable healthcare and higher education (both of which are free in many countries), debased industry outside the Military Industrial Complex and rotting cities. The rich get richer and the poor poorer.

 To cite just one statistic, CEO’s of many U.S. corporations take home pay many hundreds of times larger than average employees. Fifty years ago the ratio was double digits, and in some cases even single digits. One could go on with various comparisons of all kinds to describe the descent of social sense, but any reasonable person gets the picture of a country that has lost its way and is no longer worth emulating.

Meanwhile, in my adult lifetime wars of choice have been launched and millions killed on the flimsiest of pretexts, or none at all. Those benefitting from the aggressions, starting primarily with Vietnam in the 1960s, have narrowed with each successive decade since, and now, who? Alleged beneficiaries are U.S. corporations embedded in the Military Industrial Complex and their shareholders, and associated oligarchs, U.S. banks and Wall Street (which profit on discord), all representing a tiny slice of an American population that overall has seen the “middle class” decimated while public and private debt has accumulated like nowhere else in history ever has, threatening the foundations of the fiat monetary system itself.

As dystopian as one can paint aspects of the U.S. now for a majority of its citizens, one also has to be well aware that on the surface anyway, the U.S. remains one of the “richest” resource rich countries on earth. So-called living standards, albeit supported by unsustainable debts of all kinds, remains relatively high, the façade intact for now and capable of lulling too many Americans into complacency. The question that at bottom remains is this: for how much longer? I don’t know and neither does anyone else.

 But one might discern that U.S. militarism around the world may suggest a tone of desperation in Washington. So what does this mean for the Islamic Republic that the Trump administration, catering to Neocons and Zionists almost exclusively, has obviously put in its crosshairs for “regime change”, pretending it cares about the welfare of the Iranian people?

Well, first of all, Power in the U.S. cares for almost nothing but itself. And it seems fairly clear that, as with Syria, the ultimate aim is not necessarily better or more liberal government for Iran, but simply and mostly chaos, the breaking up of Iran’s diverse population into competing factions virtually at war with each other such that, as a unified country, Iran would no longer exist. (This gambit did, of course, fail in Syria thanks to Russian and Iranian assistance and the fight and spirit of Syrians. In Iran’s case, I know of no particular expatriate group that the U.S. emboldens but the terrorist MEK that, by most accounts, is despised by most all Iranians.

But let’s say that with radical economic sanctions ahead from outside and other pressures, protests in Iran against the mullahs and demands for change reach a critical point, as they did in 1979 against the Shah. What then? I don’t know, but as an outsider who has never been able to visit Iran and knows far less than I should, one would simply pray that any evolution at all proves to be positive and positively enduring.

 And as an outsider, I frankly don’t care who is in charge in Iran as long as those in charge are positively responsive and responsibly serving all Iranians as best they can and hold that service out as the primary goal, including the maintenance of the demand that Iran not become a vassal to rapacious U.S. or Western interests, and as well keeps up opposition to Zionism.

One positive thing that did cross my desk this past week is a recent statement by Ardashir Zahedi, former Iranian ambassador to the U.S. just prior to the revolution, long exiled in Switzerland. In this statement, he slams the U.S. as a bully. He declares that Iran’s “noble people” in the face of outside threats always manage to stand together. He supports invited Iranian aid to Syria’s elected government.

 He is disgusted by the war on Yemen. He says that the JCPOA remains a valid and binding document, and prays for the diplomatic maturity to keep it alive. And he adds that the social situation inside Iran will evolve and he has tremendous confidence in Iran’s youth. He says unequivocally: “No one will be able to crush Iran.”

What I take from Zahedi, whatever his current standing may be in Iran, is simply this, and it is encouraging: Iran will continue being an independent, proud nation, subservient to no bully, come whatever “evolution” that may occur, despite the U.S. and its minions.