From whence comes the United States' love of blowback? You kill off and snuff out all of the commies and destroy all of the secular organizational capacity that gives off even a hint of social welfare, and then juice up all of the religious reactionaries and proto-fascists and wind 'em up and shove 'em off, and then wail on and on when those reactionary forces slip their leashes and run away from your control. And then having made the whole of the world an enemy, there comes the pitiful lamentations that there is no one left sympathetic enough to pick you up, dust you off, and retrieve your fallen ice cream cone after you finally get your well-deserved ass-kicking.
Reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove's Major Kong riding the nuclear bomb, the second half of the last century, and a near quarter of this one - and we could easily go further than that - saw the United States gleefully causing chaos and destruction in everything it touched, riding that destruction and thriving in that chaos as it coasted from crisis to crisis, causing bigger crises and deeper entangled quagmires as it went. And the Empire has run out of foamed runway to land on.
So why do it? When you have so much power, why act like a goddanged prick all the time? Just ask the Athenians. Eventually that game comes to an end.
But also, why ask silly questions? Being a prick is how you get the power of course. But more seriously, when you're the hegemon, it is implied that what you are doing plays some part in your global dominance, so the only thing left to do is sabotage and scuttle all the many alternatives sprouting up that can pose any kind of challenge to that dominance. There is nothing left to offer, other than staying on top, so you just sort of subvert and destroy everyone else's programs, and then try to maintain that position in that perpetually turbulent environment and hope for the best. For you, anyway. Further, with nothing left to constrain your power, boredom and nihilism have a tendency to settle in, so why not go to excess and absurdity for the fun of it, and see how far it can go?
Fold into that explanation the reality of the US' source of great power: the nature of capital, a force whose only real guiding motivation is growth and profit. This is a nature that can be apprehended in both the domestic and foreign spheres: witness the perpetual blowing and popping bubbles that make up the US Economy. This landscape can be described in a variety of ways in a variety of angles, but a quick illustration can leave us with the image of the rapacious automobile, firearm, chemical, and agricultural industries (to name a few) perpetually growing and speeding up, harming wider circles of the population, with the US health care and pharmaceutical industries waiting in the wings to mop up, mitigating the damage in one direction while causing ever more damage in another direction, backed by predatory insurance and finance.
And this explosive growth must expand outwards, seeking ever more markets, oftentimes in the form of disintegrating societies where arms, contractors, and drugs flow in. The essence of this dynamic can be found in the fawning reverence for the measure of GDP and its constant growth, which not only measures the growth of manufactures and energy utilization, but also "services" such as predatory finance and rent-seeking.
Blowing bubbles with a basis in warfare is just fine as long as you are doing the ass-kicking. There is a sort of Goldilocks zone that capital thrives in, in which there is just enough fear and desire piqued to promote continuous growth in products and services - whether the productive or destructive kind - without going over the cliff into a state change of war and revolution. Unfortunately it is precisely this sort of Goldilocks zone that progresses in just that direction.
