Blockade, Blackmail, Invade: The Washington Three-Step

Say what you will about American imperialism, it may be absolutely lawless and perfectly immoral but it does have its favorite and predictable routines. One of them is what we can call the Washington Three-Step of “blockade, blackmail, invade.”

The Three-Step is by no means foolproof. Witness, for instance, the recent de facto defeat of the US (and its at least occasional overlord Israel) at the hands of Iran, which even arch neocon warmonger Robert Kagan has as good as admitted in, of all places, The Atlantic. But failure has never deterred America’s best and brightest. Indeed, the combination of slow, sadistic strangulation of whole nations and taking the military baseball bat to them is a virtual fixation, as central to American foreign policy as permanent bad faith.