When America Sneezed…

Faryal Mustafa
The morning of 29th Oct 1929 brought the biggest economic catastrophe in global history, with headlines of a local newspaper in America stating “Wall St. in panic as stocks crash”. It was only after World War I that America started rising as the “World Banker”. The industries in America started flourishing with inventions of new machinery, increased production of goods and risen stock market investments. The decade following World War-I was referred as the “Roaring 20s”. This inflow of money in USA made other war-torn countries depend heavily on US-Aid. But the Roaring 20s end with the crash of stock market in October 1929. The sudden downturn of stock market and collapse of major banks in America left the country desolated as the life savings of the people were now turned to ashes. America entered the period of great depression with GDP decreased by 25% and unemployment rose to 25%. This economic slump not only depressed USA but the ripple effect of America’s internal destruction made the world suffer as the US loan now dried up. The world already traumatized by the World War was now being tested with an economic calamity.
This was not the only time when the world paid the price of America’s interests. After World War-II the world entered into yet another era of cold war between USA and USSR. The world witnessed the monopoly of power slipping from the hands of USSR and USA erected as the new world power. This tug of war for power massively affected other countries specially the developing ones. Although the proxy wars in North and South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Afghanistan served the purpose for America to become the super-power, but in the way brought irreversible damage to the participant countries.
“If it (USA) allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interest, rather than the interest of UNITED STATES, the American influence over them would diminish” writes Stephen Kinzer in his book Overthrow: America’s century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq. Countries like Iraq went under the worst regime change oppressions, demolishing all major cities, with death tolls up to 460,000 as direct or indirect result of war. However this oppression was later declared as a great blunder by the American analysts as the USA lost 36,716 of its soldiers and this body count ,both American and Iraqi, will forever haunt American foreign policy debates.
The world has gone through a series of depressions, the two World Wars, Cold War, and most recently the COVID pandemic, in which along with the global powers the whole world had to go through economic crisis. These wars always gave positive outcomes for America. Be it the Great Britain losing its colonies after the two World Wars or Hitler’s wrong policies causing the mass migration of German Jewish businessmen to The United States, both made America even more powerful. Despite being small in number, The capitalist Jews gained complete control over America’s domestic and foreign policies. The biggest obstacle in the path of capitalism has always been the socialist system, which became the primary cause of United States launching Taliban to counter socialist Russia in the 1970s. This however did not go in the favor of USA for long and after 9/11 the US entered the blind hills of Tora Bora to defeat the Taliban, causing huge damage to its own economy.
Pakistan has been no behind when serving for American interests. Pakistan’s international relations remained under the influence of American foreign policy. The giant tree of terrorism in the region with strong and spread out roots was first planted by America itself. This tree though shook America to it’s core but also pushed Pakistan into a great turmoil, the after effects of which are still felt by the country. The economy of Pakistan suffered a great downfall due to it’s war against terror. With everyday depreciation of Pakistani rupees, its time our policy makers realize that we no longer can pay for someone else’s benefit on our soil.
As the British economist John Maynard Keynes famously quoted, “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” But, with increasing number of nuclear states, the World’s immune now no longer affords another cold because that might prove to be deadly for the whole world.