Terry Crawford-Browne should get his facts right before accusing anyone of being delusional (“US goes rogue as its star fades”, 17 February 2025).
While China’s tech industry is growing, it is nowhere close to the quality being produced in Silicon Valley. Microsoft and Apple are US companies and still dominate the industry and it is US allies such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, not China, that continue to deliver top-notch vehicles and technology.
I also find it quite delusional that Crawford-Browne considers the war in Ukraine a proxy one between the US and Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine defended itself. I believe the US has failed to do enough to help Ukraine, but this war wasn’t caused by the US. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government is solely at fault for that. People died because Russia invaded its neighbour. And the threat of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, controlled by a tyrant, will always stop direct confrontation — which the US would otherwise be able to use to quickly end the war.
It is also patently false to accuse Israel of genocide. Even if we accept Hamas’s unreliable numbers, 49,000 Gazans had died by February 11. It is unclear how many of these people are non-combatants or Hamas fighters. This number has scarcely changed since 2023. It has been 500 days since October 7, when more than 1,000 Israelis were slaughtered during an invasion of their suburbs and a music festival. Most of that number were proven to be civilians and the vast majority were unarmed.
If Hamas got its way, it would have kept up that pace of killing, and the Israeli death toll would be sitting at 500,000 today, if not more.
Israel has shown restraint. There is no genocide happening in Gaza. No concerted effort to kill civilians or ethnically cleanse Gazans. Any other assertion is blood libel and disinformation.
Overall, the US is the world hegemon. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Historically, global superpowers have presided over the most peaceful and prosperous periods of human history. Pax Americana and Pax Britannica were far more peaceful than the multipolar eras of the world wars and the chaos of Europe’s wars for dominance.
US dominance will eventually fade, but it takes decades, if not centuries for such powers to truly become irrelevant. We will not see the complete collapse of the US in our lifetime. And despite its many failings, it still proves to be morally superior to Iran, China and Russia, which continue to wage wars of aggression, and their own genocides, while simultaneously oppressing their people.
Nicholas Woode-Smith
Cape Town
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