THE SHERBRO ISLANDER
A Political Essay from the Margin
Power Without Conscience
By Tom Somah
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the world lost a rival power and a counterweight. The order that had shaped global politics for decades — two forces, two visions, pressing against each other across the fault lines of history — gave way to something less stable. Not peace, but the emergence of a reckless and unaccountable imperial hegemon: the United States of America. A single power drunk on its own victory.
The United States concluded that its values were universal and that the world now existed to be remade in its image. It pursued a global order in which no government, no economy, no military force would be permitted to operate outside the terms Washington set.
Washington built a project and dressed it in the language of democracy, rules-based order, and freedom. Every government that resisted had to be recast as a threat. The machinery operates through media organisations, think tanks, financial institutions, military alliances, and the sanctions regime that has become Washington’s preferred instrument of collective punishment.
When a government declines to open its markets on American terms, it is labelled corrupt. When a nation pursues an independent foreign policy, its leadership is declared authoritarian. When a country refuses to host American military infrastructure, its elections are scrutinised for irregularities.
The demonisation is a precondition for what Washington intends to do next: to destabilise, to remove, and to rebuild in its own image — the wreckage billed to the people who never asked for the intervention. And an impotent world, with its fanciful but powerless institutions, applauds and concurs. What matters is subservience to Washington’s will. Not the human catastrophe.
Gaza, where the world has watched as one of the most densely populated territories on earth has been reduced to rubble, is a case in point. The casualty figures are children pulled from beneath collapsed buildings. Women who walked into a market and did not return. Entire family lines — grandparents, parents, children, infants — erased in a single air strike, their names recorded in a ledger the world’s most powerful government has chosen not to read.
The United States has been financing and supplying Israel with bomb shipments, artillery shells, and precision-guided munitions for the slaughter of innocent civilians. When the Security Council moved to call for a ceasefire, the United States vetoed.
When the International Court of Justice raised the question of genocide, Washington dismissed the proceedings. The language of self-defense was deployed to justify the destruction of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and aid convoys—targets whose protection is a matter of international humanitarian law, not political opinion.
In Iraq, a war launched on fabricated evidence killed hundreds of thousands and shattered a society whose wounds continue to bleed today. In Libya, an intervention hailed as humanitarian left a functioning state in ruin, with slave markets emerging within years of the bombing campaign. In Yemen, American support enabled a devastating assault on one of the world’s poorest populations, contributing to famine, cholera, and the deaths of countless children. On what moral ground does Washington stand to lecture any nation about human rights?
The history of American interference in South America requires no exaggeration. Democratically elected governments were overthrown when they challenged Washington’s interests; dictatorships were supported when they ensured compliance. Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela — different countries, the same pattern: power shaped in Washington and paid for in the suffering of others. The objective has remained constant — to prevent any nation in the hemisphere from becoming truly independent of American influence.
For more than four decades, the United States has waged economic warfare against Iran. The sanctions regime has sought to make life so unbearable that either the government collapses or the population turns against it. Medicines delayed. Agricultural equipment restricted. Financial transactions unrelated to weapons programmes blocked under the threat of secondary sanctions. The result has been inflation, currency collapse, unemployment, and widespread human suffering beyond the visibility of bombs.
Washington and its allies continue to portray Iran as an existential threat to world peace. Yet history raises an unavoidable question: which nation has used atomic weapons against civilian populations, destroying cities and killing countless innocent people? It was the United States, not Iran.
Alongside sanctions, sovereign assets have been frozen or placed beyond reach: nearly $300 billion in Russian reserves immobilised, Venezuela’s gold reserves withheld in the Bank of England, and Afghanistan’s central bank assets frozen as its people descended into hunger. These are not merely legal measures, but instruments of power cloaked in legal language — the assertion that one nation’s judgment can override the sovereign rights of others.
The unipolar moment was always going to be temporary. China’s rise, the BRICS expansion, the refusal of the Global South to accept that Washington’s interests and humanity’s interests are the same — all of this is eroding the foundations of an empire that declared itself permanent thirty years ago. The empire is not falling. But it is cracking.
In the meantime, people die. Children in Gaza die. Families in Iran are impoverished by sanctions they had no hand in provoking. Sovereign wealth disappears into frozen accounts at the pleasure of a power that answers to no court, no treaty, and no conscience it does not itself appoint.
An empire that has exhausted its arguments becomes dangerous.
Unhinged. Barbaric. That is where we are.
www.echosinwords.com — The Sherbro Islander