Decline of a superpower

A caravan of a few thousand unarmed migrants on foot, mainly women and children, getting fewer every day due to distance and fatigue, could reach the US border within the next month or two to apply for asylum.

Stoking fear and hatred, US President Donald Trump announced that he will send 16,000 troops to assist border control to stop this “invasion”.

Eleven Jews had already been shot in cold blood in a synagogue in the US because of fearmongering that accused Jewish interests of being behind the caravan. In the same week, pipe bombs were dispatched to critics of Trump and targets of his wrath, including a former US president.

Observers and historians point to the fact that the US has always been an immigrant nation. The president himself comes from an immigrant family and two of his former wives, including the current one, are immigrants.

Observers are confident that a superpower with more than 318-million citizens and the world’s deadliest military force would survive a few thousand exhausted and unarmed people on foot. Furthermore, the US has survived armed invasions by Europeans over the centuries — although, sadly, at a huge cost to the original inhabitants, who did not have troops at their borders at the time to stop the “invasion”.

The world watches the decline of a superpower with amazement and in real time.

Dawie Jacobs Sterrewag