Began not with Biden as this rightist claims, but rather after the first gulf war, in the early 1990s, when the mantra became “It is only our military that can get the job done.”. Because they finished that war in just 4 days. Through the 1990s, this “shedding of Vietnam syndrome” was compared and contrasted to the “ineffectual” United Nations, which was “incapable of resolving anything”.

At the time, this new trend rang alarm bells with me, in the extreme. Talk about TR’s “Carry a big stick but walk gently” - not.

Not long after the above, the state department became basically the official PR department for the Pentagon. (In fact, for the longest time now, the spokesperson for the State Department has been an actual rear admiral for christ-sakes):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirby_(admiral)#Military_career

It doesn’t get much clearer than that, in my opinion.

And then, as the 1990s progressed, a frenzy rose day by day about the black helicopters of the United Nations taking over the US:

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Black_helicopter

Periodic hateful screams arose among the anti-taxation crowd: “But the UN is ours, we pay for it”. By the end of the 1990s the Pentagon had been elevated, unchallenged, to the status of sole institution that could save America while the actual president was a moral disgrace getting a blow job under the desk. These trends, back in the 1990s were, I feel, the beginning of end of empire. It was not the rather sedate 1990s that it may have appeared to be from a comfortable distance. It was a rather tumultuous decade when, for a brief time the rather stabilizing act of actually paying down the US national debt by running a federal surplus was immediately, loudly and viciously decried as over-taxation - an argument that won in short order.

It seemed obvious something rather big was bound to happen, and the rest is history.

- Shyaku