Interview: U.S. military hegemony threatens world peace, stability -- Russian scholar

MOSCOW, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- U.S. military hegemony is a threat to international peace and stability, a Russian scholar has said.

The United States has long been attempting to promote and preserve its military dominance through its expansionist policies, illegal military interventions, and by undermining the security and stability of other nations, said Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Xinhua Institute, the think tank of Xinhua News Agency, released a report titled Origins, Facts and Perils of U.S. Military Hegemony on Tuesday, with some experts joining the event in person and virtually, including Suslov.

"U.S. military hegemony has not brought peace and stability to the world. On the contrary, the so-called unipolar moment was characterized by staunch violations of international law and illegal military interventions," he said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

NATO's brutal bombing on Yugoslavia in 1999, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 are just several tragic consequences of America's pursuit of military dominance, said Suslov, adding that these tactics are not new, as they are rooted in U.S. history and its pursuit of military primacy.

The U.S. hegemony, its tradition of equating security and primacy, and its perception of itself as a chosen nation explain why "the United States has never had and cannot even imagine equal non-confrontational relations," he said.

According to the expert, this U.S. tradition was one of the major reasons behind the Cold War, and is currently one of the key reasons behind its confrontational foreign policies.

"As soon as any country becomes powerful enough to challenge the global primacy of the United States, it regards this as a threat and begins to carry out policies of containment and confrontation," Suslov said.

Furthermore, the United States maintains its global primacy through military hegemony. The United States spends the largest military budget in the world, possesses the largest number of military bases, and is a part of many military alliances, said the scholar.

Nonetheless, U.S. global military hegemony is doomed to failure, as many non-Western countries support the formation of a just and multipolar world, he said.