“I do think we are on the right side of history, aligning ourselves with people’s aspirations for freedom, democracy, universal human rights,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in a recent interview with the Economist magazine. Describing Washington’s role in the world, she added that “we stand up and say we’re for all these universal values, they’re consonant with American values.”

Such conceptions, that the US role in the world is to promote freedom and export “American values” that are, in reality, “universal values” are nothing new. They go all the way back to the advent of

American imperialism and the Spanish American War at the close of the 19^th century. Then, as now, they have served as the default ideological cover for carrying out wars of conquest, military coups and repression in the interests of US finance capital.

As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted scathingly in 1924, “America is always liberating somebody. That’s her profession.”

In the past week, the Obama administration has invoked “human rights” as the pretext for stoking a civil war in Syria aimed at bringing about regime-change, as the grounds for preparing war against Iran, and as a justification for ratcheting up military tensions with North Korea and China.

The US government’s posturing as the champion of universal human rights is a patent fraud. Its claims of outrage over violations of freedom and democracy in one or another country are steeped in hypocrisy.

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