That John, Paul, George and Ringo I wouldn’t have been able to sing about holding someone’s hand, and The Rolling Stones wouldn’t have had the chance to dress up as deep blues singers straight out of the Black experience.

So America provided the postwar mood music and the weapons that backed it so we could spend our time in the sun.

My own personal love affair with America began with my mother’s constant post-war stories about her prosperous American cousins ​​and their times of living in abundance. And his love of big band music. And then later, when we found ourselves in an orphanage, American airmen from a local air base, unable to return home for Christmas, came to spoil us with gifts and shows.

Tearful Airmen are here to keep the enemy from our shores, missing their own children and families. Such humanity broke out when the nuns themselves joined in the sense of a vanished family; they shouted in unison.

But Elvis cemented our love of America, and everything that was modern and beautiful and wonderful about the great power across the ocean. I dreamed at night that when I woke up in the morning, instead of a gas plant outside the window of our municipal apartment, there were skyscrapers; and I woke up in New York.

It all comes back in droves; a realization that virtually all the peace and quiet with which most of us have lived has been provided by our great and powerful “friend.” That we could not have had the freedoms we have without this important and sometimes bellicose force at our side.

This is sobering, especially as we have just gone through a very tense and very angry US election. Yet while we are outraged by many opinions emanating from the United States with which we do not agree, we nevertheless owe them our protection.

Sometimes it seems like we are in “custody”. That we are controlled and expected to toe the American party line. That we are subject to them because we know they are our only protection.

Of course, the United States emerged from its isolation, the Wall Street crash and the enormous poverty of the 1930s. Without emerging from this recession which seemed to last forever, the country would not have accumulated 50% of the wealth world in 1945, and its prosperity would not have increased by 300% at the end of the war.

We must blame Hitler for creating the balance of power of the modern world. Where two powers roamed the world as if it were their own. The Soviet Union and the United States became strong, bold and powerful, and therefore dominant over the world, thanks to Hitler’s war. Thus, behind the American supremacy which held back the Soviet Union lies the harsh reality: Hitler was the hidden creator of American power. Because his war made them rich.

Today, almost 80 years later, we still live in the shadow of this great creation of consolidated power, the concentration of which was born from the defeat of Hitler’s Nazism. But we are now faced with these questions which arise again with Ukraine and the growth of an eastern power that may well eclipse all previous world powers.

What happens in America today and in the future will remain the barometer of our security and evolving geopolitics. We are stuck in this equation of big power games. Britain once played the role of great power, but now we see other powers imitating what was done by previous generations of British statesmen, businessmen and expansionists.

Geopolitics is as dangerous in the world today as the environmental collapse, the spread of global disruptions, and the winds and floods that have and will continue to bear down on us.

The big problems must be faced. Great thinking to go with it. Big changes in the politics we practice. Hopefully we will develop the thinking that will get us out of our various holes. But one thing is certain: everything we have done so far is no longer working. And the realization that our liberal ways and beliefs are backed by American power is perhaps the greatest realization we need.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read the rest of his words here.

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