The
American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars
in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened
by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade
agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that
steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution
for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the
U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and
respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do
its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and
you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the
highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of
imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to
be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.
The
empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped
as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States
into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its
military machine.
Short
of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the
death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will
no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave
behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and
military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up
among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other
states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred
W. McCoywrites in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational
corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international
financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a
supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”
Under
every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to
advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare,
we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S.
Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by
nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come
close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s
second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading
manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the
world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober
report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a
Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an
unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can …
automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at
range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.
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Empires
in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable
to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world
where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy,
multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument
of war.
This
collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic
blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W.
Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who
were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded,
were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were
blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid
evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted
in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S.
troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They
promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They
insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore
American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the
opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinskinoted, this “unilateral war
of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign
policy.”
Historians
of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples
of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during
the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of
200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the
empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the
nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in
humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s
Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining
colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.
“While
rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed
force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are
inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military
masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” McCoy writes.
“Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary
operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only
accelerate the process already under way.”
Empires
need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This
mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation—seduces some
native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at
least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to
justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain
empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in
appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as
polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and
the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the
invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together
from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s
high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with
basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the
military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II.
Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to
orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda
campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works
anymore.
The
loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates
to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners
at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic
State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of
other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of
the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees
fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat
from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have
exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread
atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations,
actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.
The
brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police
gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of
penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s
prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population.
Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a
shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized.
Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague
a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment
and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup
d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed
the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate
hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president
in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation
in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The
foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion
pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the
myth of human progress.
“The
demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more
quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence
empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent
strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history
should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from
diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better
part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the
main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an
expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic
budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign
nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or
profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo,
British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet
exploitation of Eastern Europe.”
When
revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So
delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong,
empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two
years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the
Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just
twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003
[when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
Many of
the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent
leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the
Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority
may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.
“For
the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a
demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international
competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve
currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling
Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be
a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic
clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous
hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.
A discredited elite, suspicious
and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array
of instruments created for global dominance—wholesale surveillance, the
evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized
police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and
satellites—will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the
nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from
those who rule the corporate state.
