During the days of the George W. Bush presidency when the country was dragged into disastrous wars on the lies propagated by Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and others, Tom Tomorrow had a cartoon where he ‘explained’ how it came to be that Bush and Cheney had embarked on this disastrous course. The cartoon said that the two had actually been pot-smoking hippie radical friends in their youth and carefully planned a long time ago to pretend to be arch-conservatives so that they could rise to power and destroy the US from within by advocating policies that would destroy it.
Unfortunately, I could not find that old cartoon but that same cartoon could be resurrected with Donald Trump playing the starring role. Nafeez Ahmed writes that a new Pentagon study says that the American empire is collapsing.
The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which US power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling.
Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence,” the US now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority.”
One must treat such US military studies with a great deal of caution since they often take a ‘sky is falling’ approach in order to extort yet more funds for themselves, and indeed that is what the report encourages, that the government “invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” US military.”
But even allowing for that self-interest, there can be no doubt that the US is being undermined from within, by cutting back on health, education, infrastructure, basic research, alternative energy, and all the other aspects of life that make a country truly healthy. Instead the US is spending more and more on enriching a very few and on a bloated military that is entangled in many conflicts that it cannot get out of. As with all empires, collapse comes when it is over-extended, when things fall apart because the center cannot hold.
With Trump, we can expect the process to accelerate. I wrote a few weeks ago how the fear of losing the support of your own party and base serves as the normal brake that restrains politicians from going off the rails, but that these are no longer operating since the Trump fans are unbelievably loyal and the Republican party is a mere rubber stamp. I fear that without those brakes, we are witnessing a runaway political locomotive. While we don’t know when and how it will crash, all we can be sure of is that the crash itself will be terrible and cause a lot of damage, not just to the people who are ostensibly in control, but even more so to those who had nothing to do with the crash.
The American empire is collapsing.
Living in the USA you probably don’t hear the academics and the pundits but outside the USA this has been the consensus for at least the last 5 or 10 years at least.
The general analogy has been Britain in the early 1900s but in the last few years I think the analogy is failing as Britain did not seem to be destroying its industry and educational system and did not appear to be going increasing irrational. It just was losing its predominant position as the greatest industrialist power.
It was not abandoning its infrastructure as far as I know.
I have been reading a few articles about the New York and Washington subways which appear to be on the verge of complete collapse and then ran into an article about Beijing’s new maglev train and thought of the contrast. http://www.crrcgc.cc/en/g7389/s14333/t280141.aspx
the US is spending more and more on enriching a very few and on a bloated military
British--German navel race? Sounds like the US military is light on history though there did not seem to be the same kleptocracy the US is now seeing, Huge social inequality but not the same level of looting.
The premise of this conclusion is that the US-backed “status quo” international order is fundamentally “favorable” for the interests of the US and its allies.
Allies, what allies? The way Trump is going the US may not have many allies. Angela Merkel has already made pointed remarks about taking more responsibility for the defence of the EU and if Trump really wreaks the accord with Iran, the EU is not likely to be too happy, Currently South Korea must be thinking they’d be better off uniting with North Korea than losing Seoul, and Australia must be worried given declining American military and economic power and its increasing closeness to much of Asia.
Shorter US military: “we broke it.”
Some folks must have thought 1946 would never end.
It did, a long time ago.
It’s an extremely optimistic report, then. Too bad they want to “fix” it.
@#4
I don’t know whether the decline of US power is utopian or distopian, but the decline of any international order and all government authority will surely just lead to more Somalias and Syrias. I would hardly call that “optimistic”.