The Coming Fall of the American Empire

[FAH1223]

EVEN AS PRESIDENT DONALD Trump faces ever-intensifying investigations into the alleged connections between his top aides and family members and powerful Russian figures, he serves as commander in chief over a U.S. military that is killing an astonishing and growing number of civilians. Under Trump, the U.S. is re-escalating its war in Afghanistan, expanding its operations in Iraq and Syria, conducting covert raids in Somalia and Yemen, and openly facilitating the Saudi’s genocidal military destruction of Yemen.

Meanwhile, China has quietly and rapidly expanded its influence without deploying its military on foreign soil.

A new book by the famed historian Alfred McCoy predicts that China is set to surpass the influence of the U.S. globally, both militarily and economically, by the year 2030. At that point, McCoy asserts the United States Empire as we know it will be no more. He sees the Trump presidency as one of the clearest byproducts of the erosion of U.S. global dominance, but not its root cause. At the same time, he also believes Trump may accelerate the empire’s decline.

McCoy argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the beginning of the end. McCoy is not some chicken little. He is a serious academic. And he has guts.

During the Vietnam war, McCoy was ambushed by CIA-backed paramilitaries as he investigated the swelling heroin trade. The CIA tried to stop the publication of his now classic book, “The Politics of Heroin.” His phone was tapped, he was audited by the IRS and he was investigated and spied on by the FBI. McCoy also wrote one of the earliest and most prescient books on the post 9-11 CIA torture program and he is one of the world’s foremost experts on U.S. covert action. His new book, which will be released in September, is called “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.”

“The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, may already be tattered and fading by 2025 and, except for the finger pointing, could be over by 2030,” McCoy writes. Imagining the real-life impact on the U.S. economy, McCoy offers a dark prediction:

“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness. After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2030 the U.S. dollar eventually loses its special status as the world’s dominant reserve currency.

Suddenly, there are punitive price increases for American imports ranging from clothing to computers. And the costs for all overseas activity surges as well, making travel for both tourists and troops prohibitive. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, its forces begin to pull back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. Such a desperate move, however, comes too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying its bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.”

Alfred McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.” His new book, out in September, is “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.”

[paperino]

Interesting analysis.

[FAH1223]

The part about the crumbling of the empire here:

The pillars of empire are starting to crumble
JS: One of the things that struck me as I read your book, In the Shadows of the American Century, was how often you predict, based on data, on historical example, that the United States as an empire is headed down a path of demise and you write about that with a nuance and you don’t pretend to know the exact scenario. One of the things you write in the book is, “Future historians are likely to identify George W. Bush’s rash invasion of Iraq, in 2003, as the start of America’s downfall. But instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this 21st century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic contraction or cyber warfare.”

Why do you seem so convinced that this is inevitable, and how do you foresee the scenarios, potential scenarios for the demise of what we now understand as the American empire?

AM: There are, I think multiple factors, that lead to an imperial decline. If you look at the key aspects of the U.S. global power, you can see a waning of strength in every one of those. One of the key things that I think very few people understand, after World War II, the United States became the first world power, the first empire in a 1000 years to control both ends of the vast Eurasian continent. Now Eurasia, that enormous landmass, is the epicenter of world power. It’s got the resources, the people, the civilizations that—you’ve got to control that to control the world. And the United States, through the NATO alliance in Western Europe and a string of alliances along the Pacific littoral with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, controlled the axial ends of the Eurasian landmass.

And then we link that with layers of power, treaties multilateral defense treaties, starting with NATO in Europe, all the way to SETO and ANSIS with Australia, the Japan Mutual Security Treaty, the South Korea U.S. Mutual Security Treaty, the Philippine U.S. Mutual Security Treaty. And then we had fleets, we had the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, the Seventh Fleet at Subic Bay Philippines, later the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. We had hundreds of military bases. By the end of the Cold War we have about 800 overseas military bases.

Most of those were arrayed around the Eurasian landmass. In the last ten years as drone technology has developed, we’ve laid the latest layer upon that, which are the drone bases. There are 60 US drone bases that stretch from Sicily all the way to Andersen air base on Guam, and that, given the range of the most powerful drones, the Global Hawk, it gives us surveillance and then with Predator and Reaper, strike capacity, all the way along that rim, and that has been, if you will, the key pillars in the global architecture of U.S. power.

And those pillars are starting to crumble. The NATO alliance is weakening under Trump, with the rise of Russian pressure on that alliance, but more particularly, our capacity to control those critical allies along the Pacific littoral is beginning to weaken. Jeremy, your organization The Intercept had, last April, a very important document that leaked out, the transcript of that phone conversation between President Trump and President Duterte of the Philippines, that should have had front page coverage all across the world, and every serious American newspaper. It got good coverage, but not the coverage it deserved.

If you read that transcript closely, you can see the waning of U.S. power along the Pacific littoral. Donald Trump is calling up, he’s got a fellow demagogue in the person of Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, who has killed about 8000 people in his so-called drug war— people blown away, bodies dumped in the streets of Manila and Cebu and elsewhere in the country, and he’s calling up and congratulating him and trying to bond with him, you know, autocrat to autocrat. And then Trump shifts the conversation and says, “Well, we got this problem in Korea. Kim Jong Un is unreliable.” And Duterte says, “I’m going to call China, I’ll talk to Xi Jinping about that.” And Trump says, “We’ve got some very powerful submarines, which we’re going to have in the area.” And Duterte says, “Yeah, I’m going to call,” he says, “Yeah, I’m gonna call Xi Jinping about that. I’ll be talking to China.”

And it’s clear that Trump is trying to court the man, trying to impress him with U.S. strength, and every time Trump tries to do it, Duterte responds, “I will call China.” It’s a clear indication of China’s rising power along that Pacific littoral. Also, China has been conducting a very skillful geopolitical strategy, so-called “One belt, One road” or “Silk Road” strategy and what China has been doing since about 2007 is they’ve spent a trillion dollars and they’re going to spend another trillion dollars in laying down a massive infrastructure of rails and gas and oil pipelines that will integrate the entire Eurasian landmass. Look, Europe and Asia, which we think of as— we’re learning in geography in elementary school that they’re two separate continents—they’re not. They were only separated by the vast distances, the steps in the desert that seem to divide them. Well China’s laid down, through a trillion dollars investment, a series of pipelines that are bringing energy from Central Asia across thousands of miles into China, from Siberia into China.

They’ve also built seven bases in the South China Sea and they’re taking control over these— spent over two hundred million dollars in transforming a fishing village on the Arabian Sea named Gwadar, in Pakistan, into a major modern port. They’ve also got port facilities in Africa. And through these port facilities they’re cutting those circles of steel that the United States laid down to kind of link and hold those two axial ends of Eurasia. So we are slowly, because of China’s investment, its development, some of our mismanagement of our relationships and long term trends, those axial ends of Eurasia they’re crumbling. Our power, our control over that critical continent is weakening, and China’s control is slowly inexorably increasing and that is going to be a major geopolitical shift. One that is going to weaken the United States and strengthen China.

JS: You write, “All available economic, educational, technological data indicate that when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends are likely to aggregate rapidly by 2020, and could reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, may already be tattered and fading by 2025, and, except for the finger pointing could be over by 2030.” How do you see that happening and what does that mean for the United States in the world, but also for ordinary Americans?

AM: Sure. How do I see it happening? There are the geopolitical shifts that I just described. The other thing of the long term trends, the issues of economic waning, U.S. economic strength. China is slowly, is steadily surpassing the United States as the number one economic power. That’s one long term trend. And China will therefore have the resources to invest in military technology.

The second thing is, we speak of crumbling U.S. infrastructure, one thing that nobody talks about very seriously in a sustained way is the intellectual infrastructure of the country. The OECD, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the rich countries club, conducts these tests every couple years, the PISA tests, and they test fifteen year-olds. In the latest rounds of tests, Shanghai students have come number one in math, science, and literacy.

U.S. students have been somewhere, in math and science, somewhere between twenty and thirty. And so you might say, “Who cares about a bunch of fifteen year-olds with braces, backpacks, and attitudes?” Well, by 2030, those fifteen year-olds are going to be in their 20s and 30s. They’re going to be the super smart scientists and engineers that are coming up with the cutting edge technology. Technology, for example, like photon communications. China is evidently going to lead in this, that means that China can communicate with its satellites and its entire cyber and space and military apparatus without fear of being compromised. We have not developed the same level of photon communications as China. We’re much more subject to being hijacked and manipulated.

So, those kinds of trends in raw military power. The sort of the erosion of U.S. educational standards within ten or fifteen years can have some very serious implications for our military technology. It means you just don’t have the scientists, the technology, the innovation that has been so central to U.S. global power for so many years. And so that waning, the geopolitical shifts, you know, those invisible movements of a power arrayed across the landscape. And then the technological and educational shifts coming together means that there are all kinds of ways for the U.S. to lose power. Either with a bang or a whimper. But by 2030, it’s pretty much over for our global dominion.

JS: And is that, is that in your opinion a bad thing?

AM: Well, yes it is, and I here, you know I speak, you could call me, you know a narrow American. But, okay, every empire—if you think we’ve had empires in the world for about four thousand years. Some have been more benign and beneficent, others have been absolutely brutal. If you want to go to the most brutal empire, I think in human history, the Nazi empire in Europe. It was an empire. It plundered. Much of that mobilization of labor was just raw exploitation. It was the most brutal empire in human history and it collapsed. The Japanese Empire in Asia, which was arguably the biggest empire in history, was a second runner-up for raw brutality, they collapsed. The British Empire was relatively benign. Yes, it was a global power, there were many excesses, many incidents, one can go on, but when it was all over, they left the Westminster system of parliament, they left the global language, they left a global economy, they left a culture of sports, they created artifacts like the B.B.C.

So the US empire has been, and we’ve had our excesses, Vietnam, we could go on. Afghanistan. There are many problems with the US exercise of its power but we have stood for human rights, the world has had 70 years of relative peace and lots of medium size wars but nothing like World War I and World War II. There has been an increase in global development, the growth of a global economy, with many inequities, but nonetheless, transnationally, a new middle class is appearing around the globe. We’ve stood for labor rights and environmental protection. Our successor powers, China and Russia, are authoritarian regimes. Russia’s autocratic, China’s a former communist regime. They stand for none of these liberal principles.

So you’ll have the realpolitik exercise of power, all the downsides with none of the upsides, with none of the positive development. I mean we’ve stood for women’s rights, for gay rights, for human progress, for democracy. You know we’ve been flawed in efficacy, but we’ve stood for those principles and we have advanced them. So we have been, on the scale of empires, comparatively benign and beneficent. And I don’t think the succeeding powers are going to be that way.

Moreover, there are going to be implications for the United States. Most visibly, I think that when the dollar is no longer the world’s unchallenged, preeminent, global reserve currency, the grand imperial game will be over. Look, what we’ve been able to do for the last twenty years is we send the world our brightly colored, our nicely printed paper, tea notes, and they give us oil and automobiles and computers and technology. We get real goods and they get brightly colored paper. Because of the position of the dollar. When the dollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the cost of goods in the United States is going to skyrocket.

We will not be able to travel the world as we do now. We won’t be able to enjoy the standard of living we do now. There will be lots of tensions that are going to occur in the society from what will be a major rewriting of the American social contract. This will not be pleasant. And arguably, I think it’s possible if we look back, we could see Trump’s election and all the problems of the Trump Administration as one manifestation of this imperial decline.

All the fault of the elites, arrogance, and an inability to study the world.

[thehappyone]

FAH for the last decade I have seen you post disparaging posts about the USA, and celebrating it's imminent demise. If you hate the USA so much do you want to swap passports?

[FAH1223]

FAH for the last decade I have seen you post disparaging posts about the USA, and celebrating it's imminent demise. If you hate the USA so much do you want to swap passports?

I don't hate the USA at all.

I just wish the richest country in the world got its priorities straight and quit the empire game. Invest in the country, rebuild it, give the citizens of the working and middle classes their just dues, give us health care, get rid of the parasite banks..

The foreign policy has been disastrous and I hate it.

[thehappyone]

FAH for the last decade I have seen you post disparaging posts about the USA, and celebrating it's imminent demise. If you hate the USA so much do you want to swap passports?

I don't hate the USA at all.

I just wish the richest country in the world got its priorities straight and quit the empire game. Invest in the country, rebuild it, give the citizens of the working and middle classes their just dues, give us health care, get rid of the parasite banks..

The foreign policy has been disastrous and I hate it.

Do you think these two are mere coincidences? To be the richest you have to play the game. You are young and naive. No country ever got rich without exploiting others or by being charitable.

Working and middle classes of America don't make America rich. The top 20% in usa own 80% of the wealth. They make america rich. And they are mostly bankers. The rest of you are just there for cheap labour and military personnel. You can make a conscious decision today if you want to be among the top 20% or the bottom 80%, what's your decision.

[FAH1223]

Do you think these two are mere coincidences? To be the richest you have to play the game. You are young and naive. No country ever got rich without exploiting others or by being charitable.

Working and middle classes of America don't make America rich. The top 20% in usa own 80% of the wealth. They make america rich. And they are mostly bankers. The rest of you are just there for cheap labour and military personnel. You can make a conscious decision today if you want to be among the top 20% or the bottom 80%, what's your decision.

Not coincidence at all.

My trajectory is being in the top 20%. But, there's no vision dude. There are very simple solutions that are impossible to implement for this country. It's pretty maddening.

[CigaalSHiiDaaDCFC]

FAH for the last decade I have seen you post disparaging posts about the USA, and celebrating it's imminent demise. If you hate the USA so much do you want to swap passports?

I don't hate the USA at all.

I just wish the richest country in the world got its priorities straight and quit the empire game. Invest in the country, rebuild it, give the citizens of the working and middle classes their just dues, give us health care, get rid of the parasite banks..

The foreign policy has been disastrous and I hate it.

Do you think these two are mere coincidences? To be the richest you have to play the game. You are young and naive. No country ever got rich without exploiting others or by being charitable.

Working and middle classes of America don't make America rich. The top 20% in usa own 80% of the wealth. They make america rich. And they are mostly bankers. The rest of you are just there for cheap labour and military personnel. You can make a conscious decision today if you want to be among the top 20% or the bottom 80%, what's your decision.

[DaacasBiyo]

So this guy tells us all the evil and horrible things the US Empire is doing on one hand, then feels angry and upset the power of that same empire will decline. If he was genuinely concerned about the evils deeds of the US and how they destabilize the world through their covert manipulations then wouldn't it be great if their ability to harm the world wanes?
I think he's one of those libertarian who rants about the US global reach but support the Empire nonetheless, Rand Paul is like that, he rants about the US military expansions and other awful things the Empire is doing but then supports huge increases in military spending.
All the so-called US intellectuals and academics who are White and who pretend to write against the government are fake like the media. They all entertain in some shape or form a relationship with the corporate elites and the governing politicians. What is also interesting about this guy is that for someone who pretends to be ambushed by the CIA, tapped, spied on by the FBI, audited by the IRS, he's still pretty alive and even makes money selling books while the CIA destroyed and eventually killed Gary Webb the guy who exposed their trafficking of the crack cocaine. Also for a historian is very biased and even tries to rewrite history by stating "The British Empire was relatively benign" when in fact it was genocidal, or that the Nazi was an empire of labor exploitation as if the US was not. Then he talks about some other nonsense on how the US is great, how it brings democracy and how other empires will be bad for the world if the US falls, etc..etc...his rant is almost identical to congressman steve king western civilization rant.
But I agree with him on one thing, his fear of China. These white supremacist Yankees are shitting themselves of the thought of future confrontation with the Chinese, remember the only war they've won since becoming a superpower after WWII is Desert Storm, and what he said about Eisenhower ordering the CIA to attack the free world because they could not penetrate the Soviets shows you how coward they are, they much rather attack the weak and the defenseless than the strong this is the same typical mindset white supremacists in the US have where they attack and kill women, children and the elderly.
He's right also when he says they don't have photon communications as China, in fact the Chinese were the first country recently to ever launch a quantum satellite but he seems more worried about the Artificial Intelligence domain and how Trump is damaging it, and in this area the Chinese are also really going fast, they're investing like crazy in this because they know whoever dominates AI will control the world economically and militarily. This is a very interesting recent MIT article about it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6083 ... e-by-2030/

I also love how this cracker is already crying the dollar will lose its importance and that they'll be poor and not be able to control the world as a global currency by 2030, these white supremacists are stealing Trillions of dollars from developing countries and so they'll fight to keep their scam going even after the fall of the dollar unless the developing world bands together with China and stomp on these blood suckers once they fall. That's why we should have China as an ally for Africa and not listen to their propaganda about how the Chinese will be bad for the world once they fall. They are already scaring the world about the recent Chinese military in Africa, keep in mind, the crackers are not worried about the Chinese military in Africa although they pretend to be, they are more worried about the Chinese soft power, namely their investments in the continent and their education/training of students because these are the tools that win the hearts and minds respectively.

This dude knows what's coming and wishes for a soft landing, Steve Bannon vowed to destroy the Administrative State, Trump and Reince Priebus agree with him but the Deep State will try to stop them and this is the fight that will determine how hard this Empire falls.

[gobdoon]

By the time the damage is done it would be too late for the Americans
The sooner they remove this beter for them for damage limitation but the think is he is so arrogant that doesnt care whether removed or not after all he is billioner and is not going to loose anything and wants to run America like his own privete business.