The Decline of the American Empire

A recent post here reviewed Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, that documents the United States' systematic pillaging of dozens of national economies around the world over the past thirty-five years. The ease with which the US achieved this and the inability of the targeted nations to defend themselves makes for a depressing read, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I believe that the end of the American Empire is in sight.

Back in 1914 Britain was the world's unquestioned superpower, although historians now recognize that year as the beginning of the end for Britain's supremacy. Few in England at the time would have even entertained the idea that their empire on which the sun never set was on the verge of decline. The First World War shattered the economy and the faith of the public in its leaders. The Depression, followed by the Second World War, bankrupted the country and left it without the power to hold onto its colonies.

When historians look back fifty years from now, they will probably point to 1989 as a similar turning point for the United States. By that time, the appalling mismanagement of the Reagan years had already taken the US from the world's biggest creditor nation to its greatest debtor. Education and social programmes were being decimated, huge government budget deficits paid for a massive military buildup and deregulation of various industries had transformed the US into a casino economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States without a excuse for its aggressive actions and the Cold War was shown to have been based on wildly exaggerated CIA estimates of the largely fictional Soviet threat.

Today, the United States has a standard of living surpassed by several western European nations and the European Union has displaced it as the world's largest economy. China will soon push it out of second place. Washington has forsaken even the pretense of leadership in the world by invading Iraq over the protests of virtually the entire world community. The mounting human and economic costs of occupying Iraq, a conflict that the American people now realize they were duped into, will eventually bring about a national political crisis and demands from the public for reform. Opinion polls already show that eight out of ten Americans feel their country is on the wrong course and trust in government has fallen beneath the previous lows that followed Watergate.

The Project for a New American Century is the ideological blueprint that Bush Jr and company expect to ensure global US dominance for the next hundred years, but it is out of step with current realities. At the end of the Second World War, the United States was the only major power that had not been devastated and it assumed a position of supremacy almost by default. The US represented half of the entire world economy in 1945, but today it is less than a quarter and the growth of China, a resurgent Russia and Europe will continue to diminish its importance. Twenty years ago, the American market was essential to all of the other trading nations, today it is of minor significance and in twenty more years it will give Washington little leverage at all. America will need friends and allies. Unilateralism will no longer be an option.

Contrary to claims that we have reached the end of history, the international power structure continues to evolve. The election of social-democratic, nationalist governments throughout Latin American precedes a coming revolt against the Monroe Doctrine that, for almost two hundred years, has presumed a US right to interfere in the internal affairs of any country in the Western Hemisphere to enforce its economic interests. Japan, Korea and the other East Asian trading nations are turning away from the US and towards China. Europe, excepting Britain, is also disengaging itself and moving to a more arms length relationship with the United Sates.

As economic power shifts from the US to other nations and groups of nations, the day comes closer when the United States will attempt to coerce other countries and fail utterly, suddenly encountering the foreshortened limits of its influence. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was such a humiliating moment for Britain and sounded the final death knell for its empire.

This change will happen because other nations, like China with its current $1.5 trillion in US dollar currency reserves and Japan with its massive holdings of US government securities, will tell Washington to go pound sand. It will be a watershed that profoundly alters the perception of the United States among the world's nations. The US government may find itself under tremendous economic pressure to reduce its military spending and withdraw from many of its hundreds of foreign bases to help balance the books at home. Strong arm tactics will no longer be acceptable. American leaders will need to develop new skills in diplomacy and consensus building.

When that time comes, the people of the United States will have to adjust their own perceptions, just as the British were forced to do. American exceptionalism will be exposed for what it is, a myth. The US is just another country, better than some and worse than others, that has enjoyed an historically brief period of extraordinary success through a combination of larceny and luck. The big question is: what kind of new power alignment will follow the inevitable decline of the American empire?