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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
By Alfred W. McCoy
December 11, 2010 "The Nation" - - A soft landing for America 40 years from
now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global
superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington
is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more
realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025,
just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.
Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their
history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is
their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires
regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for
the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17
years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United
States, counting from the crucial year 2003.
Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash
invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However,
instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with
cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial
collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of
economic collapse or cyberwarfare.
But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there
will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for
Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have
discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact
on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation
. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious
domestic unrest.
Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it
comes to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and
are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American
Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be
tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
Significantly, in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council admitted for
the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining
trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025,
the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now
under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern
history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States'
relative strength—even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington,
however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing
for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the US
would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power
globally” for decades to come.
No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself
in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy)
in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese
innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science
and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's
current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without
adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.
By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail
Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of
advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of
retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year,
however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the
world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational,
providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of
space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes
into every quadrant of the globe.
Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the
White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual,
gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January,
President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place
for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden
ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul]
Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed
because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly,
writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs,
neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's
economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic
decline” and denying that any deterioration in US global power was underway.
Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic
view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that
65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.”
Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional US military allies, are using
their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with
China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from
Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president
flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline
summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World
Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge US, Trade Talks With Seoul Fail,
Too.”
Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose
its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the
decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the
National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four
realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global
power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying
assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include:
economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III.
While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American
decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.
Economic Decline: Present Situation
Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the
global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world
trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the
dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.
By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global
merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16%
for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will
reverse itself.
Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane.
In 2008, the US was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent
applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to
a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in
2009 the US hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the
Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in
“global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade.
Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry
unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said
one US expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.
Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of
future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors.
After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university
degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum
ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality
of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all
graduate students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom
will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By
2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical
shortage of talented scientists.
Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the
dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no
longer willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic
policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the
International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks
holding an astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian president
Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially
maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency
.”
Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future
might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual
nations” (that is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to
come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “
to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order.”
Economic Decline: Scenario 2020
After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands,
in 2020, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as
the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. 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, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from
hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it
is far too late.
Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India,
Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge
US dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid
soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real
wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates,
often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of
disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency
with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and
threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next
to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.
Oil Shock: Present Situation
One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global
oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane
, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a
position the US had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael
Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping
our global future.”
By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas
supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-
starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National
Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and
Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”
Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big
basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction.
The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “
spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to
search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the
ocean to keep its profits up.
Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far
heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain
constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to
rise—and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat
aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative
energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too
little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades,
doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil
imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66%.
Oil Shock: Scenario 2025
The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse
developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By
comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just
months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's
plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future
energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes
the cost of US oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new
series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize
their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile,
China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline
and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at
South Pars in the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil
tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of
Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and
affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth
patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy
economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean
island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese,
informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use
Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian
Ocean.
With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “
Carter Doctrine,” by which US military power was to eternally protect the
Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured
the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—
logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US
can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its
nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil
for half of its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices
to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition,
putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and
rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With
thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars
flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed
. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US
military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.
Within a few years, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking
toward midnight on the American Century.
Military Misadventure: Present Situation
Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-
advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians
of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically
compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying
new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations,
irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging
expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.
Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to
plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle.
In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily.
In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred
by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed
its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied
Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the
millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000,
expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and
beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested,
nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.
Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014
So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly
fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military
stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel
, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis
abroad are multifold.
It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down US garrison in embattled Kandahar in
southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas
, while US aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are
taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1
bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that
are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships
rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.
Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and
Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the
war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of
remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at US garrisons across the country,
sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975
, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in
Kabul and Kandahar.
Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC
’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of
Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its
ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and
refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special
Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn,
sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells
. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly
denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to
brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that
marked the end of the British Empire.
World War III: Present Situation
In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to
rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a
year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington
played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global
power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export
trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to
American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.
With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from
Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. In August, after
Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and
conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official
Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The US-China wrestling match over
the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real
future ruler of the planet will be.”
Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the
capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean”
and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.”
By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,”
China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the
information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With
ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as
the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a
total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides
toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning,
communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.
To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is
intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced
cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners
expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable
of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single
terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the
Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from
stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient
modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.
Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into
the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a
low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new
generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of
space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone
before.
World War III: Scenario 2025
The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even
the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard
to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force
itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a
better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,”
and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.
It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers
pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home
electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance
Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens
suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand's
operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries
that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of
China's People's Liberation Army.
The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes
control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US “Vulture”
drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and
Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot
wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the
Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.
Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory
strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite
system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic
codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the
Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China
's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its
Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific
Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire
missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are
suddenly inoperative.
As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite
architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the
malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of
US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin
steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded.
Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is
exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long
called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power
that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in
World War III without a single human casualty.
A New World Order?
Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every
significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American
global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.
As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of
rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military
bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal
on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to
weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to
rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly
guaranteed.
Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological
trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to
European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly
prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create
crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin
the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a
generation or more of economic misery.
As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a
future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global
superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia
evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional
defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key
instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower
seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.
In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of
transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an
international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly
unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to
speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and
multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban
enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a
world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed
into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will
make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive
battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some
future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of
repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies
in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply
with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly
might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India,
and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan,
and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the
loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.
Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something
reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires
took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of
micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its
immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America,
Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime
deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the
United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an
expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body.
All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the
assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of
historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the
unchecked erosion of their global position.
If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025,
then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline
with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed
onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.
If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain
high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system
is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is
little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our
bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our
antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to
assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and
prosperity in a changing world.
Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems
increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain
's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests,
preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values. | l****5
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【在 R****a 的大作中提到】
: 帝国的陨落
: 来源: ognc 于 2010-12-12 05:58:18 [档案] [博客] 旧帖] [转至博客] [给我悄悄话
: ] 本文已被阅读：254次 字体：调大/调小/重置 | 加入书签 | 打印 | 所有跟帖 | 加
: 跟贴 | 查看当前最热讨论主题 0
: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
: By Alfred W. McCoy
: December 11, 2010 "The Nation" - - A soft landing for America 40 years from
: now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global
: superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington
: is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more
|
|
