[THS] The American Empire Is Collapsing, And Americans Will Be The Last to Know

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.alternet.org/story/149173/the_american_empire_is_collapsing%2C_and_americans_will_be_the_last_to_know?page=entire


News Junkie Post / By Gilbert Mercier

The American Empire Is Collapsing, And Americans Will Be The Last to Know

December 15, 2010  |



50 years from now historians will probably be writing about the fall of the American
empire. But history is writing itself furiously in the present, accelerated by the
revolution of global freedom of information. What would have taken years to unlikely
gather is accessible to anyone with a few strokes on a computer keyboard. So never
mind the historians of the future, and lets  see how  reality is shaping up today.

The crumbling period of the United States empire started on September 11th. Since
then, a chain of events so dire occurred that it would seem the empire defeated itself
by a series of catastrophic mistakes. After 9/11,  Americans wanted revenge, and the
war in Afghanistan became a very easy sale for the Bush administration. But then the
neo-cons seized the opportunity to push their agenda  of the New American Century
project, and it was precisely the Achille’s heel  of the empire.

Attacking Iraq: The Biggest Geopolitical Blunder In History

When the Bush administration attacked Iraq in 2003, a critical element escaped their
understanding of the regional and demographic parameters: By toppling the Sunni
regime of Saddam Hussein, they would give the upper hand to the oppressed Shia
Iraqi majority allied with Iran.

In a word, the US troops who fought and died in the conflict did it ultimately for the
regional benefit of the Iranian Islamic Republic. The blunders did not stop with
geopolitics, but were compounded by a catastrophic financial burden.

The Cost Of Wars in Iraq And Afghanistan Is Bankrupting The US Economy

If the Pentagon was a corporation, it would be the largest in the world. The curiously
called, Department Of Defense, costs the  American taxpayers, since the ill advised
attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, around $700 billion a year. Of course, if you add up
health care for wounded veterans, and  layers of new “security” administration such
as the Department of Homeland Security,   the numbers keep adding up to top $1
trillion a year. Overall more than 25 percent of the federal budget gets swallowed in
the financial black hole that is the Pentagon.

If Americans could do the math, they would quickly understand that the bill for the
two wars is now creeping up to $10 trillion. In order to achieve the chimeric goals of
the neocons of an ever lasting global American empire money had to be borrowed.
Currently, for every dollar spent by the federal government 40 cents is borrowed.
America used to borrow mainly from Japan and Europe. but now does its main
borrowing from China. In a striking reversal of fortune, the “poor man of Asia” has
now become the country in the world with the most liquid assets.

Empires Always Have An Expiration Date

Americans have a delusional  sense of historic exceptionalism which they share with
most previous empires. After all America’s ascension to a leading role on the world
scene is very recent. The deal was sealed in Yalta in 1945 between Stalin and
Roosevelt, with Churchill present but already taking the back seat. In a matter of 5
years, and about 60 million deaths, two news empires had emerged from the ruin of
three: the United States and the Soviet Union. On the losing side of history was, of
course, Japan, the empire of the sun, but also Britain and France.

The old imperial powers of Britain and France were slow to fully understand the
nature of the new game. It took the loss of India for the United Kingdom, in 1948,
and the one of Indochina for France in 1951 to make them understand that they
would have from now on an ever shrinking role on the world stage. However, it took
9 years for Britain and France to fully digest the consequences of Yalta. In 1956,
France and Britain took their very last joint imperialist venture by attacking Egypt over
the ownership of the Suez Canal. The decaying empires were told to back off by the
United States and the USSR.

A Repressive Capitalist  Globalization Or The Revolution Of Global Freedom Of
Information ?

The Cold War was a fairly predictable era. Beside a few crisis such as the flash point
of  the Cuba missile crisis, the two super-powers fought to augment their respective
turfs thought proxy wars. But Afghanistan came along for the Soviets, and the long
war made the USSR collapsed. Naturally the United States started acting as the only
super-power left, and for this reason as the master of the universe.

The narrative of Ronald Reagan is peppered by such elements, and so is the one of
all of his successors including Barack Obama. But all empires had the same  distorted
visions of themselves, the Romans imposed the Pax Romana on their vassals for a
long time , so did Charlemagne, and Napoleon for a much shorter time. In any
sense, power is cyclical and never lasts.

Thanks to WikiLeaks and the courage of his founder Julian Assange and the one of
Pentagon’s whistleblower Bradley Manning, it has become rather obvious that while
President Obama has changed the official tone of Washington from the Bush
administration, the overall goals of US foreign policies have remained  the same:
Ensure and expend  US power and authority on vassal states. This push to establish a
new world order under exclusive US authority has been prevalent in all of the US
administrations since Ronald Reagan and the end of the cold war.

President Obama, despite what could be his personal convictions is a prisoner of this
imperial system. Obama is trapped by a complex nexus of inter-locking institutions
such as the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department etc, and by powerful interest
groups profiting from endless wars. The very same institutions and interest groups
have been at the core of every post-1945 imperial presidency. As early as 1946,
president Harry Truman said: “From Darius’ Persia, Alexander’s Greece, Hadrian’s
Rome, Victoria’s Britain; no nation or group of nations has had our responsibilities.”

However, most analysts and foreign policy experts currently assume that the present
century will not be American. In this tectonic  power shift, under the push of China
and India, the emerging new world order will be plural and decentralized. But the
main question is: How Americans will adapt to this new paradigm where the United
States loses its status of uncontested leadership?