{"id":25588,"date":"2021-02-04T02:05:45","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T02:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=113249"},"modified":"2021-02-04T02:05:45","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T02:05:45","slug":"the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/04\/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Decline and Fall of the American Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Image:\u00a0 Calvin Shen<\/p>\n

In 2004, journalist Ron Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove<\/a>, as boasting, \u201cWe\u2019re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.\u201d He dismissed Susskind\u2019s assumption that public policy must be rooted in \u201cthe reality-based community.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re history\u2019s actors,\u201d the advisor told him, \u201c\u2026and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America\u2019s international power and authority. Back in the imperial heartland, the political marketing industry that Rove and his colleagues were part of has had more success dividing and ruling the hearts and minds of Americans than of Iraqis, Russians or Chinese.<\/p>\n

The irony of the Bush administration\u2019s imperial pretensions was that America has been an empire from its very founding, and that a White House staffer\u2019s political use of the term \u201cempire\u201d in 2004 was not emblematic of a new and rising empire as he claimed, but of a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an agonizing death spiral.<\/p>\n

Americans were not always so ignorant of the imperial nature of their country\u2019s ambitions. George Washington described New York as \u201cthe seat of an empire,\u201d and his military campaign against British forces there as the \u201cpathway to empire.\u201d New Yorkers eagerly embraced their state\u2019s identity as the Empire State<\/a>, which is still enshrined in the Empire State Building and on New York State license plates.<\/p>\n

The expansion of America\u2019s territorial sovereignty over Native American lands, the Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War built an empire that far outstripped the one that George Washington built. But that imperial expansion was more controversial than most Americans realize. Fourteen out of fifty-two U.S. senators voted against the 1848 treaty<\/a> to annex most of Mexico, without which Americans might still be visiting California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah and most of Colorado as exotic Mexican travel spots.<\/p>\n

In the full flowering of the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going to welcome imperial invaders from America. So America\u2019s leaders developed a system of neocolonialism through which they exercised overarching imperial sovereignty over much of the world, while scrupulously avoiding terms like \u201cempire\u201d or \u201cimperialism\u201d that would undermine their post-colonial credentials.<\/p>\n

It was left to critics like President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to seriously examine the imperial control that wealthy countries still exercised over nominally independent post-colonial countries like his. In his book<\/a>, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism<\/em>, Nkrumah condemned neocolonialism as \u201cthe worst form of imperialism.\u201d \u201cFor those who practice it,\u201d he wrote, \u201cit means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.\u201d<\/p>\n

So post-World War Two Americans grew up in carefully crafted ignorance of the very fact<\/a> of American empire, and the myths woven to disguise it provide fertile soil for today\u2019s political divisions and disintegration. Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d and Biden\u2019s promise to \u201crestore American leadership\u201d are both appeals to nostalgia for the fruits of American empire.<\/p>\n

Past blame games over who lost China<\/a> or Vietnam or Cuba have come home to roost in an argument over who lost America and who can somehow restore its mythical former greatness or leadership. Even as America leads the world in allowing a pandemic to ravage its people and economy, neither party\u2019s leaders are ready for a more realistic debate over how to redefine and rebuild America as a post-imperial nation in today\u2019s multipolar world.<\/p>\n

Every successful empire has expanded, ruled and exploited its far-flung territories through a combination of economic and military power. Even in the American empire\u2019s neocolonial phase, the role of the U.S. military and the CIA was to kick open doors through which American businessmen could \u201cfollow the flag\u201d to set up shop and develop new markets.<\/p>\n

But now U.S. militarism and America\u2019s economic interests have diverged. Apart from a few military contractors, American businesses have not followed the flag into the ruins of Iraq or America\u2019s other current war-zones in any lasting way. Eighteen years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq\u2019s largest trading partner<\/a> is China, while Afghanistan\u2019s is Pakistan, Somalia\u2019s is the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Libya\u2019s is the European Union (EU).<\/p>\n

Instead of opening doors for American big business or supporting America\u2019s diplomatic position in the world, the U.S. war machine has become a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power to destabilize countries and wreck their economies, closing doors to economic opportunity instead of opening them, diverting resources from real needs at home, and damaging<\/a> America\u2019s international standing instead of enhancing it.<\/p>\n

When President Eisenhower warned against the \u201cunwarranted influence<\/a>\u201d of America\u2019s military-industrial complex, he was predicting precisely this kind of dangerous dichotomy between the real economic and social needs of the American people and a war machine that costs more than the next\u00a0ten militaries<\/a> in the world put together but cannot win a war or vanquish a virus, let alone reconquer a lost empire.<\/p>\n

China and the EU have become the major trading partners<\/a> of most countries in the world. The United States is still a regional economic power, but even in South America, most countries now trade more with China. America\u2019s militarism has accelerated these trends by squandering our resources on weapons and wars, while China and the EU have invested in peaceful economic development and 21st century infrastructure.<\/p>\n

For example, China has built the largest high-speed rail<\/a> network in the world in just 10 years (2008-2018), and Europe has been building and expanding its high-speed network<\/a> since the 1990s, but high-speed rail is still only on the drawing board<\/a> in America.<\/p>\n

China has lifted 800 million<\/a> people out of poverty, while America\u2019s poverty rate<\/a> has barely budged in 50 years and child poverty has increased. America still has the weakest social safety net of any developed country and no universal healthcare system, and the inequalities of wealth and power caused by extreme neoliberalism<\/a> have left half of Americans<\/a> with little or no savings to live on in retirement or to weather any disruption in their lives.<\/p>\n

Our leaders\u2019 insistence on siphoning off 66% of U.S. federal discretionary spending<\/a> to preserve and expand a war machine that has long outlived any useful role in America\u2019s declining economic empire is a debilitating waste of resources that jeopardizes our future.<\/p>\n

Decades ago Martin Luther King Jr. warned us<\/a> that \u201ca nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.\u201d<\/p>\n

As our government debates whether we can “afford” COVID relief, a Green New Deal and universal healthcare, we would be wise to recognize that our only hope of transforming this decadent, declining empire into a dynamic and prosperous post-imperial nation is to rapidly and profoundly shift our national priorities from irrelevant, destructive militarism to the programs of social uplift that Dr. King called for.<\/p>The post The Decline and Fall of the American Empire<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image:\u00a0 Calvin Shen In 2004, journalist Ron Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, \u201cWe\u2019re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.\u201d He dismissed Susskind\u2019s assumption that public policy must be rooted in \u201cthe reality-based community.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re history\u2019s actors,\u201d the advisor told him, \u201c\u2026and you, [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post The Decline and Fall of the American Empire<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":171,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[834,190,1010,1178,286,192,194,1018,32,445,595,2720,201,57,202,714,204],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/171"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25589,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588\/revisions\/25589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}