{"id":31940,"date":"2013-05-07T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-07T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/u-s-empire-and-disaster-capitalism-and-then-there-was-one\/31940\/"},"modified":"2013-05-07T16:12:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T15:12:00","slug":"u-s-empire-and-disaster-capitalism-and-then-there-was-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/u-s-empire-and-disaster-capitalism-and-then-there-was-one\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S Empire and Disaster Capitalism: And Then There Was One"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"World<\/p>\n

It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held\u00a045,000 warheads<\/a>, and its military had\u00a0five million<\/a>\u00a0troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.<\/em><\/p>\n

And then there was one. There had never been such a moment: a single nation astride the globe without a competitor in sight. There wasn\u2019t even a name for such a state (or state of mind). \u201cSuperpower\u201d had already been used when there were two of them. \u201cHyperpower\u201d was tried briefly but didn\u2019t stick. \u201cSole superpower\u201d stood in for a while but didn\u2019t satisfy. \u201cGreat Power,\u201d once the zenith of appellations, was by then a lesser phrase, left over from the centuries when various European nations and Japan were expanding their empires. Some started speaking about a \u201cunipolar\u201d world in which all roads led\u2026 well, to Washington.<\/p>\n

To this day, we\u2019ve never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly \u2014\u00a0above all<\/a>, to Washington \u2013 became imperial crash-and-burn. Left standing, the Cold War\u2019s victor seemed, then, like an empire of everything under the sun. It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot. It seemed like the end of the line.<\/p>\n

The Last Empire?
<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the rise and fall of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Japanese, some process seemed over. The United States was dominant in a previously unimaginable way \u2013 except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil plans to dominate the world.<\/p>\n

As a start, the U.S. was an empire of global capital. With the fall of Soviet-style communism (and the transformation of a communist regime in China into a crew of authoritarian \u201ccapitalist roaders\u201d), there was no other model for how to do anything, economically speaking. There was Washington\u2019s way \u2013 and that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both controlled by Washington) \u2013 or there was the highway, and the Soviet Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence and ruin.<\/p>\n

In addition, the U.S. had unprecedented military power. By the time the Soviet Union began to totter, America\u2019s leaders had for nearly a decade been consciously using \u201cthe arms race\u201d to spend its opponent into an early grave. And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the U.S. continued an arms race of one.<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, it would\u00a0outpace<\/a>\u00a0all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts. \u00a0It housed the world\u2019s\u00a0most powerful weapons makers<\/a>, was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop\u00a0future weaponry<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a\u00a0near monopoly<\/a>\u00a0on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn\u2019t).<\/p>\n

It had an\u00a0empire of bases<\/a>\u00a0abroad, more than\u00a01,000<\/a>\u00a0of them spanning the globe, also an unprecedented phenomenon. And it was culturally dominant, again in a way that made comparisons with other moments ludicrous. Like American weapons makers producing things that went boom in the night for an international audience, Hollywood\u2019s action and fantasy films took the world by storm. From those movies to the golden arches, the swoosh, and the personal computer, there was no other culture that could come close to claiming such a global cachet.<\/p>\n

The key non-U.S. economic powerhouses of the moment \u2013 Europe and Japan \u2013 maintained militaries dependent on Washington, had U.S. bases littering their territories, and continued to nestle under Washington\u2019s \u201cnuclear umbrella.\u201d No wonder that, in the U.S., the post-Soviet moment was soon proclaimed \u201cthe end of history<\/a>,\u201d and the victory of \u201cliberal democracy\u201d or \u201cfreedom\u201d was celebrated as if there really were no tomorrow, except more of what today had to offer.<\/p>\n

No wonder that, in the new century, neocons and\u00a0supporting pundits<\/a>\u00a0would begin to claim that the British and Roman empires had been second-raters by comparison. No wonder that key figures in and around the George W. Bush administration\u00a0dreamed<\/a>\u00a0of establishing a\u00a0Pax Americana<\/em>\u00a0in the Greater Middle East and possibly over the globe itself (as well as a\u00a0Pax Republicana<\/em>\u00a0at home). They imagined that they might\u00a0actually prevent<\/a>\u00a0another competitor or bloc of competitors from arising to challenge American power. Ever.<\/p>\n

No wonder they had remarkably few hesitations about launching their incomparably powerful military on wars of choice in the Greater Middle East. What could possibly go wrong? What could stand in the way of the greatest power history had ever seen?<\/p>\n

Assessing the Imperial Moment, Twenty-First-Century-Style<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what\u2019s remarkable is how much \u2013 and how little \u2013 has changed.<\/p>\n

On the how-much front: Washington\u2019s dreams of military glory ran aground with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, in 2007, the transcendent empire of capital came close to imploding as well, as a unipolar financial disaster spread across the planet. It led people to begin to wonder whether the globe\u2019s greatest power might not, in fact, be too big to fail, and we were suddenly \u2013 so everyone said \u2013 plunged into a \u201cmultipolar world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a\u00a0Pax Americana<\/em>\u00a0in sight, as a Washington-controlled Cold War system in the region shuddered without (yet) collapsing. The ability of Washington to impose its will on the planet looked ever more like the wildest of fantasies, while every sign, including the\u00a0hemorrhaging<\/a>\u00a0of national treasure into losing\u00a0trillion-dollar wars<\/a>, reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.<\/p>\n

And yet, in the how-little category: the Europeans and Japanese remained nestled under that American \u201cumbrella,\u201d their territories still filled with U.S. bases. In the Euro Zone, governmentscontinued to cut back<\/a>\u00a0on their investments in both NATO and their own militaries. Russia remained a country with a sizeable nuclear arsenal and a reduced but still large military. Yet it showed no signs of \u201csuperpower\u201d pretensions. Other regional powers\u00a0challenged unipolarity<\/a>\u00a0economically \u2013 Turkey and Brazil, to name two \u2013 but not militarily, and none showed an urge either singly or in blocs to compete in an imperial sense with the U.S.<\/p>\n

Washington\u2019s enemies in the world remained\u00a0remarkably modest-sized<\/a>\u00a0(though blown to enormous proportions in the American media echo-chamber). They included a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran and North Korea), a minority insurgency or two, and relatively small groups of Islamist \u201cterrorists.\u201d Otherwise, as one gauge of power on the planet, no more than a\u00a0handful<\/a>\u00a0of other countries had even a\u00a0handful of military bases<\/a>\u00a0outside their territory.<\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth\u2019s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn\u2019t win a war against minimally armed guerillas. Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure\u00a0rotting out<\/a>, its populace economically depressed, its wealth\u00a0ever more unequally divided<\/a>, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power\u00a0heading toward<\/a>\u00a0the national security state. Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.<\/p>\n

And then, of course, there was China. On the planet that humanity has inhabited these last several thousand years, can there be any question that China would have been the obvious pick to challenge, sooner or later, the dominion of the reigning great power of the moment? Estimates are that it will\u00a0surpass<\/a>\u00a0the U.S. as the globe\u2019s number one economy by perhaps 2030.<\/p>\n

Right now, the Obama administration seems to be working on just that assumption. With its well-publicized\u00a0\u201cpivot\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(or \u201crebalancing\u201d) to Asia, it has been moving to \u201ccontain\u201d what it fears might be the next great power. However, while the Chinese are indeed\u00a0expanding their military<\/a>\u00a0andchallenging<\/a>\u00a0their neighbors in the waters of the Pacific, there is no sign that the country\u2019s leadership is ready to embark on anything like a global challenge to the U.S., nor that it could do so in any conceivable future. Its domestic problems, from\u00a0pollution<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0unrest<\/a>, remain staggering enough that it\u2019s hard to imagine a China not absorbed with domestic issues through 2030 and beyond.<\/p>\n

And Then There Was One (Planet)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Militarily, culturally, and even to some extent economically, the U.S. remains surprisingly alone on planet Earth in imperial terms, even if little has worked out as planned in Washington. The story of the years since the Soviet Union fell may prove to be a tale of how American domination and decline went hand-in-hand, with the decline part of the equation being strikingly self-generated.<\/p>\n

And yet here\u2019s a genuine, even confounding, possibility: that moment of \u201cunipolarity\u201d in the 1990s may really have been the end point of history as human beings had known it for millennia \u2013 the history, that is, of the rise and fall of empires. Could the United States actually be the last empire? Is it possible that there will be no successor because something has profoundly changed in the realm of empire building? One thing is increasingly clear: whatever the state of imperial America, something significantly more crucial to the fate of humanity (and of empires)\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0in decline. I\u2019m talking, of course, about the planet itself.<\/p>\n

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature. The very definition of success \u2013 more middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere \u2013 is also, as it never would have been before, the definition of failure. The greater the \u201csuccess,\u201d the more intense\u00a0the droughts<\/a>, the stronger the storms, the more\u00a0extreme<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0weather<\/a>, the higher the rise insea levels<\/a>, the\u00a0hotter<\/a>\u00a0the temperatures, the greater\u00a0the chaos<\/a>\u00a0in low-lying or tropical lands, the more profound the failure. The question is: Will this put an end to the previous patterns of history, including the until-now-predictable rise of the next great power, the next empire? On a devolving planet, is it even possible to imagine the next stage in imperial gigantism?<\/p>\n

Every factor that would normally lead toward \u201cgreatness\u201d now also leads toward global decline. This process \u2013 which couldn\u2019t be more unfair to countries having their industrial and consumer revolutions late \u2013 gives a new meaning to the phrase \u201cdisaster capitalism<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take the Chinese, whose leaders, on leaving the Maoist model behind, did the most natural thing in the world at the time: they patterned their future economy on the United States \u2013 on, that is, success as it was then defined. Despite both traditional and revolutionary communal traditions, for instance, they decided that to be a power in the world, you needed to make the car (which meant the individual driver) a pillar of any future state-capitalist China. If it worked for the U.S., it would work for them, and in the short run, it worked like a dream, a capitalist miracle \u2013 and China rose.<\/p>\n

It was, however, also a formula for\u00a0massive pollution<\/a>, environmental degradation, and the pouring of ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere in\u00a0record amounts<\/a>. And it\u2019s not just China. It doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re talking about that country\u2019s ravenous energy use, including its possible future \u201ccarbon bombs<\/a>,\u201d or the potential for American decline to be halted by new extreme methods of producing energy (fracking<\/a>,\u00a0tar-sands extraction<\/a>, deep-water drilling). Such methods, however much they hurt local environments, might indeed\u00a0turn<\/a>\u00a0the U.S. into a \u201cnew Saudi Arabia<\/a>.\u201d Yet that, in turn, would only contribute further to the degradation of the planet, to decline on an ever-larger scale.<\/p>\n

What if, in the twenty-first century, going up means declining? What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events \u2013 the rise and fall of empires \u2013 fuse into a single disastrous system?<\/p>\n

What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt<\/strong>, co-founder of the\u00a0<\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and author of\u00a0<\/em>The United States of Fear<\/a>\u00a0as well as a history of the Cold War,\u00a0<\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>, runs the Nation Institute\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is\u00a0<\/em>Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held\u00a045,000 warheads, and its military had\u00a0five million\u00a0troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-31940","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}