The End of the American Century?

[Ryuji_tanaka]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/12/06/america_collapse_2025

 

 

How America will collapse (by 2025)

 

Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it -- in the very near future

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 percent of Americans believed the country was now "in a state of decline." Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. 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 U.S., 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, U.S. 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 percent of them compared to 12 percent for China and 16 percent 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 U.S. 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 percent increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. 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 U.S. expert, that it "blows away the existing No. 1 machine" in America.

 

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 percent of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66 percent.

 

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 U.S. 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 percent natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

 

Concerned that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.

 

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the "Carter Doctrine," by which U.S. 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 U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12 percent 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, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

 

Within a few years, the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. 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 U.S. garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.N. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-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… [u.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean" and target "nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States." By developing "offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare 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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. "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 U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.

 

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 U.N. 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.

 

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, "From the Cold War to the War on Terror." Later this year, "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State," a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.

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http://www.villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2010/12/the-staggered-end-of-western-civilisation/

 

The Staggered End of Western Civilisation

Post-War consumerism and licentious liberalism are senseless.

by Desmond Fennell “There were whispered arguments between our parents while we watched TV—arguments about changing the rules, we gathered, that applied to all of us, the dads and moms as well as the kids…”

Naomi Wolf in Promiscuities (1997) on San Francisco in 1970.

 

During the last ninety odd years Western civilisation has been coming to an end in three revolutions: the Russian and German revolutions, and the Second American Revolution which is still shaping life in the West today. Let me clarify three key terms.

First, a civilisation. A civilisation is essentially a grounded hierarchy of rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community’s rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period. The community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense that it finds in its set of rules, its framework for life. Some of the rules are circumstantial and therefore changeable; others are essential, forming the civilisation’s defining core.

 

European or western civilisation. Constructed in Western Europe in the twelfth century AD by Latin, Germanic and Celtic Christians, it later crossed the Atlantic and other seas and lasted into the twentieth century. Its set of essential rules of behaviour made sense to our ancestors for nearly a thousand years.

 

A revolution. It begins with a group of people who adhere to a new ideology which they believe contains the formula for a good and just life. These believers take possession of a nation’s central government and by unconstitutional means increase its power. Using that augmented power, they preach their ideology, establish new rules derived from it, empower those who support these rules, and disempower opponents. This process takes at least twenty years, maybe thirty or more.

 

Until the first half of the twentieth century there existed a tacit agreement of European nations, at home and overseas, that all political and military action must respect—or after a transgression re-assert—the essential rules of European civilisation. This tacit agreement applied also to revolutions: the new rules which a revolution enduringly established must not breach the essential European rules. The Irish Revolution and the Italian Fascist revolution operated within this framework.

 

But three revolutions, in three powerful countries, Russia, Germany and the USA, rejected the rules system of European civilisation. The revolutionaries, finding that European civilisation unjustly limited their power to create the good life they envisaged, made new rules that, while forbidding certain behaviours, justified states and individuals doing things which European civilisation forbade. The Russian revolution maintained its post-European rules system for 70 years. The German Revolution was beginning to establish its rules when it was overthrown. From the 1960s onwards the second American revolution established its post-European rules system in its own country and, by proxy, in Western Europe. That rules system is still in force.

 

The second American Revolution

The second American revolution began in 1933 during thee Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President. The American revolutionaries were Left liberals who called themselves simply “liberals”. Their liberalism required a big and powerful State shaping the lives of people for their good.

 

Roosevelt brought them to power as advisors and colleagues because he was convinced that their demand for a “Big State” was the best means of tackling the Depression. His New Deal programme greatly increased the power of the Federal Government. When the Supreme Court pronounced twelve New Deal measures unconstitutional, Roosevelt, in effect, got a new Constitution by appointing left-liberal judges who declared the measures constitutional. In 1940, in disregard of American precedent, Roosevelt was elected President for a third term, and later, while America was at war, he sought and won election for a fourth term.

 

The Big State which the left liberals created reached its apogee with the manufacture of the atomic bomb, its use against two Japanese cities, and the official justification of the resulting massacres. This justification of massacre signalled to the liberals that the State they had worked to create was likely to approve those elements of their programme that rejected other core rules of Western civilisation.

 

The aim of their programme, given the Big State, was to bring about a perfect human condition. For that purpose, first, there must be an end to the tacit recognition of Christianity as America’s ‘national’ religion, and to the consequent role of Christian morality as a determinant of behavioural rules. Second, categories of citizens who were legally or otherwise unequal must be raised or lowered to legal equality, so as to bring about a fraternity of individuals, equal in law and in their treatment by their fellows. Third, all citizens must have access to education and health services and be equipped with buying power. And finally, with due regard to the rights of others, the desires of individuals must be recognised as rights and realised as far as possible.

 

Implicit in that programme were Black civil rights and radical feminism; normalisation of homosexuals and of unmarried mothers and their offspring; political and financial empowerment of young people; maximal facilitation of the physically deficient; invalidation of intrinsic personal authority such as that possessed by clergy, males, parents, teachers and the aged; ample social welfare; unshackling of sex and of pornography; legalisation of abortion; and a blank cheque for science. Implicit, therefore, in their programme was a new collection of rules many of which would replace essential European rules, which were traditional in the USA and which they deemed oppressive or unjust.

 

The culmination of the revolution

Their chance to implement their programme fully came in the 1960s and early 70s. when the US Government and manufacturing industry needed to increase consumption, with its dual yield of revenue and profit. The Government, committed to reaching the Moon, was waging the Cold War and the Vietnam war. Manufacturing industry with the help of computers and automation was producing more goods than it could sell. First Government, then also manufacturing industry, perceived in the unfulfilled parts of the liberal agenda the means of increasing consumption and the consequent money yield.

 

So from the 1960s, the American state began endorsing that agenda through Supreme Court rulings and by legislation. Under the liberal President, Lyndon Johnson, the revolution made its great breakthrough. In the Partisan Review for Winter 1967, Susan Sontag, high-priestess of the American intelligentsia, set the tone for those decisive years when she wrote:

 

If America is the culmination of the Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation….The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilisation has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of world history.

 

Campus campaigns against ‘Western white civilisation’ continued into the Nixon 70s. The teachers of the post-western, liberal rules of correct behaviour came to function as a sort of secular State Church or informal, doctrinally paramount “Party”. Since its role had to do with defining correct thought and behaviour, to call it the liberal ‘Correctorate’ seems appropriate.

 

The principal preaching space allotted to the liberals was in the mass media, including films. But their dominance of the mass media was dependent on, and shared with, business big and small, inasmuch as these same media were the principal public space where businessmen paid to advertise their goods-for-sale. Because their advertising campaigns, like the liberals’ teaching, amounted to telling people how they should act, live and be—much of it, for example, had to do with personal body care—they de facto formed a part of the State-licensed Correctorate. Thus a conjunction of all the interests involved made up that state-liberal system, with ethical, economic, technological and political dimensions, which contemporaries called “consumerism”.

 

Consumerism spreads to Western Europe

Pressure from the USA led to the imposition of the new State-liberal system in America’s West European satellites. London became the centre from which the new rules system reached Ireland and the Continental countries. The aim of the American rulers was to widen the area of maximal money yield and to counter, with a display of “permissiveness” and prosperity, the communist indoctrination of Eastern Europe. In each West European State, successively, elements of the mass media spearheaded the new rules; a national Correctorate took shape; the media as a whole conformed; and the rulers, in varying degrees, gave legal force to the new teachings and placed correctors at key points in the state administration.

 

Through the mass media, the Correctorates managed public opinion, Allocating public honour to conforming elements, they hounded or effectively silenced dissident groups and individuals, and dissident writings and speeches. In the Member-States of the European Community, they worked in collaboration with the liberal party in the Community’s central administration, lauding the latter’s liberal directives and insisting on their meticulous implementation.

The net result, with regard to rules to live by, was that a collection of non-Western rules, combined with some surviving Western rules, became the reigning and widely accepted system of do’s, don’ts and do-as-you-likes of North America and much of Europe, Ireland centrally included.

 

Not a new civilisation

This post-European collection of rules did not constitute a new civilisation. It lacked a civilisation’s basic prerequisite: it did not make sense to the peoples it was presented to for adoption. Thrown together by a late-European ideological sect and its supporting governments, to promote justice, virtue, consumption and power, its sponsors treated overall sense as superfluous. Its rules system constituted, like that of its Soviet counterpart, a utopian experiment not shaped into sense by combined human instinct, reason and experience.

 

Take a random array of don’ts as taught and administered by the Correctorate. No intelligible ranking of incorrectness was indicated as between don’t k*ll people with non-state-sponsored bombs, don’t be fat or speak badly of Jews or urge that a law should reflect Christian morality; don’t be smelly or invade another country without the authority of the United Nations or smoke in an enclosed public space or say that homosexuality is a perversion or “deny the Holocaust”; don’t torture prisoners, pollute a river, ban pornography, present women as sex-objects or prevent them aborting offspring, or restrict what adults read, view, say, write or think; and don’t, if a man, beat your wife or pursue a female in the office.

 

Leave aside the obvious contradictions. Because the consumers did not have available a grounded exposition by the Correctorate of which of these incorrectnesses was gravely, less gravely or only somewhat incorrect, they had perforce to try to gauge this from the Correctorate’s reactions or non-reactions to incorrectnesses as they occurred. And the teaching thus delivered was bafflingly dual. On the one hand, it was to the effect that all behaviours or thoughts forbidden by the Correctorate were, for a variety of variously grounded reasons, very grave. On the other hand, the same teaching indicated—read the contemporary newspapers—that the gravity of many incorrectnesses was greater, lesser or cancelled, depending on who committed them or why; or if there were victims, on which nation, creed, party or sex they belonged to. Inevitably, the conclusion drawn by the consumers was that all the Correctorate’s don’t rules were of more or less equal importance, and were in practice not actually rules.

 

Virtual do-as-you-likes operated alongside the dos and don’ts. They operated, for example, for art in all its forms, for official killing in righteous wars, as for dress, dancing, social manners, propriety of speech, modes of personal address, utterances about Catholics, Germans, Arabs or other non-protected groups, and for relations with the supernatural on condition that these were kept private. A special do-as-you-like applied to the state of Israel.

For the use of the human reproductive organs the Correctorate’s rule ran as follows: provided that minors and adults use their reproductive organs separately, that if more than one user is involved there is mutual consent, and that a contraceptive is employed unless conception is intended, do as you like in private, or in public to gratify a paying audience.

 

Reactions to the senselessness

It was not simply that this chaos of rules did not make sense. It was also experienced as senselessness by those white Westerners to whom its white Western sponsors presented it as a life framework. For the most part, they experienced it as senselessness unreflectively, in that depth of their being where generations before them had trained them by heredity to assess—in a combined act of reason, feeling and intuition—any presentation purporting to be a framework for life. And that encounter with senselessness, when their minds and hearts were seeking sense, sent distress pressing into their consciousness. To be precise, white Westerners found that consciousness of the collection of rules-to-live-by that was presented to them was accompanied by a pain of soul—a hunger for sense and a feeling of offence that it was not being provided. Nothing more natural, then, than that they should want to annul that pain and, collectively, feel little desire to reproduce that white western life.

 

The pain was abundantly evidenced by the many tons of mood-changing and hallucinating drugs imported into the West every month; the huge production and sale of pharmaceutical antidotes to psychic distress; the profusion since the 1960s of professional soul-healers of many different kinds; the many methods from big rock concerts to binge-drinking by which young people tried to achieve some suspension of consciousness; and the high incidence of suicide mainly by men and of self-harming by girls and women. Those were the years in the history of Europe when women stopped singing as they went about their housework, and boys stopped whistling in the street.

 

The West’s protracted suicide

When people encounter in their collective life a famine of sense, motivation to reproduce that life flags. In the latter decades of the twentieth century the fertility of white westerners fell increasingly beneath the necessary average for population stability of 2.1 children per woman. In the USA the government forecast that white people would be a minority there by 2042. For the European Union the fertility rate was 1.5, and several of the larger European countries were expecting sharp declines in population in the next twenty-five years.

 

The demographic situation of the white West repeated that of Communist Russia in the latter decades of the Soviet Union. While rampant vodka addiction was lowering Russian male life expectancy, Russians noted with dismay that in the foreseeable future, due to their low fertility rate, they would constitute a minority in the Union.

 

The key thing that human beings look for, subconsciously, in the life framework presented to them by authority is that it privileges reproduction, that is, the conception and birth of children and the cared-for raising of them to puberty. If the proffered set of rules does this, it is possible that the rules as a whole will make sense to them. But if such privileging is not evident, then the entire rules system will appear senseless. In the white West from the latter part of the twentieth century, the prevalent set of rules downgraded and discouraged reproduction by privileging recreational sex of every kind, preferably with a contraceptive. Hence, fundamentally, the ongoing protracted suicide of the white West.

 

Consumerism’s ersatz sense

The consumerist-liberal system had an effective means of countering, in day-to-day living, the conscious impact of the hunger pain. On top of the training that people had inherited from the generations before them in assessing for sense the life presented to them, another skin-deep training was now superimposed. From tender years onwards, the consumerist economy, and its accompanying teaching, conditioned them to accept an ersatz sense in place of the real sense they craved for.

 

This ersatz sense was provided, mainly, by the continuously increasing power to buy things and to do things which the consumerist economy supplied to individual consumers as well as to states and business firms. For the consumers, the persuasive force of this increasing power to buy and do was actualised in two interlocked ways. Repeatedly it enabled them to acquire more, bigger or costlier things, and these included the powers of new gadgets and machines that enabled them to do more things than they previously could. The result was that most consumers, most of the time, believed in the surface of their minds that, despite the stress of living it, this present life was a good life.

 

As the new Millennium arrived, that was the situation. For as long as the power to buy and do of governments and consumers kept increasing, the West’s post-European system would continue to function. It still had some years to go before it would match the 70-year life span of its more conservatively post-European Soviet counterpart. That the Ameropean system could last as long as did its former antagonist seemed possible. That it could endure much longer was excluded by the extreme fragility of its life-support mechanism.

 

Inevitably, within a matter of years, there would be an end to the continuous increase of the power to buy and do, and with that the main source of the system’s ersatz sense and social glue would vanish. Nothing would then remain to prevent the direct and continuous impact of its senselessness on the consciousness of westerners, nor to make the system’s senseless and unloved life framework seem a good life. Bereft of its life-support mechanism, the chaos of its values and rules would translate into violent social chaos and disintegration.

 

Postscript fifty years from now

What was inevitable happened. With that, the final episode in the staggered and war-filled end of European civilisation concluded. The three successive powerful rejections of it within less than a century had indicated a shared conviction among twentieth-century Europeans, in Europe and overseas: a conviction that the civilisation which their ancestors had created, and which had enabled them to lead and dominate the world, had exhausted its usefulness and required replacement.

The two replacements, Russian and American, which lasted through several generations, failed because neither of them provided the only adequate substitute: a new civilisation. Instead, they offered utopian constructions fashioned by the pursuit of unlimited power and perfect justice, which the peoples involved experienced as senseless. And so it was that, in the historical succession of great civilisations, Europe’s followed Rome’s and ended.

 

 

[lomex32]

America needs another world war ..... so they will be back in business

[dungeonbaby]

On the first article: Interesting. But flawed.

 

When you see America as nothing but an arrogant brat and assume, therefore, that it operates on the misguided belief that it is its birthright to rule the world instead of on a Judeo-Christian impetus to do what is right, then you can only imagine certain responses coming from their people. You can only imagine that they would act in a self-centered, short-sighted way. The scenarios you quoted paint the US as having such little imagination and being so intent on hegemony that they would build the hammer (or buy one from China) to nail their own coffin.

 

Americans are sitting on vast reserves of energy and could stop dependence on their enemies’ oil if they wanted ignored al gore or felt sufficiently threatened. Just in Pennsylvania the oil hasn’t been touched in 80 years, I heard. And they can always do what the Germans did in WWII – convert coal to gasoline. They could do that tomorrow. So the oil shock scenario…kaput.

 

Besides, China doesn’t want the dollar to devalue. They need to prop up the US or else their investment is gone. What good is their loan to the US if the US pays them back with cheap dollars? And who will buy all the stuff they manufacture for Walmart?

 

Anyway, it would be more interesting, sir, if you stated your own views on the matter.

 

On the second article: I need another big mug of coffee...

[Ryuji_tanaka]

On the first article: Interesting. But flawed.

 

When you see America as nothing but an arrogant brat and assume, therefore, that it operates on the misguided belief that it is its birthright to rule the world instead of on a Judeo-Christian impetus to do what is right, then you can only imagine certain responses coming from their people. You can only imagine that they would act in a self-centered, short-sighted way. The scenarios you quoted paint the US as having such little imagination and being so intent on hegemony that they would build the hammer (or buy one from China) to nail their own coffin.

 

Americans are sitting on vast reserves of energy and could stop dependence on their enemies' oil if they wanted ignored al gore or felt sufficiently threatened. Just in Pennsylvania the oil hasn't been touched in 80 years, I heard. And they can always do what the Germans did in WWII – convert coal to gasoline. They could do that tomorrow. So the oil shock scenario…kaput.

 

Besides, China doesn't want the dollar to devalue. They need to prop up the US or else their investment is gone. What good is their loan to the US if the US pays them back with cheap dollars? And who will buy all the stuff they manufacture for Walmart?

 

Anyway, it would be more interesting, sir, if you stated your own views on the matter.

 

On the second article: I need another big mug of coffee...

 

True, but American Exceptionalism and the view that America should be the world's policeman makes the military misadventure more likely than the others. The unpopular war in Iraq is an example.

 

Although, I do not think that it would cause the end of American domination. A more like scenario would be social implosion. Things in the US are now tense with the economic downturn, massive illegal immigration from Mexico, and a taxation system favoring socialist ideology. I think it would be more like the middle class being taxed out of existence, collapse of social security due to lots of massive unemployment and the job market bottoming out because the illegals from Mexico pouring in on the American Southwest (check out California as a harbinger for all 3 scenarios).

[wizard23]

I would treat this philosophically, akin to Hegel's philosophy of history, best known as Zeitgeist.

 

Before America, these countries were the superpowers of the world, Egypt, Babylon (Iran), Spain, U.S.S.R. together with the US, to name a few and now the last country standing, the USA. nothing is permanent in this world. we may not see it in our lifetime but for sure, America will not be forever be entrenched as the world's superpower. a lot of factors, economically, politically, etc. even possibly, another world war, will lead to its decline and in turn, another country will benefit from this turn of events. such is life. it's a world history pattern.

 

but in the meantime, it's hard to think that the US will collapse anytime soon.

[wolfwhistler]

I would treat this philosophically, akin to Hegel's philosophy of history, best known as Zeitgeist.

 

Before America, these countries were the superpowers of the world, Egypt, Babylon (Iran), Spain, U.S.S.R. together with the US, to name a few and now the last country standing, the USA. nothing is permanent in this world. we may not see it in our lifetime but for sure, America will not be forever be entrenched as the world's superpower. a lot of factors, economically, politically, etc. even possibly, another world war, will lead to its decline and in turn, another country will benefit from this turn of events. such is life. it's a world history pattern.

 

but in the meantime, it's hard to think that the US will collapse anytime soon.

 

 

i subscribe to this idea..that america is far from imploding 'anytime soon'..if only to put a timetable, NOT in the next 50 years...

and that's being conservative...

if i may add to the list of superpowers of yore...the british and roman empires...

[Mandrake]

I just hope I will have enough Budd Lites in my cooler when the time comes.

[mbt31]

You do know when the Americans govthat they're gonna take Starbucks n Mcdo with em right? Hehe!

 

Seriously the scenarios generated are highly probable but as history shows, the US has always shown a remarkable ability to bounce back from decline and while it may be time for american global dominNce to end, there is a need for an american style idealism if nothing else to act as a counterpoint for autocratic or totalitarian rule

[agxo3]

The article paints a doomsday scenario that is certainly possible. But, as has been pointed out, the US is remarkably resilient and there is a depth and a resolve that has not been tested in recent generations, 9/11 notwithstanding. The future is unknown, and the dangers that the article points out certainly should not be ignored, but I don't have a crystal ball, and neither does the author of the article. There is a need for the Chicken Littles of the world, but a greater need for the risk takers and visionaries who lead. The only question is - are the American people smart enough to choose the right leaders?

[khantan]

very interesting read

[*kalel*]

how will they collapse? they control oil and weaponry...... what happened recently was a cover up of the war financial loses and not because of their economic managers and world-dominating capitalist market

[*kalel*]

sabi ng kakilala ko, his wife was pulled out from libya by the american govrnment, 1 week bago ang libya political crisis.....

[Ryuji_tanaka]

Well..on paper, US "police action" in the region would turn out to be highly advantageous, using the cover of stabilizing the region and the War against Terror, the US, establishing a presence there would give the US a foothold in the oil-rich region and be within striking distance of a vital transport route (Suez Canal). In addition if a "hot war" breaks out, it would revitalize the US economy thru the military-industrial complex selling weapons to both sides of the conflict.

 

But the question is..would they be able to take advantage of it? with the US military severely stretched in Afghanistan and Iraq, the economy sucker punched, and the increasing movement within the US to bring home their troops to guard the border with Mexico, it looks to very iffy. The increasing number of lone wolf terrorist attacks, the increasing number of hate groups and militia movements further stretches domestic resources...

[Mango Man]

obviously the US is in decline economically and geopolitically, but collapse? Nah, i seriously doubt it. They do have to come to terms that China (and later on, India) will be ascending in terms of economic strength.

[paeng]

On the first article: Interesting. But flawed.

 

When you see America as nothing but an arrogant brat and assume, therefore, that it operates on the misguided belief that it is its birthright to rule the world instead of on a Judeo-Christian impetus to do what is right, then you can only imagine certain responses coming from their people. You can only imagine that they would act in a self-centered, short-sighted way. The scenarios you quoted paint the US as having such little imagination and being so intent on hegemony that they would build the hammer (or buy one from China) to nail their own coffin.

 

Americans are sitting on vast reserves of energy and could stop dependence on their enemies' oil if they wanted ignored al gore or felt sufficiently threatened. Just in Pennsylvania the oil hasn't been touched in 80 years, I heard. And they can always do what the Germans did in WWII – convert coal to gasoline. They could do that tomorrow. So the oil shock scenario…kaput.

 

Besides, China doesn't want the dollar to devalue. They need to prop up the US or else their investment is gone. What good is their loan to the US if the US pays them back with cheap dollars? And who will buy all the stuff they manufacture for Walmart?

 

Anyway, it would be more interesting, sir, if you stated your own views on the matter.

 

On the second article: I need another big mug of coffee...

 

The "vast" resources are actually based on "technically recoverable" oil, of which the EROEI is very low. As Hubbert predicted accurately, oil production in the U.S. peaked in '71, and there is no more "easy oil" there. If the U.S. military, Lloyd's of London, the IEA, and other organizations are correct, then the same will happen to Saudi Arabia soon, just as the same is taking place for Mexico.

 

The U.S. economy is essentially a house of cards built on incredible levels of casino capitalism (around $370 trillion in derivatives), total debt (around $57 trillion), consumer spending (which makes up around 70 pct of its economic "growth"), and military expansionism (of which prob. up to 40 pct is funded through foreign loans). Most U.S. states are close to bankruptcy, and the only thing that they are all relying on is the U.S. dollar, which is essentially worthless like much of total money supply.

 

For the last few months, China and the rest of BRIC (as well as the IMF) have been publicly talking about what to do if or when the dollar collapses. But that will be a walk-in-the-park given the effects of a resource crunch.