An Empire in Decline

In any case all the classic indicators of imperial decline have been there for quite a while for all to see-the outsourcing of manufacturing, immense and increasing indebtedness to foreign creditors, the exhaustion of an overstretched military bogged down in far-flung conflicts, the increasing reliance on mercenaries to wage wars, political paralysis, a restive and divided populace, crumbling infrastructure, an ever more skewed wealth pyramid, etc., etc.

Americans are particularly resistant to the idea of limits, but nothing lasts forever: no empire remains dominant indefinitely. The fundamental question for the ruling elites in any empire in decline is how to manage its diminution of clout-how to, ideally, transition gracefully into a new position that still offers a high degree of domestic prosperity and stability while preserving as much global influence as possible. Spain, Holland, Britain, France, among others, managed this transition with pretty good ultimate results, though none without a lot of trauma, and some very, very bumpily indeed. But the U.S.' relative level of global dominance surpassed all previous empires, so it has farther to fall, and its demise, if traumatic, could cause far more planetary turmoil, especially given the ubiquity of nuclear weapons and materials in our era. The stakes couldn't be higher, but so far the U.S. has been stumbling very badly in the early phases of this inevitable global geo-strategic realignment.

The Reagan administration rapidly accelerated the de-industrialization of the nation's heartland. It, and all subsequent administrations recklessly allowed financial markets to run amok and eviscerate a lot of the nation's productive capacity. Despite a few impressive tactical geo-political successes (George Bush Senior's deft assembling of an unprecedented global coalition to repel the invasion of Kuwait and, arguably, the U.S.-led intervention in Bosnia while Europe dithered) by and large the U.S., which was widely perceived as a nearly omnipotent "hyper-power" unequaled in world history after the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, is, while still undisputedly the world's most powerful nation, obviously weakened. The recent catastrophic eight years of the Bush 43/Cheney reign radically accelerated and exacerbated the empire's decline. The decisions made in that ruinous period in nearly every policy domain were so counter-productive that they made a somewhat smooth transition, if not totally impossible, at least extremely difficult. They probably hastened America's decline by one or two decades and radically reduced its capacity to maneuver.

How we relate to China, the rising power a few years away from supplanting us as the world's largest economy and already totally outmaneuvering the U.S. in its relentless hunt for raw materials and markets in the developing world, is by far and away the most fundamentally important geopolitical issue facing the U.S. and the world. History is not comforting. It tells us that when a hungry new power rises to challenge a declining one, war almost always eventually ensues. China may be too culturally ethnocentric to become a true global power in every sphere, but it will certainly challenge us to become the undisputed dominant power in Asia. China's ruling elites are not at ease: they know they are riding a tiger, as they are under tremendous pressure to rapidly raise the standards of living of hundreds of millions of peasants heading to the cities lest social unrest rend the nation. China is sure to hit some jolting speed bumps, but so far its ruling elites, while ruthless, are exhibiting far more discipline, foresight and patience than ours, and, thousands of peasant riots against corrupt local party bosses notwithstanding, they have the advantage of a long tradition of obedience to central rule in the very cohesive Han culture.

Violent, radical Islamic militancy is certainly a menace that needs to be resisted, as it is clearly a source of potential harm to our citizens, and the post 9/11 U.S. reaction was so extraordinarily clumsy that it has made this enemy far more of a threat than it needed to be by inflating its importance and boosting its mythos. But Al Qaeda and their ilk, as dangerous as they are and as annoying as they will be for years to come, are not remotely close to being existential threats to any Western society and never will be, any more than the I.R.A. was to the U.K. or E.T.A. is to Spain. Radical Islam will, in the long term, no matter how many individual lives the conflict with it claims, turn out to be historically almost insignificant compared to the impacts the rise of China and the other "BRICs" (Brazil, Russia, India) will have upon the planet, and certainly insignificant compared to the global environmental unraveling we are now plunging into. And yet, we obsess about Islamists far more than we do about China or than about the very real threats to the biosphere, the matrix of all life.

One tremendous problem is that, as I mentioned, honest discussions about how to manage the geopolitical shifts underway are taboo in public American political discourse. Even hinting at the notion of decline would be an act of political suicide for any public figure in a nation addicted to a sense of its own God-granted exceptional status. There certainly are intelligence and diplomatic analysts and even some politicians and high-ranking officials who have a lucid understanding of these issues, which are in fact discussed openly in think-tank colloquia by specialists and academics. But translating these open secrets into intelligent policies has so far been impossible. Managing a global geopolitical transition is a very difficult and demanding challenge for even the deftest of governing elites in the best of circumstances, but ours seems particularly ill-equipped to even face the nation's situation realistically, let alone address it. In fact, in the last few decades our governing elites have seemed far more myopic and, to be blunt, far more incompetent than those in most other industrially developed nations.

There are certainly many historical, geographic, social and cultural factors I have discussed elsewhere that I can't do justice to here that make the American body politic particularly hard to govern. Several of the nation's foundational myths including eternal expansion and rugged individualism that worked well to stimulate enterprise and invention in periods of rapid growth make sane adjustment to limits in periods of contraction nigh impossible. And as we've seen in recent months with the re-emergence of the rabid, irrational far right, there just seem to be much larger swaths of the population here that are politically unhinged.

But while all that is important, as I pondered the matter I came to the conclusion that ultimately the most important difference between current decision-making and policy formulation in the U.S. and other developed nations lies in the attitude and culture of our business class. One still gets the sense that the business classes in continental Europe or in Japan like all capitalists obviously want to keep their profits high and their taxes low and are certainly as willing to pillage poorer nations' resources as other capitalists, but they also by and large act as though they want to maintain a level of shared prosperity and social cohesion, at least in their own societies. They seem to understand that widespread decent living standards, reasonably robust social safety nets and public spending on infrastructure create a livable, stable society in which their enterprises can prosper in the long term, even if they have to pay more in taxes. Though globalization is eroding this solidarity, they still to a large extent act as though they are part of the whole social order, not an entirely separate species. Granted they have to contend with far more powerful labor unions than in the U.S., but still they don't seem to aspire to crushing them completely. They may not like every aspect of it, but they seem to have made peace with the historical right-left compromise that has shaped modern "bourgeois democracies."

The center-right, which in an industrialized nation with a large middle-class is the "default setting" governing class, is, in Europe, far more willing to seek national consensus and long ago accepted the value of the "welfare state" than its U.S. counterpart, which seems incredibly shortsighted in its quest for immediate profits and almost cynically nihilistic in its disregard for the larger social good. The U.S. business classes do not act in general as though they feel an authentic social solidarity with the larger society. It is surprising that while there are far more radical parties active in European electoral politics, from xenophobic nativists and royalists on the right to Trotskyites on the left, than in the U.S., and far more strikes and labor actions, if one looks beneath the surface there actually seems to be far more social cohesion as well. There is also, in many countries, far more of a tradition of centralized decision making in national capitals and, despite a lot of grumbling, more respect for expertise and science-based policies.   

Silly political tirades aside, all modern societies' economies without exception are hybrids of private markets and large socialized sectors. Right-left divides on economic issues are about the contours of that fundamental architecture, with the left arguing for a larger commons and the right for a larger private sphere. The reason the center-right is in power in so much of Europe today despite global capitalism's recent catastrophe is because it has accepted and appropriated much of the socialist left's historical program regarding the welfare state, so the electorate can vote for those who seem "tougher," i.e. slightly more nationalistic and xenophobic, with no fear their safety net will get too badly frayed. The Conservative Party in Britain, for example, wouldn't dream of dismantling the U.K.'s national health service, the most socialistic in all of Europe.

The U.S. center-right business classes have in large part (and of course with noteworthy exceptions) been extraordinarily cynical in their willingness to cater to religious social ultra-conservatives and right wing populists in order to achieve coalitions for electoral success to protect and enhance their profits, but this is a very dangerous game. They have lost touch with the commons. They live in gated communities or urban equivalents with private security, send their children to private schools, and hire the nation's brightest minds to dodge taxes. John Kenneth Galbraith once said that the 50 million richest Americans had seceded from the Union.

Reformers, notably the two Roosevelts and now perhaps Obama, have had to rescue capitalism from its own excesses, but the current economic crisis combined with imperial decline is a lethal mixture. Current U.S. business elites, who have an opportunity under the far more enlightened and competent Obama administration to redeem themselves and rejoin the commons, seem incapable of participating in the forging of a national consensus to legitimately address the critical challenges of this era. Instead they seem hell-bent on sabotaging any threat to their short-term gain and any attempt to limit their power for the greater good. They may weather this storm this time, but, if they persist in their sociopathic ways, one day "the center will not hold."

The messy American democracy/plutocracy hybrid was a remarkably dynamic engine of expansion and novelty (as well as destruction) in an earlier age, but it seems so far to be failing to adjust to an era defined by limits to growth and power. In my view it is above all the worldview and political behavior of the U.S.' irresponsible center-right business elites that is its greatest weakness as it faces this turbulent period of global resource crunches, climatic destabilization, and imperial decline.