Part I
When you write about the end of the American empire, you will necessarily have to go back to September 11, 2001. Several of the theorists who discuss the rise and fall of the great powers agree on this point, a date that shattered the neoliberal utopia that was the “end of history,” because ” the sleeping giant,” in the words of Hegel, the Orient, awakened the world to the thundering of a historic event that would change the socio-political face of the planet.
After a decade of world government under capitalism, with Pax Americana finally able to recreate the era of Pax Romana, the United States was confronted with the effect of the same expansionist policy. The impact of the East on the North American domestic sphere was the result of the close ties of the White House to Islamic fundamentalism, for the purpose of its use against communism.
It was Al-Qaeda, an organization supported by the United States in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that turned against the master’s hand, biting it in the very heart of New York’s city. Immanuel Wallestein, American academic, acknowledges in the gesture of the Islamists an episode similar to that of Rome in its later years, marked by aggressions by the ” barbarians ” who were previously used as mercenaries.
The second date that marked the crisis of the capitalist system was September 15, 2008, when important U.S. and European assets collapsed, at the same time as there was a decline in security and world confidence in the dollar since Richard Nixon removed that currency from the gold standard in the 1970s. The US enjoyed undisputed power, and for the first time in history, to determine the value of everything that exists by the mere issuance of inked paper.
The neoliberal bubble, that replaced productive capitalism in the 1970s, gave way to financial speculation that was based on the movement of fictional wealth through the stock market. Such capitalism brings with it as consequences the increase in inequality and the decrease in living standards of the working middle class, which previously benefited from lower prices of consumer goods and job creation. After the paradigm shift, the country de-industrialized, as companies migrated to countries with larger and cheaper labour. At the same time, the value of the dollar, dependent on oil, determined U.S. foreign policy.
The transition from gold to the dollar took place in the context of the Vietnam War, the last war that empire conducted with any hope of success. A conflict that was more ideological than expansionist, that resulted in a squandering of gold reserves, as well as a complete discrediting of the system at all levels. Security had to be sought at all costs for an empire that did not win expansive wars (in Korea, the US and its allies were left behind).
The fragile system of the dollar, upon which the great speculative fortunes of the twentieth century of the United States arose, collapsed in 2008, bringing chaos to the great Western powers that is not over yet and which modified the position of global hegemony. After that financial blow, China emerged as the second largest economy on the planet, and Russia regained its role as a power in geopolitical equilibrium. Other countries, ruled by financial power, such as the United Kingdom, fell behind those in world rankings, in clear decline as world hegemonies.
Thus 2008 revealed that the US was far from being, as was said under the Clinton administration, an “indispensable power”. Economies that were not neoliberal, but mixed and had a strong central planning component, such as China, Russia, Iran, India and Turkey, formed a second bloc of pressure, prepared in turn to serve as a benchmark in the construction of a new economic paradigm.
The third date marking the decline of the United States would be 9 November 2016, coinciding with Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections. This event altered public perception of domestic politics, which had for decades kept the establishment afloat: the so-called party of the sun (democrat) and the party of the moon (republican). The former governed the destiny of the country, dictating the norms of international politics, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal or the Alliance for Progress.
However, since the rise of Trump, an outsider with no predictable ideology, disposed to reason emotionally and convert rage into state policy, Americans now watch as water pours from their boat in the face of a crisis of governability due to the lack of alternative figures capable of representing the people.
The concern expressed on the face of Barack Obama, on the day of Trump’s inauguration, is the same that we have seen in so many other career politicians, who know that, the ruling class could not reverse the economic turmoil, much less will an upstart who is running the country from Twitter.
Part II
Trump is obsessed with China, is worried about the political and military hegemony of the Asian giant in the Pacific. Whoever governs the great world island, Eurasia, will govern the world, as was known to the ruling classes of the major powers in the past, especially Germany, which was occupied with acquiring that “living space”.
Today China, an economic power, and Russia, a military power, have brought the post-Cold War situation into balance. This enrages white people, still confined in their racist discourse, who are an increasingly poor middle class beings deceived by the American dream. Such a voter, who is extremely ignorant and dangerous, will do whatever it takes to recover the mythology that gives them their sense of worth.
To paraphrase the German social democrat Kurt Schumacher, who said in 1932 that Nazism was an appeal to the “inner pig of man,” Trump today represents something similar, which alienates the United States from its traditional allies.
In this regard, we could say with Immanuel Wallestein that the furious mass of White America closely resemble the Roman people.
Frustrated under the aegis of Nero, who lashed out against any ghostly enemy created had hoc. Even the wars waged by the empire in the hemisphere and beyond characterize what historians of decadence call “micromilitarism,” the use of force which tends only to display muscle with absolutely no other function, since it serves as a compensatory mechanism for the decadence of the power in question.
THE BLINDNESS OF THE POLITICAL CLASS
The fight against terrorism, the most infinite and invincible enemy that corporations of the military industrial complex could have wished for, has depleted the funds of the wealth that is increasingly artificial and dependent on the global economic system. Extensive studies abound on the fall of the U.S. dollar in terms of its contribution to world GDP, to the advantage of the new rising powers.
This economic and political reality points to an increasingly multi-regulated world, which requires an overhaul of the United Nations system, emerging from the Yalta Meeting of the great victorious powers of the Second World War. In this geopolitical truth, Western influence is becoming less, while the role of the East is strengthened, a situation that would generate a dynamic that is different from neoliberal capitalism within the African and American contexts.
The blindness of the American political class has prevented it from acting objectively, even arriving at the fallacy that “there is nothing beyond the Pax Americana”. In the face of this new end of history, the Americans would be willing to implement to the extreme their doctrine of national security, abandoning disarmament treaties, isolating themselves from diplomatic circles in order to escalate conflicts into confrontational warfare.
The withdrawal from an Afghanistan plunged into civil war, as well as its poor performance in Syria, compared to Russia’s firm position that defeated the Islamic State, is evidence that clinging to the doctrine of national security at all costs brought neither geostrategic nor economic success.
The United States, with its outsider president, is a drifting power, as was never the case with its predecessor in history, the British Empire, whose political class reluctantly recognized the end of its world hegemonic role.
China has developed a comprehensive alternative financial program, which the United States refuses to pursue. This is tempting for those States willing to save themselves from the dollar debacle.
The decline in the prestige of US currency is exploited even by old allies, such as the United Kingdom, which after Brexit will try to position the pound as a world currency of far-reaching and stability.
Everything indicates that power will return to the hands of the powers of the world island, Eurasia, that geopolitical terrain that since the Mongols has defined the real mandate of an empire on a global scale. This drift is strengthened by an increasingly important role played by powers such as India, in addition to the alignment of Australia on the side of China.
Were a new president to enter the White House in the next election, a member of the political class would not be able to restore Pax Americana by decree, much less by the use of force on a global scale.
John Bolton’s positions, encouraging a microwar in Venezuela, indicate that the compensation policy typical of all decaying empires is active.
American politicians, who no longer control the main assets of the world island, Eurasia, and who were also unable to seize the Middle East, will have to accustom themselves to a world where other countries function as powers, with their own agendas that are neither coincident nor allied with the United States.
Since Donald Trump became president, the poor in America have become poorer. Americans born into poverty are more likely than ever before to go on like this, according to a United Nations report on poverty and inequality in the United States.
Secessionist tendencies have re-emerged in the union, without much force yet, but with a tendency to increase that can be described as worrisome, given the coming of “difficult times”.
President Trump has made a choice between developing the isolationist policy he proposed in his electoral campaign, removing the United States from international alliances, putting an end to military conflicts that have existed for more than a decade, forcing his allies to sustain U.S. military aid in their territories or giving in to the push of the empire’s most warlike wing.
The hawks, with whom the president has finally had to seek an alliance in order to preserve his political position, are applying strong pressure to preserve the armed conflicts that feed the economy of the military industrial complex. This powerful group is wagering on war to tackle the coming economic crisis.
Pence, Bolton, Abrams and Rubio, his closest collaborators, propel the war machine, while conversations with Democratic Korea fail and imperial troops in Afghanistan and Syria continue, and the crisis in Venezuela is pushed to the limit.
For now, everything points to the entrenchment in an old diplomatic school where in war the continuity of politics is visible, although the real politik perhaps in the near future will restore reason to an empire that, like the British in its day, increasingly realizes that the world no longer belongs to it.
Although the White and middle-class are exploding with rage, the decline of the United States is evident and will be ongoing over the next two decades.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
