America may very well be the last empire, because the planet can't sustain any more.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
May 7, 2013
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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
45,000 warheads, and its military had
five million troops
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.
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’t even a name for such a state (or
state of mind). “Superpower” had already been used when there were two
of them. “Hyperpower” was tried briefly but didn’t stick. “Sole
superpower” stood in for a while but didn’t satisfy. “Great Power,”
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 “unipolar” world
in which all roads led... well, to Washington.
To this day, we’ve never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly --
above all,
to Washington -- became imperial crash-and-burn. Left standing, the
Cold War's 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.
The Last Empire?
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
-- except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil
plans to dominate the world.
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 “capitalist roaders”), there was no other model for how to
do anything, economically speaking. There was Washington’s way -- and
that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both
controlled by Washington) -- or there was the highway, and the Soviet
Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence
and ruin.
In
addition, the U.S. had unprecedented military power. By the time the
Soviet Union began to totter, America's leaders had for nearly a decade
been consciously using “the arms race” 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.
In the years that followed, it would
outpace all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts. It housed the world’s
most powerful weapons makers, was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop
future weaponry for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a
near monopoly on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn’t).
It had an
empire of bases abroad, more than
1,000 of
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's 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.
The
key non-U.S. economic powerhouses of the moment -- Europe and Japan --
maintained militaries dependent on Washington, had U.S. bases littering
their territories, and continued to nestle under Washington’s “nuclear
umbrella.” No wonder that, in the U.S., the post-Soviet moment was soon
proclaimed “
the end of history,”
and the victory of “liberal democracy” or “freedom” was celebrated as
if there really were no tomorrow, except more of what today had to
offer.
No wonder that, in the new century, neocons and
supporting pundits would
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
dreamed of
establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and possibly
over the globe itself (as well as a Pax Republicana at home). They
imagined that they might
actually prevent another competitor or bloc of competitors from arising to challenge American power. Ever.
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?
Assessing the Imperial Moment, Twenty-First-Century-Style
Almost
a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what’s
remarkable is how much -- and how little -- has changed.
On the
how-much front: Washington’s 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’s greatest power might not, in fact,
be too big to fail, and we were suddenly -- so everyone said -- plunged
into a “multipolar world.”
Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East
descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a Pax
Americana in 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
hemorrhaging of national treasure into losing
trillion-dollar wars, reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.
And
yet, in the how-little category: the Europeans and Japanese remained
nestled under that American “umbrella,” their territories still filled
with U.S. bases. In the Euro Zone, governments
continued to cut back on
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 “superpower”
pretensions. Other regional powers
challenged unipolarity economically
-- Turkey and Brazil, to name two -- but not militarily, and none
showed an urge either singly or in blocs to compete in an imperial sense
with the U.S.
Washington’s enemies in the world remained
remarkably modest-sized (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 “terrorists.” Otherwise, as one gauge of power on the planet,
no more than a
handful of other countries had even a
handful of military bases outside their territory.
Under
the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its
moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military
of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication
couldn’t 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
rotting out, its populace economically depressed, its wealth
ever more unequally divided, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power
heading toward the national security state. Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.
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
surpass the U.S. as the globe’s number one economy by perhaps 2030.
Right now, the Obama administration seems to be working on just that assumption. With its well-publicized
“pivot” (or
“rebalancing”) to Asia, it has been moving to “contain” what it fears
might be the next great power. However, while the Chinese are indeed
expanding their military and
challenging their
neighbors in the waters of the Pacific, there is no sign that the
country’s 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
pollution to
unrest, remain staggering enough that it’s hard to imagine a China not absorbed with domestic issues through 2030 and beyond.
And Then There Was One (Planet)
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.
And yet here’s a genuine, even
confounding, possibility: that moment of “unipolarity” in the 1990s may
really have been the end point of history as human beings had known it
for millennia -- 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) is in decline. I’m
talking, of course, about the planet itself.
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 -- more
middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more
energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering
the atmosphere -- is also, as it never would have been before, the
definition of failure. The greater the “success,” the more intense
the droughts, the stronger the storms, the more
extreme the
weather, the higher the rise in
sea levels, the
hotter the temperatures, the greater
the chaos in
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?
Every factor that would normally
lead toward “greatness” now also leads toward global decline. This
process -- which couldn’t be more unfair to countries having their
industrial and consumer revolutions late -- gives a new meaning to the
phrase “
disaster capitalism.”
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 -- 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 -- and China rose.
It was, however, also a formula for
massive pollution, environmental degradation, and the pouring of ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere in
record amounts.
And it's not just China. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking
about that country's ravenous energy use, including its possible future “
carbon bombs,” or the potential for American decline to be halted by new extreme methods of producing energy (
fracking,
tar-sands extraction, deep-water drilling). Such methods, however much they hurt local environments, might indeed
turn the U.S. into a “
new Saudi Arabia.” Yet that, in turn, would only contribute further to the degradation of the planet, to decline on an ever-larger scale.
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 -- the rise and fall of empires -- fuse into a
single disastrous system?
What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of
The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on
Facebook or
Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s
The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt
