Travails of empire
There is catastrophic inequality, worse now than during the Great Depression of 1929 and France in 1789
The writer is a postdoctoral researcher in the UK, working on cybersecurity, next-generation voting systems and virtual currencies
Journalist Glenn Greenwald posted a rhetorical tweet recently which raised more than a few eyebrows: “Just curious: is there anyone who still doubts that the US is well into late-stage imperial collapse?”
This question — the decline of the US empire — surfaces regularly every decade or so, creates a minor buzz and then fades away. This time, however, is markedly different. For one, the decline itself is not a question anymore, not a future prospect, as much as an acknowledged fact in the here and now. Second, almost everyone agrees that something is fundamentally broken with the US. One need only look at Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again!”
Multiple factors are responsible: US wars and interventions in the Middle East have all proved failures, if not outright disasters. Other powers are becoming more assertive on the world stage. Power blocs are forming and some countries are ditching the US dollar from reserves and bilateral trade. The Great Recession has wreaked havoc on the US economy and a meaningful recovery is still far from sight. Local infrastructure is collapsing, homelessness is soaring, racism has returned with a vengeance, and crime is registering double-digit increases in several big cities. The problems seem well-nigh intractable. Most importantly though, thanks to George W Bush and later Barack Obama, the US has lost that aura of moral authority and invincibility that it once had.
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army colonel and Washington insider, recently dissected this trend in a remarkable speech titled “The Travails of the American Empire".
Wilkerson served as an assistant to Colin Powell during his tenures as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff through the Gulf War and later secretary of state during the Bush administration. Wilkerson’s experience with the disastrous Iraq invasion was demoralising, leading him to part ways and turn to teaching. He is currently a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary and has also taught at George Washington University. He has seen things up close and personal and doesn’t mince his words.
Wilkerson starts his talk with stumbling blocks listeners typically encounter. One is the notion of America even being an empire, whereas, given its network of overseas military bases, it fits the description “by every measure of imperialism”. More interesting though is the internal psychological resistance many face at the notion of the decline of an empire. Folks seem to find it hard to even conceive that empires can decline.
Why do empires fall? Simply put, change is the only certainty in this world. Nations become empires by harnessing the waves of change, by grasping at opportunities as they come. But when an empire reaches its zenith, its energies slowly turn to perpetuating the status quo — in short, to resisting change. And so, decline inevitably begins.
There are numerous signs. For one, slowly but surely, the use of the ‘instrument of force’ starts to predominate over other approaches effecting change — ‘soft’ options such as diplomacy, culture and politics, which are pushed into the background. Military force becomes the ‘end all and be all’ of power. Empires build massive military forces and extensive industries or ‘complexes’ to support them. In the old days, this consisted of metal smiths and farmers, now it is the military-industrial complex. And near the end, empires also tend to rely on mercenaries rather than citizens to fight their wars.
Declining empires also face ethical and moral bankruptcy. Financiers and bankers generally end up pulling the strings on power. Modernity accelerates the life and death cycle of empires. Here, Wilkerson refers to Niall Ferguson’s well known thesis which visualises empires as systems growing more and more complex and overstretched with time — and therefore ever more vulnerable to sudden and catastrophic breakdown.
And every few sentences, Wilkerson pauses to ask his audience, a twinkle in his eye: “Does any of this sound familiar?”
Coming to the US specifically: as per Wilkerson, the only thing exceptional about the US has been its ideology i.e., its ability to embrace masses of disparate people into a vast melting pot. But the US faces incredible challenges ahead: there is catastrophic inequality, worse now than during the Great Depression of 1929 and France in 1789, when Napoleon seized power. The only strategic long-term thinking and planning happens in the Department of Defence. Thanks to climate change, once-in-a-century storms like Katrina will be happening every decade now. The US is “strategically inept” and “not what it used to be". And things are only getting worse. The rest of the world is not blind to this. According to Wilkerson, this is the real reason Japan is increasing military spending after almost half a century without an army — it knows the Empire won’t be around to protect it for much longer.
Charting the Empire’s decline has picked up pace in mainstream circles in the last decade-and-a-half. Notables such as Chris Hedges, Emmanuel Todd and Dimitry Orlov have written well-received books on the subject. Economist Paul Craig Roberts predicted in 2004 that America would be a Third World country by 2020.
Noam Chomsky actually thinks it’s already there. In an interview last year, he commented: "Look around the country. This country is falling apart. Even when you come back from Argentina to the United States it looks like a Third World country, and when you come back from Europe even more so. The infrastructure is collapsing. Nothing works. The transportation system doesn’t work. The health system is a total scandal — twice the per capita cost of other countries, with not very good outcomes … The schools are declining, they don’t have enough teachers...”
All that said, this is not a gloom-and-doom subject at all. Wilkerson is the very opposite of a defeatist. The subtext of his speech is an impassioned call to arms. Whereas the days of empire are numbered, Wilkerson believes that this is a golden chance at regaining the American Republic. And – as in the case of former colonial powers like France, Britain and Germany — the demise of empire stands to benefit the Republic.
Wilkerson offers some advice to Americans for the battle ahead (which we should mull over too). We need to be informed, he emphasises. In these days of corporate-controlled media, we desperately need to educate ourselves. We need to be politically active. For too long, the best and the brightest of us have gone to Wall Street, we need to go into government instead. We need to change this rotten system from within — and more fundamentally — we need to incarnate change. The stakes could not be higher: “We are either going to change this country or die with it.”
Published in The Express Tribune, May 6th, 2016.
This question — the decline of the US empire — surfaces regularly every decade or so, creates a minor buzz and then fades away. This time, however, is markedly different. For one, the decline itself is not a question anymore, not a future prospect, as much as an acknowledged fact in the here and now. Second, almost everyone agrees that something is fundamentally broken with the US. One need only look at Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again!”
Multiple factors are responsible: US wars and interventions in the Middle East have all proved failures, if not outright disasters. Other powers are becoming more assertive on the world stage. Power blocs are forming and some countries are ditching the US dollar from reserves and bilateral trade. The Great Recession has wreaked havoc on the US economy and a meaningful recovery is still far from sight. Local infrastructure is collapsing, homelessness is soaring, racism has returned with a vengeance, and crime is registering double-digit increases in several big cities. The problems seem well-nigh intractable. Most importantly though, thanks to George W Bush and later Barack Obama, the US has lost that aura of moral authority and invincibility that it once had.
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army colonel and Washington insider, recently dissected this trend in a remarkable speech titled “The Travails of the American Empire".
Wilkerson served as an assistant to Colin Powell during his tenures as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff through the Gulf War and later secretary of state during the Bush administration. Wilkerson’s experience with the disastrous Iraq invasion was demoralising, leading him to part ways and turn to teaching. He is currently a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary and has also taught at George Washington University. He has seen things up close and personal and doesn’t mince his words.
Wilkerson starts his talk with stumbling blocks listeners typically encounter. One is the notion of America even being an empire, whereas, given its network of overseas military bases, it fits the description “by every measure of imperialism”. More interesting though is the internal psychological resistance many face at the notion of the decline of an empire. Folks seem to find it hard to even conceive that empires can decline.
Why do empires fall? Simply put, change is the only certainty in this world. Nations become empires by harnessing the waves of change, by grasping at opportunities as they come. But when an empire reaches its zenith, its energies slowly turn to perpetuating the status quo — in short, to resisting change. And so, decline inevitably begins.
There are numerous signs. For one, slowly but surely, the use of the ‘instrument of force’ starts to predominate over other approaches effecting change — ‘soft’ options such as diplomacy, culture and politics, which are pushed into the background. Military force becomes the ‘end all and be all’ of power. Empires build massive military forces and extensive industries or ‘complexes’ to support them. In the old days, this consisted of metal smiths and farmers, now it is the military-industrial complex. And near the end, empires also tend to rely on mercenaries rather than citizens to fight their wars.
Declining empires also face ethical and moral bankruptcy. Financiers and bankers generally end up pulling the strings on power. Modernity accelerates the life and death cycle of empires. Here, Wilkerson refers to Niall Ferguson’s well known thesis which visualises empires as systems growing more and more complex and overstretched with time — and therefore ever more vulnerable to sudden and catastrophic breakdown.
And every few sentences, Wilkerson pauses to ask his audience, a twinkle in his eye: “Does any of this sound familiar?”
Coming to the US specifically: as per Wilkerson, the only thing exceptional about the US has been its ideology i.e., its ability to embrace masses of disparate people into a vast melting pot. But the US faces incredible challenges ahead: there is catastrophic inequality, worse now than during the Great Depression of 1929 and France in 1789, when Napoleon seized power. The only strategic long-term thinking and planning happens in the Department of Defence. Thanks to climate change, once-in-a-century storms like Katrina will be happening every decade now. The US is “strategically inept” and “not what it used to be". And things are only getting worse. The rest of the world is not blind to this. According to Wilkerson, this is the real reason Japan is increasing military spending after almost half a century without an army — it knows the Empire won’t be around to protect it for much longer.
Charting the Empire’s decline has picked up pace in mainstream circles in the last decade-and-a-half. Notables such as Chris Hedges, Emmanuel Todd and Dimitry Orlov have written well-received books on the subject. Economist Paul Craig Roberts predicted in 2004 that America would be a Third World country by 2020.
Noam Chomsky actually thinks it’s already there. In an interview last year, he commented: "Look around the country. This country is falling apart. Even when you come back from Argentina to the United States it looks like a Third World country, and when you come back from Europe even more so. The infrastructure is collapsing. Nothing works. The transportation system doesn’t work. The health system is a total scandal — twice the per capita cost of other countries, with not very good outcomes … The schools are declining, they don’t have enough teachers...”
All that said, this is not a gloom-and-doom subject at all. Wilkerson is the very opposite of a defeatist. The subtext of his speech is an impassioned call to arms. Whereas the days of empire are numbered, Wilkerson believes that this is a golden chance at regaining the American Republic. And – as in the case of former colonial powers like France, Britain and Germany — the demise of empire stands to benefit the Republic.
Wilkerson offers some advice to Americans for the battle ahead (which we should mull over too). We need to be informed, he emphasises. In these days of corporate-controlled media, we desperately need to educate ourselves. We need to be politically active. For too long, the best and the brightest of us have gone to Wall Street, we need to go into government instead. We need to change this rotten system from within — and more fundamentally — we need to incarnate change. The stakes could not be higher: “We are either going to change this country or die with it.”
Published in The Express Tribune, May 6th, 2016.