The Decline and Fall of the
American Empire
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Posted on February 04, 2021
https://original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2021/02/03/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire/
In 2004, journalist Ron
Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, "We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." He dismissed
Susskind’s assumption that public policy must be rooted in "the
reality-based community." "We’re history’s actors," the advisor
told him, "…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do."
Sixteen years later, the
American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only
spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of
criminality and failure has predictably undermined America’s international
power and authority. Back in the imperial heartland, the political marketing
industry that Rove and his colleagues were part of has had more success
dividing and ruling the hearts and minds of Americans than of Iraqis, Russians
or Chinese.
The irony of the Bush
administration’s imperial pretensions were that America has been an empire from
it's very founding, and that a White House staffer’s political use of the term
"empire" in 2004 was not emblematic of a new and rising empire as he
claimed, but of a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an
agonizing death spiral.
Americans were not always
so ignorant of the imperial nature of their country’s ambitions. George
Washington described New York as "the seat of an empire," and his
military campaign against British forces there as the "pathway to the empire." New Yorkers eagerly embraced their state’s identity as the Empire State, which is still enshrined
in the Empire State Building and on New York State license plates.
The expansion of America’s
territorial sovereignty over Native American lands, the Louisiana Purchase and
the annexation of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War built an empire
that far outstripped the one that George Washington built. But that imperial
expansion was more controversial than most Americans realize. Fourteen out of
fifty-two U.S. senators voted against the 1848 treaty to annex most of
Mexico, without which Americans might still be visiting California, Arizona,
New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah, and most of Colorado as exotic Mexican travel
spots.
In the full flowering of
the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the
skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial
world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going
to welcome imperial invaders from America. So America’s leaders developed a
system of neocolonialism through which they exercised overarching imperial
sovereignty over much of the world, while scrupulously avoiding terms like
"empire" or "imperialism" that would undermine their
post-colonial credentials.
It was left to critics like
President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to seriously examine the imperial control that
wealthy countries still exercised over nominally independent post-colonial
countries like his. In his book, Neo-Colonialism:
the Last Stage of Imperialism, Nkrumah condemned neocolonialism as
"the worst form of imperialism." "For those who practice
it," he wrote, "it means power without responsibility, and for those
who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress."
So post-World War Two
Americans grew up in carefully crafted ignorance of the very fact of the American empire,
and the myths are woven to disguise it provide fertile soil for today’s political
divisions and disintegration. Trump’s "Make America Great Again" and
Biden’s promise to "restore American leadership" are both appeals to
nostalgia for the fruits of the American empire.
Past blame games over who lost China or Vietnam or Cuba
have come home to roost in an argument over who lost America and who can
somehow restore its mythical former greatness or leadership. Even as America
leads the world in allowing a pandemic to ravage its people and economy,
neither party’s leaders are ready for a more realistic debate over how to
redefine and rebuild America as a post-imperial nation in today’s multipolar
world.
Every successful empire has
expanded, ruled, and exploited its far-flung territories through a combination
of economic and military power. Even in the American empire’s neocolonial
phase, the role of the US military and the CIA was to kick open doors through
which American businessmen could "follow the flag" to set up shop and
develop new markets.
But now US militarism and
America’s economic interests have diverged. Apart from a few militaries
contractors, American businesses have not followed the flag into the ruins of
Iraq or America’s other current war-zones in any lasting way. Eighteen years
after the US invasion, Iraq’s largest trading partner is China, while
Afghanistan’s is Pakistan, Somalia’s is the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and
Libya’s is the European Union (EU).
Instead of opening doors
for American big business or supporting America’s diplomatic position in the
world, the US war machine has become a bull in the global china shop, wielding
purely destructive power to destabilize countries and wreck their economies,
closing doors to economic opportunity instead of opening them, diverting
resources from real needs at home, and damaging America’s
international standing instead of enhancing it.
When President Eisenhower
warned against the "unwarranted influence" of America’s
military-industrial complex, he was predicting precisely this kind of dangerous
dichotomy between the real economic and social needs of the American people and
a war machine that costs more than the next ten militaries in the world put
together but cannot win a war or vanquish a virus, let alone reconquer a lost
empire.
China and the EU have
become the major trading partners of most countries in
the world. The United States is still a regional economic power, but even in
South America, most countries now trade more with China. America’s militarism
has accelerated these trends by squandering our resources on weapons and wars,
while China and the EU have invested in peaceful economic development and 21st
century infrastructure.
For example, China has
built the largest high-speed rail network in the world
in just 10 years (2008-2018), and Europe has been building and expanding its
high-speed network since the 1990s, but
high-speed rail is still just on the drawing board in America.
China has lifted 800 million people out of
poverty, while America’s poverty rate has barely budged in
50 years and child poverty have increased. America still has the weakest social
safety net of any developed country and no universal healthcare system, and the
inequalities of wealth and power caused by extreme neoliberalism have left half of Americans with little or no
savings to live on in retirement or to weather any disruption in their lives.
Our leaders’ insistence on
siphoning off 66% of US federal discretionary spending to preserve and
expand a war machine that has long outlived any useful role in America’s
declining economic empire is a debilitating waste of resources that jeopardizes
our future.
Decades ago Martin Luther
King Jr. warned us that "a nation
that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift are approaching spiritual death."
As our government debates
whether we can “afford” COVID relief, a Green New Deal, and universal
healthcare, we would be wise to recognize that our only hope of transforming
this decadent, declining empire into a dynamic and prosperous post-imperial
nation is to rapidly and profoundly shift our national priorities from
irrelevant, destructive militarism to the programs of social uplift that Dr.
King called for.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder
of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several
books, including Inside Iran: The Real
History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an
independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our
Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
