[News] Collapse of the American Empire

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February 22, 2005   counterpunch.org

Imperial Entropy

Collapse  of the American Empire

By  KIRKPATRICK SALE

It is quite ironic: only a decade or  so after the idea of the United 
States as an imperial power came  to be accepted by both right and left, 
and people were actually  able to talk openly about an American empire, it 
is showing multiple  signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is 
now possible  to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.

The neocons in power in Washington  these days, those who were delighted to 
talk about America as  the sole empire in the world following the Soviet 
disintegration,  will of course refuse to believe in any such collapse, 
just as  they ignore the realities of the imperial war in Iraq. But 
I  think it behooves us to examine seriously the ways in which the  U.S. 
system is so drastically imperiling itself that it will cause not only the 
collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically alter the nation itself on 
the domestic front.

All empires collapse eventually:  Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, 
Assyria, Persia, Macedonia,  Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, 
Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta,  Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, 
Ottoman, Austrian,  French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all 
fell,  and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not 
really  complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes 
the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and 
inevitably fails because of its size, complexity,  territorial reach, 
stratification, heterogeneity, domination,  hierarchy, and inequalities.

In my reading of the history  of empires, I have come up with four reasons 
that almost always  explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book 
Collapse  also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, 
slightly  overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than 
empires.)  Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present 
American  empire.

First, environmental degradation.  Empires always end by destroying the 
lands and waters they depend  upon for survival, largely because they build 
and farm and grow  without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we 
have yet  to experience the worst of our assault on nature. Science is  in 
agreement that all important ecological indicators  are in decline and have 
been for decades: erosion of topsoils  and beaches, overfishing, 
deforestation, freshwater and aquifer  depletion, pollution of water, soil, 
air, and food, soil salinization, overpopulation , overconsumption, 
depletion of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and 
invigoration of old ones, extreme weather, melting icecaps and rising 
sealevels, species extinctions,  and excessive human overuse of the earth's 
photosynthetic capacity.  As the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said, 
after lengthy  examination of human impact on the earth, our 
"ecological  footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain, 
and  it is getting larger." A Defense Department study last year predicted 
"abrupt climate change," likely to occur  within a decade, will lead to 
"catastrophic" shortages  of water and energy, endemic "disruption and 
conflict,"  warfare that "would define human life," and a 
"significant  drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present 
population.  End of empire for sure, maybe end of civilization.

Second, economic meltdown.  Empires always depend on excessive resource 
exploitation, usually  derived from colonies farther and farther away from 
the center,  and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or 
become  too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the path  we 
are on--peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted  to come in 
the next year or two--and our economy is built entirely  on a fragile 
system in which the world produces and we, by and  large, consume (U.S. 
manufacturing is just 13 per cent of our GDP). At the moment we sustain a 
nearly $630 billion trade deficit  with the rest of the world-it has leapt 
by an incredible $500  billion since 1993, and $180 billion since Bush took 
office in  2001-and in order to pay for that we have to have an inflow 
of  cash from the rest of the world of about $1 billion every day  to pay 
for it, which was down by half late last year. That  kind of excess is 
simply unsustainable, especially when you think  that it is the other world 
empire, China, that is crucial for  supporting it, at the tune of some $83 
billion on loan to the  U.S. treasury.

Add to that an economy resting  on a nearly $500 billion Federal budget 
deficit, making up part  of a total national debt of $7.4 trillion as of 
last fall,  and the continual drain on the economy by the military of 
at  least $530 billion a year (not counting military intelligence,  whose 
figure we never know). Nobody thinks that is sustainable  either, which is 
why the dollar has lost value everywhere-down  by 30 per cent against the 
euro since 2000-and the world begins  to lose faith in investment here. I 
foresee that in just a few  years the dollar will be so battered that the 
oil states will  no longer want to operate in that currency and will turn 
to the  euro instead, and China will let the yuan float against the dollar, 
effectively making this nation bankrupt and powerless, unable  to control 
economic life within its borders much less abroad.

Third, military overstretch.  Empires, because they are by definition 
colonizers, are always  forced to extend their military reach farther and 
farther, and  enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until 
coffers  are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops 
are  unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts.  The 
American empire, which began its worldwide reach well before  Bush II, now 
has some 446,000 active troops at more than 725  acknowledged (and any 
number secret) bases in at least 38 countries  around the world, plus a 
formal "military presence"  in no less than 153 countries, on every 
continent but Antarctica-and  nearly a dozen fully armed courier fleets on 
all the oceans.  Talk about overstretch: the U.S. is less than 5 per cent 
of the  world's population. And now that Bush has declared a "war  on 
terror," instead of the more doable war on Al Quada we  should have waged, 
our armies and agents will be on a battlefield  universal and permanent 
that cannot possibly be controlled or  contained.

So far that military network  has not collapsed, but as Iraq indicates it 
is mightily tested  and quite incapable of establishing client states to do 
our bidding  and protect resources we need. And as anti-American 
sentiment  continues to spread and darken in all the Muslim countries, 
in  much of Europe, in much of Asia-and as more countries refuse  the 
"structural adjustments" that our IMF-led globalization  requires, it is 
quite likely that the periphery of our empire  will begin resisting our 
dominance, militarily if necessary.  And far from having a capacity to 
fight two wars simultaneously,  as the Pentagon once hoped, we are proving 
that we can't even  fight one.

Finally, domestic dissent and  upheaval. Traditional empires end up 
collapsing from within as  well as often being attacked from without, and 
so far the level  of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of 
rebellion  or secession--thanks both to the increasing repression of 
dissent  and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to 
the success of our modern version of bread and circuses,  a unique 
combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet  sex and games, 
consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that  effectively deadens the 
general public into stupor. But the tactics  of the Bush II administration 
show that it is so fearful of an  expression of popular dissent that it is 
willing to defy and  ignore environmental, civil-rights, and progressive 
groups, to  bribe commentators to put out its propaganda, to expand 
surveillance  and data-base invasions of privacy, to use party 
superiority  and backroom tactics to ride roughshod over Congressional 
opposition,  to use lies and deceptions as a normal part of government 
operations,  to break international laws and treaties for short-term 
ends,  and to use religion to cloak its every policy.

It's hard to believe that the  great mass of the American public would ever 
bestir itself to  challenge the empire at home until things get much, much 
worse.  It is a public, after all, of which, as a Gallup poll in 
2004  found, 61 per cent believe that "religion can answer all  or most of 
today's problems," and according to a Time/CNN  poll in 2002 59 per cent 
believe in the imminent apocalypse foretold  in the Book of Revelation and 
take every threat and disaster  as evidence of God's will. And yet, it's 
also hard to believe  that a nation so thoroughly corrupt as this-in all 
its fundamental  institutions, its boughten parties, academies, 
corporations,  brokerages, accountants, governments-and resting on a 
social  and economic base of intolerably unequal incomes and 
property,  getting increasingly unequal, will be able to sustain itself for 
long. The upsurge in talk about secession after the last  election, some of 
which was deadly serious and led on to organizations throughout most of the 
blue states, indicates that at least a  minority is willing to think about 
drastic steps to "alter  or abolish" a regime it finds itself fundamentally 
at odds  with.

Those four processes by which  empires always eventually fall seem to me to 
be inescapably operative,  in varying degrees, in this latest empire. And I 
think a combination  of several or all of them will bring about its 
collapse within  the next 15 years or so.

Jared Diamond's recent book  detailing the ways societies collapse suggests 
that American  society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is 
aware  of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the 
failures  of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and 
for a reason Diamond himself understands.

As he says, in his analysis  of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that 
collapsed in the  early 15th century: "The values to which people cling 
most  stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that  were 
previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."  If this 
is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the 
values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest 
triumphs and know that we will cling  to them no matter what. They are, in 
one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, 
and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance 
whatever,  no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a 
society  that we will abandon those.

Hence no chance to escape the  collapse of empire.

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including  Human Scale, 
The  Conquest of Paradise, Rebels  Against the Future, and The Fire of His 
Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.


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