[News] Decline and Fall of the American Empire - 4 Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025

Sun Dec 5 19:26:31 EST 2010

TomDispatch

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Taking Down America

By Alfred McCoy
Posted on December 5, 2010, Printed on December 5, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175327/

Trying to play down the significance of an 
ongoing 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables>Wikileaks 
dump of more than 250,000 State Department 
documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates 
recently 
<http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4728>offered 
the following bit of Washington wisdom: “The fact 
is, governments deal with the United States 
because it's in their interest, not because they 
like us, not because they trust us, and not 
because they believe we can keep secrets... 
[S]ome governments deal with us because they fear 
us, some because they respect us, most because 
they need us.  We are still essentially, as has 
been said before, the indispensable nation.”

Now, wisdom like that certainly sounds sober; 
it’s definitely what passes for hardheaded 
geopolitical realism in our nation’s capital; and 
it's true, Gates is not the first top American 
official to 
<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/madeleinea144932.html>call 
the U.S. “the indispensable nation”; nor do I 
doubt that he and many other inside-the-Beltway 
players are convinced of our global 
indispensability.  The problem is that the news 
has almost weekly been undermining his version of 
realism, making it look ever more 
phantasmagorical.  The ability of Wikileaks, a 
tiny organization of activists, to thumb its 
cyber-nose at the global superpower, repeatedly 
shining a blaze of illumination on the 
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/>penumbra 
of secrecy under which its political and military 
elite like to conduct their affairs, hasn’t 
helped one bit either.  If our indispensability 
is, as yet, hardly questioned in Washington, 
elsewhere on the planet it’s 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175299/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro,_the_waning_of_america/>another 
matter.

The once shiny badge of the “global sheriff” has 
lost its gleam and, in Dodge City, ever fewer are 
paying the sort of attention that Washington 
believes is its due.  To my mind, the single most 
intelligent comment on the latest Wikileaks 
uproar 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-wikileaks>comes 
from Simon Jenkins of the British Guardian who, 
on making his way through the various 
<http://www.juancole.com/2010/12/top-ten-middle-east-wikileaks-revelations-so-far.html>revelations 
(not to speak of the 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/europe/01wikileaks-france.html>mounds 
of global 
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101129/wl_nm/us_wikileaks_russia>gossip), 
summed matters up this way: “The money-wasting is 
staggering. [U.S.] Aid payments are never 
followed, never audited, never evaluated. The 
impression is of the world's superpower roaming 
helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as 
bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, 
Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually 
off script. Washington reacts like a wounded 
bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”

Sometimes, to understand just where you are in 
the present, it helps to peer into the past -- in 
this case, into what happened to previous 
“indispensable” imperial powers; sometimes, it’s 
no less useful to peer into the future.  In his 
latest 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175225/alfred_mccoy_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war>TomDispatch 
post, Alfred W. McCoy, author most recently of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Policing 
America’s Empire: The United States, the 
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance 
State, does both.  Having convened a global 
working group of 140 historians to consider the 
fate of the U.S. as an imperial power, he offers 
us a glimpse of four possible American 
(near-)futures.  They add up to a monumental, 
even indispensable look at just how fast our 
indispensability is likely to unravel in the years to come.  Tom

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy>Alfred W. McCoy

A soft landing for America 40 years from 
now?  Don’t bet on it.  The demise of the United 
States as the global superpower could come far 
more quickly than anyone imagines.  If Washington 
is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the 
American Century, a more realistic assessment of 
domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, 
just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires 
project, a look at their history should remind us 
that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is 
their ecology of power that, when things start to 
go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with 
unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years 
for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 
years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great 
Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the 
United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush 
administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that 
year as the start of America's downfall. However, 
instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of 
so many past empires, with cities burning and 
civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century 
imperial collapse could come relatively quietly 
through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global 
dominion finally ends, there will be painful 
daily reminders of what such a loss of power 
means for Americans in every walk of life. As a 
half-dozen European nations have discovered, 
imperial decline tends to have a remarkably 
demoralizing impact on a society, regularly 
bringing at least a generation of economic 
privation. As the economy cools, political 
temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military 
data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global 
power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 
2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no 
later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed 
so triumphantly at the start of World War II, 
will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth 
decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National 
Intelligence Council admitted for the first time 
that America's global power was indeed on a 
declining trajectory. In one of its 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175113/Michael_Klare_the_great_superpower_meltdown>periodic 
futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the 
Council 
<http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html>cited 
“the transfer of global wealth and economic power 
now under way, roughly from West to East" and 
"without precedent in modern history,” as the 
primary factor in the decline of the “United 
States' relative strength -- even in the military 
realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the 
Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very 
soft landing for American global preeminence, and 
harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would 
long “retain unique military capabilities
 to 
project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck.  Under current projections, the 
United States will find itself in second place 
behind China (already the world's second largest 
economy) in economic output around 2026, and 
behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese 
innovation is on a trajectory toward world 
leadership in applied science and military 
technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just 
as America's current supply of brilliant 
scientists and engineers retires, without 
adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon 
will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying 
empire.  It will launch a lethal triple canopy of 
advanced aerospace robotics that represents 
Washington's last best hope of retaining global 
power despite its waning economic influence. By 
that year, however, China's global network of 
communications satellites, backed by the world's 
most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully 
operational, providing Beijing with an 
independent platform for the weaponization of 
space and a powerful communications system for 
missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or 
Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still 
seems to imagine that American decline will be 
gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the 
Union address last January, President Obama 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address>offered 
the reassurance that “I do not accept second 
place for the United States of America.” A few 
days later, Vice President Biden 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/03/AR2010020302913.html>ridiculed 
the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill 
[historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are 
going to be a great nation that has failed 
because we lost control of our economy and 
overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November 
issue of the establishment journal Foreign 
Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph 
Nye 
<http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66796/joseph-s-nye-jr/the-future-of-american-power>waved 
away talk of China's economic and military rise, 
dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic 
decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
[]
Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head 
overseas, have a more realistic view than their 
cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38996574/ns/politics/>found 
that 65% of Americans believed the country was 
now “in a state of decline.”  Already, 
<http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Australia-China-Conduct-Live-Fire-Naval-Exercise-in-Yellow-Sea-103780194.html>Australia 
and 
<http://www.acus.org/natosource/new-questions-about-turkeys-secret-military-exercise-china>Turkey, 
traditional U.S. military allies, are using their 
American-manufactured weapons for joint air and 
naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's 
closest economic partners are backing away from 
Washington's opposition to China's rigged 
currency rates. As the president flew back from 
his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York 
Times headline 
<http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/11/12/gergen.america.economy/?hpt=Sbin>summed 
the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is 
Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and 
Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether 
the United States will lose its unchallenged 
global power, but just how precipitous and 
wrenching the decline will be. In place of 
Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the 
National Intelligence Council's own futuristic 
methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios 
for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. 
global power could reach its end in the 2020s 
(along with four accompanying assessments of just 
where we are today).  The future scenarios 
include: economic decline, oil shock, military 
misadventure, and World War III.  While these are 
hardly the only possibilities when it comes to 
American decline or even collapse, they offer a 
window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s 
dominant position in the global economy: loss of 
economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of 
world trade, the decline of American 
technological innovation, and the end of the 
dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already 
<http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres09_e/pr554_e.htm>fallen 
to number three in global merchandise exports, 
with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China 
and 16% for the European Union.  There is no 
reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological 
innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was 
still 
<http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IP.PAT.RESD>number 
two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications 
with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 
195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase 
since 2000.  A harbinger of further decline: in 
2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among 
the 40 nations 
<http://www.itif.org/publications/atlantic-century-benchmarking-eu-and-us-innovation-and-competitiveness>surveyed 
by the Information Technology & Innovation 
Foundation when it came to “change” in “global 
innovation-based competitiveness” during the 
previous decade.  Adding substance to these 
statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry 
unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the 
Tianhe-1A, so powerful, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/28compute.html>said 
one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. 
education system, that source of future 
scientists and innovators, has been falling 
behind its competitors. After leading the world 
for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with 
university degrees, the country 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/education/23college.html>sank 
to 12th place in 2010.  The World Economic Forum 
<http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Global%20Competitiveness%20Report/index.htm>ranked 
the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 
nations in the quality of its university math and 
science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all 
graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are 
now foreigners, most of whom will be heading 
home, not staying here as once would have 
happened.  By 2025, in other words, the United 
States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly 
sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the 
world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no 
longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. 
knows best on economic policy,” 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/business/economy/11currency.html>observed 
Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at 
the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, 
with the world's central banks holding an 
astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, 
Russian president Dimitri Medvedev 
<http://michael-hudson.com/2009/06/washington-cannot-call-all-the-shots/>insisted 
that it was time to end “the artificially 
maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor 
<http://www.cfr.org/publication/21189/chinas_foreign_exchange_reserves.html>suggested 
that the future might lie with a global reserve 
currency “disconnected from individual nations” 
(that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as 
signposts of a world to come, and of a possible 
attempt, as economist Michael Hudson 
<http://michael-hudson.com/2009/06/washington-cannot-call-all-the-shots/>has 
argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant 
warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long 
expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its 
special status as the world's reserve 
currency.  Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. 
Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling 
now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is 
finally forced to slash its bloated military 
budget.  Under pressure at home and abroad, 
Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from 
hundreds of overseas bases to a continental 
perimeter.  By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of 
paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and 
other powers, great and regional, provocatively 
challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, 
and cyberspace.  Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, 
ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing 
decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen 
into violent clashes and divisive debates, often 
over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a 
political tide of disillusionment and despair, a 
far-right patriot captures the presidency with 
thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for 
American authority and threatening military 
retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays 
next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power 
has been its lock on global oil supplies. 
Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the 
passing lane, China became the world's number one 
energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. 
had held for over a century.  Energy specialist 
Michael Klare 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175297/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_china_shakes_the_world/>has 
argued that this change means China will “set the 
pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half 
of the world's natural gas supply, which will 
potentially give them enormous leverage over 
energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to 
the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council 
<http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html>has 
warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia 
and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil 
powers are now draining the big basins of 
petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, 
cheap extraction. The real lesson of the 
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of 
Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but 
the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one 
of the corporate energy giants had little choice 
but to search for what Klare 
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128212150>calls 
“tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians 
have suddenly become far heavier energy 
consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to 
remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and 
so costs, are almost certain to rise -- and 
sharply at that.  Other developed nations are 
meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into 
experimental programs to develop alternative 
energy sources.  The United States has taken a 
different path, doing far too little to develop 
alternative sources while, in the last three 
decades, 
<http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTNTUS2&f=M>doubling 
its dependence on foreign oil imports.  Between 
1973 and 2007, oil imports have 
<http://www.answers.com/topic/oil-crises>risen 
from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 
<http://centexresources.com/investors.php>66%.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon 
foreign oil that a few adverse developments in 
the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil 
shock.  By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil 
shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) 
look like the proverbial molehill.  Angered at 
the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil 
ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future 
energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and 
Euros.  That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil 
imports further.  At the same moment, while 
signing a new series of long-term delivery 
contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their 
own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the 
Yuan.  Meanwhile, China pours countless billions 
into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and 
funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest 
natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be 
able to protect the oil tankers traveling from 
the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition 
of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an 
unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that 
China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will 
henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on 
the Gulf of Oman.  Under heavy economic pressure, 
London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its 
Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while 
Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs 
Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer 
welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, 
effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse 
announcements, 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine>the 
“Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power 
was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is 
laid to rest in 2025.  All the elements that long 
assured the United States limitless supplies of 
low-cost oil from that region -- logistics, 
exchange rates, and naval power -- evaporate. At 
this point, the U.S. can still cover only an 
<http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/execsummary.html>insignificant 
12% of its energy needs from its nascent 
alternative energy industry, and remains 
dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like 
a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, 
making travel a staggeringly expensive 
proposition, putting real wages (which had long 
been declining) into freefall, and rendering 
non-competitive whatever American exports 
remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices 
climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing 
overseas in return for costly oil, the American 
economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances 
at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. 
military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally 
bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires 
often plunge into ill-advised military 
misadventures.  This phenomenon is known among 
historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and 
seems to involve psychologically compensatory 
efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat 
by occupying new territories, however briefly and 
catastrophically. These operations, irrational 
even from an imperial point of view, often yield 
hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats 
that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an 
arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper 
into military misadventures until defeat becomes 
debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 
ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a 
dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers 
to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. 
In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its 
prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, 
the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. 
With the hubris that marks empires over the 
millennia, Washington has increased its troops in 
Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into 
Pakistan, and 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175324/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_general_petraeus%27s_two_campaigns/>extended 
its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting 
disasters large and small in this 
guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is 
“micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful 
scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With 
the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to 
the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, 
Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a 
disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. 
garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern 
Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by 
Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are 
grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are 
taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American 
war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 
fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the 
city that are believed to be under Taliban 
control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the 
rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques 
throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, 
long trained by American forces to turn the tide 
of the war, begin to desert en masse.  Taliban 
fighters then launch a series of remarkably 
sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons 
across the country, sending American casualties 
soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, 
U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and 
civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long 
stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a 
new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its 
backing of Israel as well as the killing of 
untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing 
wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas 
prices soaring and refineries running dry, 
Washington makes its move, sending in Special 
Operations forces to seize oil ports in the 
Persian Gulf.  This, in turn, sparks a rash of 
suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and 
oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and 
diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce 
American actions, commentators worldwide reach 
back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” 
a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that 
marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between 
the U.S. and China began to rise in the western 
Pacific, once considered an American 
“lake.”  Even a year earlier no one would have 
predicted such a development. As Washington 
played upon its alliance with London to 
appropriate much of Britain's global power after 
World War II, so China is now using the profits 
from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what 
is likely to become a military challenge to 
American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a 
vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long 
dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after 
Washington 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/world/asia/24diplo.html>expressed 
a “national interest” in the South China Sea and 
conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that 
claim, Beijing's official Global Times 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2010/0817/China-and-the-US-battle-to-assert-presence-in-South-China-Sea>responded 
angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match 
over the South China Sea issue has raised the 
stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon 
<http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA526678>reported 
that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack

[U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific 
Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout
 the 
continental United States.” By developing 
“offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare 
capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for 
dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the 
information spectrum in all dimensions of the 
modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of 
the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well 
as the 
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/17/content_12822615.htm>launch 
of two satellites in January 2010 and 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67005R20100801>another 
in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled 
that the country was making rapid strides toward 
an “independent” network of 35 satellites for 
global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position 
globally, Washington is intent on building a new 
digital network of air and space robotics, 
advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and 
electronic surveillance.  Military planners 
expect this integrated system to envelop the 
Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire 
armies on the battlefield or taking out a single 
terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all 
goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch 
a three-tiered shield of space drones -- reaching 
from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile 
missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite 
system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history.  It 
extended drone operations into the exosphere by 
quietly 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/science/space/23secret.html>launching 
the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 
255 miles above the planet.  The X-37B is the 
first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles 
that will mark the full weaponization of space, 
creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so 
new and untested that even the most outlandish 
scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality 
still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the 
sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself 
<http://www.aetc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123175083>used 
in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we 
can gain “a better understanding of how air, 
space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so 
begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. 
While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best 
Buy for deep discounts on the latest home 
electronics from China, U.S. Air Force 
technicians at the 
<http://www.darpa.mil/tto/programs/sst/index.html>Space 
Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on 
their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly 
blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the 
U.S. CyberCommand's 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html>operations 
center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect 
malicious binaries that, though fired 
anonymously, show the 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/06cyber.html?pagewanted=all>distinctive 
digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. 
Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics 
aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. 
<http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=1425>“Vulture” 
drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the 
Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan.  It 
suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its 
enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of 
lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the 
Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White 
House authorizes a retaliatory strike.  Confident 
that its 
<http://www.darpa.mil/tto/programs/systemf6/>F-6 
“Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is 
impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California 
transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B 
space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, 
ordering them to launch their 
<http://www.darpa.mil/tto/programs/t3/index.html>“Triple 
Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. 
Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force 
launches its 
<http://air-attack.com/page/32/USAF--DARPA-FALCON-Program.html>Falcon 
Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles 
above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes 
later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles 
at seven Chinese satellites in nearby 
orbits.  The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably 
through the F-6 satellite architecture, while 
those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to 
crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS 
signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships 
and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier 
fleets begin steaming in circles in the 
mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. 
Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, 
crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, 
the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force 
has long 
<http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj06/sum06/harter.html>called 
“the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, 
the military power that had dominated the globe 
for nearly a century has been defeated in World 
War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these 
four scenarios suggest, every significant trend 
points toward a far more striking decline in 
American global power by 2025 than anything 
Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their 
policies to take cognizance of rising Asian 
powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more 
overseas military bases will simply become 
unsustainable, finally forcing a staged 
withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With 
both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize 
space and cyberspace, tensions between the two 
powers are bound to rise, making military 
conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, 
military, and technological trends outlined above 
will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened 
to European empires after World War II, such 
negative forces will undoubtedly prove 
synergistic.  They will combine in thoroughly 
unexpected ways, create crises for which 
Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten 
to spin the economy into a sudden downward 
spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum 
of possibilities for a future world order.  At 
one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new 
global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be 
ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince 
self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman 
scripts, regional defense strategies, and 
underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key 
instruments for global dominion. At the moment 
then, no single superpower seems to be on the 
horizon likely to succeed the U.S.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global 
future, a coalition of transnational 
corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and 
an international financial elite could 
conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, 
supra-national nexus that would make it no longer 
meaningful to speak of national empires at 
all.  While denationalized corporations and 
multinational elites would assumedly rule such a 
world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes 
would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844671607/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Planet 
of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial 
vision of such a world from the bottom up.  He 
argues that the billion people already packed 
into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising 
to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, 
failed cities' of the Third World
 the 
distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first 
century.” As darkness settles over some future 
super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian 
technologies of repression” as “hornet-like 
helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in 
the narrow streets of the slum districts
 Every 
morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible 
futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge 
between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, 
Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with 
receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and 
the United States to enforce an ad hoc global 
dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European 
empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional 
hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of 
the international system that operated before 
modern empires took shape. In this 
neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless 
vistas of micro-violence and unchecked 
exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its 
immediate region -- Brasilia in South America, 
Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern 
Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the 
maritime deeps, removed from the control of the 
former planetary “policeman,” the United States, 
might even become a new global commons, 
controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing 
trends into the future on the assumption that 
Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of 
historically unparalleled power, cannot or will 
not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year 
trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have 
already frittered away most of the first decade 
of that decline with wars that distracted us from 
long-term problems and, like water tossed onto 
desert sands, 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html>wasted 
trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering 
them all away still remain high.  Congress and 
the president are now in gridlock; the American 
system is flooded with corporate money meant to 
jam up the works; and there is little suggestion 
that any issues of significance, including our 
wars, our bloated national security state, our 
starved education system, and our antiquated 
energy supplies, will be addressed with 
sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft 
landing that might maximize our country's role 
and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium 
is going.  It seems increasingly doubtful that 
the United States will have anything like 
Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world 
order that protects its interests, preserves its 
prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison.  A 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175225/alfred_mccoy_afghanista_as_a_drug_war>TomDispatch 
regular, he is the author, most recently, of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Policing 
America’s Empire: The United States, the 
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance 
State (2009). He is also the convener of the 
<http://history.wisc.edu/goldberg/us_empire_project.htm>“Empires 
in Transition” project, a global working group of 
140 historians from universities on four 
continents. The results of their first meetings 
at Madison, Sydney, and Manila were published as 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299231046/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Colonial 
Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern 
American State and the findings from their latest 
conference will appear next year as “Endless 
Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and 
the Decline of U.S. Global Power.”

Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy

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