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<font size=3><br><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>February 22,
2005 counterpunch.org<br><br>
</font><font face="Helvetica, Helvetica" size=5>Imperial
Entropy<br><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">Collapse
of the American Empire<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>By
KIRKPATRICK SALE<br><br>
</font><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=3><b>Kirkpatrick Sale</b> is the author
of twelve books, including
</font><font face="Verdana" size=3 color="#184B81"> Human
Scale</font><font face="Verdana" size=3>,</font><font face="Verdana" size=3 color="#184B81">
The Conquest of
Paradise</font><font face="Verdana" size=3>,</font><font face="Verdana" size=3 color="#184B81">
Rebels Against the Future</font><font face="Verdana" size=3>,
and</font><font face="Verdana" size=3 color="#184B81"> The Fire of His
Genius: Robert Fulton and the American
Dream</font><font face="Verdana" size=3>.<br><br>
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