America’s Future: Managing Imperial Decline
Its truly sad that it is coming to this. It didn’t have to be this way, but alas, the hubris of power and the megalomania of the neo-conservatives take their toll. Not that we should have ever had these kinds of delusional ambitions, but that those with them actually wrested the levers of power and perverted the whole notion of an American republic as one founded in 1776 in order to overthrow empire, actually morphing into the very thing we were born into existence to oppose. But then, this trend certainly didn’t start with the neo-cons, as it has been going on since the early days of the nation itself.
Here we can see the cost of Bush’s adventurism for American imperial power. In failing to understand the inherent limits of US global power consequent upon deeper, though seemingly unrecognised, longer-term global trends, the Bush administration hugely overestimated American power and thereby committed a gross act of imperial over-reach, for which subsequent administrations will pay a heavy price. Far from the US simply conjoining its pre-1989 power with that of the deceased USSR, it is increasingly confronted with a world marked by the growing power of a range of new national actors, notably - but by no means only - China, India and Brazil.
Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the US seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline. And, as a footnote, one might add that this is a task for which pragmatists are rather better suited than ideologues.
Our nation, our people and the future health and well-being (physically and financially) of our nation will be what suffers, unfortunately.
on December 2nd, 2006 at 1:51 pm
We Americans shouldn’t feel too morally righteous in our anger toward Bush for exposing the myth of American power and wrecking the empire. What is the empire? Our prosperity is built on the exploitation of other nations, especially third-world nations. Our houses are cluttered with goods made in Asian sweatshops. Our economy runs on oil pumped by poor workers in Africa, the Middle East, and South America. A redistribution of wealth across this wide, overpopulated world would only be fair, right?
Personally, I might be able to stomach living in a commune with 10 or 20 like-minded people, but I imagine socialism as a large-scale government institution would be unbearable. So I enjoy capitalism. Perhaps in a capitalist system, someone is always top dog, both on a local scale (your boss) and a worldwide scale (the USA). There are far too many people in this world for everyone to be wealthy. So if a nation is going to be top dog, it might as well be us, right? I will be sad to see our prosperity decline, but I will try to bear in mind the concept of fairness and refrain from bitching about it.