Dealing with two unwanted consequences of capitalism — climate change and wealth inequality — offers projects for a US-China partnership.
As the US Empire Declines, Where Is It Taking Us?
Richard Wolf / LA Progressive
(September 8, 2024) — The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire — and that once did — now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline.
However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating. In empires’ early years, leaders and the led may repress those among them who stress or merely even mention decline. Social problems may likewise be denied, minimized, or, if admitted, blamed on convenient scapegoats — immigrants, foreign powers, or ethnic minorities — rather than linked to imperial decline.
The US empire, audaciously proclaimed by the Monroe Doctrine soon after two independence wars won against Britain, grew across the 19th and 20th centuries, and peaked during the decades between 1945 and 2010. The rise of the US empire overlapped with the decline of the British empire. The Soviet Union represented limited political and military challenges, but never any serious economic competition or threat. The Cold War was a lopsided contest whose outcome was programmed in from its beginning.
All of the US empire’s potential economic competitors or threats were devastated by World War II. The following years found Europe losing its colonies. The unique global position of the United States then, with its disproportional position in world trade and investment, was anomalous and likely unsustainable. An attitude of denial at the time that decline was all but certain morphed only too readily into the attitude of denial now that the decline is well underway.
The United States could not prevail militarily over all of Korea in its 1950–53 war there. The United States lost its subsequent wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The NATO alliance was insufficient to alter any of those outcomes. US military and financial support for Ukraine and the massive United States and NATO sanctions war against Russia are failures to date and are likely to remain so. US sanctions programs against Cuba, Iran, and China have failed too. Meanwhile, the BRICS alliance counteracts US policies to protect its empire, including its sanctions warfare, with increasing effectiveness.
In the realms of trade, investment, and finance, we can measure the decline of the US empire differently. One index is the decline of the US dollar as a central bank reserve holding. Another is its decline as a means of trade, loans, and investment. Finally, consider the US dollar’s decline alongside that of dollar-denominated assets as internationally desired means of holding wealth. Across the Global South, countries, industries, or firms seeking trade, loans, or investments used to go to London, Washington, or Paris for decades; they now have other options. They can go instead to Beijing, New Delhi, or Moscow, where they often secure more attractive terms.
Empire confers special advantages that translate into extraordinary profits for firms located in the country that dominates the empire. The 19th century was remarkable for its endless confrontations and struggles among empires competing for territory to dominate and thus for their industries’ higher profits. Declines of any one empire could enhance opportunities for competing empires. If the latter grabbed those opportunities, the former’s decline could worsen. One set of competing empires delivered two world wars in the last century. Another set seems increasingly driven to deliver worse, possibly nuclear world wars in this century.
Before World War I, theories circulated that the evolution of multinational corporations out of merely national mega-corporations would end or reduce the risks of war. Owners and directors of increasingly global corporations would work against war among countries as a logical extension of their profit-maximizing strategies. The century’s two world wars undermined those theories’ appearance of truth. So too did the fact that multinational mega-corporations increasingly purchased governments and subordinated state policies to those corporations’ competing growth strategies.
Capitalists’ competition governed state policies at least as much as the reverse. Out of their interaction emerged the wars of the 21st century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. Likewise from their interaction, rising US-China tensions emerged around Taiwan and the South China Sea.
