Chalmers Johnson, one of the key articulators of the “imperial overstretch” argument (I liked his book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic) argues that military Keynesianism and an unchecked presidency on the warpath will lead to a non-democratic United States and, eventually, bankruptcy. From Harpers:
The United States remains, for the moment, the most powerful nation in history, but it faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions.
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
Several factors, however, indicate that this course will be a brief one, which most likely will end in economic and political collapse.
Issandr, what would “economic and political collapse” look like, say, 25 years after what you’d call a recognizeable start of that collapse? Would it be like Jared Diamond predicts for the first world in his book, “Collapse?” That is, higher prices for everyone, more “hard times” and potential starvation for the poor and middle class (kind of like during our Great Depression), more violence over resources, etc. but still a relatively more comfortable way of living compared to many other places in the world? Or do you foresee a huge plummet to, say, Rwanda-like poverty & violence?
-Katie in the US
I would say the former, higher prices, more social conflict, wider rich-poor income differentials, but not a total collapse.
A similar argument is made in a book I am currently reading by Jacques Attali, a French public intellectual and former advisor to President Francois Mitterrand. He sees the obvious decline of the US by 2035, by which point the international system will go through a period of heightened and potentially extremely dangerous instability, and afterwards the US as a great power among others. But surely the economics of the oil age impose a rise a prices by that time as scarcity is more apparent and competition over resources. The French sociologist/demographer Emmanuel Todd also made an argument showing the rapid decline of the US within a decade or two, driven in art by demographic pressures.
What all of these arguments have in common is that while US supremacy was bound to end sooner or later, the Bush administration’s policies have rapidly accelerated that decline and made a “soft landing” more difficult. The ability of the American political class, which has long nurtured imperialist/milleniarist ideas of American power, to deal with that decline is perhaps the most important question. If we get more Bushies, they’ll want to go out all guns blazing. If you get sensible people, they will leverage the still considerable power (hard and soft) of the US to secure dominance without hegemony, ideally as part of an internationally guaranteed international framework (think Congress of Vienna, which gave Europe a period between 1815 and 1870 with only (as far as I remember) the Crimean War as major conflict.
I should clarify: the Crimean War was the only major conflict in Europe. Obviously massive conflict was brought to the rest of the world, notably by the British.
Oh, Issandr, I wish I were in Egypt. I could meet you and we’d geek out all day. Show each other books, talk about different ways of predicting history…
😀