1). “The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis: The Decline and Fall of It All?”, (“Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Living in a Quagmire World”), Mar 12, 2024, Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch, at < https://tomdispatch.com/the-
2). “U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony”, Nov 01, 2019, Immanuel Wallerstein, Monthly Review, Volume 71, Issue 06, at < https://monthlyreview.org/
3). “ 'China most likely to win war against US over Taiwan': Niall Ferguson: Ferguson said China is spending a huge amount of money on defence and that its navy is already the biggest in the world”, Updated Jan 17, 2024, Saurabh Sharma, Niall Ferguson interviewed by Rahul Kanwal & Kalli Purie, Business Today, duration of video 28:33, at < https://www.businesstoday.in/
4). “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan”, Jan 9, 2023, Mark F. Cancian, Matthew Cancian, & Eric Heginbotham, CSIS (Center for Stategic and International Studies), Duration of video 2:23, at < https://www.csis.org/analysis/
5). “COMAC Explained: China’s Boeing”, May 2, 2021, Asianometry, ( {COMAC}: Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China), duration of video 16:50, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
6). “The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams l Al Jazeera Investigations”, Sep 10, 2014, Will Jordan Reporter, Al Jazeera English, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
The Ongoing Crisis of American Empire: The Three Foreign Policy Debacles and the Erosion of the Bases of Imperialist Power
Introduction: Alfred McCoy (who wrote the seminal book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, while still a graduate student in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the book was published in 1972) has been discussing just how the U.S. Empire would meet its final demise for years now. In his latest article posted here as Item 1)., “The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis: ….” he looks at the two simultaneous ongoing crises, and a third potential crisis, that the U.S. Empire is contending with in Ukraine, Israel, and potentially in the Taiwan / China situation. He writes that:
“As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, 'win' the Cold War, and become the 'lone superpower' on this planet. (Emphasis added) ….
“America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad. ….
“Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November. (Emphasis added)
“Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.”
In the last article here posted as Item 2)., “U.S. Weakness and the Struggle ….”, penned by Immanuel Wallerstein (a major theorist in the World Systems Theory school of thought) before he died in 2019 he looked at the decay of U.S. Power as seen in 2019 when compared to the immediate post WW 2 period. Wallerstein observed that:
(The period of supreme U.S. Power) “.... lasted only about twenty-five years. The United States ran into difficulty somewhere between 1967 and 1973 because of three things. One, it lost its economic edge. Western Europe and Japan became sufficiently strong to defend their own markets. They even began to invade U.S. markets. They were then about as strong and as competitive as the United States economically and that, of course, had political implications. (Emphasis added)
“Secondly, there was the world revolution of 1968 in which many MR readers were involved, in one way or another. ….
“The third thing that happened is that there were people who didn’t agree with Yalta. They were located in the third world and there were at least four significant defeats of imperialism that occurred in the third world. The first was China, where the Communist Party defied Stalin and marched on Kuomintang-controlled Shanghai in 1948, thus getting China out from under U.S. influence on the mainland. That was a central defeat in the U.S. attempt to control the periphery. Secondly, there was Algeria and all its implications as a role model for other colonial territories. There was Cuba, in the backyard of the United States. And finally, there was Vietnam, which both France and then the United States were incapable of defeating. It was a military defeat for the United States that has structured world geopolitics ever since.” (Emphasis added)
From the other side of the ideological spectrum we have the interview of Niall Ferguson in Item 3)., “ 'China most likely to win war against US ….”. Ferguson notes that:“ 'It's (China) building a navy that, in terms of numbers of boats, is already the biggest in the world. It is building a nuclear arsenal, which does not get nearly enough attention. …. Right now, if there were a showdown between the US and China over Taiwan, I would not put money on the US winning that showdown,' the historian said…. 'If you look at the war games that have been done, one of the striking features is - how quickly the US runs out of precision missiles, in a week. Now, if you're going to run out of precision missiles in a week, you're not in great shape to win a war like that,' the historian said.
“ 'China's manufacturing capacity is now so much greater than the US, probably two times greater. If it came to a hot war, China would have some real advantages,' he said, adding that his strong advice to the American policymakers would be - 'Don't do this. Let's not have a showdown over Taiwan. You're not in the kind of position you were in back in the 1990s, the last time there was a Taiwan Strait crisis.'
Numerous Military and Think Tank military simulations have predicted a grim outcome to a potential war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. An example is found at Item 4)., “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming ….”, this particular one from CSIS, a firm ruling class think tank. The introductory paragraph at the website states that:
“CSIS developed a wargame for a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan and ran it 24 times. In most scenarios, the United States/Taiwan/Japan defeated a conventional amphibious invasion by China and maintained an autonomous Taiwan. However, this defense came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers. Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years. China also lost heavily, and failure to occupy Taiwan might destabilize Chinese Communist Party rule. Victory is therefore not enough. The United States needs to strengthen deterrence immediately.” (Emphasis added)
Many of the more recent war-games have predicted a costly Pyrrhic victory, for a coalition of forces led by the U.S. A number of earlier studies actually predicted that the U.S. and its allies woulde lose the battle in a confrontation with China near Taiwan.
The basis of power for a global hegemon is the economic strength and socioeconomic cohesiveness of a society. The U.S. was the undoubted hegemon from about 1945 – 1975 a period that is variously defined as Strong Hegemony. Meanwhile the change after the end of Strong Hegemony, such as took place in the early to mid 1970s for the U.S., has been defined as the transition from Strong to Weak Hegemony or the occurrence of the Signal Crisis as the Capitalists move from Productive (Industrial) Capitalism to Finance (Rentier) Capitalism. There are several industries where the U.S. ruling class has tranformed themselves from giants to pygmies. These include the auto and truck industry, computers and electronics in general, basic industrial operations like steel, aluminum, glass, shipbuilding, and even the crown jewel of industrial production the aerospace products expecially airliners. (For Steel, Aluminum, and LNG, See, “Trade Wars and Disrupted Global Commodity ChainsHallmarks of the Breakdown of the U.S. World Order and a New Era of Competition and Conflict?”, Spring 2024, Paul S. Ciccantell, David A. Smith, & Elizabeth Sowers, JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, Vol. 29 Issue 2, at < https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/
Of course, the only significant company building airliners in the U.S., Boeing, has suffered a series of deadly, damaging, stunning failures; that exposed a great variety of problems. Item 6)., “The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams ….”, examined what happened when Boeing moved the production of its most advanced airliner, from Renton, Washington to South Carolina. The report noted that many of the parts needed to assemble the plane, that came from all over the world and that amounted to 70% of the aircraft, did not fit properly. In the South Carolina 787 Assembly plant, in a state and city that have no particular tradition of industrial manufacturing, in many cases the workers merely pounded the parts into place, an extremely dubious action on their parts. Meanwhile in Renton, that was still assembling 787s the workers would if possible drill new holes or otherwise properly modify the parts so that they would fit properly. Pounding the parts together certainly shortens the safe service life of the planes being assembled. In South Carolina Boeing actually hired people away from fast food restaurants and scoured the community colleges of the Southeast looking for likely candidates to work on the 787. The Al Jazeera documentary reporter even spoke with people who worked on the planes who said, on camera or at least in the audio, that they would not fly on one. Of course, the Boeing 737 Max series was pushed through with a defective and unreliable software program that depended on ONE Sensor, violating the most basic aircraft safety dictum of all REDUNDANCY of all systems. Boeing arrogantly, and the FAA supinely, defied calls to ground the 737 Max after the first deadly Crash in Ethiopia, and only acquiesced to a complete grounding of the 737 Maxs after the second deadly crash in Indonesia. Later, of course, there was the blowout of the panels used to seal unused door sections, and some problems with engines (that are not manufactured by Boeing btw).
The U.S. ruling class has overseen the dismantling of U.S. Power over the last 50 years, just as they rode the U.S. Economy and State Apparatus during century and a half that U.S. Power was on the rise. Hopes of restoring the conditions in the U.S., before the last 50 years of unfavorable changes, are in vain. What we can do is try to steer our society to a “soft landing” one in which the social order includes decent social services and much better land use and communities.
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The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis
Alfred McCoy, Living in a Quagmire World
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a small reminder that, if you find today’s Alfred McCoy piece as fascinating as I did, a signed, personalized copy of his remarkable book on empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, is still available to anyone who visits the TD contribution page and donates $125 or more. Think of this as but another reminder that this site needs your donations in a big-time fashion. Tom]
Americans have never liked to think of themselves as part of the West’s imperial history that began with the Roman empire and may now quite literally be ending, as historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy suggests, in a distinctly un-American moment. The author of a classic history of empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, McCoy has previously suggested that, in symbolic terms, if Donald Trump were to win the 2024 presidential election (or even lose it and once again contest it, possibly, thanks to his most fervent followers, in an ominously well-armed fashion), he could prove to be the end of empire personified.
Certainly, as McCoy explains today, it’s hard not to imagine that, from Ukraine to Gaza to Asia, this country is on a dramatic imperial downward slide. His own findings only serve to reinforce a view taking root among America’s European and Asian allies that the United States, globally dominant since 1945 and triumphantly the lone superpower on Planet Earth in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now experiencing an epoch-ending terminal failure. The global Pax Americana (that proved to have all too much war in it) is, it seems, crumbling amid two grim conflicts, one in Europe and the other in the Middle East, and a political and military stand-off with China that could, at any moment, take a turn for the worse.
And let me add: it’s strange to see the American Moment (and yes, historically speaking, I do think that should be capitalized!) potentially ending here at home with two elderly men locked in an electoral knife fight that could blow the American imperium sky-high from the inside out. Tom
Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.
Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.
America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.
As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.
In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.
America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.
Creeping Disaster in Ukraine
Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.
During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.
When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.
Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)
Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”
Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.
In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.
In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”
Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.
After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.
Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.
The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”
Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.
Crisis in Gaza
Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.
In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.
Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”
On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.
After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.
Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.
Trouble in the Taiwan Straits
While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”
After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”
Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”
But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.
Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.
The Sum of Three Crises
Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.
Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.
Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy
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Monthly Review | U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony
Immanuel Wallerstein. Image credit: lauro.campos.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) was the director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations; the editor of Review; and Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He was the author of numerous books, including Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System, cowritten with Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, and Samir Amin (Monthly Review Press, 1990).
Wallerstein was also a frequent contributor to Monthly Review. “U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony” was first published in Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (July–August 2003).
I am going to start with two things with which I think nearly all MR readers will probably agree. One, imperialism is an integral part of the capitalist world-economy. It is not a special phenomenon. It has always been there. It always will be there as long as we have a capitalist world economy. Two, we are experiencing at the moment a particularly aggressive and egregious form of imperialism, which is now even ready to claim that it is being imperialist.
Now, I ask you to reflect upon that anomaly. How do we explain that, at the moment, we are living through a particularly aggressive and egregious form of imperialism, which for the first time in over a hundred years has been ready to use the words imperial and imperialism? Why should they do that? Now, the answer most people give in one word is U.S. strength. And the answer I will give in one word is U.S. weakness.
We have to start in 1945, when the United States became hegemonic, really hegemonic. What does hegemony in this context mean? It means that the U.S. nation-state was so much the strongest, it had an economic capability so far ahead of anybody else in the world as of 1945, that it could undersell anyone in their own home markets. The United States had a military strength that was unparalleled. As a consequence, it had an ability to create formidable alliances, NATO, the U.S.-Japan Defense Pact, and so on. At the same time, the United States, as the hegemonic power, became culturally the center of the world. New York became the center of high culture and American popular culture went on its march throughout the world.
The first time I was in the Soviet Union, in the Brezhnev era, my host took me to a nightclub in Leningrad. The one thing that startled me in the Soviet Union, the whole time I was there, was that in this nightclub one heard American popular music sung in English. And, of course, ideologically, I think we underestimate the degree to which the theme of the “free world” has had legitimacy among wide segments of the world population.
So the United States was really on top of the world for about twenty-five years, and it got its way in whatever it wanted to do.
It is true that there was the Soviet Union, which posed a military difficulty for the United States. Nonetheless, the United States handled that very simply by an agreement. It is called Yalta, which encompasses more than just what happened at Yalta itself. I think the left has underestimated historically the reality and the importance of the Yalta agreement that made the Cold War a choreographed arrangement in which nothing ever really happened for forty years. That was the important thing about the Cold War. It divided up the world into the Soviet zone that was about a third of the world, and the U.S. zone that was two-thirds. It kept the zones economically separate and allowed them to shout at each other loudly in order to keep their own side in order, but never to make any truly substantial changes in the arrangement. The United States was therefore sitting on top of the world.
This lasted only about twenty-five years. The United States ran into difficulty somewhere between 1967 and 1973 because of three things. One, it lost its economic edge. Western Europe and Japan became sufficiently strong to defend their own markets. They even began to invade U.S. markets. They were then about as strong and as competitive as the United States economically and that, of course, had political implications.
Secondly, there was the world revolution of 1968 in which many MR readers were involved, in one way or another. Think of what happened in 1968. In 1968, there were two themes that were repeated everywhere throughout the world in one version or another. One, we don’t like the U.S. hegemony and dominance of the world, and we don’t like Soviet collusion with it. That was a theme everywhere. That was not only the Chinese stance on the two superpowers but that of most of the rest of the world as well.
The second thing that 1968 made clear was that the Old Left, which had come to power everywhere—Communist parties, social-democratic parties, and national liberation movements—had not changed the world and something had to be done about it. We were not sure we trusted them anymore. That undermined the ideological basis of the Yalta agreement, and that was very important.
The third thing that happened is that there were people who didn’t agree with Yalta. They were located in the third world and there were at least four significant defeats of imperialism that occurred in the third world. The first was China, where the Communist Party defied Stalin and marched on Kuomintang-controlled Shanghai in 1948, thus getting China out from under U.S. influence on the mainland. That was a central defeat in the U.S. attempt to control the periphery. Secondly, there was Algeria and all its implications as a role model for other colonial territories. There was Cuba, in the backyard of the United States. And finally, there was Vietnam, which both France and then the United States were incapable of defeating. It was a military defeat for the United States that has structured world geopolitics ever since.
The threefold fact of the rise of economic rivals, the world revolution of 1968 and its impact on mentalities across the world, and Vietnam’s defeat of the United States, all taken together, mark the beginning of the decline of the United States.
How could the rulers of the United States handle the loss of hegemony? That has been the problem ever since. There were two dominant modes of handling this loss of hegemony. One is that pursued from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton, including Ronald Reagan, including George Bush Sr. All these U.S . presidents handled it the same way, basically a variant of the velvet glove hiding the mailed fist.
They sought to persuade Western Europe and Japan and others that the United States could be cooperative; that the others could have an alliance of semi-equals, though with the United States exerting “leadership.” That’s the Trilateral Commission and the G7. And, of course, they were using all this time the unifying force of opposition to the Soviet Union.
Secondly, there was the so-called Washington Consensus that coalesced in the 1980s. What was the Washington Consensus about? I remind you that the 1970s was the era when the United Nations proclaimed the decade of development. Developmentalism was the name of the game from the 1950s through the 1970s. Everybody proclaimed that countries could develop. The United States proclaimed it. The Soviet Union proclaimed it, and everybody in the third world proclaimed it—if only a state were organized properly. Of course, people disagreed about how to organize a state properly, but if only it were organized properly and did the right things, it could develop. This was the basic ideology; development was to be achieved by some kind of control over what went on within sovereign national states.
Now, the Washington Consensus was the abandonment and the denigration of developmentalism, which had visibily failed by the late 1980s, and, therefore, everybody was ready to abandon. They substituted for developmentalism what they called globalization, which simply meant opening up all the frontiers, breaking down all the barriers for: (a) the movement of goods and, more importantly, (b) capital, but not (c) labor. And the United States set out to impose this on the world.
The third thing they did along this line of “cooperation” was an ideological consensus-building process at Davos. Davos is not unimportant. Davos was an attempt to create a meeting ground of the world’s elites, including elites from the third world, and constantly bring together and blend their political activity.
At the same time, the objectives of the United States during this period took three forms. One was to launch a counteroffensive. It was a counteroffensive of neoliberalism on three levels to: (1) reduce wages worldwide; (2) reduce costs for (and end ecological constraints on) corporations, permitting the total externalization and socialization of such costs; and (3) reduce taxation, which was subsidizing social welfare (that is to say, subsidizing education, health care, and lifelong guarantees of income).
On all these three levels they were only partially successful. None of these three succeeded totally, but they all succeeded a little. However, cost curves were not brought down to anything like the 1945 level. The cost curves had gone way up and they are down now, but they are not down below the 1945 level, and they will go up again.
The second objective was to deal with the military threat. The real threat to U.S. military power, and they say it all the time, so let’s believe them, is nuclear proliferation; because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action. That is what North Korea is demonstrating at this moment. North Korea only has two nuclear bombs, if what the newspapers say is correct. But that is enough to shake things up.
The third objective—and this was very crucial and they’ve been working at it since the 1970s—was to stop the European Union. The United States was for the European Union in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was a means of getting France to agree to have Germany rearm. But once it became serious it was viewed as an attempt to create a European state of one variety or another, and the United States was of course strongly opposed to it.
What happened? First, we had the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was a disaster for the United States; it removed the most important political weapon they had in relation to Western Europe and East Asia.
Second, there was Saddam. Saddam Hussein started the first Gulf War. He did it deliberately. He did it deliberately to challenge the United States. He could not have done that if the Soviet Union had still been an active power. They would have stopped him from doing it because it would have been too dangerous in terms of the Yalta agreement. And he got away with it. That is to say, at the end of the war, all he lost was what he had gained. He was back at the starting point. That is what has stuck in the craw for ten years. That war was a draw. It was not a victory for the United States.
Third, we saw in the 1990s, to be sure, a momentary spurt of the U.S. economy, but not of the world-economy as a whole and a spurt that is now over. But we now have a weakening of the dollar, and the dollar has been a crucial lever of the United States, enabling it to have the kind of economy it has and the dominance it has over the rest of the world. And finally, we had 9/11 that showed that the United States was vulnerable.
Enter the hawks. The hawks do not see themselves as the triumphant continuation of U.S. capitalism or U.S. power or anything else. They see themselves as a group of frustrated outsiders who for fifty years did not get their way even with Reagan, even with Bush Sr., even with George Bush Jr. before 9/11. They are still worried that Bush Jr. will chicken out on them. They think that the policy that went from Nixon to Clinton to the first year of George W. Bush, of trying to handle this situation, diplomatically, multilaterally—I call it the velvet glove—was an utter failure. They think it just accelerated the decline of the United States and they think that had to be changed radically by engaging in an egregious, overt, imperial action—war for the sake of war. They did not go to war on Iraq or Saddam Hussein because he was a dictator. They did not go to war on Iraq even for oil. I will not argue that point here, but they did not need the war on Iraq for oil. They needed it to show the United States could do it, and they needed that demonstration in order to intimidate two groups of people: (1) anybody in the third world who thinks that they should engage in nuclear proliferation; and (2) Europe. This was an attack on Europe, and that is why Europe responded the way it did.
I wrote an article in 1980 in which I said, “It is geopolitically inevitable that over the next period, there will emerge a Paris/Berlin/Moscow alliance.” I said this when the Soviet Union was still in existence and I have repeated it ever since. Now, everybody talks about it. There is actually a website now, paris-berlin-moscou.info, which reprints what people are writing in French, German, Russian, and English throughout Europe about the virtues of a Paris/Berlin/Moscow linkup.
We must not underestimate the second Security Council nonvote in March of this year. It is the first time since the United Nations was founded that the United States, on an issue that mattered to it, could not get a majority on the Security Council. Of course, they have had to veto various resolutions in the past but on no issue that was truly crucial to them. But in March 2003 they withdrew the resolution because they could not get more than four votes for it. It was a political humiliation and it was universally regarded as such. The United States has lost legitimacy, and that is why you cannot call it hegemonic anymore. Whatever you want to call it, there is no legitimacy now and that’s crucial.
So, what should we look for in the next ten years? First, there is the question of how Europe will construct itself. It will be very difficult, but they will construct themselves and they will construct an army. Maybe not all of Europe, but the core. The United States is really worried about it, and that army will sooner or later link up with the Russian army.
Second, look at North East Asia. This is harder but I think China, a reunited Korea, and Japan will begin to move together politically and economically. Now, this will not be easy. The reunification of Korea will be a tremendously difficult thing to achieve. The reunification of China as well will be a difficult thing to achieve, and those countries have all sorts of reasons for hating one another and tensions with deep historical roots, but the pressure is on them. If, realistically, they are going to survive as independent forces in the world, they will move in this direction.
Thirdly, you should watch the World Social Forum. I think that is where the action is. It is the most important social movement now on the face of the earth and the only one that has a chance of playing a really significant role. It has blossomed very fast. It has a wealth of internal contradictions that we should not underestimate and it will run through all sorts of difficult periods, and it may not make it. It may not survive as a movement that is a movement of movements, that has no hierarchical center, is tolerant of all the varieties within it and yet stands for something. This is not an easy game, but it is where the best hope lies.
Finally, I would think you ought to look at the internal contradictions among capitalists. The basic political contradiction of capitalism throughout its history has been that all capitalists have a common political interest insofar as there is a world class struggle going on. At the same time, all capitalists are rivals of all other capitalists. Now that is a fundamental contradiction of the system and it’s going to be very explosive.
I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that in April 2003 Lawrence Eagleberger, the secretary of state under the first President Bush, and still a close adviser of the current president’s father, said in print that if the United States were now to invade Syria, he, Eagleberger, would be for impeaching George W. Bush. Now, that is not a very light thing for a person of that sort to say. So there is a message being sent, and who is the message coming from? I think it is coming from the father for one thing. And beyond that, it is coming from an important segment of U.S. capital and of world capital. They are not all happy about the hawks. The hawks have not won the game. They have grabbed hold of the U.S. state machinery; 9/11 made that possible. And the hawks know it is now or never and they will continue to push, because if they don’t push forward, they will fall back. But they have no guarantee of success, and some of their biggest enemies are other capitalists who do not like the line with Europe and Japan because they basically do believe in the unity of capital; who don’t think that the way you handle these things is by smashing all opposition, but would prefer to co-opt it. They are extremely worried that this is Samson pulling down the house.
We have entered a chaotic world. It has to do with the crisis of capitalism as a system, but I will not argue that now. What I will say is that this chaotic world situation will now go on for the next twenty or thirty years. No one controls it, least of all the U.S. government. The U.S. government is adrift in a situation that it is trying to manage all over the place and that it will be incapable of managing. This is neither good nor bad, but we should not overestimate these people nor the strength on which they rely.
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'China most likely to win war against US over Taiwan': Niall Ferguson
- Updated Jan 17, 2024, 12:06 PM IST
- Historian Niall Ferguson on Tuesday predicted that China is most likely to win the war against the US over Taiwan
- He said China is spending a huge amount of money on defence and that its navy is already the biggest in the world
- He said his advice to the American policymakers would be - "Don't do this. Let's not have a showdown over Taiwan"
Historian and author Niall Ferguson on Tuesday predicted that China is most likely to win the war against the United States (US) over Taiwan -- a self-governing island that Beijing considers as its own territory. He said his advice to policymakers in Washington would be to not go to war with China. Ferguson said China is spending a huge amount of money on defence and that its navy is already the biggest in the world.
"It's (China) building a navy that, in terms of numbers of boats, is already the biggest in the world. It is building a nuclear arsenal, which does not get nearly enough attention. But there is a huge threat to global stability. Right now, if there were a showdown between the US and China over Taiwan, I would not put money on the US winning that showdown," the historian said while speaking with India Today Group's Vice Chairperson & Executive Editor-in-Chief Kalli Purie and Business Today Executive Director Rahul Kanwal at WEF2024 in Davos.
Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said China would be more likely to win the war because its manufacturing capacity is now so much greater than the US. "If you look at the war games that have been done, one of the striking features is - how quickly the US runs out of precision missiles, in a week. Now, if you're going to run out of precision missiles in a week, you're not in great shape to win a war like that," the historian said.
"China's manufacturing capacity is now so much greater than the US, probably two times greater. If it came to a hot war, China would have some real advantages," he said, adding that his strong advice to the American policymakers would be - "Don't do this. Let's not have a showdown over Taiwan. You're not in the kind of position you were in back in the 1990s, the last time there was a Taiwan Strait crisis."
Tensions between the US and China escalated in August 2022 after former US Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan - the first high-profile visit to the territory in recent years that upset Beijing. China has, on multiple occasions, made its intent clear that is prepared to unify Taiwan by force, if required.
When asked whether Taiwan becoming a part of mainland China is inevitable at some point, the scholar said that he hopes not because Taiwan is a free society and a true democracy. "It shows that Chinese people can run a really exemplary democracy. But you have to ask yourself if its autonomy depends on an American military guarantee, how long can that last when the guarantee ceases to be credible?"
Ferguson said China's investment in its military is a serious cause for disquiet. But this, he added, cannot offset the fact that China's economy is slowing down and President Xi Jinping is facing serious issues in the real estate sector and rising youth unemployment. "The demographics are terrible. There's a scenario in which the population halves between now and the end of the century. It's hard for me to see that China's power is there for the long term. Youth unemployment is past 20%."
"These are serious problems for Xi Jinping that they may make him take strategic risks. Sometimes it is when things are going badly that authoritarian regimes do reckless things," the historian said.
Taiwan earlier this month elected its new president, Lai Ching-te -- who calls the island "an independent sovereign state". Ferguson said that so far nothing bad has happened from China but it may happen in the future.
"It feels like we have probably avoided a crisis this year. But at some point in the next few years, I am afraid there is bound to be a Taiwan crisis. And when that happens, that will be the real test of the US-India relationship. Where will India be in that scenario? My guess is not picking up the phone kind of busy this weekend."
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NB note - the links for the 4th articles do not seem to be working. If I can figure this out, I will update this post. Apologies!
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