The State of the American Empire
Exhausted, Overextended and at odds with itself ...
The current state of the American Empire is exhausted, overextended and at odds with itself. As I wrote on Monday, its most powerful adversaries -- Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran -- are coordinated and encircling, nipping at America’s increasingly exposed entrails like hyenas on the hunt. And America’s foreign entanglements as well as its internal domestic turbulence keep tripping it up. To wit: the United States recently tossed $320 million into the Mediterranean Sea on its quixotic, adrift, aid pier while, at the same time, arming Netanyahu’s fascist war against the Palestinian people, which happens to be the proximate that awkward pier. In fine, the Biden administration is making the case against the fascism of his political opponent in November, Donald Trump, while at the same time steadfastly backing Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic campaign against the Palestinian people. Such, dear reader, are the vagaries of “Great Power” geopolitics.
One cannot help in times like these to recall Gore Vidal’s provocative, if premature, essay “The Day the Empire Ran Out of Gas”:
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London’s primacy in the money markets. Then, in 1914, New York replaced London as the world’s financial capital. Before 1914, the United States had been a developing country, dependent on outside investment. But with the shift of the money power from Old World to New, what had been a debtor nation became a creditor nation and central motor to the world’s economy. All in all, the English were well pleased to have us take their place. They were too few in number for so big a task. As early as the turn of the century, they were eager for us not only to help them out financially but to continue, in their behalf, the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race: to bear with courage the white man’s burden, as Rudyard Kipling not so tactfully put it. Were we not—English and Americans—all Anglo-Saxons, united by common blood, laws, language? Well, no, we were not. But our differences were not so apparent then. In any case, we took on the job. We would supervise and civilize the lesser breeds. We would make money.
And, for a time we did just that, with far more subtlety and guile than, say, the Belgian colonial empire in Africa. At the height of American hyperpower, Vidal, our most syntactically elegant imperial elegist, correctly surmised that our agenda focus would be energy. What better way to seal the deal than to elect a stupid princeling from the Walker-Bush dynasty as President and a former (and future) CEO of the energy behemoth Halliburton as his elder partner? “Then there was the first Gulf War, launched after Bush signaled to his former ally Saddam that invading Kuwait wouldn't trigger U.S. military action, then changed his mind, then ended the war without toppling Saddam, then encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to revolt, then abandoned them to Saddam's vengeance, finally leaving Iraq a cesspool of weapons and tyranny and suffering for the Clinton administration to deal with,” wrote the Joan Walsh in Salon during Bush the Younger’s sanguinary rein.
At America’s hyperpower zenith, it invaded Afghanistan and Mesopotamia (Iraq), like so many Empire’s previous. And we cannot fail to note that Paul Bremer, who was once America’s imperial administrator in Mesopotamia, is at present a ski instructor in Vermont (imperial decline or lifestyle upgrade? You decide).
But back to fundamental questions - Is America indeed an Empire and, if so, should it be? More to the point, Can Empires be democratic? Or, as The Economist Democracy Index describes the United States, a “flawed democracy.” Niall Ferguson, of whom I am not really a fan, calls America an Empire in denial, which sounds about right. The original thirteen colonies expanded to the Pacific Ocean by way of Manifest Destiny and just kept going. “We subsequently took Florida from Spain, conquered roughly half of Mexico, and continued the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans,” is how Jeff Faux describes the process. And after digesting as much of North America as was palatable in the Nineteenth century, we looked overseas. To Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and even blameless Guam. But it was after Europe’s devastation in World War II, as Vidal correctly writes, that the Old World graciously made way for the New. Which circles us back to Iraq.
And speaking of Mesopotamia, it is impossible not to note what a long, strange trip that imperial adventure was. Bush the Younger’s somnolescent Presidency ultimately led to the growing power and influence of Persia, even as it distracted the imperial gaze from the true perpetrators of September 11th, ostensibly the reason for the war in the first place. Bush’s successor and fellow Harvard-man Barack Obama was not immune to the cognitive vertigo attendant to ascending the imperial heights. Jeet Heer in The Nation sums up the incommensurability of sprawling Empire and efficient democracy here quite nicely:
In response to Iran’s new strength and also the Arab Spring that flared in 2011 and threatened to topple many long-standing American allies, the United States formed what Jamie Allinson, a lecturer on International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, calls the ‘axis of reaction.’ This is a ‘counterrevolutionary’ bloc that brought ‘Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the Egyptian military regime, and Israel, in alliance with US imperialism” and ‘hardened in the decade since the uprisings of 2011.’
In the ultimate irony, Saudi Arabia—the one state that actually was deeply implicated in the 9/11 attack—went not just unpunished but has been rewarded by the superpower it helped terrorize. This inversion of elementary moral logic was made possible by the topsy-turvy reasoning of crackpot realism: Saudi Arabia is too important an ally (and, it should go without saying, too important a source of free-flowing oil) to ever be subject to justice. Instead, scapegoats were found in the form of Iraq and Afghanistan (where the Taliban did host Al Qaeda—but which never had the intelligence capability inside the United States that Saudi Arabia possessed.)
Charmed, I’m sure. So we find ourselves here, with Biden, who, we cannot fail to note, did not go to Harvard. Thank Heaven for such small favors. And perhaps that explains, in part, why he had no problems dismissing neoliberalism altogether. But then there is the problem of his Middle East policy and its Spaniel-like fidelity to a neo-fascist like Bibi Netanyahu, largely (but not entirely) in the interest of Empire. The Netanyahu Hug, a signal as much of imperial protection as much of recognition of the fragility of the Israeli vassal state, exposed the President’s weakness with the younger generations. Further, the younger American generation’s protestations against Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war reflects the current thinking throughout the Global South. What a magnificent political cost is this! Of Palestinian blood and American treasure!
But back to the mundane domestic politics and the state of the Empire. Regardless of administration, debt keeps rising. And, as anyone who has gone to the grocery store can tell you, it costs a lot more denarii to buy vegetable oil -- or olive, for the Whole Foods set — than it did before. All of these things -- domestic and international -- in small part explain the present imperial disfunction.
The state of America’s three branches of government is dismal. There appear to be two embedded insurgents on the Supreme Court. And it is not improbable that they could be on the verge of making the President the equivalent of a Roman Emperor, or at least it seems that way at this point in time. Further, a former President is, for the first time in American history, on trial. And, regarding the third branch, a recent Gallup poll found that Americans trust the legislative branch the least (32%). Given all of this thusness, why would any country in the Global South aspire to be like us? The United States is making the argument towards an accelerated path to a multipolar world in which the United States has as little influence as possible. Who needs Putin, Xi and the Ayatollah? They need only amplify through cyber what is already on full display.
On the subject of 2024, let us examine Trump. I maintain that I do not think that he will win, despite ridiculously early polling in swing states (which is bound to tighten by Labor Day, when such polls really matter). Bobroygmous are his corruptions. These also are on display throughout global capitals, undermining the laurels of democracy.
The United States of America, like all empires, is existentially resistant to multipolarity. And yet who among us can deny that this is where the world is headed? America can almost certainly lead, at least in the beginning, as a first among equals in a multipolar world order. But what would such a leadership entail? Which brings me, finally, to the matter of international law. Consider it a ray of sunshine in a dystopian-looking geopolitical future. The United States has had, perhaps more than any nation on earth, the most influence over the concept. And the whole world needs it. In the seas, in cyberspace, in warfare we need influential nations to shape and enforce international law and not act unilaterally. Russia, which is using choking agents against Ukraine is in no such position to shape the contours of such laws. Neither is China, which detains journalists reporting on the possible origins of a global pandemic. But neither is the United States, the flawed democracy, as The Economist puts it.
The argument for the United States of America as the first among equals in the upcoming multipolar world order is not helped by its own lawless “no limits soldier” Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is disappearing Palestinian doctors as we speak. Our legal origins are steeped in international law. The Treaty Clause is a perfect example of those origins. What better way to ensure world order in the transition towards a more just, multipolar system than to have the United States in a leadership role. China is already openly campaigning for such a role, even as it ravages the South China Seas. But America cannot be the paragon of international law if it continues to back Netanyahu without limits and America cannot be the paragon of international law if it refuses to ratify the Rome Statute. But if the United States were to voluntarily ratify the Rome Statute, placing itself in the bounds of international law, it would be a greater symbolic gesture towards assuming leadership of a multipolar world order than all the empty rhetoric coming out of Beijing or Moscow.
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