{"id":257208,"date":"2024-03-18T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=257208"},"modified":"2024-03-15T07:21:53","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T07:21:53","slug":"the-decline-and-fall-of-it-all-u-s-empire-in-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/the-decline-and-fall-of-it-all-u-s-empire-in-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Decline and Fall of It All? U.S. Empire in Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p><\/div>\n

14 Mar 2024<\/em> – Empires don\u2019t 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 USA.<\/p>\n

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

US\u2019 post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan<\/a> and Iraq<\/a>. Now, looming just over history\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As a start, let\u2019s 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 \u2014 usually mastered in the empire\u2019s 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\u2019s most powerful empire, Washington\u2019s 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, \u201cwin\u201d the Cold War, and become the \u201clone superpower\u201d on this planet.<\/p>\n

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy\u2019s 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<\/a> of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

The US 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\u2019s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War\u2019s 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 USA ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s arsenal of possibly 45,000<\/a> nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons<\/a> then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.<\/p>\n

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine\u2019s future independence and gave what became known as his \u201cchicken Kiev\u201d speech, saying<\/a>: \u201cAmericans 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.\u201d He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn\u2019t have nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world\u2019s 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 \u201cassurances\u201d (but not \u201cguarantees\u201d) of its future security \u2014 the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.<\/p>\n

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security<\/a> in December 1994, three former Soviet republics \u2014 Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine \u2014 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<\/a> the North Americans that he had \u201cno illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n
Meanwhile \u2014 and this should sound familiar today \u2014 Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington\u2019s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a \u201ccold peace.\u201d Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned<\/a> Clinton, point blank, that \u201ca wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019s 26 members unanimously agreed<\/a> that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would \u201cbecome members of NATO.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 US world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia\u2019s 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\u2019s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula<\/a> in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized<\/a> the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia\u2019s orbit, saying: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very \u201cmilitary domination.\u201d At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve \u2014 cutting Europe\u2019s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington\u2019s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia\u2019s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets<\/a>, and its gross domestic product is projected<\/a> to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer\u2019s fighting season, a Ukrainian \u201ccounteroffensive\u201d failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders<\/a>, at least \u201cstalemated,\u201d if not now beginning to turn in Russia\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened<\/a> 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<\/a> to consider President Biden\u2019s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv\u2019s recent reverses on the battlefield.<\/p>\n

The Republican Party\u2019s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential<\/a> to Vladimir Putin during \u201cthe now legendarily disastrous press conference\u201d at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced \u201cthe Kremlin held sway over the American president.\u201d But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times <\/em>columnist David Brooks noted<\/a>recently, the Republican Party\u2019s historic \u201cisolationism is still on the march.\u201d Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives \u201ctoo much support\u201d to Ukraine climbed<\/a> from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels<\/a>that \u201cTrumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach\u2026 [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage<\/a> Russia to \u201cdo whatever the hell they want\u201d to a NATO ally that didn\u2019t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider<\/a> 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<\/a> Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington\u2019s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.<\/p>\n

Crisis in Gaza<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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\u2019s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.<\/p>\n

In 2005, Israel\u2019s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim<\/a> of improving \u201cIsrael\u2019s security and international status.\u201d Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power<\/a> 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\u2019s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas<\/a> as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year\u2019s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel<\/em> published<\/a> this headline: \u201cFor Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It\u2019s Blown Up in Our Faces.\u201d In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: \u201cFor years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank \u2014 bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised<\/a> the president for drawing \u201ca clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,\u201d Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for \u201cevils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational\u201d and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed \u201cas they respond to these attacks.\u201d Biden said nothing about Netanyahu\u2019s previous arm\u2019s length alliance with Hamas<\/a> or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting<\/a>, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound \u201cbunker busters\u201d that were soon flattening Gaza\u2019s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.<\/p>\n

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu\u2019s plan for an endless occupation<\/a> 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<\/a> calling for peace in Gaza marched<\/a> in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000<\/a> in Gaza, striking numbers of them children<\/a>, has already weakened<\/a> Biden\u2019s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 \u2014 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<\/a> 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 \u2014 with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.<\/p>\n

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing\u2019s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it\u2019s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases<\/a> in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle<\/a> Taiwan\u2019s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island\u2019s 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, \u201cThere soon may be no lines left for China to cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

After recognizing Beijing as \u201cthe sole legal Government of China\u201d in 1979, Washington agreed<\/a> to \u201cacknowledge\u201d that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring \u201cthat the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force\u2026 that would jeopardize the security\u2026 of the people on Taiwan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told<\/a> the 20th Communist Party Congress that \u201creunification must be realized\u201d and refused \u201cto renounce the use of force\u201d against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated<\/a>, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan \u201cif in fact there was an unprecedented attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that \u201cunprecedented attack\u201d by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine<\/a> that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Sum of Three Crises<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s) 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.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Alfred William McCoy is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison. He specializes in the history of the Philippines, foreign policy of the USA, European colonization of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and Central Intelligence Agency covert operations.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Mar 2024 – Empires don\u2019t 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 USA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":257209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1876,2368,1126,1050,2639,2200,70],"class_list":["post-257208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-british-empire","tag-french-empire","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-soviet-empire","tag-us-empire","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257211,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257208\/revisions\/257211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}