An Empire in Decline
United States global hegemony is coming to an end. The
United States was the country that collaborated with the Soviet Union to defeat
fascism in Europe and with Great Britain to crush Japanese militarism in Asia
in 1945. The Soviet Union, the first Socialist state, suffered 27 million dead
in the war to defeat the Nazis. Great Britain, the last great imperial power,
was near the end of its global reach because of war and the rise of
anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa.
As the beneficiary of war-driven industrial growth and
the development of a military-industrial complex unparalleled in world history,
the United States was in a position in 1945 to construct a post-war
international political and economic order based on huge banks and
corporations. The United States created the international financial and trading
system, imposed the dollar as the global currency, built military alliances to
challenge the Socialist Bloc, and used its massive military might and capacity
for economic penetration to infiltrate, subvert, and dominate most of the
economic and political regimes across the globe.
The United States always faced resistance and was by
virtue of its economic system and ideology drawn into perpetual wars, leading
to trillions of dollars in military spending, the loss of hundreds of thousands
of American lives, and the deaths of literally millions of people, mostly
people of color, to maintain its empire.
As was the case of prior empires, the United States
empire is coming to an end. A multipolar world is reemerging with challenges to
traditional hegemony coming from China, India, Russia, and the larger less
developed countries such as Brazil (until recently), Argentina, South Africa,
South Korea, and Thailand. By the 1970s, traditional allies in Europe and Japan
had become economic competitors of the United States.
The United States throughout this period of change has
remained the overwhelming military power, however, spending more on defense
than the next seven countries combined. It remains the world’s economic giant
even though growth in domestic product between 1980 and 2000 has been a third
of its GDP growth from 1960 to 1980. Confronted with economic stagnation and
declining profit rates the United States economy began in the 1970s to
transition from a vibrant industrial base to financial speculation and the globalization
of production.
The latest phase of capitalism, the era of neoliberal
globalization, has required massive shifts of surplus value from workers to
bankers and the top 200 hundred corporations which by the 1980s controlled
about one-third of all production. The instruments of consciousness, a handful
of media conglomerates, have consolidated their control of most of what people
read, see, hear, and learn about the world.
A policy centerpiece of the new era, roughly spanning
the rise to power of Ronald Reagan to today, including the eight years of the
Obama Administration, has been a massive shift of wealth from the many to the
few. A series of graphs published by the Economic Policy Institute in December,
2016 showed that productivity, profits, and economic concentration had risen
while real wages declined, inequality increased, gaps between the earnings of
people of color and women and white men grew, and persistent poverty remained
for twenty percent of the population. The austerity policies, the centerpiece
of neoliberalism, spread across the globe. That is what globalization has been
about.
Paralleling the shifts toward a transnational
capitalist system and the concentration of wealth and power on a global level, the
decline of U.S power, relative to other nation-states in the twenty-first
century, has increased. The wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and the spreading violence throughout the Middle East have
overwhelmed US efforts to control events. Russia, Iran, China, and even weaker nations
in the United Nations Security Council have begun to challenge its power and
authority. Mass movements increasingly mobilize against vial regimes supported
by the United States virtually everywhere (including within the U.S. as well).
However, most U.S. politicians still articulate the mantra
of “the United States as the indispensable nation.” The articulation of the
myth of American Exceptionalism represents an effort to maintain a global
hegemony that no longer exists and a
rationale to justify the massive military-industrial complex which fuels much
of the United States economy.
Imperial
Decline and Domestic Politics
The narrative above is of necessity brief and
oversimplified but provides a back drop for reflecting on the substantial
shifts in American politics. The argument here is that foreign policy and
international political economy are “the elephants in the room” as we reflect
on the outcomes of recent elections and their ongoing consequences, including
the current impeachment debacle. It does not replace other explanations or
“causes” of United States politics today but supplements them.
First, the pursuit of austerity policies, particularly
in other countries (the cornerstone of neoliberal globalization) has been a
central feature of international economics since the late 1970s. From the
establishment of the debt system in the Global South, to “shock therapy” in
countries as varied as Bolivia and the former Socialist Bloc, to European bank
demands on Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, to Reaganomics and the
promotion of Clinton’s “market democracies,” and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
the wealth of the world has been shifting from the poor and working classes to
the rich.
Second, to promote neoliberal globalization, the
United States has constructed by far the world’s largest war machine. With
growing opposition to U.S. militarism around the world, policy has shifted in
recent years from “boots on the ground,” (although there still are many), to
special ops, private contractors, drones, cyberwar, spying, and “quiet coups,”
such as in Brazil and Venezuela, to achieve neoliberal advances.
One group of foreign policy insiders, the humanitarian
interventionists, has lobbied for varied forms of intervention to promote
“human rights, democratization, and markets.” 2016 presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton and a host of “deep state” insiders advocated for support of
the military coup in Honduras, a NATO coalition effort to topple the regime in
Libya, the expansion of troops in Afghanistan, even stronger support of Israel,
funding and training anti-government rebels in Syria, and the overthrow of the
elected government of Ukraine. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a major
advocate for humanitarian interventionist policies in the Obama administration,
as was Vice President Joe Biden. In addition, this perspective has been broadly
accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Humanitarian interventionists have joined forces with
“neoconservatives” in the new century to advocate policies that, they believe,
would reverse the declining relative power of the United States. This coalition
of foreign policy influentials has promoted a New Cold War against Russia and
an Asian pivot to challenge the emerging multipolar world, largely a result of
the rising economic and diplomatic influence of China. The growing turmoil in
the Middle East and the new rising powers in Eurasia also provide rationale for
qualitative increases in military spending, enormous increases in research and
development of new military technologies, and the reintroduction of ideologies
that were current during the last century about mortal enemies and the
inevitability of war.
The “elephant in the room” that pertained to the 2016
election was growing opposition to an activist United States
economic/political/military role in the world. Many center/left Americans, to
the extent that they were motivated by international issues, saw the Clinton
foreign policy record as emblematic of the long history of United States
imperialism. Further, given the fact that U.S. interventionism and support for
neoliberalism have generated growing global opposition, many voters feared a
possible Clinton presidency would extend foreign policies that have already created
chaos and anger, particularly in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Finally, to the extent that economics affected the
electoral outcomes of 2016 and beyond (and the degree to which this is correct
is being hotly debated), the neoliberal global agenda that has been enshrined
in United States international economic policy since the 1970s, has had much to
do with rising austerity, growing disparities of wealth and power, wage and
income stagnation, and declining social safety nets at home as well. The Trans
Pacific Partnership was both a possible reality and a metaphor for fifty years
of failed international economic policy for American workers.
Since the 2016 election, foreign policy has become
even more of an “elephant in the room” as millions of Americans struggle with
the devastatingly inhumane Trump
administration (perhaps one that logically follows from the fifty-year
trajectory described above). Now this “elephant in the room” is playing itself
out in the impeachment controversy which has involved multiple forms of
intervention in Ukraine.
