(Adapted from a 2017 post which appeared in The Rag Blog)
Harry Targ
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, 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, 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 have 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
US population. The austerity policies, the centerpiece of neoliberalism, spread
all across the globe. That is what globalization has been about.
Contrary to
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. China’s
economy and scientific/technological base have expanded dramatically. 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
US power and authority. Mass movements increasingly mobilize against regimes
supported by the United States virtually everywhere (including mass
mobilizations 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 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
backdrop 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.
It does not replace other explanations or “causes” of election results 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 Obama era 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 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.
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 China and Russia and an Asian pivot to
challenge an emerging multipolar world. 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 pertains to US politics, now that Afghanistan has
“fallen” after 40 years of covert and overt military intervention, must include
growing opposition to an activist United States economic/political/military
role in the world, the long history of United States imperialism.
Finally, to
the extent that economics affects domestic politics the neoliberal global agenda
that has been enshrined in United States international economic policy since
the 1970s, coupled with humanitarian interventionism, 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 millions of Americans
struggle to survive poverty, inadequate access to healthcare, homelessness, a
variety of environmental disasters it is time to include visions of a
non-interventionist, anti-militaristic foreign policy back into our progressive
political agenda.
