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Yves here. One key point by Richard Wolff is that despite the US having overwhelming advantages at the end of World War II via the Soviet Union having been so weakened by the conflict and European powers losing their empire, US military efforts to preserve and extend its hegemony, even very early on, were not particularly successful (coups were an entirely different matter, witness for instance Mossadegh in Iran). Despite our role in World War I, even as of the 1930s, the US did not have a very large military by the standards of the day (why would we, given our secure geographic position?). So I wonder if part of our hubris is due to our belief in our PR about winning World War II, when the Soviet Union was overwhelmingly responsible in Europe, that we conflated our economic dominance with our ability to deploy power physically.
By Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire—and that once did—now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating. In empires’ early years, leaders and the led may repress those among them who stress or merely even mention decline. Social problems may likewise be denied, minimized, or, if admitted, blamed on convenient scapegoats—immigrants, foreign powers, or ethnic minorities—rather than linked to imperial decline.
The U.S. empire, audaciously proclaimed by the Monroe Doctrine soon after two independence wars won against Britain, grew across the 19th and 20th centuries, and peaked during the decades between 1945 and 2010. The rise of the U.S. empire overlapped with the decline of the British empire. The Soviet Union represented limited political and military challenges, but never any serious economic competition or threat. The Cold War was a lopsided contest whose outcome was programmed in from its beginning. All of the U.S. empire’s potential economic competitors or threats were devastated by World War II. The following years found Europe losing its colonies. The unique global position of the United States then, with its disproportional position in world trade and investment, was anomalous and likely unsustainable. An attitude of denial at the time that decline was all but certain morphed only too readily into the attitude of denial now that the decline is well underway.
The United States could not prevail militarily over all of Korea in its 1950–53 war there. The United States lost its subsequent wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The NATO alliance was insufficient to alter any of those outcomes. U.S. military and financial support for Ukraine and the massive United States and NATO sanctions war against Russia are failures to date and are likely to remain so. U.S. sanctions programs against Cuba, Iran, and China have failed too. Meanwhile, the BRICS alliance counteracts U.S. policies to protect its empire, including its sanctions warfare, with increasing effectiveness.
In the realms of trade, investment, and finance, we can measure the decline of the U.S. empire differently. One index is the decline of the U.S. dollar as a central bank reserve holding. Another is its decline as a means of trade, loans, and investment. Finally, consider the U.S. dollar’s decline alongside that of dollar-denominated assets as internationally desired means of holding wealth. Across the Global South, countries, industries, or firms seeking trade, loans, or investments used to go to London, Washington, or Paris for decades; they now have other options. They can go instead to Beijing, New Delhi, or Moscow, where they often secure more attractive terms.
Empire confers special advantages that translate into extraordinary profits for firms located in the country that dominates the empire. The 19th century was remarkable for its endless confrontations and struggles among empires competing for territory to dominate and thus for their industries’ higher profits. Declines of any one empire could enhance opportunities for competing empires. If the latter grabbed those opportunities, the former’s decline could worsen. One set of competing empires delivered two world wars in the last century. Another set seems increasingly driven to deliver worse, possibly nuclear world wars in this century.
Before World War I, theories circulated that the evolution of multinational corporations out of merely national mega-corporations would end or reduce the risks of war. Owners and directors of increasingly global corporations would work against war among countries as a logical extension of their profit-maximizing strategies. The century’s two world wars undermined those theories’ appearance of truth. So too did the fact that multinational mega-corporations increasingly purchased governments and subordinated state policies to those corporations’ competing growth strategies. Capitalists’ competition governed state policies at least as much as the reverse. Out of their interaction emerged the wars of the 21st century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. Likewise from their interaction, rising U.S.-China tensions emerged around Taiwan and the South China Sea.
China presents a unique analytical problem. The private capitalist half of its hybrid economic system exhibits growth imperatives parallel to those agitating economies where 90–100 percent of enterprises are private capitalist in organization. The state-owned-and-operated enterprises comprising the other half of China’s economy exhibit different drives and motivations. Profit is less their bottom line than it is for private capitalist enterprises. Similarly, the Communist Party’s rule over the state—including the state’s regulation of the entire Chinese economy—introduces other objectives besides profit, ones that also govern enterprise decisions. Since China and its major economic allies (BRICS) comprise the entity now competing with the declining U.S. empire and its major economic allies (G7), China’s uniqueness may yield an outcome different from past clashes of empires.
In the past, one empire often supplanted another. That may be our future with this century becoming “China’s” as previous empires were American, British, and so on. However, China’s history includes earlier empires that rose and fell: another unique quality. Might China’s past and its present hybrid economy influence China away from becoming another empire and rather toward a genuinely multipolar global organization instead? Might the dreams and hopes behind the League of Nations and the United Nations achieve reality if and when China makes that happen? Or will China become the next global hegemon against heightened resistance from the United States, bringing the risk of nuclear war closer?
A rough historical parallel may shed some additional light from a different angle on where today’s class of empires may lead. The movement toward independence of its North American colony irritated Britain sufficiently for it to attempt two wars (1775–83 and 1812–15) to stop that movement. Both wars failed. Britain learned the valuable lesson that peaceful co-existence with some co-respective planning and accommodation would enable both economies to function and grow, including in trade and investment both ways across their borders. That peaceful co-existence extended to allowing the imperial reach of the one to give way to that of the other.
Why not suggest a similar trajectory for U.S.-China relations over the next generation? Except for ideologues detached from reality, the world would prefer it over the nuclear alternative. Dealing with the two massive, unwanted consequences of capitalism—climate change and unequal distributions of wealth and income—offers projects for a U.S.-China partnership that the world will applaud. Capitalism changed dramatically in both Britain and the United States after 1815. It will likely do so again after 2025. The opportunities are attractively open-ended.
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I regret to say that some sort of conflict between China and the US is already baked into the cake. Previously, is was that the major financial interests in the US coveted China’s wealth and wanted to set up a regime in China that would allow them to extract if not loot that country. The amount of trillions of dollars was simply too tempting. When that was not working there was even a semi-serious offer for the US to go into partnership with China to run the world about twenty years ago – with China being the junior partner of course and providing the wealth and the troops. When China let it be known that they were not interested in running the world but only developing their country, I think that this is when the fear set in. That China was overtaking them and was going to become the more powerful country. Instead of reforming the country to meet this challenge, a military option was decided on instead with Obama’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific. NATO would be encouraged to send their forces into this areas, a NATO equivalent was set up called AUKUS which was hoped to be the kernel of an anti-China coalition, the original TTP was negotiated as an everybody but China trade pact and now we see more US bases being set up from Australia to the Philippines to threaten China with. Going to make for interesting times the next coupla years.
It’s not like China is a pure virgin maiden with no hostile geopolitical interests vis-a-vis its neighbors.
If you’ve got a fact based argument this is the place to make it.
There are issues amongst multiple claimants in the SCS but it wasn’t a major issue until the US started interfering 15-20 yrs ago. And China is open to negotiation with all neighboring countries in good faith. It’s remaining land borders have been settled with the exception of Bhutan (which is close to an agreement) and India.
As for India, maybe it’s time for some introspection on their part. India has ongoing border disputes with all its neighbors, including a new one with Sri Lanka which was previously settled with favorable terms for India but for religious-political reasons was reopened again by the BJP.
India claims lands controlled by China so of course China will reciprocate by claiming territory that India controls. India was offered a pretty sweet border deal (settle the border along the status quo at the time) prior to the 1962 war which they rejected.
The US has about 750 foreign bases. China has one, in Djibouti.
Despite having carpet-bombed Korea into the Stone Age, the US could not achieve victory on the peninsula. Then, despite having dropped more bombs on SE Asia than all bombs dropped in WWII, the US failed to achieve it’s objectives in the region and forced Nixon to close the gold window. The limits of brute terror to achieve goals is limited. We see that the internal corruption has created a situation where fleecing the public treasury is the primary goal of the oligarchy. The outward appearance is that as long as the US can maintain some sort of dollar hegemony, it can continue to funnel huge sums into the MICIMATT. (see Michael Hudson).
However, as time goes on, the internal rot and corruption shows itself more and more: the Boeing fiasco, the F-35 boondoggle, and inability to match Russia in a sort of a new arms race etc. In short, the US is destroying itself, and will continue to destroy itself through this massive institutional corruption. (or the result of late-stage “Capitalism”, or some would prefer, Techno/Financial Neo-Feudalism). That is if nuclear disaster or climate/environmental collapse does not destroy us first.
“…Or will China become the next global hegemon against heightened resistance from the United States, bringing the risk of nuclear war closer?…”
I don’t see any evidence that China will try to become a world hegemon, or even has the unique opportunity to do so, even if it wanted to. After the explorations of Admiral Zheng He in the fourteenth century, China has not sought to expand into a global hegemon. It built the Great Wall to keep out the “barbarians” and all that. I would turn this phrase around and say the increased provocations of the US in China’s “backyard” has heightened the risk of nuclear confrontation. The hubris and desperation of a declining, corrupt and lawless empire is the source of the problem.
“I don’t see any evidence that China will try to become a world hegemon…”
What China has been trying to become is a world development partner. So that 53 of 54 countries in Africa are already part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, and just now 53 African heads of state have come to China to expressly further the development partnership. China has pledged $50 billion in economic assistance, the creation of 1 million jobs in the coming 3 years. China has immediately offered zero tariff domestic market access to 33 African countries.
China will be rebuilding a railroad built by China long ago, stretching from Zambia through Tanzania. There are agriculture projects from Ethiopia to Namibia to Ghana…
This is the Chinese vision.
I am not afraid of the development of a Chinese hegemon either, but I have read a bit about life in the general southeast Asian, Indian and Pacific regions. What I notice is that in all of these places there are Chinese storekeepers, traders, and small businessmen. They seem to have a reputation for either sharp dealing or being good businessmen, depending on the source. I am also aware of the extent of Chinese shops all over the world, extending even into the most remote corners of Mississippi and the deep south. China stores, or the Chinos as they are known in Spain. Every little town has at least one. I don´t know about the rest of Europe.
Hegemony is a State policy of military/economic domination – a colonial, exploitive policy that relies on military force to transfer wealth to the hegemon. I do not think this is the same thing as extensive market penetration by small (and large too) Chinese businessmen all over the world. There is no doubt that, generally speaking, the Chinese people are good businessmen. As opportunities for increased trade appear they will take advantage of them. We should not confuse that sort of honest competition with the use of State military power to provide unfair advantage that leads to looting. I think that many of those who fear the rise of the Chinese hegemon are confusing the two.
“January 1, 2023, Spain’s population was 48,085,361.”
“In 2023, Chinese citizens made up the largest Asian nationality in Spain, with around 239,000 residents. This number does not include those who have acquired Spanish citizenship.”
The Chinese seem to be willing to spend the hours necessary to run those small shops. Family life? I don’t know how that goes but a lot of those small businesses would probably be missed.
Sorry, this idea is overstated. I have lived in Alabama for a bit, have family in coastal Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The sort of Chinese stores you describe here are absent. And where I am now, in a moderately big city, there’s some resentment at the fact that the Chinese businesses here are designed to serve Chinese who come in on cheap package tours and send the money back to China, very much limiting the participation of the local community.
I come from the Mississippi delta region where the Chinese have a long history. Originally brought in to work the large cotton plantations, they understandably wanted no part of that back breaking work. To this day, their decsendants own and operate small grocery stores, restaurants, and other concerns throughout what remains of the depopulated towns.
Aha, that makes sense.
The part of Alabama I lived in was not cotton but coal and steel, and not incorporated until after the Civil War. So not classic Deep South.
Who talks about virgin maidens apart from you? Who would expect to find any? Yet you can treat any of those with diplomacy or straight confrontation. The world is far more complex than those Neocons tell us. There is no division on “democracies vs autocracies” as we are supposed to believe. Not black and white and too many interests here and there. Less Manichean and more openness and ability to regard others interest as legitimate as yours.
Strictly, ‘virgin maiden’ is tautology.
Redundundancy
For a nominal service charge we can make that happen. /s
@ Cervantes
How so ? China’s actions including those in the South China Sea are certainly no worse than its neighbours and considerably more restrained than the US .
The US and the UK have appalling records of attacking other countries for purely hegemonic or imperial reasons. China while not perfect is much , much more restrained.
Historically, which means over the last 5,000 years, China has not been expansionist beyond its present confines in Asia…Hence the fallacy of Mark Steyn’s theory that it will eventually take Siberia…The Han know who they are, and like things the way they are…
Can you provide evidence that this partnership was seriously offered and rejected? I’m curious…
Just shutting down the computer for the night (it’s 1 am here) but that offer was talked about when Bush was President and the US found itself mired in Iraq. The Chinese rejected that idea on sight.
If their love is truly for financial wealth, then it is ironic that they would burn the world for that which is but electronic bits in a computer, which can be created by fiat by the federal reserve or via debt in the banks. Can’t they just do something easy, create a few fraudulent companies plus a web of offshore entities, suck in huge amounts of money via taking on debt, then just bankrupt those companies?
On the other hand, if what they love is power and control, and to see their desiccated idealogy of ‘free markets and woke liberalism’ (all still controlled by them) spread throughout out the world, then this is a different matter that will be much more difficult to satisfy.
and when America lose that confrontation militarily and Taiwan rids itself of US bases as a result (or China does it for them) all roads lead to loss for the US militarily, Ukraine is the smelling salts they need to wake themselves up but I think their noses are impervious. This is the reality dawning on some but not enough. There is no Grand reawakening for America, its military might simply isnt up to the task (ok we could all go nuke but I think the worlds elites want to live to enjoy their ill gotten gains)
The West can do this the easy way or the hard way, I think Eurasia, BRICS, the rest of the world are prepared for this, the West absolutely is not. Maybe a small series of ‘limited conflicts’ will bring the fire to enough western countries that they finally smell the coffee? (I don’t have great hope for that, the current crop of western leaders are incompetent, disconnected from reality and simply ideologically cauterised into their dogmatic beliefs)
Thank you. Of course the causes of imperial breakdown are various, and have been attributed to vested interests throttling the effective functioning of the economy (Mancur Olson), excessive complexity (Joseph Tainter) or relative success resulting in a migratory overload that subverts the integrity and unity of the polity (Peter Heather). One factor which I don’t think receives sufficient emphasis is the extent to which imperial peripheries affirm and sustain empire but also increase costs which ultimately debilitate the metropole and lead to collapse or at least implosion. The article mentions the UK, but what is striking about the British imperial experience is the way in which it hobbled itself even at its supposed zenith. The cost of waging war in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as well as in North America during the period c. 1790 to 1815 meant that debt was 270% of GDP by the end of the French wars. A very large portion of that cost burden related to the UK’s underwriting the finances of its allies, notably Austria, Prussia, Russia and in Iberia. The UK had done as much during previous wars against France, but the revolutionary wars were on a scale and of a duration that exploded the debt to an almost ungovernable extent. There are a number of articles railing against Labour’s reversion to austerity, but the Treasury’s fear of ‘crowing out’ was a real and present one for much of the 19th century, and as Charles Read has recently demonstrated, increased public expenditure on famine relief in 1844-46 on top of a very heavy existing debt burden led to a devastating gilts strike and mass panic in 1846, forcing the Russell government to slash famine relief, with catastrophic consequences for Ireland. Thereafter candle-paring remained the order of the day, permitting Goschen’s conversion of 1888 until the debt rose once again during the second Boer war.
Nor was that all. As Jeffrey Williamson argued in 1984 the enormous post-1815 debt load eviscerated investment in public goods, which crowded out capital accumulation, flattened growth (even at the height of the industrial revolution British growth was little more than 1% p/a) and depressed workers’ real wages. If Britain was the sole European superpower in the decades after 1815 it was a heavily debilitated, indeed crippled one, and the consequences for British society have endured to this day.
The US has risked going down the same path. In order to ‘defeat’ communism, ‘Islamism’ and other real or imagined rivals, it has sunk enormous capital into providing a defence shield for its ‘allies’. Even as growth remained brisk in the first generation following 1945 the enormous surplus drawn from Europe (and, specifically, the UK) during WW2 ran down very quickly as military expenditures overseas weighed upon current account and as the US was obliged to provide liquidity to the international economic order it oversaw. The US has only been able to live well beyond its means since 1971-73 because of the overhang of military and political suasion which its vast array of overseas bases established during the cold war has been able to exert on much of the rest of the World, as well as the absence of alternative payment systems. The Ukraine and Gaza wars have underscored the problem: in order to preserve the decaying fiction of US hegemony the US has embarked on wars of subsidy which weigh on its finances and so subvert the very financial hegemony those same wars have been intended to defend. The US is now desperately trying to pass the financial buck for Ukrainian reconstruction costs onto a Europe which it is simultaneously trying to bleed in order to offset its inability to reduce its deficit with China (this bleed is ‘recompense’ for the many decades in which the Europeans reduced the US wartime surplus by free riding on the US defence shield). Paradoxically, the more the US bleeds the Europeans, the less effective they will be as allies and consumers of US goods, and the more unwilling they will be to function as a defensive rampart for US interests and as the financiers of a rehabilitated Ukraine. Indeed, the reconstruction costs will themselves be a deterrent to further Russian territorial advances: the Russians and Chinese will probably be content to sit back and watch the Americans and Europeans fall out over who is to pay for the rehabilitation of Ukraine, as per the war debt disputes of the 1920s and early 1930s.
The cost burden is likely to force the US to the negotiating table. Britain was a major proponent and exponent of the post-1815 ‘concert’ or ‘congress’ system. This was not merely out of deference to the other powers or the need to re-establish the status quo ante bellum, as a recognition of the fact that Britain’s financial predicament was such that it had to reduce costs through a policy of international co-operation, tact and goodwill, at least until the collapse of the first entente cordiale in the fateful year of 1846 (the antagonism between Palmerston and Guizot). The US has reached a fork in the road: it can either writhe against an emerging multipolarity, with the thrashing of a dying dragon, and risking omnicide in the process, or it can re-establish a concert system with the other leading players: China, Russia, India and perhaps Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc. It is possible that some of the less purblind policymakers in Washington are slowly starting to appreciate where uniting China with Russia, Iran and Turkey has got them, but that the time is not yet ripe to admit defeat, at least publicly. However, it is also possible that when presented with such an imponderable geopolitical choice – one with grave reputational consequences and potential costs (respecting the ability of the US to finance its debts at present discounts), they will simply follow the Yogi Berra strategy: ‘when you meet a fork in the road, take it’.
When the pretension of primacy becomes ruinously expensive, bend or you shall break. I was once reasonably well read in the history of the 19th century. This comment was a useful reminder to refresh that knowledge and understanding. Richard Wolff’s article and this comment put paid to the notion of the United States as “the exceptional nation.” The position of the US was exceptional after 1945. Others had done most of the bleeding and dying. Others had taken all of the physical destruction. To continue to think and act as if nothing would change has been hubris at best, willful blindness as a median position, and stubborn stupidity at worst. While apparent for the last generation, it has been blindingly obvious for over a decade that purported hegemony was a fantasy and that it was time to discuss multi-polar co-existence, a new Congress system. It is time to ease the ideologues aside with whatever degree of force is required.
It’s understandable that a nation (or a person for that matter) would not wish to give up what they already have. The US has this vast empire that it would like to keep. Le’s not forget that the vast American middle class has been a beneficiary of empire and that it too does no wish to give up what it has. Something will eventually give. It will take wise men and women to wind down the empire in an orderly fashion. That is unlikely, so things will get rough in the decades ahead.
How vast is the American middle class anymore? What does it still have?
“Le’s not forget that the vast American middle class has been a beneficiary of empire and that it too does no wish to give up what it has.”
The middle class has been slowly dying for fifty years, unless you point to the office workers in the security state.
In fact, if the American Empire actually reverted to what it was in 1938, maybe we would be able to resuscitate that middle class.
After cancellation of every Forcey-FreeTrade Agreement and withdrawal from every Forcey-FreeTrade world organization such as the WTO.
Then we could rebuild a modest surviving-decently-enough middle class behind a Big Beautiful Wall of Protection.
National Survivalism in One Country.
Agreed. But don’t expect that ‘force’ to come from America.
I mean the social disarray is beginning and things are not that difficult, yet.
That was a very nice mini-essay, more enjoyable and informative than the original posting.
Very true.
Following on the back of Yves’s opening comments, it’s always been amazing to me to behold the infantile neo-con obsession with hard military power and building security architecture. It’s never been a demonstrable long-term success anywhere, unless the metric is how much money got drained out of the US Treasury and into the coffers of various contractors.
The most effective tool to extend US influence around the world has always been our various types of soft power. Our strength in WWII was our ability to out-produce the Axis powers. Yes, the USSR did most of the heavy lifting against Germany, but the US did beat Japan in the Pacific. I suppose it could be argued that the Japanese army was overextended in China, but the US just plain out-produced the Japanese in the naval arena. We cranked out a bunch of aircraft carriers and they couldn’t keep up. It was obvious ahead of time, too, as the Japanese top-brass acknowledge the long-term strategic short-comings in their archives.
When you compare the somewhat pedestrian military success of the US in WWII to what the US built AFTER the second world war, well, the latter is much more interesting and attractive for other countries to participate in.
We built a Golden Age of prosperity in Western Europe, and we redesigned Japan, and then South Korea into prosperous, middle-class nations. We even created space for several South American countries to make big leaps forward until the 1960s and 1970s when we decided to launch coups to squash political and democratic progress and then in the 1980s, we kicked them in the teeth and stopped their economic progress.
Nonetheless, pacifying Western Europe was unprecedented after hundreds of years of very violent imperial competition amongst those countries was a monumental achievement. Doing the same with Japan was even more remarkable and the Chinese took careful notes. Then, bringing along Taiwan and South Korea really hammered home the point that the US can really guide countries to a peaceful, prosperous future.
When the Soviets ran into problems (largely due to low oil prices) in the late 1980s, it wasn’t hard to pitch the idea that there was going to be a place for them in our reasonably well-designed economic architecture. Russia had plenty to offer. Lots of natural resources, skilled engineers, well-designed cities and an intelligentsia that had long yearned to be seen as equal to any in Western Europe. Russian elites wanted to show off St. Petersburg and Moscow to the west and hear visitors rave about how glorious their culture and history was. They wanted take vacations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Rome and do the same back to us. Putin himself has spoken many times on how Russia wanted to reintegrate with the Western world.
When looking at this story, it seems laughable that the Russians were intimidated into surrender by our ballistic missiles, our M1A1 tanks, our F-16s, and our Apache helicopter gunships. After all, history shows it’s the various western countries that invade Russia, and usually fail, not the reverse!
China watched the Russian episode very carefully and as the debacle unfolded and Russian society in the 1990s plunged into the abyss they understood the West hadn’t changed its ways at all. They weren’t taking newcomers into their club and were still looking to exploit and ravage; — just as they spent the 1800s doing to China.
American empire has always been most successful when it uses soft power of the economic kind. The hard military power just destroys stuff, but it usually doesn’t “win”, at least in the long term.
And it’s if interest to note that it wasn’t only the neocons who pursued muscular power towards Russia – but Bill and Hillary Clinton (under Obama) and now Biden as well. I’m always amazed when I discuss foreign relations with my liberal friends and family… they almost wholeheartedly believe that Democratic leaders always use soft power tactics no matter what evidence I bring up to the contrary. They seem to be motivated by the idea of wanting to share their privileged lifestyle with others – and beware of anyone that gets in the way.
The Democratic Party has always had its share of neo-cons. They were called “hawks” during the Truman and Johnson administrations.
“hawks” is a euphemism often used in popular discourse, even today, but this is an anthropomorphic metaphor: hawks are beautiful creatures, warmongers are ugly advocates of mass murder.
These terms can be confusing, we have had the “Realist” school of IR warmongers (Kissinger, Brzezinski et al.), the followers of Leo Strauss (the original “neoconservatives” many of whom formed PNAC and AEI) then the R2P “liberal interventionist” warmongers. Now all the warmongers are simply called “neocon”, but warmongers and war profiteers (necrophagist parasites) are always there, no matter what labels are used.
I think your perspective is leading in the right direction. After WWII, the US had the opportunity to be the city on the hill as well as a financial empire. As described above, efforts to support the development of European and Asian countries met with real success. The US managed the construction of a system of successful allies who were also expansive markets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the neocon hawks saw an opportunity to become a traditional empire based on naked military power. We can see now that the result has been a multifaceted failure. We must be strong, but we must lead by example. We cannot be successful if we present ourselves as a criminal enterprise. If the Monroe Doctrine is valid, why not begin by supporting the development of the Western Hemisphere, including South American countries.
it was Truman after WWII that would not allow the creation of a all powerful world trade organization run by corporations, which would have allowed america to become a true empire.
Truman vetoed the bill till it was watered down into GATT, which allowed sovereignty and democratic control, and had no real enforcement mechanisms.
when bill clinton rammed through NAFTA, he said something on this order, Gatt was next. and its about time. he said Gatt like it was a slur.
then of course the crackpot notion no one will want to upset the apple cart under free trade, which Wolff provided where that crackpot belief came from.
the free traders just can’t get over the facts that the world changed in the late 1800’s.
“when bill clinton rammed through NAFTA…”
Forgive the correction, but NAFTA was negotiated and signed into law during the Presidency of George H. Bush. NAFTA was signed into law by President Bush in 1992.
Clinton signed NAFTA on December 8, 1993.
Bush did negotiate the treaty, but the Clinton administration and its neoliberal Democratic allies in Congress were crucial in its ratification, without which it would have died. The administration exerted considerable political capital to get it passed as its first major legislative “victory,” which was an indication of its policy priorities. The Dems did require a fig leaf of “side agreements” which supposedly provided protections for labor and the environment but were actually toothless. It is important to point this out, since it was the first of a number of crucial pieces of neoliberal legislation passed thanks to ol’ Bill that would contribute to our economic dislocations of the 21st century.
Of course we could consider our foreign policy under Clinton as well, including Yugoslavia, the beginnings of NATO expansion, the attempted dismantling and looting of Russia, etc. But I think that issue has been covered a lot recently here.
Yes, and as proof, the new Labor Secretary Robert Reich went to bat for NAFTA, saying it would create US jobs. For grins, from 1993:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1993/07/14/reich-labor-plain-wrong-on-nafta/
Thank you “all” for having the patience to fully explain what I was missing. I understand the policy development and continuity now.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-signing-the-north-american-free-trade-agreement
December 17, 1992
Remarks on Signing the North American Free Trade Agreement
By President George Bush
Thank you, Mr. Secretary General. And let me say at the outset how very pleased I am to be here. May I thank you for permitting us to have this ceremony here and welcoming us. I’m delighted to be back here. I’ve been privileged as Vice President and President over the past 12 years to be here on quite a few occasions, and I am so thrilled that this, the final one, is to sign the NAFTA agreement…
See my comment above. I point this out to stress the continuity in policy from Carter to Reagan to Bush I to Clinton and beyond. For the most part each administration has continued the policy trajectories of the previous one. NAFTA would not have been ratified without Clinton and the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) Democrats.
I clearly remember the token “lefty” in Clinton’s administration and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich going around explaining how NAFTA would benefit all of us, and trying to counter the resistance by organized labor. It was a very notable campaign as a sign of things to come.
Yes indeed. And ol prof. Reich is shilling for the D party and “Joyful Genocide” Kamala Harris. How “progressive” of him. (He also pushes discredited econ theory (Junk Economics) , but that’s another topic)
But didn’t the Senate have to ratify it, then send it back to POTUS to sign the final version? Then ol’ Bubba signed it to make it official US law.
BOTH Bush Sr. (R) and WJ Clinton agreed!
So, we can see the Bipartisan Consensus/Washington Consensus in full view.
To be precise, President Clinton signed supplemental agreements to NAFTA on September 14, 1993:
https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/101726
AFTER it was ratified by Senate. Technically, it did not become law until WJC signed it. As I wrote above: The point is, it was ratified with massive BIPARTISAN support in the Senate, and support of BOTH an R and D POTUS.
sorry, nafta was not doable, it was dead in the water. it was bill clinton that resurrected it, and rammed it through. nafta was and still is, bill clintons baby.
as per another post down below, the year was 1993, when america was plunged into a fascist oligarchy.
https://www.salon.com/2016/10/02/own-up-to-nafta-democrats-trump-is-right-that-the-terrible-trade-pact-was-bill-clintons-baby/
Own up to NAFTA, Democrats: Trump is right that the terrible trade pact was Bill Clinton’s baby
If the Democrats want to reclaim a progressive identity, they must own up to the dreadful mistakes of the past
By Paul Rosenberg
Published October 2, 2016 12:00PM (EDT)
“Actually, it was both. Bush signed the treaty with Canada and Mexico in December of 1992 (his final month in office), and Clinton immediately pledged not to renegotiate it. Less than a year later, on Dec. 8, 1993, Clinton signed the treaty into law. Neither signing was perfunctory or irrelevant. Both were necessary. Clinton absolutely did sign NAFTA. ”
“If Democrats want to move on, and shape a new politics for the future, they must first own their past mistakes: NAFTA, welfare reform, mass incarceration, financial deregulation and so on — the whole spectrum of neoliberal policies enacted under Bill Clinton despite fierce opposition from many, if not most, congressional Democrats, as well as the people they represented. It’s no good trying to foist those policies off on Republicans: The Clinton White House drove Democrats hard to support them, despite the resistance of the party rank-and-file. Well, the party rank-and-file was right.”
“In late 2013, just before NAFTA turned 20, Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, wrote an assessment of its impact, calling it “A Template for Neoliberal Globalization.” He highlighted four main ways NAFTA had impacted American workers:
First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as companies moved their production to Mexico, where labor was cheaper ….
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits ….
Third, NAFTA drove several million Mexican workers and their families out of the agriculture and small business sectors, which could not compete with the flood of products — often subsidized — from U.S. producers. This dislocation was a major cause of the dramatic increase of undocumented workers in the United States ….
Fourth, and ultimately most importantly, NAFTA created a template for the rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. Among other things, NAFTA granted corporations extraordinary protections against national labor laws that might threaten profits, set up special courts — chosen from rosters of pro-business experts — to judge corporate suits against governments, and at the same time effectively denied legal status to workers and unions to defend themselves in these new cross-border jurisdictions. ”
…
we can lay some blame on carter, reagan and bush, but they were minor players.
it was and still is today, we live under bill clintons policies period. we cannot get out of the mess we are in, till each and every bill he ever signed, and signing statements, are gone through line by line and done away with.
If ” New Deal Reactionary” Democrats wish to reconquer the Democratic Party and make it exclusively theirs again, they will have to face up to the fact that the ClintoBama PelosiBidenites are a different group of Democrats. They would have to conduct a purge of Stalinist intensity against every single individual embed, left-behind and “ideological Gladio” implanted into the Party by From, Clinton, Boren and too many others to name. Treat them as cancer cells to be burned out with relentless and merciless political chemotherapy.
“the US can really guide countries to a peaceful, prosperous future”
– so what went wrong in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Cuba and numerous others?
This cosy picture of the US as a disinterested benefactor of humanity may be comforting to the patriotic mind, but as can plainly be seen today, it bears little relation to reality.
Agree. It wasn’t as much military might as other factors for the Western empires of more modern history that exerted global domination.
1) Divide and conquer and/or insert themselves in foreign civil wars.
2) Propaganda. Often including a more ancient trick of the erasure or distortion (as much as possible) of another land’s history.
3) Then comes the “soft power” and more cultural influences
The killing blow in the Pacific War was given by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. The spectre of Soviet troops landing in Hokkaido and moving south really concentrated the minds of the Japanese General Staff as well as the Emperor’s entourage…
Soviet troops, relieved after the defeat of Germany, could be more easily moved along the Trans Siberian, from west to east. All battle hardened. It was not the atomic bombs dropped in August 1945. The Tokyo fire bombing did similar if not more damage than the 2 nukes.
At the end of World War II, I believe the u.s. had a rare opportunity to create a truly magnificent Empire that could have benefited almost all of Humankind — excepting the sociopaths and psychopaths who ended up twisting that opportunity into an opportunity for short-term pillaging. The soft power the u.s. once enjoyed has been wasted. Efforts toward forcibly compelling the world to heel to u.s. exploitation and hegemony assured the ongoing decline and fall of the Empire u.s. Elites built. The u.s. soft power became a hideous joke reduced to rock-and-roll, blue jeans and fastfood restaurants.
If nuclear war can be avoided, I believe the depth of u.s. decline after the Collapse will dwarf that of other nations that retained something of their ability to produce goods. I think the u.s. might become a nation of scavengers picking through our junkyards and garbage heaps to find and repair or repurpose the remnants of the goods we once produced. I doubt the u.s. has many, if any friends in the world who will be able and willing to assuage the abject misery that will visit the u.s. after the Collapse.
The golden age of prosperity would ha arrived regardless, albeit a little slower. During the WW2 State Department was taken over by the Wall Street, and for then it was a high priority to reconstruct the European markets to prevent new recession in USA. Not restore, for before the war Europe did not need US product, but to reconstruct so that West European economy was dependent on USA.
The price for Europe was 50 years of division, conflict and security trauma, but it was a price USA was willing to pay and blame it all on Soviet Union. And even then the fear of Europe becoming an economic competitor was so big, that State Department had to use plenty of dirty tricks to get the funding for rebuilding Europe trough US congress. Soon enough USA turned from a federal republic to a security state, and much less shenanigans were needed for the president to run circles around the congress – because of “national security”.
I encourage Wolff to take a look at the work of Johan Rockstrom – we have passed six planetary boundaries and probably have no more than a generation left.
It is simple ’Limits To Growth’ dynamics – we soil our nest so that it can no longer sustain us. But we have pursued our blind and obsessives imperative to the point that the nest is, now, our planet and the life it supports, including us. Climate change is but a symptom of something bigger – our war on life by means of land appropriation for agriculture, chemicals, pollution of all kinds and rapacious extraction and consumption – with appalling consequences for biodiversity.
The insane economic model that drives all this is ‘growth’ – extracting wealth (or trying to with increasing and despairing savagery) – from a future that is rapidly declining.
Talk of lessons from past empires is all very well but is increasingly irrelevant. As is any thought that US financial exploitation can have any share, whatsoever, in a world future.
Nate Hagens makes the point fittingly – today’s American economy is a way of creating microlitres of dopamine from megalitres of oil. It is insanity.
Given our existential crisis we don’t have much time to look for new ways of thinking and cooperation and living. The trouble with Wolff and his ilk is he is not even trying.
It is indeed amusing to read people’s talk of some future multipolar world or whether the U.S. will “win out” in competition with China and Russia.
Mother Nature cares not for petty human trifles such as these. She will take care of our pathetic global industrial society in the same way “we” took care of countless species: ruthless extirpation.
Enjoy indoor plumbing and plentiful McDonald’s while you still have it, folks. Mother Nature is coming to collect her debts.
Great insight- thank you!
BAU. Hard to shift off pair of dimes.
I’d think Antifa or Wuk could come up with some alternative lyrics, to the tune of The Rivington’s
Um Poppa Mau Mau
Seeing footage of drones dropping thermite– humans can innovate all right, we simply seem to not want to evolve beyond war and disrespect, toward love and cooperation. No Lives Matter?
I enjoyed Wolff’s post along with the learned comments that followed–in spite of the fact that I agree with you about the state of things. If nation states survive long enough, and if one of those nation states, one that possesses some power in its various forms as described above, manages to come to its senses and address our situation as the three-alarm emergency it is, then international politics will become relevant again along with all this history.
None of that’s very likely, in my opinion, but it makes sense not to lose touch with our history and past ways of thinking if only to warn off any survivors and their progeny against traveling down the same road again 5,000 years from now. It could serve as a sort of Tower of Babel story to remind too-smart/too-dumb hominids about the dangers of hubris, both as exercised toward others of our species and as wielded against the Earth, which has the wherewithal to smite us good and hard in return.
Perhaps future generations will marvel that humans created a field of intellectual endeavor which created metrics such as GDP that encouraged destruction of the life supporting earth.
A smaller, simpler world with fewer humans and more wildlife seems to be in the cards.
But getting there will be catastrophic to the lifestyle of many humans.
Perhaps the insect die off is a “leading indicator” of future changes coming to human kind?
The existential crisis with destruction of our environment will pretty obviously not be mitigated by any planful human efforts, especially in the West. The comments above about not recognizing the US was in a unique position after World War II, with the idea that we could remain the indispensable empire lording it over the rest of the world by military threats and fiat currency blandishments, are applicable also to the environmental crisis: wishful thinking, and a deep faith that the future will always be just like the present, trump realism and strategic thinking, thus ensuring we will refuse to accept any plan for the future that involves diminishing our present position. By “we” I of course mean the empire managers and their multimillionaire employers and next level down administrative and enforcement employees. That “we” is all too ready to accept diminishing the quality of life for the peons in whatever country they rule, as has happened in the US since the mid 1970s.
Imo it’s not a matter of time to find a new way but a total lack of interest. Extractive finance owns all branches of our gov; any attempt to find a new way will be slapped down hard, just as Bernie was.
The neo lib short term profits rot that has hollowed out our economy and institutions will not be allowed to change. Seems nothing can stop us accelerating into the ground. The only difference I see with trump is he might be more reluctant to start hot wars with Iran or China that would lead to nukes (because we can’t win a conventional war with either.)
I agree. But it almost feels like the beginning of real negotiating because nobody wants to go first because that’s the best way to lose your position. Funny. When RW says that capitalism has taken on many changes over the centuries of mostly imperialist rule somewhere, he invokes specifically the two contesting negative extremes of capitalism: inequality and ecology (“climate crisis”). I don’t know why he doesn’t come right out and say that our two biggest problems can serve to solve each other. I think China does understand this, but as always, capitalism demands competition which imo is the most self defeating concept in modern capitalism. So just a thought: the change capitalism needs to achieve now is to cooperate instead of compete. I’m not saying innovation is a negative, but cooperative innovation might be one tactic to help protect ecology, etc.
Unless China’s Xi has been promoting concrete cooperative solutions for the future, we haven’t seen any? By its global actions, it seems that Xi is following a US’ -like hegemonic plan of it s own
The US isn’t prepared to change course right now. It lacks the talent. Kamala Harris chief foreign policy advisor is Philip Gordon, yet another of God’s Chosen whose turn is now – expect the status quo to keep . If convicted felon Trump wins, expect him to sell anything and everything for personal gain. Unless the House changes hands, and Citizens United is eliminated, God’s Brilliant Chosen oligarchs will continue extracting billions for personal gain, without any care as the country continues slouching to irrelevance.
In the 1990’s the United States was transformed into a totalitarian oligarchy. According to Statista the number of billionaires in the U.S. quintupled from 66 in 1990 to 298 in 2000. That number gradually increased over the next 25 years to the current estimate of 748-800. This trajectory appears to have been driven by the political-party duopoly finding the super-rich to be a more convenient fundraising ATM than traditional “retail” politics.
During the 1990’s Russia transformed into an oligarchy and in the 2000’s China appeared to be on a similar path, with a few mega-rich presiding over poverty-stricken masses with low standards of living and poor life expectancies. However, their “President-for-Life” authoritarian political models allowed their states a degree of independence from their oligarchs. Eventually both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping took-out some of their countries’ most rapacious oligarchs and have restructured their societies in favor of a little bit more sharing of the wealth with ordinary folks. This may be a cynical play for legitimacy but it’s still improving the quality of life for most of their citizens.
Totalitarian oligarchies tend toward rapacity and greed. They like to believe their own B.S. and create ideologies of legitimacy and history that justify the hoarding of resources. Austerity for the masses in order to preserve the oligarchs’ carbon-spewing lifestyles is the current American trajectory and appears to be baked-into the political pie until there is a total collapse on the scale that 20th century Russia and China had to experience.
yep, the rise of the rich started in ernest, 1993. Pickettys graph says it all.
“… Or will China become the next global hegemon against heightened resistance from the United States, bringing the risk of nuclear war closer?…”
This sentence is poorly framed.
Given the many US military assets (and US vassals) that surround China geographically, the naked provocations of the US, the historical context of China’s “Century of Humilitation” by the Anglo/Americans, lack of historical precedent of China’s desire to expand (perhaps with a brief exception of Admiral Zheng He’s explorations in the early 15th century) it appears that the former is the path that China is taking.
If nuclear war does escalate, it will almost certainly be due to the aggression of a hubris-filled, desperate, and reckless actions of a corrupt, collapsing empire.
I have the book on Lord McCartney’s expedition to open the Chinese market in the 1790s. Interestingly, it is translated from the French, presumably because no one English could bring themselves to write about the abject disaster.
All the precious (to a trader) goods were warmly accepted as tribute to the Celestial Emperor from His foreign supplicants. It all went sideways when the supplicant-in-chief refused to kowtow. The ‘precious’ trade was left to rot in the garden of the summer palace and the English were sent packing, half of them died returning to their boats. Plan B was the opium wars and a century of Chinese humiliation by the west.
What is utterly tragic, today, is thevcomplete and utter disdain by America for this ancient and sophisticated culture. What is needed is deep and respectful study of its ways, culture and language. What is on offer is beating drums and sabre rattling. The obvious question – has nothing been learned since McCartney? And who are the barbarians?
Great comment, it’s tragic as well as unnecessary – and potentially horrific. With luck, the reckless sabre-rattling by the US (economic warfare/sanctions; insulting, hostile rhetoric; military provocation etc.) will remain at that level and military hostilities will not escalate. But no matter what the outcome of the US “elections”, the policies will continue.
Indeed, and this was Alain Peyrefitte’s 1992 book. It should be mentioned that Peyrefitte was a minister under de Gaulle and shared the latter’s Anglophobia, which may have given an edge to his assessment of Macartney. It wasn’t just Macartney’s embassy which was rejected, but that of Amherst in 1815-17. Both Macartney and Amherst failed to kowtow, which was thought to be a gross violation of Chinese etiquette. However, they were effectively under directions not to indicate to the Qianlong or Jiaqing emperors that Britain or India should adhere to the Chinese tributary system. It seems that Amherst felt he could repeat Macartney’s blunder because British power in Asia had increased vastly since 1792-94, when it had been largely confined to Bengal: by the time Amherst travelled to China, it was following the annexations undertaken by Wellesley and with those of Hastings (Moira) being well in hand.
However, regardless of this misunderstanding, it became evident that neither Britain or India had anything of consequence by way of manufactured goods which would appeal to the Chinese market. That is why the importing of opium became necessary in order to put Sino-Indian trade back into equilibrium and to stop the drain of specie from India to China: if the Chinese would not buy anything the East India Company had to offer then they needed to be sold a good at scale which would create its own demand – a good which would sell itself.
What is clear now is that China has much to offer the rest of the world up and down the value chain, but the rest of the world, and most especially the US, has little to offer in exchange. This means the US being in permanent and irretrievable deficit with China, posing a risk to dollar hegemony. It has to be asked whether increasing US predation is a function of China’s refusal to play by the West’s trading rules, not least because China seems to view its surpluses as part of its permanent defensive rampart against a recrudescence of Western imperialism. The paradox is that the more the surplus functions as a rampart, the more it provokes the West’s imperialist tendencies.
The Chinese seem to be willing to spend the hours necessary to run those small shops. Family life? I don’t know how that goes but a lot of those small businesses would probably be missed.
I’m sure Wolf knows his economics, but he seems to have skipped school during history classes, or perhaps the curriculum was drawn up by the American empire.
Britain in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century is the rottennest example I can think of if you are looking for peaceful coexistence with other states. After they lost the Revolutionary War, the British did not conclude that such wars were bad – they went straight out and colonised Australia and New Zealand, slaughtering the natives as they did so. They then expanded their conquest of India, eventually taking over the whole subcontinent, went to war with Russia for no obvious reason except that it seemed vulnerable and might someday have menaced British interests in Central Asia which didn’t exist at the time, and then took over most of Africa at gunpoint. Then they fought two wars to sustain their hegemony over central Europe. I see no sign that the British learned anything from all this about peaceful coexistence – they are among the noisiest of America’s satellite states when it comes to whooping for war with Russia and China.
As for the United States, the 1812 war was an attempt to conquer Canada while Britain was busy fighting against Napoleon. Unfortunately for the “war hawks”, the US military turned out to be inadequate for the conquest, and before it could be expanded Napoleon’s empire collapsed and the US found itself fighting against Britain all alone, a war which it could not win as a long sequence of US defeats demonstrated. Fortunately the British, exhausted after two decades of largely futile land combat, decided not to press the war home and made peace. The US failed to learn from this defeat, instead invading native American territories, provoking a successful war with Mexico, launching “filibustering” raids elsewhere in Central America and making another attempt after the end of the Civil War to seize Canada using the Fenian Irish as mercenaries. The fact is that the trajectory of the two countries is similar. Britain never accommodated itself to losing its global power, which is one reason why it chose to become America’s boot-boy after 1956.
I can’t think of examples of countries which have willingly allowed themselves to lose hegemony. The best hope is that China predominantly wants economic hegemony and consolidation of its position, both of which it has more or less accomplished despite all efforts by the US to undermine these things. However, China is building up military power and if the US continues trying to annoy and irritate China with futile diplomatic posturing, propaganda and military deployments which are too weak to endanger China but large enough to be disastrous for the US in a shooting war – one can only assume that the end product will indeed be that shooting war, which is apparently what the US government, and both of the political parties which purport to represent that government, wants.
Such a shooting war would probably bring down human civilisation, or at the very least render us incapable of responding to global warming so that our civilisation is brought down a decade or so after the war ends.
Thank you MFB. I believe it was Mr Jefferson who said that it would be just a matter of ‘marching in’ and all of North America would be USian. Militarily, it was a disaster. American military heavily outnumbered British regulars and Canadian militia. Yet despite it being an American invasion, all of the Michigan territory was in British/Canadian possession at the end of 1812.
I suggest that RW at least do a web search of Isaac Brock and Laura Secord. He might learn some history.
It’s true the US empire is in decline, however, is it due to US policy mistakes or has the world changed such that empires have become obsolete and no matter what the US does its empire will expire? Imo, it’s the latter and the US rulers don’t realize hegemony is futile.
It was certainly true in the past that as one group of people came into contact with a technologically advanced people it didn’t work well for the former. The Aztecs and the Incas were no match for the voracious and unappeasable Spanish. And England, the size of Pennsylvania, controlled India as well as most of South Asia and beyond.
The world today is now filled with nation states and the people identify with their nation, not their religion, region, or village. Iran is not rich and powerful compared to the US but it has an educated and scientific base, and fully capable of making and maintaining enough inexpensive high tech weapons to discourage any invader.
Russia has scientific expertise at the forefront of innovation, as well as world class culture. What’s deceiving is Russia was never committed to consumer products. Nobody ever said you must get your hands on that Russian cell phone, electric razor, shampoo, bicycle, kitchen appliance, motorcycle, or other products that people actually want. Besides nuclear weapons, Russians are computer savvy and I think it’s incredibly stupid to underestimate their ability to wage cyber warfare.
The US is still rich and powerful but that’s no longer enough to maintain an empire. Nearly all nation states have some intellectual and scientific base of support. These nation states are catching up and organizing themselves in cooperative groups like BRICS and the SCO.
The sooner the US ruling class realizes that hegemony is pointless, more akin to pursuing the holy grail, the better off Americans and the world’s people will be.