Yves here. I suspect readers will find this piece on America losing, or perhaps more accurately, sabotaging its empire to be frustrating. But as Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway once said, “The good thing about someone else’s prejudices is that they either confirm your own, or they make you cross – either of which is a blessing in these bland times.” Even though that was 1999, and now in 2024 we are suffering from an excess of cross people, that does not make it less true that having someone else’s prejudices as a reference point is useful.
As you will see, historian Alfred McCoy discusses how he was pretty much alone in 2010 in predicting the decline of US primacy and that specifically, globalization would further hollow out well paid manufacturing jobs and increase inequality. That would produce a nationalist backlash and a right-wing “strongman” who would try to cow other nations via military and/or economic retaliation.
Even though seeing this trajectory, and even the timing, is impressive, McCoy goes off the rails in trying to fit recent developments to his thesis. He depicts Putin as a strong man and ignores why Russians have voted him in again and again: he pulled Russia out of collapse and has increased GDP per capita by five times during his time in authority. One hates to point out that FDR, who rode roughshod over the Constitution, tried packing the Supreme Court and was depicted by conservative opponents as engaging in other power grabs. But one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
McCoy has more sour notes on Russia, depicting it as losing the war in Ukraine and having suffered economic damage too, and buying into the debunked Washington Post story about a recent phone call between Trump and Putin.
McCoy depicts Trump as a strong man, as opposed to what in this part of the world is called a big man. That is a person of influence, which can be via legitimate status but often has a connotation of being due to wealth, with the further implication of a whiff of unseemliness as to how it was acquired. Big men expect to be seen as bigger than they are.1 Trump is not a strong man due to the limited success he has had in getting his way, starting with his famed wall.
To put it another way, America still has enough institutional backbone and checks and balances, versus Trump’s lack of personal discipline and tendency to be all tactics, no strategy,2 that his strong man impulses are unlikely to get anywhere near as far as the TDS-afflicted would have you believe.
It is also disturbing to seem him give Biden a free pass. That goes in part with McCoy’s gross misreading of the war in Ukraine: how it has bled US and NATO weapon stocks and the EU economies, and helped feed the move to “populism” that he decries (and not just Georgia Meloni in Italy but left-wing populist Robert Fico in Slovakia).
As former CIA daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern has described in detail, the US appeared to have given the Russia a critically important concession regarding its security interests, that of putting no long-range missiles in Ukraine, at the very end of 2021. The US walked that back in January 2022. That plus Zelenksy stating that he wanted to get nukes in the Munich Security Conference in mid-February 2022 and no one from the US or NATO walking it back then or shortly thereafter appear to have been the immediate triggers for the Special Military Operation.
Similarly, the US has lost massive stature and whatever pretense it had left to moral authority via Biden not even attempting to check the genocide in Gaza. While Trump won’t do so either, the die was cast under Biden.
By Alfred McCoy. Originally published at TomDispatch
Some 15 years ago, on December 5, 2010, a historian writing for TomDispatch made a prediction that may yet prove prescient. Rejecting the consensus of that moment that U.S. global hegemony would persist to 2040 or 2050, he argued that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come… in 2025, just 15 years from now.”
To make that forecast, the historian conducted what he called “a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends.” Starting with the global context, he argued that, “faced with a fading superpower,” China, India, Iran, and Russia would all start to “provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.” At home in the United States, domestic divisions would “widen into violent clashes and divisive debates… Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But, that historian concluded, “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
Now that a “far-right patriot,” one Donald J. Trump, has indeed captured (or rather recaptured) the presidency “with thundering rhetoric,” let’s explore the likelihood that a second Trump term in office, starting in the fateful year 2025, might actually bring a hasty end, silent or otherwise, to an “American Century” of global dominion.
Making the Original Prediction
Let’s begin by examining the reasoning underlying my original prediction. (Yes, of course, that historian was me.) Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of American decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad. The presidency of Barack Obama was producing a “post-racial” society. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. was on track for a decade of dynamic growth — the auto industry saved, oil and gas production booming, the tech sector thriving, the stock market soaring, and employment solid. Internationally, Washington was the world’s preeminent leader, with an unchallenged military, formidable diplomatic clout, unchecked economic globalization, and its democratic governance still the global norm.
Looking forward, leading historians of empire agreed that America would remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Writing in the Financial Times in 2002, for instance, Yale professor Paul Kennedy, author of a widely read book on imperial decline, argued that “America’s array of force is staggering,” with a mix of economic, diplomatic, and technological dominance that made it the globe’s “single superpower” without peer in the entire history of the world. Russia’s defense budget had “collapsed” and its economy was “less than that of the Netherlands.” Should China’s high growth rates continue for another 30 years, it “might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance” — but that wouldn’t be true until 2032, if then. While America’s “unipolar moment” would surely not “continue for centuries,” its end, he predicted, “seems a long way off for now.”
Writing in a similar vein in the New York Times in February 2010, Piers Brendon, a historian of Britain’s imperial decline, dismissed the “doom mongers” who “conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony.” While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the U.S. was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.” Taking a few “relatively simple steps,” he concluded, Washington should be able to overcome current budgetary problems and perpetuate its global power indefinitely.
When I made my very different prediction nine months later, I was coordinating a network of 140 historians from universities on three continents who were studying the decline of earlier empires, particularly those of Britain, France, and Spain. Beneath the surface of this country’s seeming strength, we could already see the telltale signs of decline that had led to the collapse of those earlier empires.
By 2010, economic globalization was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was widening, and corporate bailouts were booming — all essential ingredients for rising working-class resentment and deepening domestic divisions. Foolhardy military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by Washington elites trying to deny any sense of decline, stoked simmering anger among ordinary Americans, slowly discrediting the very idea of international commitments. And the erosion of America’s relative economic strength from half the world’s output in 1950 to a quarter in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.
Only a “near-peer” competitor was needed to turn that attenuating U.S. global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population, and the world’s longest imperial tradition, China seemed primed to become just such a country. But back then, Washington’s foreign policy elites thought not and even admitted China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), fully confident, according to two Beltway insiders, that “U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”
Our group of historians, mindful of the frequent imperial wars fought when near-peer competitors finally confronted the reigning hegemon of their moment — think Germany versus Great Britain in World War I — fully expected China’s challenge would not be long in coming. Indeed, in 2012, just two years after my prediction, the U.S. National Intelligence Council warned that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030” and this country would no longer be “a hegemonic power.”
Just a year after that, China’s president, Xi Jinping, drawing on a massive $4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves accumulated in the decade after joining the WTO, announced his bid for global power through what he called “the Belt and Road Initiative,” history’s largest development program. It was designed to make Beijing the center of the global economy.
In the following decade, the U.S.-China rivalry would become so intense that, last September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned: “I’ve been closely watching the evolution of [China’s] military for 15 years. China is not a future threat; China is a threat today.”
The Global Rise of the Strongman
Another major setback for Washington’s world order, long legitimated by its promotion of democracy (whatever its own dominating tendencies), came from the rise of populist strongmen worldwide. Consider them part of a nationalist reaction to the West’s aggressive economic globalization.
At the close of the Cold War in 1991, Washington became the planet’s sole superpower, using its hegemony to forcefully promote a wide-open global economy — forming the World Trade Organization in 1995, pressing open-market “reforms” on developing economies, and knocking down tariff barriers worldwide. It also built a global communications grid by laying 700,000 miles of fiber-optic submarine cables and then launching 1,300 satellites (now 4,700).
By exploiting that very globalized economy, however, China’s industrial output soared to $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the U.S. and Japan, while simultaneously eliminating 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011, ensuring the closure of factories in countless towns across the South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protection for labor unions and local businesses in both the U.S. and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for many, while creating inequality on a staggering scale and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.
Riding that wave, right-wing populists have been winning a steady succession of elections — in Russia (2000), Israel (2009), Hungary (2010), China (2012), Turkey (2014), the Philippines (2016), the U.S. (2016), Brazil (2018), Italy (2022), the Netherlands (2023), Indonesia (2024), and the U.S. again (2024).
Set aside their incendiary us-versus-them rhetoric, however, and look at their actual achievements and those right-wing demagogues turn out to have a record that can only be described as dismal. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ravaged the vast Amazon rainforest and left office amid an abortive coup. In Russia, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, sacrificing his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked). In Turkey, Recep Erdogan caused a crippling debt crisis, while jailing 50,000 suspected opponents. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte murdered 30,000 suspected drug users and courted China by giving up his country’s claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on Gaza and neighboring lands, in part to stay in office and stay out of prison.
Prospects for Donald Trump’s Second Term
After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, America is no longer the — or perhaps even an — “exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries. And as it has become more of an ordinary country, it has also felt the full force of the worldwide move toward strongman rule. Not only does that global trend help explain Trump’s election and his recent reelection, but it provides some clues as to what he’s likely to do with that office the second time around.
In the globalized world America made, there is now an intimate interaction between domestic and international policy. That will soon be apparent in a second Trump administration whose policies are likely to simultaneously damage the country’s economy and further degrade Washington’s world leadership.
Let’s start with the clearest of his commitments: environmental policy. During the recent election campaign, Trump called climate change “a scam” and his transition team has already drawn up executive orders to exit from the Paris climate accords. By quitting that agreement, the U.S. will abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Since these two countries now account for nearly half (45%) of global carbon emissions, such a move will ensure that the world blows past the target of keeping this planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade until the end of the century. Instead, on a planet that’s already had 12 recent months of just such a temperature rise, that mark is expected to be permanently reached by perhaps 2029, the year Trump finishes his second term.
On the domestic side of climate policy, Trump promised last September that he would “terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam, and rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” On the day after his election, he committed himself to increasing the country’s oil and gas production, telling a celebratory crowd, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He will undoubtedly also block wind farm leases on Federal lands and cancel the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electrical vehicle.
As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the American economy. In 2023, the International Renewable Energy Agency reported that, amid continuing price decreases, wind and solar power now generate electricity for less than half the cost of fossil fuels. Any attempt to slow the conversion of this country’s utilities to the most cost-effective form of energy runs a serious risk of ensuring that American-made products will be ever less competitive.
To put it bluntly, he seems to be proposing that electricity users here should pay twice as much for their power as those in other advanced nations. Similarly, as relentless engineering innovation makes electric vehicles cheaper and more reliable than petrol-powered ones, attempting to slow such an energy transition is likely to make the U.S. auto industry uncompetitive, at home and abroad.
Calling tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump has proposed slapping a 20% duty on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China. In another instance of domestic-foreign synergy, such duties will undoubtedly end up crippling American farm exports, thanks to retaliatory overseas tariffs, while dramatically raising the cost of consumer goods for Americans, stoking inflation, and slowing consumer spending.
Reflecting his aversion to alliances and military commitments, Trump’s first foreign policy initiative will likely be an attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. During a CNN town hall in May 2023, he claimed he could stop the fighting “in 24 hours.” Last July, he added: “I would tell [Ukraine’s president] Zelenskyy, no more. You got to make a deal.”
Just two days after the November election, according to the Washington Post, Trump reputedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone call, “not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Drawing on sources inside the Trump transition team, the Wall Street Journal reported that the new administration is considering “cementing Russia’s seizure of 20% of Ukraine” and forcing Kyiv to forego its bid to join NATO, perhaps for as long as 20 years.
With Russia drained of manpower and its economy pummeled by three years of bloody warfare, a competent negotiator (should Trump actually appoint one) might indeed be able to bring a tenuous peace to a ravaged Ukraine. Since it has been Europe’s frontline of defense against a revanchist Russia, the continent’s major powers would be expected to play a significant role. But Germany’s coalition government has just collapsed; French president Emmanuel Macron is crippled by recent electoral reverses; and the NATO alliance, after three years of a shared commitment to Ukraine, faces real uncertainty with the advent of a Trump presidency.
America’s Allies
Those impending negotiations over Ukraine highlight the paramount importance of alliances for U.S. global power. For 80 years, from World War II through the Cold War and beyond, Washington relied on bilateral and multilateral alliances as a critical force multiplier. With China and Russia both rearmed and increasingly closely aligned, reliable allies have become even more important to maintaining Washington’s global presence. With 32 member nations representing a billion people and a commitment to mutual defense that has lasted 75 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is arguably the most powerful military alliance in all of modern history.
Yet Trump has long been sharply critical of it. As a candidate in 2016, he called the alliance “obsolete.” As president, he mocked the treaty’s mutual-defense clause, claiming even “tiny” Montenegro could drag the U.S. into war. While campaigning last February, he announced that he would tell Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay what he considered its fair share.
Right after Trump’s election, caught between what one analyst called “an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America,” French President Macron insisted that the continent needed to be a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context.” Even if the new administration doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s repeated hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to eviscerate the alliance.
In the Asia-Pacific region, the American presence rests on three sets of overlapping alliances: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense pacts stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Via careful diplomacy, the Biden administration strengthened those alliances, bringing two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines that had drifted Beijing-wards, back into the Western fold. Trump’s penchant for abusing allies and, as in his first term, withdrawing from multilateral pacts is likely to weaken such ties and so American power in the region.
Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan is bluntly transactional. “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June, adding: “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” In October, he told the Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use military force to defend Taiwan because China’s President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—— crazy.” Bluster aside, Trump, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, has never committed himself to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.
Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more likely, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump seems unlikely to risk a war with China. The loss of Taiwan would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, for 80 years the fulcrum of its global imperial posture, pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to America’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.
A Silent U.S. Recessional
Adding up the likely impact of Donald Trump’s policies in this country, Asia, Europe, and the international community generally, his second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos, and a further loss of global leadership. As “respect for American authority” fades, Trump may yet resort to “threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But as I predicted back in 2010, it seems quite likely that “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
_____
1 Again, in this part of the world, the big man is understood to be setting himself up for failure by having sycophants around him and coming victim to bad and self-serving advice. Big men typically operate in networks with other big men; see Trump and Musk (and Miriam Adelson) as fitting that pattern.
2 Sun Tsu: “All tactics and no strategy is the noise before the defeat.”
62 comments
Comments are closed.
No mention of Chalmers Johnson?
Indeed. Johnson made his case more than 10 years earlier.
I personally demarcated the beginning of the end of empire with Bush-2’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, coming on the heels of the start of the manufacturing decline under NAFTA and the wizardry of the dot com bust. The imperial overstretch with the two major invasions obviously became quagmires a few years in. Hubris on steroids. The GFC and Obama’s third term of Bush-2 solidified my view.
Reading a few books recently of Teddy Roosevelt, the wreckage unleased at Versailles and the escalation in Vietnam, the mentality of TPTB has consistency and continuity. There was only a very brief period of US humility after the defeat in Vietnam, which was extinguished starting with Carter and completed with Reagan. The elites have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
McCoy is nostalgic for Pax Americana. The guy seems to have forgotten what Vietnam was all about and the consequences of that tragic history. Sad.
Agreed. Gone from investigator, to cheerleader
Rather important typo in the 2nd to last paragraph of Yves’ much-needed commentary on the article: “the US appeared to have given the US a critically important concession regarding its security interests”
From context I infer that the second “US” in that sentence ought to read “Russia.”
Fixing, thanks!
>>>>Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of American decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad.
what has happend over there at Tomsdispatch?
Did they live in an alternative timeline? 2010, for the majority of Americans, was not a good financial year.
the “right track-wrong track” polling numbers prove it.. “right track” didn’t peak post-GFC until Trump 45.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/general-mood-country.aspx
Empire acquired terminal cancer when Iraq 2 started.
Then Obama came along and get the patient get sepsis and pneumonia when he gave rubber-stamped the bank bailouts and shrugged when it came to the bottom 75%.
Obama, a man who won Iowa and Indiana as a candidate….then let those states become vehemently red until his watch, lol.
Yes, when Bush-Cheney went into Iraq I figured it was just a matter of time. Nothing at all learned from the VietNam experience. They started crapifying the military in the 90s too, under Clinton, I remember it well.
America was at it’s peak in 2010 when Obama was running things? Yeah, nah! By then the financial economy had wrecked the industrial economy as no longer being needed, workers were working multiple jobs just to keep food on the table, the Iraqi resistance and the Taliban had fought the US military to a stalemate, neither political party listened to what the bulk majority of Americans wanted anymore and had – as Jimmy Carter pointed out – had become an oligarchy. I could list another dozen points like that but these alone will be enough to show that 2010 is a ridiculous year to say that America was at it’s peak. I would call it at the early 90s while the US military was at it’s peak, America still had a good sized industrial base and Bill Clinton had not pushed through all his financial “reforms” yet.
I’m not sure you can separate the American claim to being at the peak of its power in the 90s from its power in the 50s. In the 50s, the US was the only real standing superpower. It dominated all of the former colonial powers including Japan, Germany, and England. Admittedly the USSR existed and it failed at the beginning of the 90s. But between the 50s and 90s the US had failed to win the war in Korea, lost the war in Vietnam, and was about to lose the war in Iraq. There was also the OPEC oil embargo and the Iranian hostage crisis. I would argue that America presented the world with technological, economic, and cultural revolutions between 1950 and 1990 that transferred humanity in a way unmatched in human history, generally for the better. At the same time, the American government and military proved unable to translate this strength, power, and influence into anything other than an opportunity to become the world’s greatest historical bully and thief. This was true throughout the American century/twentieth century and was the source of the failure of the American “empire” that never really existed.
Yes. The 50’s and 60’s were when the US could still design and produce weapons and machines that were excellent and actually worked. And great popular culture, comic books, Rock n’ Roll, etc. My theory is that after that period the engineers who had to operate in the real world of consequences, during WWII, started to retire or die. Then, gradually, the money men took over, as at Boeing, and failure just meant some back-stage manipulation was needed.
(I don´t want to enrage anyone, but as German I do remember not too long ago that, often Americans were envious of European “elegant” engineering, and Europeans in general mocking – to say it with Enzo Ferrari´s words America´s “big ugly cars from big ugly factories” (re: Ford Company).
In 2024 those big ugly American factories in conversations have turned into symbols of faded excellence and sophistication. I am not the expert at all. But I had to notice this change where things become better with passing time. Whether or not Andrei Martyanov is correct with his assessment that German cars are “over-engineered” and “over-priced” I don´t know. I know from the past that car mechanics in general preferred German-built over others because they were allegedly more simple to repair and guaranteed longevity which are among the two most important quality features with eingineering and construction. But that could as well have dramatically changed since the late 1990s. And I think profit margins were not that mind-boggling with German car-manufacturerers compared to finance products. Production costs even with mundane VWs had always been considerable which made even labour unions accept VW management selling out on overseas VW-employees to keep costs low – supported by German labour leadership to an extent. Not always and everywhere. But there were neo-colonial tendencies by German labour against non-German. For fear of too high costs threating their German locations. Everybody knew that German industrial colossus in truth was one built on shaky ground.)
p.s. With Chinese products I wasn´t satisfied. Gimmicks instead of simplicity (Samsung TV software e.g., inadequate designs for handling, limited product life). That was a decade ago. But I asked myself then if Chinese companies did not simply skip that phase of manufacturing expensive highly developed products with the intent to put quality first and profit second just as Western industry had experienced it in an era of zero market competitor outside G7. And instead immediately devised those market strategies that downgraded quality for sake of profitability just as Western companies had taught ´em to do. Long after those Western mother companies had abandoned the pride of great and simple engineering that causes high costs with R&D and will always put you in the high-price segment. And eventually hurt your market share once someone cheaper shows up. Leading to deteriotation in quality the way I observed it comparing my first Apple MBPro 2 decades ago with my most recent. Of course here we need not talk about unions and genuine profit worries.
Yeah, when I think about it, I think that you are right. America was in its peak in the 1950s when it had a strong economy at home that was decentralized and had a military capable of fighting multiple war fronts. Apart from the old Soviets it had no competitor economically that could threaten it, it was bound up in a system of alliances along with the United Nations, it was renowned for it’s engineering works, American culture was being spread around the world and foreigners dreamed of coming to America as it was still seen as a land of opportunities.
Early 90s gave us Ross Perot, whose candidacy foreshadowed Sanders and Trump 20+ years later. People were already seeing thing slipping.
Agreed. Obama reneged on all his implied promises. We were in a depression for many years afterward for most. People with means could buy up the housing. The majority, now never again. His political economic perspective is fallacious
The idea that the US in 2010 was “unassailable” is simply beyond parody. The US economy was based on a financial oligarchy which had just broken the global financial system using an ideology of greed and corruption legitimated by the claim that neoliberal bankers were always right and that state support was evil, and then demanded that the state support them when they turned out to have been wrong about everything.
The US had also just started a cold war with Russia by trying to get Georgia to take out Russian peacekeepers in the country, starting a small war which Georgia lost and basically setting the stage for everything which followed. The US was militarily bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, so much so that the following year it had to rely on European puppets for its murderous aggression against Libya, and then on al-Qaeda and the newly-created Islamic State for its murderous (and failed) aggression against Syria.
None of that is anything like the unassailable US of, say, 1965, when the US could simply send its own troops to Vietnam on the pretext that naval operations in North Vietnamese waters and right outside Chinese waters had been interrupted by the Vietnamese defending themselves.
This is simply crazy stuff; it’s like the kind of worldview which I suppose goes on in Biden’s head these days. Setting aside the partisan crap which pervades the article, it’s still worthless.
Cudos and respect to Alfred McCoy for his prescience, and Yves Smith’s cutting commentary. This is one of the reasons I come here.
Invaded Ukraine to capture some more land?
That’s a pretty shallow take for an expert.
What happened to Alfred McCoy? Since The Politics of Heroin, it’s been all downhill
I am awaiting McCoy’s recalibration of his worldview as reality asserts itself. He had a reputation for good scholarship, so at some point I hope for a recalibration (with a few mea culpas?). I blame it on his forraying into current events, which requires many years to become history (and is filled with propaganda and narrative).
That said, Tom Dispatch does not publish views that are not aligned with the mainstream (democratic) media on most issues. I would say Tom (and Alfred) know what their audience expects.
To McCoy´s defense: Walter Kirn correctly complained – he is not willing to first check 17 social media channels every single time some news report comes out to find out whether that report is true or not before commenting it on air. Our media “environment” makes scholarship extremely nauseating. I saw it with folks like Ellsberg and Chomsky- rarely had they been as off as in the Ukraine War probably relying much on younger helping hands not necessarily up for the task.
(e.g. Ellsberg totally bought into RUs shelling their own troops at Zaporizhzhia power plant and Chomsky got hung up too much on his fascism warnings over Putin. Although hid did some very good interviews with truthout. But you felt the lack of his usual certainty throughout.)
Yep. He was protecting ethnic Russians who were being genocided.
Edit: /…/ Robert Fico in
SloveniaSlovakia).My cousin from Prague lived on a dude ranch in Montana in the USA for a year in the mid 1990’s after the fall of Communism, and he was on a road trip somewhere in the midwest when he got stopped for speeding.
He handed his Czech drivers license to the cop, who then told him that he’d heard of the ethnic cleansing going on in his country, and he went for the sympathy angle, in deftly avoiding the speeding ticket.
Why explain to a geographically bewildered copper that the country in question was a few countries over?
Cop thought he was from Chad?
Yugoslavia.
Goodness, right. I didn´t get it…
(But as I used to make the joke “Hungarians left Hungary because they were – ahem – starving”. Not much correct on 1956. But hey, it was enough for a giggle.)
p.s. You can´t deny that cop his good intentions. At least he paid some attention when watching those Hollywood 90s political dramas that tried to put benign Dems´ world views into context for US audiences. In fact I always found myself defending Americans. After all it really is a huge place. And with that the perception of borders and other countries does change. Especially with 50 states each one claiming to be more important than the other 49.
Aargh…fixing, thanks!
As with the last McCoy essay that was posted here, this one both confirms my prejudices and makes me cross. It actually did not upset me quite as much as the last one, since most of it is spent describing the dimensions of US decline in a more or less factual manner. The irritating elements, as Yves says, are in his explanation for these facts, including the important omissions from this historical narrative. Some of these omissions suggest McCoy must be suffering from amnesia in his old age. After a lifetime criticizing the misadventures of the US empire he now seems to think our imperial forces necessary to defend the free world from the new Axis of Evil and its “strongmen.” As Yves suggests, the most egregious omission is the role of the US and NATO expansion in triggering a Russian response (after thirty years of warnings and pleadings). Instead, this historian and (former) critic of US empire stresses NATO’s importance in defending Europe against Putin, who apparently just up and invaded Ukraine because he wanted more land! He also leaves out the whole story of *why* “right-wing strongmen” are popping up in the US and elsewhere. When the domestic efforts of the neoliberal globalists in power are focused on destroying any real alternatives on the left, then the people who are left behind have no where else to go.
There are a number of other issues with McCoy’s discussion, but in general, like many liberals, he describes important symptoms while remaining stubbornly myopic about their causes. But given his own past work, it’s depressing to see such a one-sided perspective at this stage in his career.
Yes, you could call this a historical analysis, but not a political analysis — you get structural trends, like globalization, characterized as movers, but no examination of the agent groups that adopted and pushed the policies. He’s a liberal, I guess, and that’s what you get, even if he is an acute observer — the reification of consciousness.
McCoy came into focus for leftists like me thanks to his updated research on the CIA and drug trafficking in the 1990s. Work which had put McCoy on the map originally in the 1970s. Being a scholar and not a reporter like Gary Webb he did cover similiar territory but with the benefit of not destroying himself by relentlessly attacking and embarrassing the deep state the way Webb did. And McCoy is a major scholar which meant protection, then.
– For those who are interested, Amy Goodman made interviews with Webb in the 1990s, only audio back then which are still available on DemocracyNow, and it is a thrill to hear that man alive. –
A nice quote which I did find on Wiki – in response to McCoy´s accusations of drug-trafficking by the CIA:
“A spokesman for the United States Department of State responded to the allegations: “We are aware of these charges but we have been unable to find any evidence to substantiate them, much less proof.” (1972)
Imagine how a response would look like today…when CIA is best buddy.
However something odd happened to this US academic left since 9/11.
If now Putin is regarded by the Global South as its true and effective freedom fighter – to pick up a point by Yves above and mirrored in the comments – the US Left that had so intensly fought for the rights of the Global South when it was third rate, now totally fails to see that in fact there is indeed someone who represents their interests.
But that someone has no Berkeley credentials, he did not spend time in prison or was underground, and he didn´t publish with Mother Jones and did not support Ralph Nader in 2000 (also someone who has a suprisingly limited understanding of geopolitics beside may be Palestine) – but a former KGB guy.
I assume McCoy is baffled over this and he believes nothing good will come from it. McCoy-style doubts documented in his penultimate paragraph:
“The loss of Taiwan would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, for 80 years the fulcrum of its global imperial posture, pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to America’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.”
At least to me: Every phrase rings with hidden bitterness. Because where USA is gone only worse can follow.
The US progressive left has failed in intern. politics. And in order to reduce the embarrassment somehow the people who they believe have beaten them in capturing the public´s mind – i.e. Trump-ism – cannot just be ordinary dudes like them – no, they have to be outsized fascists or really really dangerous people because then at least the failure can be compared to the heroic downfall of the interwar left against the father of all fascist evil-doers. That way you at least have a good story to tell.
What he doesn’t mention is that the “loss of Taiwan” (uncomfortable reminder of the McCarthyite campaign “Who lost China?” of 1949-50) is entirely a product of US policy trying to provoke China into a war — in other words, of hubris based on the false notion that the US is unassailable. So he has noticed that the US is not unassailable, but he is unwilling to make policy recommendations based on that fact.
>”in other words, of hubris based on the false notion that the US is unassailable. So he has noticed that the US is not unassailable, but he is unwilling to make policy recommendations based on that fact.”
Correct. His odd `set of scholarly values´ works about as contradictory as that.
p.s I have come to the conclusion that our academic elites (i.e. those who have the privilege to get well-paid for basically reading books and talk to people) have zilch knowledge about Russia and China. Zilch. I find this deeply shameful.
Aaron Good has made a case that The Politics of Heroin was perhaps pushed by interested actors in 1972, perhaps as a limited hangout, perhaps as part of the struggle over covert operations and the drug trade that was in the background of Watergate.
Scott sent an essay “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club and the Kuomintang,” to Ramparts magazine in 1970. The essay disappeared and was never published. I believe Good found it on the CIA’s website almost 50 years later. Scott included some of the same material in a book, The War Conspiracy, that he finished in 1970. That book was delayed for 2 years by it’s publisher, Bobbs Merrill, allowing McCoy’s book to be published first. In Scott’s words:
I have read McCoy’s To Govern The Globe, and I thought it was good, but perhaps certain attitudes about the nature of the U.S. and it’s imperium are structural features of academia. You have to adopt them to become tenured.
Great!
Thank you very much.
Of course the realism of Scott´s view on the matter is much more adult and truthful.
And yesssss: “You have to adopt them to become tenured.”
I am outside academia but I observe this incestuous relationship now clearer than ever since the war started. It´s pretty embarrassing how systemic it is and how people seriously practice these delusional attitudes in their scholarship. They don´t even see the truth any more. And if you point it out you are excommunicated.
Just recently there was this minor German affair over a new award for honesty in scholarship which was first “given” to Noam Chomsky in 2021 and now to German scholar and former politician, Julian Nida-Rümelin. After the gentleman who had come up with this award in the first place gave his laudation speech he was accused of being pro-Russian and the award was canceled..
https://overton-magazin.de/hintergrund/kultur/deutscher-hochschulverband-cancel-culture-statt-freiheit-der-wissenschaft/
In case you want an Engl. version use google. I can´t get google-translations archived any more to post them here.
My SWAG is he worries about the Chinese curse to live in interesting times.
Yep. Putin was protecting ethnic Russians who were being genocided.
Greatest threat to the US?
Russia?
China?
Iran?
Israel?
US?
Pogo Possum wuz right. (~60 years ago no less!)
“We have met the enemy, and he is us!!”
Pogo Possum quote: All the halls in Congress, and the White House too, should be lined with mirrors. Each mirror should have that Pogo quote etched in the glass for all to see – every day.
Greatest threat to America is the USA.
Russia’s economy ‘pummeled’ for three years. Tell that to the IMF and CIA who have just confirmed the world ranking by the World Bank at no4.
There are too many errors in this article to take it seriously.
What didn’t kill it, made it stronger.
>”What didn’t kill it, made it stronger.”
You mean: the “many errors in this article” made the article stronger?!
(Just kidding. But that twisted 1984-logic would fit too.)
I suspect all of these requiems for US power and dominance are sadly most likely not just premature but irrelevant.
With Putin now folding like a house of card it increasingly looks like the world will have to endure another leaden american century after all.
Most of it probably will look like Gaza at the end of it.
Ironically climate change is probably our last hope going forward.
“With Putin now folding like a house of card”
It would be enlightening* if you produced some evidence of that, with sources.
*to say the least.
He may be referring to the ATACMS strikes inside Russia that so far have resulted in no response from Russia. To-date, there have been no red lines for the West to cross when it concerns Russia. At this juncture it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the ever cautious Putin to sit still even if nuclear armed cruise missiles are launched towards Russia from Poland. By the time Putin is removed from power it may be too late to save Russia.
You seem to miss the clear patience and intelligence that Putin employs. At least so far, there have been few signs of him mistaking Western aggression and not responding to it in kind, but carefully so as not to kindle the irrational response where the West launches a nuclear WWIII.
wo ho sister/brother, you’re not in the FT comments here. We actually read.
With Putin now folding like a house of card(s), one would expect to see rivers of Champagne flowing trough Brussels, and Washington, and Kiev too. It seems that they haven’t got the memo yet, though Kiev does have some fireworks going on.
Another howler;
“By quitting that agreement, the U.S. will . . . while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions”
China seems to be fully aware of the climate problem and is not depending on the US to set the pace.
https://tomdispatch.com/china-is-digging-its-own-grave-and-ours-as-well/
February 24, 2022
China Is Digging Its Own Grave (and Ours as Well)
Or How to Create a New World Order Amid a Climate Crisis
By Alfred McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Which Harrington is that professorship names after? Please, please tell me it’s not Michael Harrington. I’ve always had a lingering respect for him, even though he was anti-Stalinist.
The point here is just what WEB Du Bois understood in 1903. * The actual China problem is the problem of the “color line.” The need to undermine the growth of a thoroughly benign China. After all, the United States vetoed a Chinese proposal before the United Nations, that the peoples of the world all have the right to development.
* http://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm#chap02
April 25, 1903
The Souls of Black Folk
By W.E.B. Du Bois
Of the Dawn of Freedom
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict…
The comparison of both Putin and Xi to being much like FDR was for America is very valid and should be explored more.
My thought too when I first read!
Excellent take on a whole set of issues concerning Western ideology.
Except that Xi and Putin continue to achieve their objectives by force of will, strategic nous and diplomatic and managerial competence which enables the rapid development of their economies, technologies and their countries political and military strength, and unlike Roosevelt, not by being presented with a war on the other side of the world, joining it after being attacked by a despairing nation wrestling with US “sanctions” in the full knowledge of the likelihood of defeat, and then having the Soviet people win it at a cosy of 27,000,000 lives so the US can claim the victory for “democracy”.
Ian Gilmour, the last of the great Tories, was bounced out of Thatcher’s cabinet by suggesting that she might better understand Russia if she were to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Pushkin, et al, rather than intelligence reports or cabinet papers because she obviously didn’t have a clue about how Russians really thought and how they understood the world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
> “suggesting that she might better understand Russia if she were to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Pushkin”
This is something the late Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor, allegedly said to a young German diplomat before being dispatched to Moscow and after conversing with him Schmidt realized the boy knew nothing. But who knows may be Schmidt used the Thatcher story and made it into his own. After all they knew each other well.
On the other hand do I really have to read books by a misogynist, a gambling-addict and two suicidal poets who both got themselves killed in duels to know that I should behave the same decent way my parents most likely taught me at home? What´s so special about Russia to not know that I should´t insult people, listen to them and learn their ways? Especially as a dipomat.
Obviously the comparisons break down at some point. This is mostly a comparison for Westerners so that they can begin to understand that these leaders are extremely popular in their countries.
One key understanding is that if the West brings war, those countries, including their populations, will fight. Russia has had no shortages of people volunteering for the military. Unlike America where the DOD long ago decided that a draft army was not desirable, and maybe not even possible (I can tell you stories of just how bad it got during Vietnam, and it was NOT confined to “in country”.)
I keep trying to tell people that what “won” the Cold War was the American middle class, a good life, however fake you can say it was. That has been wrecked, destroyed by the same people that want to now go out and re-conquer the world. Not gonna happen – that America is gone and this one is NOT worth fighting for.
Alfred McCoy is not the ‘great historian’ he is shouted out to be. His early work about the heroin trade in SE Asia was based on Peter Dale Scott’s research and publications. His notions about empire are one-sided and ignore the rich traditions of imperial Asia. He especially mistakes China, which is not an empire (and neither is the Russian federation).
What for me is most galling is his claim, “In Russia, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, sacrificing his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked).” First, although warfare is economically costly, the Russian economy has not been harmed, while the European and American economies have. Russia recently surpassed Germany and Japan according to world economic data, and even that data relies on questionable metrics. We have seen how America’s super expensive tech marvels burn on the battlefield. Second, “capturing land” was the least of Russia’s demands—in fact, land is not even on the list. Russia responded to carefully wrought American aggression that threatened Mother Russia—including the lives of those Russians living inside Ukraine, not to speak of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine—with NATO expansion and threat of invasion.
McCoy regurgitates the standard Narrative about the world. Doing so, he loses credibility as an historian.