Hear that? It’s the sound of an empire collapsing.
back
2 comments
Did it collapse in 2001?
Did the British Empire collapse during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when it was embarassingly unable to open a major shipping chokepoint via military force?
Did we know it had by 1957, or did that take a little longer to confirm the shape of the decline?
India was already independent by then. That seems like it would have been a pretty strong signal.
Didn't we rather embarrasingly withdraw from Afghanistan recently after two decades of trying to build a functioning government, only to have the Taliban take it back in a matter of days?
You're kinda making the point I'm making; the sound of an empire collapsing is often a long rumble, not a sudden snap.
If your suggestion is that the US might be in decline and there have been lots of signals of that going back 30 years, I’m pretty sympathetic. But if it’s specifically the Iran war fiasco compared to the Suez incident I’d suggest those aren’t particularly the same.
> But if it’s specifically the Iran war fiasco compared to the Suez incident I’d suggest those aren’t particularly the same.
Yes, one's a superpower failing to project power over a critical waterway to much international embarassment, the other is… oh.
Did the US lose control of the most populous part of its “empire” in the last 20 years? Did it get its population and infrastructure destroyed across 2 generations in world wars in the last 50?
Has the US just come off of required rationing for basic food stuffs and been running in 20 years of austerity?
Or is the US still the dominant economy in the world, with a problem of over abundance of staples and stuff?
The idea that late 1950s uk and the 2026 us are equivalent is laughable.
In retrospect the inability of the empire to hold Singapore against the Japanese in WW2 and leave Australia in the hands of the US was the unraveling of the British empire. The Dutch one as well with the fall of the Dutch East Indies.
Kinda, yes. Osama Bin Laden's express goal was to bankrupt the U.S. by provoking it into a war it could not win. Three wars in the Middle East later, and $33T in additional government debt, and hear we are.
9/11 was arguably the most effective asymmetric attack in the annals of military history, in terms of simple weapon effect.
At the same time, it spells out the limits of seeing the world in terms of weapon effect: an American population brutalized by twenty years of occupation; Israel binding tight alliance with Saud; a resurgent heretic Shia power; a meteoric rise of China - historically far more of a foe to Islam than the West. None of these are what you might call brilliant for Bin Laden's ultimate goals.
When we fire a gun we don't know what that bullet does twenty years from now.
9/11 eroded American democracy in ways that wouldn’t be considered possible. What we observe now is just one more chapter of a long fall that has started in the mid 1980s. Increasing income inequality, breeding dissatisfaction to the point a former reality show character gets elected president.
This all was done by many hands - Putin being an obvious one also destabilising the European Union and NATO, and China acquiring the manufacturing prowess the US decided wasn’t worth the effort anymore, and so on. Add to that what seems to be the last straw, a unified payment system that doesn’t uses the dollar as its currency, and you have the perfect storm.
Was it Stalin who said the capitalist will gladly sell you the rope you’ll use to hang them?
"What fool will sell us his secrets?" is what Stalin is said to have replied when Khrunichev (aviation minister) and Yakovlev proposed buying British engines in 1946 for their Mig design, which (with British Nene engines) would become the best-in-theatre Mig-15. As with most Stalin quotes the attribution is pretty weak, but we do have multiple sources.
The rope line is Lenin's, supposedly. The earliest verified appearance is October 31, 1955, in The Commonwealth, journal of the Commonwealth Club of California, where Major George Racey Jordan attributed to Lenin:
"When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.
"they will work on the preparation of their own suicide."
Today we are in the middle of history, no doubt about that: the transition of global hegemon[0] for the first time in the nuclear age. That's a ticklish proposition at the best of times, and it would have been lovely if the leadership class had stepped up. Unfortunately, well . . . where we are now, it's going to often be China's leadership steering humanity around the thermonuclear bonfire[1].
Let's call the whole thing the end of the western era, a phrase which makes me sound like a Nazi, but apparently if there is one thing everything can agree on it's that the age of the west is ending.
Now, the difference between me and a Nazi is that I interpret "Age of the West", as, "humanity has been `the west` and then there are other guys", and that the end means that age is over. If I were a Nazi, I interpret "End of the West" as literally existential, which would make me - surprise! - escalate my actions and rhetoric. A huge part of the art of reactionary and revolutionary movements across history is removing any idea of an alternative, of a compromise benefitting all. And in the current era, it is so dangerously easy to add and remove ideas from the populace.
[0] Which, I want to state openly, was not written in the stars. As late as 9/11, America could have made the 21st century the American century, but, well, we decided to go play in the sandbox instead. Now, why we did that, that will become an area of future study for centuries.
[1] A fact that they are quite aware of, as they watch the American situation. "Why don't they crush Taiwan like a ripe fruit?" - because PRC don't have confidence that American leadership won't jump right to the top of the escalation ladder if a CVBG is mission killed. So they wait.
Entire global society collapse is probably less than 25 years away due to climate change spiraling out of control. Relative to that the US national debt hardly even matters.