America's Place in the World: What Do We See?
How will the U.S. go down? Gracious? Mature? Or flailing, breaking the world?
“U.S. industrial policy — beggar the nation to enrich the few.”
—Yours truly, here
“Empires die bloody.”
—Ian Welsh, here
It’s time for a few “unified field theories” of what’s going on — time for a broader look at the inevitable sum of what we’ve discussed and seen.
One of those big theories involves the nature of “the state,” that crawling force-extender of the rich and elite. In our view, states represent neither progress nor inevitability. Humans were born stateless, and stateless they will become. We’ll summarize those thoughts in a bit.
For today, let’s look at what future will take us there. This future will be shaped by three conflicts, apparent today.
Three Crises
Three crises will shape the next world. These crises are:
America vs. the world
America vs. its people
The world vs. the climate
In sum: America is in decline. What will that mean for the world? Elites will never stand down (a bold prediction, I know). What does that mean for mid-century domestic affairs? And finally, the great climate crisis will sweep through the world like a fire. How will the world respond?
This piece is about the first: America’s place in the world.
America’s Global Decline
I’ve stayed away from this topic for a number of reasons. For one, it’s truly depressing if you live in the U.S. For another, the writer Ian Welsh has covered it well.
But it needs to be said at least once. The fact is, China has won, has beaten the West. The battle is over. Says Welsh:
[N]othing has changed in the fundamentals. The US is in auto-catabolic collapse and so far there is no sign of the oligarchy losing control, which is the pre-condition for any attempts to change the trajectory. I’ve now seen data indicating China is leading in 89% of key tech fields, up from 80% a couple years ago. US industry is still collapsing. Research funding has been slashed. Final bastions like chips, AI, civil aviation and biotech/pharma are all under assault and will fall like dominoes over the next five to ten years. The US has no ship building capacity to speak of, is behind on drones and missiles (the key weapon systems of modern war) and can’t even make key components in its military chain without Chinese help. Dollar hegemony is no more than five years out from being lost. [emphasis mine]
I think that’s correct, each element exactly right. And there are more elements he could add. For why China will win, read this.
China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. …
To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” …
I mean do things other than de-regulate and say “well there isn’t anything we can really do, this is just how the world is.” Do things other than just make the rich even richer? Do things other than constantly de-funding science and engineering and the humanities? Do things other than making medicine fantastically expensive? Do something other than blowing another asset bubble?
And please note: This is our own damn fault, going back to the so-called Reagan Revolution (actually a counter-rebellion), when the rich fully captured the government, which then allowed them to sell our industry off and buy bigger yachts.
The De-Americanized Future
What will this mean for America’s place in the world? Again, I think Welsh has it right. The U.S. will lose traction in South America: We offer force and impotent takeovers, China gives investment and trade. Overall, the number of our vassal states is shrinking, and those, we’ve begun to loot:
America['s] … current policy is to bleed its vassals, especially Europe, white. That will make them virtually worthless as vassals and will most likely lead to a revolt sometime between ten and fifteen years from now, as the European standard of living collapses under de-industrialization and without its sub-vassals selling it under-priced resources.
That leaves us with what? No dollar hegemony, no ability to “swing big pipe,” reduced domination and influence, but a massive military still and a hubristic determination not to go down. It’s painful to not be the king, the “indispensable nation.” It’s hard to no longer rule.
Will the U.S. stand down, not leave the world in blood as it lashes and fails? Or will it — gracious, mature — bow to the new?
I dislike the framing that some country or region has “won” while another has “lost” — the American Billionaire Overlord caste is certainly doing far “better” than the top caste in China in terms of the sumptuousness of their lifestyle and still look like the “winners” by that metric. The only “losers” are average Americans, who by 1980 enjoyed a material standard of living that would have been the envy of Tsar Nicholas II, but most of whom now face declining life expectancy, poor overall health, and economic precarity.
The St Louis Fed chart severely understates the collapse of American industrial employment by failing to adjust for population growth. When you take into account population, which grew from 132M in 1940 to 332M in 2020 you can see that industrial employment actually peaked in 1980 at 10 percent of the population. This had collapsed to fewer than 4 percent of the population as of 2012. Of course that drop can be extrapolated further, as we are now well over a decade past the period shown on the graph. It’s in free-fall and we can see the wreckage sleeping in cars or under bridges every day.
This impulse to crush wages and living standards can only be attributed to a culture of caste hatred that arose in reaction to the success of the American working caste relative to elites. It was embodied by Reagan’s characterization of them as freeloaders and has been perfectly executed by his successors who grew the number of American billionaires from a handful under Reagan to nearly 800 today.
However, in a world of diminishing resources and exploding population elite hoarding and rationing are not enough to satiate their gluttony. They have decided to kill us.
Besides the Washington consensus around neoliberalism, and a belief that the populace is to be surveiled, managed, and policed, the Madeleine Albright quote about being an “indispensable national” is perhaps the most chilling because it is believed by the populace. American exceptionalism runs throughout American history. The overwhelming majority of people have internalized that narrative and are resistant to critically thinking about our role in spreading evil in the world. They are not going to accept the karma arriving when the chickens come home to roost.
America’s role in the world: It’s going to be ugly.
America vs. the people: Elite panic is real. The government’s response to COVID shows just how disposable we are. Combined with its response to dissent our civil servants are our masters all too willing to obey their psychopathic campaign contributors.
America vs. the climate: I was educated at a high school in a sundown town in what is now “Trump Country.” I learned about man made climate change in the 1970s. Instead of stopping digging ourselves a hole, we have kept digging even faster and have created a catastrophe.
As the late Walt Kelly used to write in his comic, “We have met the enemy, he is us.”