Analog of Empire: Reflections on U.S. Ascendancy

20 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 It marks this era that die debacle of Katrina and the debacle of Baghdadhave become mergedinpeople's minds. Bodi display government ineptitude, neglect of infrastructure and public services, corporate profiteering , no-bid contracts, private security agencies, staggeringmismanagement, and systemic lack of accountability . Consider an article headlined "U.S. Cuts in Africa Aid Hurt War on Terror and Increase China's Influence , Officials Say."4 It reports that since 2003 U.S. military aid to most African states and several Latin American states has been stopped because die leaders of diese states have declined to sign agreements exemptingAmerican troops from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This leaves openings for China to expandits economic and political influencein these regions. This is an example of a state riddled by policy incoherence. The United States places itself outside international law, outside die institutions that it has helped build—the Geneva Convention, the International Court, the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights. Acting as a global judge andplacing oneself outside international law is not a sustainable combination . Thus preoccupied by a conundrum of its own making (including stubborn, one-sided policies in the Middle East), the United States on its fool's errand leaves the global field wide open for other countries to emerge and expand. While the U.S. and UK, the leaders of the war party, are stuck on the path they have chosen, entangled in the backlash it entails (the technical term is dialectics), and duly obsessed by Islamic militancy, die rest of the world travels a different path. The domestic consequences of the American rendezvous with powerinclude die opportunity costs of empire, i.e., what the U.S. government could have done instead of pursuingunipolarity. Economic consequences include the overall neglect of economic policy and die structural loss of U.S. manufacturing capacity. Togetherwith die neglect of education, diis results in loss of competitiveness and loss of jobs. That die largest American company is a retail company that sells Chinese and odier Asian goods with a logistics system that runs on Indian software is a telling sign. It leads to import dependence, an irreversibly growing trade deficit, massive current account deficits, and pressure on the dollar. Now that the armed forces serve as both an avenue of social mobility (the nation's main affirmative action and workfare program) and die centerpiece of public culture, America is becomingincreasingly out of sync with world trends—politically, economically, and culturally. Further, as militarism's influence in American culture grows, so does the influence of military authoritarianism. ContemporaryAmerican society involves a triple authoritarianism—in corporations as top-down hierarchical institutions (particularly in times of downsizing), in politics because of post-9/1 1 securitization and the general inclination toward presidentialism and mammoth bureaucracies, and as part of militarism. No wonder that a major American cultural preoccupation is with "leadership." Empire stimulates regrouping on the part of social forces and countries that increasingly work around the United States. Empire accelerates global realignments. The American preoccupation with geostrategic primacy leaves the economic terrain to industrial newcomers and thus makes space for industrial development in the semi-periphery, as was the case during the interwar years in the first half of the 20th century when the great powers were distracted by rivalry and war. For some time growth rates in the global South have been much higher than in die North. With this come new patterns of South-South relations around trade, energy, and security. Militaryprimacy on weak economic foundations means a giant on feet of clay. As die world's major deficit country, die U.S. has much less economic leverage than it had in the past. The wars drag on but American hegemony is already crumbling. The failure of the Doha round, the impasse of die WTO, the demise of die FTAA, dievanishingactof APEC, and die retreat of the World Bank and IMF signal growing American weakness. Alternative clusters are taking shape that the United States is not part of. For imports and die funds to buy them die United States depends on Asian vendor financing, which will continue until die tipping point is...