Decline and fall of the American Empire

(This post is from March 2003)

Britain’s rapid decline over the past century from imperial superpower to charming backwater couldn’t be more vividly illustrated than by the tone of this article about the new Lonely Planet Guide to Britain. The new guide quoted as saying:

“Britain is just getting better and better. The food is getting tastier, the cities more attractive and the rich cultural heritage more accessible.”

Marvellous. Makes you proud and all that. But note, if British cities are getting more attractive it is because they are still deindustrialising. They are having to move away from the raw capitalist imperative that threw them up in the first place (build a factory! build a slum to house the workers we need! build a hospital, some schools, public baths and a small park so they have somewhere to bring up the next generation of workers!). Now, instead, the cities are having to sell themselves as pleasant places to visit and live, part of the Great British service sector.

This interpretation fits perfectly with the assumptions of Independent Strategy, the authors of a report arguing that the US economy is in terminal decline. It’s interesting that their thesis - that we might be approaching the dog days of the American empire - is not just economic in nature. One of the core assumptions seems to be that the rest of the world is so pissed off by the current US administration that scope exists for a multilateral withdrawal of the support the US needs in order to continue to function as it does.

Now, UN member states are not just going to call time on the US’s massive levels of indebtedness. Each player has too much to lose, and it would require the non-US world to broadly agree on a complex course of action with no immediate way forward.

But a loss of spirit, a sense of vitality passing away from the US, a feeling that the zeitgeist has moved away from North America, would affect innumerable small business decisions that would combine to bring the empire down over, say, 30 years.

Undoubtedly I’m reflecting part of a widespread, ill-defined feeling that it’s wrong for the US to act globally in its self-interest, as Britain used to do in its days of empire. But there is always an element that wonders if we aren’t looking at the Empire’s New Clothes. To quote again the Guardian article:

“America relies on the rest of the world to finance its deficits. The rest of the world was happy to do so when the US economy was strong and returns were high, but investors will put their cash elsewhere if America looks weak economically. America borrows hundreds of millions of dollars from the rest of the world each day to cover its savings gap and, under George Bush, US dependence on foreign capital is set to increase.”

George W. Bush’s $75billion war is, in the end, a war bought on the never-never. But ‘never-never’ is always jst a euphemism. Bush may not have to settle up, but his successors will.