The End of American Empire - Reginald Dieudonne (Medium)

Não sou, nem de longe, partidário da tese simplista de que "desigualdades sociais" causam declínio ou queda de civilizações. Acho que as pessoas que repetem essa bobagem acham que "desigualdade" significa pobreza, ou mesmo empobrecimento relativo dos cidadãos, e que por isso, a sociedade estaria condenada a declinar e mesmo desaparecer. Bobagem pura.
Uma sociedade pode acumular muita desigualdade, e ainda assim os mais pobres conhecerem um "enriquecimento absoluto", ainda que perdendo relativamente aos mais ricos, que é o que ocorre atualmente na China e em outros países decididamente engajados na globalização.
Se é para afirmar o declínio dos Estados Unidos, acho que já estamos atrasados uns 60 ou 70 anos, pois Arnold Toynbee já previa o declínio da civilização ocidental desde o imediato pós-guerra.
Eu não sou muito favorável a essas teorias deterministas de ciclos inevitáveis, nem econômicos, nem culturais ou civilizacionais. Acho que a flecha do tempo não tem, necessariamente, uma direção firme e uniforme, sempre para mais progresso e evolução positiva. Acredito, sim, que o homem é apenas parcialmente racional, e que pode levar a civilização a um declínio relativo, ou seja, desafios graves que não podem ser superados a curto prazo, e que nos levam a desenvolvimentos INVOLUTIVOS, ou melhor, pela escolha de caminhos, opções e situações conduzindo a impasses reais.
Dito isto, acho, sim, que os EUA encontram-se num declínio relativo, e que está sendo acelerado pelo presidente mais ESTÚPIDO que os americanos já tiveram em toda a sua história independente. Enfim, algo que não nos é estranho tampouco, por acaso simultaneamente...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Taubaté, 28 de outubro de 2019

3 Reasons Why America is About to End

All empires fall. The American one is already well into its terminal phase.

Reginald Dieudonne

Medium, October 28, 2019

https://medium.com/vandal-press/3-reasons-why-america-is-about-to-end-138b1e18bcf4

America has its flaws. Countless books examine them, but they often conclude their grim analyses with a chapter on “how to make things better.” Rarely is the feasibility of these proposed solutions considered.

What if the flaws in our principal institutions, from Capitol Hill to the National Security apparatus to the Federal Reserve, are unfixable? What if they exacerbate one another, resulting in an unsolvable nightmare? Is the reality that America has already begun its irreversible decline, after only 250 years, staring us in the face?

All empires fall, after all. It’s just a matter of time before America goes the way of Rome.

In 2014, a study partly funded by NASA warned that global industrial civilization could implode in the near future.

The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.

Excess resource extraction and unequal wealth distribution were crucial to every civilizational collapse of the past 5,000 years. Privileged elites rapaciously exploited the environment and labor while shielding themselves from the consequences. The lives of commoners ultimately descended into chaos, creating a destructive vacuum that obliterated the foundational pillars of society.

Excess resource extraction. Unequal wealth distribution. Are these not the problems currently plaguing America, and for which there are few proposed solutions? Expecting our notoriously venal politicians or our overworked, heavily distracted citizenry to resolve these issues is absurd. Identity politics, among other things, has stifled our ability to unite and address imminent dangers.

In 2008, Thomas Fingar, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, stated that US global leadership will “rapidly deteriorate in political, economic, and arguably cultural arenas.” NIC’s Global Trends 2030 says that in the coming decades the US will be mired in internal crises as a result of low economic growth. Despite the cheery optimism of America’s politicians, the Intelligence community seems certain that ticking debt-bombs and social instability will mightily diminish America’s global standing.

Are we closer to Rome than we think?

Morris Berman’s trilogy on the American Empire and William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail offer astute analyses on why America’s problems are irreparable and reminiscent of past empires. I’ll briefly explain why America is “down for the count” for those unwilling to read the books.

1) The era of U.S. Dollar hegemony is coming to an end

In 1944, the Allied Powers constructed the post-war monetary order at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. Because America had cemented itself as the world’s preeminent superpower, it was agreed that the U.S Dollar would officially be the global reserve currency (it had unofficially held this status since 1925). The bulk of international transactions would now be conducted in U.S. Dollars. The world’s central banks would also hold massive quantities of USD. As of today, the U.S. Dollar constitutes 60% of global reserves and 80% of global payments.

According to Global Trends 2030:

Historically, US dominance has been buttressed by the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. The fall of the dollar as the global reserve currency…would be one of the sharpest indications of a loss of US global economic position, equivalent to the sterling’s demise as the world’s currency, contributing to the end of the British Empire in the post-World War II period.

Simply put, the current monetary system allows America to pay for goods and services with printed dollars. If other countries printed giant sums of their money to buy imports, their currency’s value would crash on the foreign exchange market. Because the USD’s reserve currency status creates an unlimited demand for dollars, America has been merrily churning the printing presses to bolster its military and buy foreign goods.

All of the “Made in _______” goods being sold at American retailers, as well as American made products using imported materials, should be 2–5x more expensive than they are now. The US runs trade deficits with virtually every country in the world. Other countries give us goods and we give them printed money. That the U.S has spent the past century debasing its currency is obvious; the prices of everyday goods are more expensive than in the 1950’s by several orders of magnitude.

The US Dollar is not the world’s first reserve currency, nor will it be the last.

The average reserve currency length is 95 years. That the U.S dollar will lose its status as the global reserve currency is unavoidable. This will lead to Americans paying much higher prices for imports. The federal government will downsize drastically. No longer will massive yearly deficits be run.

When we can no longer pay our deficits with printed dollars, the 1 in 5 Americans who receive federal aid will see giant reductions in their benefits. Government employees will be fired en masse. Pensioners will receive a fraction of what they’re owed. This, of course, will be happening as our currency is plummeting on the foreign exchange market. Chaos will erupt in the streets. This day is rapidly approaching because…

2) The U.S. is only a few years away from another financial crisis

In 1998, Wall Street bailed out a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management to prevent a meltdown of the global financial system. In 2008, the world’s central banks bailed out Wall Street. What’s going to happen when central banks need to be bailed out?

Since 2008, they have printed over 12 trillion dollars to prop up the financial system. They’ve engendered monstrous speculative bubbles in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Donald Trump’s presidency, Brexit, and the rise of the European Far-Right are, in part, responses to Western nations buoying our broken monetary system at the expense of the general public.

James Rickards’ The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis details how the international monetary system is more unstable and disaster-prone than ever. Unprecedented levels of risk and criminality exist within it. The world’s governments, corporations, and citizens have never been this indebted. Once the global economy slows and debt-bombs begin exploding, the world’s Central Banks will be printing obscene amounts of money in an attempt to mitigate the damage. Their efforts will prove futile as citizens rush to hard assets to preserve their wealth.

Out of necessity, the global monetary system will be reconstructed. The International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Right (SDR) will supplant the U.S Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

3) America no longer even remotely resembles what the founders envisioned

It’s remarkable how prescient our Founding Fathers were about America’s current predicament. They were keenly aware of man’s tyrannical impulses and the usurious nature of banks. They knew once the American public favored idols and indulgences over liberty, prudence, and goodwill, their leaders would follow suit. It’s shocking how far the country has deviated from what it originally was.

Whereas America used to embrace self-sufficiency and limited Federal governance, it is now a profligate, warmongering police state. Those who have suffered at the hands of our imperialistic wrath are still seething. In 2010, a military-grade, Russian attack virus was found in the NASDAQ operating system. Admiral Michael S. Rogers, head of the NSA, recently stated, “It’s only a matter of [time when] you are going to see a nation state, a group, or an actor engage in destructive behavior against critical infrastructure of the United States.”

Retaliation against our militarism abroad will soon destroy the nation.

---

The splintering of a civilization doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a gradual process. By now, it should be clear that we’re in this process, but the U.S. propaganda juggernaut has duped Americans into believing, “Once candidate X gets elected, everything will be OK!”

Often, it’s the vastness and complexity of empires that conspire against them. Resources are exhausted managing novel crises. Once the elites realize the structural problems are intractable, they pillage the society before others are aware of its inevitable dissolution.

From now on, please consider that America’s problems are of a civilizational nature. Circumstances here will likely get much worse until the country self-destructs.

A decadencia auto-induzida do imperio americano - Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs)

The Self-Destruction of American Power

Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment

Fareed Zakaria

Foreign Affairs, July-August 2019

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.

As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet. Remember that the phrase “Third World” derived from the tripartite division of the globe, the First World being the United States and Western Europe, and the Second World, the communist countries. The Third World was everywhere else, where each country was choosing between U.S. and Soviet influence. For much of the world’s population, from Poland to China, the century hardly looked American.

The United States’ post–Cold War supremacy was initially hard to detect. As I pointed out in The New Yorker in 2002, most participants missed it. In 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that the world was dividing into three political spheres, dominated by the dollar, the yen, and the deutsche mark. Henry Kissinger’s 1994 book, Diplomacy, predicted the dawn of a new multipolar age. Certainly in the United States, there was little triumphalism. The 1992 presidential campaign was marked by a sense of weakness and weariness. “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won,” the Democratic hopeful Paul Tsongas said again and again. Asia hands had already begun to speak of “the Pacific century.”

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire.

There was one exception to this analysis, a prescient essay in the pages of this magazine by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The Unipolar Moment,” which was published in 1990. But even this triumphalist take was limited in its expansiveness, as its title suggests. “The unipolar moment will be brief,” Krauthammer admitted, predicting in a Washington Post column that within a very short time, Germany and Japan, the two emerging “regional superpowers,” would be pursuing foreign policies independent of the United States.

Policymakers welcomed the waning of unipolarity, which they assumed was imminent. In 1991, as the Balkan wars began, Jacques Poos, the president of the Council of the European Union, declared, “This is the hour of Europe.” He explained: “If one problem can be solved by Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country, and it is not up to the Americans.” But it turned out that only the United States had the combined power and influence to intervene effectively and tackle the crisis.

Similarly, toward the end of the 1990s, when a series of economic panics sent East Asian economies into tailspins, only the United States could stabilize the global financial system. It organized a $120 billion international bailout for the worst-hit countries, resolving the crisis. Time magazine put three Americans, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, on its cover with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Just as American hegemony grew in the early 1990s while no one was noticing, so in the late 1990s did the forces that would undermine it, even as people had begun to speak of the United States as “the indispensable nation” and “the world’s sole superpower.” First and foremost, there was the rise of China. It is easy to see in retrospect that Beijing would become the only serious rival to Washington, but it was not as apparent a quarter century ago. Although China had grown speedily since the 1980s, it had done so from a very low base. Few countries had been able to continue that process for more than a couple of decades. China’s strange mixture of capitalism and Leninism seemed fragile, as the Tiananmen Square uprising had revealed.

But China’s rise persisted, and the country became the new great power on the block, one with the might and the ambition to match the United States. Russia, for its part, went from being both weak and quiescent in the early 1990s to being a revanchist power, a spoiler with enough capability and cunning to be disruptive. With two major global players outside the U.S.-constructed international system, the world had entered a post-American phase. Today, the United States is still the most powerful country on the planet, but it exists in a world of global and regional powers that can—and frequently do—push back.

The 9/11 attacks and the rise of Islamic terrorism played a dual role in the decline of U.S. hegemony. At first, the attacks seemed to galvanize Washington and mobilize its power. In 2001, the United States, still larger economically than the next five countries put together, chose to ramp up its annual defense spending by an amount—almost $50 billion—that was larger than the United Kingdom’s entire yearly defense budget. When Washington intervened in Afghanistan, it was able to get overwhelming support for the campaign, including from Russia. Two years later, despite many objections, it was still able to put together a large international coalition for an invasion of Iraq. The early years of this century marked the high point of the American imperium, as Washington tried to remake wholly alien nations—Afghanistan and Iraq—thousands of miles away, despite the rest of the world’s reluctant acquiescence or active opposition.

Iraq in particular marked a turning point. The United States embarked on a war of choice despite misgivings expressed in the rest of world. It tried to get the UN to rubber-stamp its mission, and when that proved arduous, it dispensed with the organization altogether. It ignored the Powell Doctrine—the idea, promulgated by General Colin Powell while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, that a war was worth entering only if vital national interests were at stake and overwhelming victory assured. The Bush administration insisted that the vast challenge of occupying Iraq could be undertaken with a small number of troops and a light touch. Iraq, it was said, would pay for itself. And once in Baghdad, Washington decided to destroy the Iraqi state, disbanding the army and purging the bureaucracy, which produced chaos and helped fuel an insurgency. Any one of these mistakes might have been overcome. But together they ensured that Iraq became a costly fiasco.

After 9/11, Washington made major, consequential decisions that continue to haunt it, but it made all of them hastily and in fear. It saw itself as in mortal danger, needing to do whatever it took to defend itself—from invading Iraq to spending untold sums on homeland security to employing torture. The rest of the world saw a country that was experiencing a kind of terrorism that many had lived with for years and yet was thrashing around like a wounded lion, tearing down international alliances and norms. In its first two years, the George W. Bush administration walked away from more international agreements than any previous administration had. (Undoubtedly, that record has now been surpassed under President Donald Trump.) American behavior abroad during the Bush administration shattered the moral and political authority of the United States, as long-standing allies such as Canada and France found themselves at odds with it on the substance, morality, and style of its foreign policy.

OWN GOAL

So which was it that eroded American hegemony—the rise of new challengers or imperial overreach? As with any large and complex historical phenomenon, it was probably all of the above. China’s rise was one of those tectonic shifts in international life that would have eroded any hegemon’s unrivaled power, no matter how skillful its diplomacy. The return of Russia, however, was a more complex affair. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early 1990s, leaders in Moscow were determined to turn their country into a liberal democracy, a European nation, and an ally of sorts of the West. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was foreign minister during the final years of the Soviet Union, supported the United States’ 1990–91 war against Iraq. And after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was an even more ardent liberal, an internationalist, and a vigorous supporter of human rights.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment was to simply stop paying attention.

Who lost Russia is a question for another article. But it is worth noting that although Washington gave Moscow some status and respect—expanding the G-7 into the G-8, for example—it never truly took Russia’s security concerns seriously. It enlarged NATO fast and furiously, a process that might have been necessary for countries such as Poland, historically insecure and threatened by Russia, but one that has continued on unthinkingly, with little concern for Russian sensitivities, and now even extends to Macedonia. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior makes every action taken against his country seem justified, but it’s worth asking, What forces produced the rise of Putin and his foreign policy in the first place? Undoubtedly, they were mostly internal to Russia, but to the extent that U.S. actions had an effect, they appear to have been damaging, helping stoke the forces of revenge and revanchism in Russia.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment, with Russia and more generally, was to simply stop paying attention. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans wanted to go home, and they did. During the Cold War, the United States had stayed deeply interested in events in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait, and even Angola and Namibia. By the mid-1990s, it had lost all interest in the world. Foreign-bureau broadcasts by NBC fell from 1,013 minutes in 1988 to 327 minutes in 1996. (Today, the three main networks combined devote roughly the same amount of time to foreign-bureau stories as each individual network did in 1988.) Both the White House and Congress during the George H. W. Bush administration had no appetite for an ambitious effort to transform Russia, no interest in rolling out a new version of the Marshall Plan or becoming deeply engaged in the country. Even amid the foreign economic crises that hit during the Clinton administration, U.S. policymakers had to scramble and improvise, knowing that Congress would appropriate no funds to rescue Mexico or Thailand or Indonesia. They offered advice, most of it designed to require little assistance from Washington, but their attitude was one of a distant well-wisher, not an engaged superpower.

Shamil Zhumatov / REUTERS

Unmarked Russian soldiers near Sevastopol, Crimea, March 2014

Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm, limited in its scope, endorsed by major powers and legitimized by international law. But right at the time of all these positive developments, the United States lost interest. U.S. policymakers still wanted to transform the world in the 1990s, but on the cheap. They did not have the political capital or resources to throw themselves into the effort. That was one reason Washington’s advice to foreign countries was always the same: economic shock therapy and instant democracy. Anything slower or more complex—anything, in other words, that resembled the manner in which the West itself had liberalized its economy and democratized its politics—was unacceptable. Before 9/11, when confronting challenges, the American tactic was mostly to attack from afar, hence the twin approaches of economic sanctions and precision air strikes. Both of these, as the political scientist Eliot Cohen wrote of airpower, had the characteristics of modern courtship: “gratification without commitment.”

Of course, these limits on the United States’ willingness to pay prices and bear burdens never changed its rhetoric, which is why, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, I pointed out that U.S. foreign policy was defined by “the rhetoric of transformation but the reality of accommodation.” The result, I said, was “a hollow hegemony.” That hollowness has persisted ever since.

THE FINAL BLOW

The Trump administration has hollowed out U.S. foreign policy even further. Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are screwing the United States. He is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he has abandoned the field. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and from engaging with Asia more generally. It is uncoupling itself from its 70-year partnership with Europe. It has dealt with Latin America through the prism of either keeping immigrants out or winning votes in Florida. It has even managed to alienate Canadians (no mean feat). And it has subcontracted Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a few impulsive exceptions—such as the narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea—what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.

The Washington Post: o que acontece nos EUA? Afundam?

Inacreditável: abro o Washington Post desta sexta-feira 21/12, e todas as notícias e comentários são, sem exceção, pessimistas, negativas, depressivas para os EUA e o mundo, isso tudo em virtude de um presidente inepto, confuso, obsessivo com certas coisas – o tal muro idiota, por exemplo, que ele jurava que os mexicanos iriam pagar por ele – e incapaz de trazer estabilidade para um país já tomado pelo temor de uma nova recessão, e trazer conforto e tranquilidade para os parceiros estrangeiros, que nunca tinham visto um presidente agressivo com os amigos e concessivo com os "inimigos".
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

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