The bigger picture behind Official Washington’s hysteria over Russia, Syria and North Korea is the image of a decaying but dangerous American hegemon resisting the start of new multipolar order, explains Daniel Lazare.…
Unipolarity will slink off to the sidelines while multilateralism takes center stage. Given that U.S. share of global GDP has fallen by better than 20 percent since 1989, a retreat is inevitable. America has tried to compensate by making maximum use of its military and political advantages. That would be a losing proposition even if it had the most brilliant leadership in the world. Yet it doesn’t. Instead, it has a President who is an international laughingstock, a dysfunctional Congress, and a foreign-policy establishment lost in a neocon dream world. As a consequence, retreat is turning into a disorderly rout.This is not just official Washington but the entire Anglo-American and European power structure — "the Atlantacists" — that has dominated the global beginning in the 16th century. Could have another world war over it as the Atlanticists struggle to maintain position. They realize that position cannot be maintained statically but must be advanced through expansion of control. These are parlous times for humanity with the world brisling with WMD and not just nukes.
See Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History for the rise and fall of civilizations.
Also Oswald Spengler.
Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency whose countering would necessitate Caesarism (extraconstitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of the central government).This also coincides with the work of Strauss and Howe, and also Ravi Batra, under the influence of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.
While historical trend analysis is far from precise, it provides a framework for thinking about issues that are complex owing to reflexivity and involve emergence that necessitates adaptation.
This dynamic is a whole lot bigger than the Thyucides trap between the US and China.
Many forces are converging now — natural forces like climate change, social forces like conflict of value structures and competing ideologies, and artificial forces like technological disruption brought by the "third, fourth and fifth industrial revolutions," which also have military implications.
"The times they are a-changin'."
Consortium News
The Dangerous Decline of US Hegemony
Daniel Lazare
1 comment:
It could be so different, we could have helped stem excessive population growth and developed new technologies long ago to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels as well as save the environment while the ruling elite could have made their fortunes out of new the industries. But nope, despite our intelligence we're kind of really stupid. The pathological ruling elite even got their economists to say that greed was good because they were particularly greedy and short sighted.
What horrible times we have lived through seeing the ruling establishment get it so wrong and now our civilisation is crumbling because? As Paul Craig Roberts says we gave our leading edge in technology away because it boosted short term profits to export our industries abroad and with it the good jobs, and so without the decent wages we maxed out on credit instead and this has hollowed out the wealth of our societies straight into the pockets of the elite, and this is the classic way that civilisations die.
They say the frog in a pot that's being slowly heated does not notice the temperature rising and so it gets boiled to death, so too most people don't see how our civilisation is crumbling. It's getting harder and harder but they just put up with it. For example, the trend for courier and delivery companies to do away with their own staff who they would have equipped with vans and uniforms and to use self employed people instead who use their own cars seems to be increasing. Gone are the pensions, the holiday and sick pay, the regular hours, and the reasonable wages.
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