***** Is the American empire already over?
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, October 5, 2002 - Page F3
..."The United States has been fading as a global power since the
1970s, and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks has merely
accelerated this decline." So says Immanuel Wallerstein, the Yale
University political scientist....In a forthcoming book, to be titled
Decline of American Power,he describes his country as "a lone
superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and
few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos
it cannot control."
In his view, America gave up the ghost in 1974, when it admitted
defeat in Vietnam and discovered that the conflict had more or less
exhausted the gold reserves, crippling its ability to remain a major
economic power. It has remained the focus of the world's attention
partly for lack of any serious challenger to the greenback for the
world's savings, and because it has kept attracting foreign
investments at a rate of $1.2-billion (U.S.) per day.
But if it comes to a crunch, the United States can no longer prevail
either economically or -- here is the most controversial statement --
militarily. In Mr. Wallerstein's calculus, of the three major wars
the United States has fought since the Second World War, one was a
defeat and two (Korea and the Gulf War) were draws.
Iraq, he told me recently, would be an end game. "The policy of the
U.S. government, which all administrations have been following since
the seventies, has been to slow down the decline by pushing on all
fronts. The hawks currently in power have to work very, very hard
twisting arms very, very tightly to get the minimal legal
justification for Iraq that they want now. This kind of thing, they
used to get with a snap of the fingers."
You don't have to agree with Mr. Wallerstein's hyperbolic view to be
a member of the Over camp -- and many do disagree: When he first
brought it up in the journal Foreign Policy this summer, half a dozen
editorial writers in the United States attacked him. But more
moderate thinkers have joined the club, including Charles Kupchan at
Georgetown University, whose forthcoming book The End of the American
Era makes a similar point in more subtle terms.
Joseph Nye at Harvard, a friend of Henry Kissinger's, argues in his
new book The Paradox of American Power that "world politics is
changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their
international goals acting alone" -- a tacit acknowledgment of Mr.
Wallerstein's thesis.
This is how great powers end: Not by suddenly collapsing, but by
quietly becoming Just Another Country. This happened to England
around 1873, but it wasn't until 1945 that anyone there noticed.
Outsiders do notice. Spend some time talking to a currency trader or
a foreign financier, and you'll glimpse the end of the almighty
dollar: Right now, about 70 per cent of the world's savings are in
greenbacks, while America contributes about 30 per cent of the
world's production -- an imbalance that has been maintained for the
past 30 years only because Japan collapsed and Europe took too long
to get its house together.
A Japanese CEO told me this in blunt terms the other day: "It was
Clinton's sole great success that he kept the world economy in
dollars for 10 years longer than anyone thought he would. But
nobody's staying in dollars any more."
There are other signs: The middling liberals, who in the 1960s would
have sided with the left in opposing U.S. imperialism, are today
begging for an empire. Michael Ignatieff, the liberal scholar, argued
at length recently that the United States ought to become an imperial
force -- on humanitarian grounds. Would this argument be necessary if
the United States actually dominated the world?
I'm not sure whether to fully believe the refreshing arguments of Mr.
Wallerstein and his friends, but they do have history on their side.
In their times, Portugal, Holland, Spain, France and England all woke
up to discover, far after the fact, that they were no longer the big
global powers, but Just Another Country....
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