Donald Trumps America was absent in every way imaginable. Im thinking of this years crucial U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil that hosted dozens of world leaders to discuss the global climate and the energy crisis, but not, of course, Donald Trump (or any other high-level official in his government). And thats not the only way the United States was quite literally missing in action at a meeting to deal with the deepest dangers humanity now faces. As New York Times correspondent Ana Ionova reported, the electric car (only one of many) that pulled up at the conference hall to let Brazilian President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva out to host the conference was made by yes, of course! Chinese automaker BYD.
And if you want a sense of where, in the age of Trump, our planet is heading, just consider this passage from Ionovas report: Last month, BYD inaugurated its biggest factory outside Asia, at a plant in Bahia State, in northeastern Brazil, that was once run by Ford. Yes, when the U.S. was at the height of its global power and influence, so were U.S. automakers. No longer, in either case.
It should, of course, be clear to anyone looking at our increasingly endangered planet as hyper-powered Hurricane Melissa indicated only recently in the Caribbean region that climate change represents the greatest crisis in human history. And it will only grow more severe with a distinct helping hand from Donald Trump, the drill, baby, drill president, who has gone out of his way to plug the most dangerous forms of energy on this planet, while forcefully rejecting any attempt to create and install green energy. Its estimated that, thanks to him, by 2035, the U.S. will have about 30% less solar energy than only recently expected and, as a result, will be ever more out of step with much of the rest of the planet. In that sense, President Trump should all too literally be considered a force from given Earths rising temperatures hell. In his own eerie fashion, in fact, hes distinctly putting a period (or do I mean an exclamation point?) on American imperial power.
And in that context, let historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, all too aptly the author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (among other works), take you on a striking tour of the rise and fall of empires (and systems of energy) from the fifteenth century to late tomorrow night. Tom
Ozymandias on the Potomac
Energy Policy and the Politics of American Decline
By Alfred McCoy
At the dawning of the British Empire in 1818, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned a memorable sonnet freighted with foreboding about the inevitable decline of all empires, whether in ancient Egypt or then-modern Britain.
In Shellys stanzas, a traveler in Egypt comes across the ruins of a once-monumental statue, with a shattered visage lying half sunk in desert sands bearing the sneer of cold command. Only its trunkless legs of stone remain standing. Yet the inscription carved on those stones still proclaims: My name isOzymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! And in a silent mockery of such imperial hubris, all the trappings of that awesome power, all the palaces and fortresses, have been utterly erased, leaving only a desolation boundless and bare as the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Taken too literally, those verses might lead us to anticipate some future traveler finding fragments of St. Pauls Cathedral scattered on the banks of the Thames River in London or stones from the Washington Monument strewn in a kudzu-covered field near the Potomac. Shelley is, however, offering us a more profound lesson that every empire teaches and every imperialist then forgets: Imperial ascent begets an inevitable decline.
Imperial Washington
Indeed, these days Donald Trumps Washington abounds with monuments to overblown imperial grandeur and plans for more, all of which add up to an unconvincing denial that Americas global imperium is facing an Ozymandias-like fate. With his future Gilded Age ballroom meant to rise from the rubble of the White Houses East Wing, his plans for a massive triumphal arch at the citys entrance, and a military parade of tanks and troops clanking down Constitution Avenue on his birthday, who could ever imagine such a thing? Not Donald Trump, thats for sure.
In a celebration of his works that are supposedly making the mighty despair in foreign capitals around the world, his former national security adviser, Robert C. OBrien, has recently argued in Foreign Affairs that the presidents policy of peace through strength is reversing a Democrat-induced decline of U.S. global power. According to OBrien, instead of crippling NATO (as his critics claim), President Trump is leading the biggest European rearmament of the postwar era; unleashing military innovation to counter China; and proving himself the indispensable global statesman by driving efforts to bring peace to long-standing disputes in Gaza, the Congo, and, quite soon, Ukraine as well. Even in North America, according to OBrien, Trumps attempt to acquire Greenland has forced Denmark to expand its military presence, putting Russia on notice that the West will compete for control of the Arctic.
As it happens, whatever the truth of any of that may be, the policy elements that OBrien cites are certain to prove largely irrelevant to the ceaseless struggle for geopolitical power among the globes great empires. Or, to borrow a favorite Trumpian epithet from the presidents cornucopia of crudeness, in the relentless, often ruthless world of grand strategy, none of those factors amounts to a hill of sh*t.
Indeed, OBriens epic catalogue of Trumps supposed foreign policy successes cleverly avoids any mention of the central factor in the rise and fall of every dominant world power for the past 500 years: energy. While the United States made genuine strides toward a green energy revolution under President Joe Biden, his successor, the drill, baby, drill president, has seemed determined not just to destroy those gains, but to revert to dependence on fossil fuels bigly, as Trump would say. In a perplexing paradox, President Trumps systematic attack on alternative energy at home will almost certainly subvert Americas geopolitical power abroad. How and why? Let me explain by dipping my toes in a bit of history.
For the past five centuries, the rise of every global empire has rested on an underlying transformation (or perhaps revolution would be a more accurate word for it) in the form of energy that drove its version of the world economy. Innovation in the basic force behind its rising global presence gave each successive hegemonic power Portugal, Spain, England, the United States, and possibly now China a critical competitive advantage, cutting costs and increasing profits. That energy innovation and the lucrative commerce it created infused each successive imperium with intangible but substantial power, impelling its armed forces relentlessly forward and crushing resistance to its rule, whether by local groups or would-be imperial rivals. Although scholars of imperial history often ignore it, energy should be considered, as I argued in my book To Govern the Globe, the determinative factor in the rise and fall of every global hegemon for the past five centuries.
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