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Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, An Epochal Decline in American Global Power

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Honestly, I wonder why (other than Covid-19) Americans aren't out in the streets protesting. Oh wait, given that we've just "celebrated" the anniversary of January 6th and our world is alive with talk of coming violence against the government in those very streets, not to speak of rising extremism in the U.S. military and potential civil war, let me amend that slightly. I meant something else entirely. After all, like the Trump administration before it, the Biden administration (with the Pentagon and Congress cheering it on) only continues to hike up the pressures for an ever-intensifying new Cold War with China, as Michael Klare reported at this site last week.

And yet here we Americans are, ready to fight it out over masking mandates and a "stolen" election, but not ready to offer a peep of protest as, for the second time in this century, this country heads off into the world all too aggressively armed to the teeth and ready for battle. And just in case you've forgotten, the last time around you know, that Global War on Terror that involved the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq didn't turn out particularly splendidly, did it? So why expect a new Cold War with China, the rising power on an endangered planet, with that old cold warrior Russia thrown in for good measure, to turn out any better?

Of course, when there's so much else to argue about here in an ever more armed fashion, why even bother to consider this country's global stance, no less protest as our collective fate is being decided elsewhere? However, if you do happen to have a passing few moments in this mad American world of ours, take a little break and check out the latest piece by TomDispatch regular and historian Alfred McCoy, author most recently of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. It offers an all-too-vivid look at an imperial American world on its way to hell in a handbasket, while Americans myopically pick at our wounds at home. It may be a new definition of what the end of empire really means in the twenty-first century (if we all even make it long enough to find out). Tom

Eurasia's Ring of Fire
The Epic Struggle over the Epicenter of U.S. Global Power

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Throughout 2021, Americans were absorbed in arguments over mask mandates, school closings, and the meaning of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Meanwhile, geopolitical hot spots were erupting across Eurasia, forming a veritable ring of fire around that vast land mass.

Let's circle that continent to visit just a few of those flashpoints, each one suffused with significance for the future of U.S. global power.

On the border with Ukraine, 100,000 Russian troops were massing with tanks and rocket launchers, ready for a possible invasion. Meanwhile, Beijing signed a $400 billion agreement with Tehran to swap infrastructure-building for Iranian oil. Such an exchange might help make that country the future rail hub of Central Asia, while projecting China's military power into the Persian Gulf. Just across the Iranian border in Afghanistan, Taliban guerrillas swept into Kabul ending a 20-year American occupation in a frantic flurry of shuttle flights for more than 100,000 defeated Afghan allies.

Farther east, high in the Himalayas, Indian Army engineers were digging tunnels and positioning artillery to fend off future clashes with China. In the Bay of Bengal, a dozen ships from Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, led by the supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, were conducting live gunnery drills, practice for a possible future war with China.

Meanwhile, a succession of American naval vessels continually passed through the South China Sea, skirting Chinese island bases there and announcing that no protests from Beijing "will deter us." Just to the north, U.S. destroyers, denounced by China, regularly sailed through the Strait of Taiwan; while some 80 Chinese jet fighters swarmed into that disputed island's air security zone, a development Washington condemned as "provocative military activity."

Around the coast of Japan, a flotilla of 10 Chinese and Russian warships steamed aggressively across waters once virtually owned by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. And in frigid Arctic oceans way to the north, thanks to the radical warming of the planet and receding sea ice, an expanding fleet of Chinese icebreakers maneuvered with their Russian counterparts to open a "polar silk road," thereby possibly taking possession of the roof of the world.

While you could have read about almost all of this in the American media, sometimes in great detail, nobody here has tried to connect such transcontinental dots to uncover their deeper significance. Our nation's leaders have visibly not done much better and there's a reason for this. As I explain in my recent book, To Govern the Globe, both liberal and conservative political elites in the New York-Washington corridor of power have been on top of the world for so long that they can't remember how they got there.

During the late 1940s, following a catastrophic world war that left some 70 million dead, Washington built a potent apparatus for global power, thanks significantly to its encirclement of Eurasia via both military bases and global trade. The U.S. also formed a new system of global governance, exemplified by the United Nations, that would not only assure its hegemony but also or so the hope was then foster an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity.

Three generations later, however, as populism, nationalism, and anti-globalism roiled public discourse, surprisingly few in Washington bothered to defend their world order in a meaningful way. And fewer of them still had any real grasp of the geopolitics that slippery mix of armaments, occupied lands, subordinated rulers, and logistics that has been every imperial leader's essential toolkit for the effective exercise of global power.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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