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Once upon a time, perhaps a century ago actually, it was probably 1959 bored by my high school American history class, I began fiddling with a sheet of paper I had hidden inside my history textbook on which I had traced a global map. I soon found myself drawing the Chinese conquest of the world (and, of course, of my own country). At the time, as I wrote back in 2014, I felt secret pleasure and entertainment in elaborating a version of the worst nightmare the anti-Communist mind could then produce: the commie conquest of the planet. Admittedly, it wasn't the Soviet Union, the other great imperial power of that moment, but Red China that I imagined on the march.
To reach the United States, tiny arrow by tiny arrow, my Chinese invaders, those blue ants (as the Chinese were then often insultingly labeled), had to cross the Bering Strait, meet up with another army routed through Greenland (you know, the country Donald Trump now so desires to possess), and then sweep down on my home in New York City. According to the date I put on that map 1968 I would have been 24 years old when I became a Red Chinese subject.
Here was the thing, though: Given the atomic weapons the U.S. had used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, the boy who made that map was part of the first generation of American children to face the possibility of human extermination at our own, not Gods, hands. It was an obliteration that could be brought about by a bunch of no-good Commies, Ruskies, Reds, but also as the real world would bring home to us on October 22, 1962 by a group of sober American strategists, by, that is, the good guys.
Back in 2014, the thing I could never have truly imagined was just how imperial America itself, uninvaded by the Chinese, would actually begin to go down or, put bluntly so many years later, I could never have imagined Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. Of course, a child creating a modern-day version of such a map would undoubtedly be doing so not on paper but on a screen of some sort. And in that context, and in the context of an imperial history of this planet that extends back to the 15th century, let TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, whose new book (due out as the year ends) is all too appropriately Cold War on Five Continents: The Geopolitics of Empire & Espionage, map out for you this country's (and the planets) imperial autumn, if not winter. Tom
In the Autumn of Americas Empire
How Trump is Demolishing U.S. Global Power and Its World Order
By Alfred McCoy
In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is eerily evocative of our current political plight, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described how a Latin American autocrat discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, [and] became convinced that the only livable life was one of show.
In amassing unchecked power spiced with unimaginable cruelty, that fictional dictator extinguished any flicker of opposition in his imaginary Caribbean country, reducing its elite to a craven set of courtiers. Even though he butchered opponents, plundered the treasury, raped the young, and reduced his nation to penury, lettered politicians and dauntless adulators proclaimed him the corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and other errors of God. When his slavishly loyal defense minister somehow displeased him, the autocrat had him served up, in full-dress uniform laden with military medals, on a silver platter with a pine-nut garnish to a table full of courtiers, forcing them to dutifully consume their slice of the cooked cadaver.
That macabre banquet presaged a recent luncheon President Donald J. Trump hosted at the White House for this nations top tech executives, which became a symphony of shameless sycophancy. Billionaire Bill Gates praised the presidents incredible leadership, while Apple CEO Tim Cook said it was incredible to be among you and the first lady before thanking him for helping American companies around the world. Other executives there celebrated him for having unleashed American innovation and creativity making it possible for America to win again and making this the most exciting time in America, ever. As Trump served up the corpse of American democracy, those tech courtiers, like so many of this country's elites, downed their slice of the cadaver with ill-concealed gusto.
With Congress compliant, the Supreme Court complicit, and media corporations compromised, President Trumps vision for America and its place in the world has become the nations destiny. Since the inauguration for his second term in office in January 2025, he has launched a radical America first foreign policy that seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington's international influence and, more seriously and much less obviously, degrade (if not destroy) the liberal international order that the U.S. has sustained since the end of World War II. Largely ignored by a media overwhelmed by daily outrages from the Oval Office, that initiative has some truly serious implications for Americas role in the world.
Trumps Geopolitical Vision
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring out of the White House, the design of the presidents dubious geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising, even stunning speed. Instead of maintaining longstanding security alliances like NATO, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered autocrat like himself with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling North and much of South America (and Greenland).
Reflecting what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a loathing of European freeloading and Vice President JD Vance's complaint that Europe has abandoned our shared democratic values, President Trump is pursuing this tri-continental strategy at the expense of the traditional transatlantic alliance embodied in NATO that has been the foundation for U.S. foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.
Admittedly, Trumps reach for complete control over North America does lend a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise quixotic overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state. In Trumps vision of fortress America, the country's more compact defense perimeter would encompass the entire Arctic, including Greenland, march down the mid-Atlantic with an anchor at the Panama Canal, and encompass the entire Pacific. Not only does such a strategy carry the high cost of alienating once-close allies Canada and Mexico, but every one of its key components comes laden with a potential for serious conflict, particularly the administrations plans for the Pacific, which run headlong into China's ongoing maritime expansion.
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