Predicting the Collapse of the American Empire

Here is the start of an excellent essay by Alfred W. McCoy on the coming collapse of the American empire:

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025

By Alfred W. McCoy

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

I'm not convinced as McCoy is that China is on an "upward trajectory". This sounds too much like the doomsayers of the late 1970s early 1980s predicting that Japan would soon buy out and shut down America. Instead, Japan blew up. I would guess that the chance that a regime run by ex-Communists will blow up before it "dominates" the world. You saw how quickly internal rebellion can arise with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

The US is in decline and has been since the Vietnam war. While its military dominance dazzled in the post-Communist era of the early 1990s, even this was quickly shown to be a "paper tiger" when Clinton cut-and-ran from Somalia and failed to face down terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.

McCoy focuses on four scenarios that he thinks are the most likely to occur:

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

I don't think WWIII is all that likely. But I do see a mixture of his scenarios 1 thru 3 as the likely path. Like all good academics, McCoy teases out and develops an abstraction in pure form. But the real world is messy, confused, and complex. The future will be a murky combination of factors that drag the US down.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

And this:

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

This insight by McCoy strikes me as sound and a reliable basis for predicting a fast decline of the American empire:

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

I'm not as gloomy as McCoy. Probably because I'm a Canadian. I see the demise of American dominance as a positive outcome. In a more realistic multi-polar world, the community of nations will have to go back to work on the United Nations and turn it into an effective governing mechanism and not just a glorified debating society.

I have found that most doomsayers get it wrong. The future is actually better than the professional pessimists claim it to be. That is not to say that everything will come up smelling like roses. Unforeseen catastrophes can overtake us (much like the sudden economic collapse of 2008). But I think the world will muck through. The positive message is that the world will be a more "adult place" once America is dethroned and the community of nations has to work collectively to ensure that Earth remains a habitable and healthy place.