Monday, December 6, 2010
Columbia University -School of International Public Affaris: Pakistan 2010: The Most Dangerous Decade Begins
Pakistan 2010: The Most Dangerous Decade Begins
A symposium on one of the most volatile and strategically‐significant spots on the globe. It was hosted by the Columbia-Paris Alliance Program, the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion, the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, and the South Asia Institute. [November 10, 2010]
Introduction: Alfred Stepan and Christophe Jaffrelot (Audio)
S. Akbar Zaidi, Economic or Political Crises? Not Learning from the Past (Audio)
Aqil Shah, The Military and Democracy After Musharraf (Audio)
Hassan Abbas, Internal Security at the Time of Counter Insurgency (Audio)
Phillip Oldenburg, Will the Judiciary Save Pakistan? (Audio)
Morning Discussion (Audio)
Christine Fair, India and Pakistan in Afghanistan: Opportunities and Constraints (Audio)
Maryam Abou-Zahab, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as a Social Movement (Audio)
W.S.P Sidhu, Prospects for Normalization of Indo‐Pak Relations (Audio)
Christophe Jaffrelot, The U.S.‐Pakistan Relations at the Crossroad – Once Again (Audio)
Afternoon Discussion (Audio)
A symposium on one of the most volatile and strategically‐significant spots on the globe. It was hosted by the Columbia-Paris Alliance Program, the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion, the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, and the South Asia Institute. [November 10, 2010]
Introduction: Alfred Stepan and Christophe Jaffrelot (Audio)
S. Akbar Zaidi, Economic or Political Crises? Not Learning from the Past (Audio)
Aqil Shah, The Military and Democracy After Musharraf (Audio)
Hassan Abbas, Internal Security at the Time of Counter Insurgency (Audio)
Phillip Oldenburg, Will the Judiciary Save Pakistan? (Audio)
Morning Discussion (Audio)
Christine Fair, India and Pakistan in Afghanistan: Opportunities and Constraints (Audio)
Maryam Abou-Zahab, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as a Social Movement (Audio)
W.S.P Sidhu, Prospects for Normalization of Indo‐Pak Relations (Audio)
Christophe Jaffrelot, The U.S.‐Pakistan Relations at the Crossroad – Once Again (Audio)
Afternoon Discussion (Audio)
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Baghdad Pet Market Bombings: A case-study in Crusader-Rejectionist Collaboration
(Link) 'Abd al-Khaliq al-Muhajr
25th Dhul-Hijjah 1431 (December 1st 2010)
All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. And peace and prayers be upon the best of Creation - Muhammad ibn Abdullah - and his family, and his Companions in their entirety.
To proceed:
In the modern world, where the media has become increasingly powerful, we find that many myths have become prevalent, so the Muslim masses remain ignorant of many realities, and are all too eager to repeat falsehoods they have heard from the Disbelievers.
One of the most common myths we find repeated by the Muslims is that the Crusaders and the Rejectionists are enemies. Countless times over the past few years the media has warned that indications suggested America or Israel was preparing to attack Iran.
Senior American military officials have went before the cameras and talked about Iran supplying weapons to those fighting the Americans in Iraq, and even to the Taliban in Afghanistan! Too often I have heard Muslims express admiration (we seek Allah's protection!) for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for 'standing up' to the Americans and/or the Israelis.
The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth - the Crusaders and the Rejectionists have collaborated with one another since before the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, and continue to do so to this day. By taking just one example - for their are not enough hours in any one lifetime, however long, to fully discuss the crimes of the Rejectionists in Iraq - it is hoped that the wise reader will be able to draw his or her own conclusions about the veracity of these claims.
The bombings:
You probably remember the story quite well.
February 1st 2008.
Two female bombers killed 99 civilians in Baghdad, at two popular pet markets. The attacks (at al-Ghazal and al-Jadida markets) left more than 100 others injured.
The story:
February 1st 2008.
Two female bombers killed 99 civilians in Baghdad, at two popular pet markets. The attacks (at al-Ghazal and al-Jadida markets) left more than 100 others injured.
The story:
American military forces - before the blood had even dried on the walls - announced confidently to the whole world that the two bombers were women suffering from Down's Syndrome. Of course, there was no need to verify this information - it had come from Americans, so it must be true! - but there seemed to be an almost unbelievable need to spread and re-spread this story across the globe. Allah's stern warning to the Believers was ignored:
“O you who believe! If an evil-doer comes to you with any news, verify it, lest you should harm people out of ignorance…” [Al-Hujurat: 6]
The media - both the portion controlled by the Zionists and Crusaders, as well as the portion that claims to represent the Arabs and/or the Muslims - immediately went into overdrive, and the frenzy didn't subside for several weeks. They could hardly contain their excitement - what a wonderful opportunity to slander the Mujahideen of the Islamic State of Iraq!
On the front page of newspapers across the world, at the top of every news site on the internet, and on the news bulletins and currents affairs programmes on virtually every satellite channel on earth, the cast of those lining up to condemn the Mujahideen seemed endless: A succession of Rejectionist politicians and clerics said the case proved yet again the 'security forces' (ie death squads) needed to do more to protect the Shia civilians.
Secularist Arabs used the case to yet again attack Islam for subjugating women. Other activists said that the case highlighted the woeful treatment of the disabled in the Muslim lands. So-called military experts confidently stated that the attack was evidence that the Islamic State of Iraq had ran out of Mujahideen, and was forced to use disabled women, as there were no more men willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Allah. Of course, no one mentioned that the Islamic State of Iraq did not claim responsibility for the attack. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?? Afterwards, and very quietly, the Americans admitted that neither woman involved had Down's Syndrome. A few newspapers and websites reported this story in tiny columns, far from the front page. Most didn't bother. And then, much quieter still, unreported by virtually the entire world, the real story emerged.
“O you who believe! If an evil-doer comes to you with any news, verify it, lest you should harm people out of ignorance…” [Al-Hujurat: 6]
The media - both the portion controlled by the Zionists and Crusaders, as well as the portion that claims to represent the Arabs and/or the Muslims - immediately went into overdrive, and the frenzy didn't subside for several weeks. They could hardly contain their excitement - what a wonderful opportunity to slander the Mujahideen of the Islamic State of Iraq!
On the front page of newspapers across the world, at the top of every news site on the internet, and on the news bulletins and currents affairs programmes on virtually every satellite channel on earth, the cast of those lining up to condemn the Mujahideen seemed endless: A succession of Rejectionist politicians and clerics said the case proved yet again the 'security forces' (ie death squads) needed to do more to protect the Shia civilians.
Secularist Arabs used the case to yet again attack Islam for subjugating women. Other activists said that the case highlighted the woeful treatment of the disabled in the Muslim lands. So-called military experts confidently stated that the attack was evidence that the Islamic State of Iraq had ran out of Mujahideen, and was forced to use disabled women, as there were no more men willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Allah. Of course, no one mentioned that the Islamic State of Iraq did not claim responsibility for the attack. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?? Afterwards, and very quietly, the Americans admitted that neither woman involved had Down's Syndrome. A few newspapers and websites reported this story in tiny columns, far from the front page. Most didn't bother. And then, much quieter still, unreported by virtually the entire world, the real story emerged.
The truth:
The truth was that the Rejectionists had yet again slaughtered 99 of their own women and children, to justify the continued need for their death squads, and to excuse their subsequent slaughter of the sons of Ahlus-Sunnah. And the Americans went along quietly with this travesty. One solitary reporter chose not to blindly repeat what the Americans were telling the entire world. For whatever reason, he actually bothered to question the Crusader-Rejectionist story.
The smallest amount of digging was required and then the whole story emerged. The women who carried the explosives were Shia. The man who chose the bombers - Sahi Aboub - was Shia. The Al-Rashad hospital they were treated at was run by Shia - in fact it was entirely controlled by Jaish al-Mahdi!! All of this information was on the public record, for anyone who bothered to look.
The lessons:
This is just one case study, the same thing has happened - if on a smaller scale - hundreds, if not thousands, of times in Iraq. Those bombings of civilian locations such as markets and masjids which are not carried out by the former regime, private security contractors, or the intelligence agencies (of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel etc...) have time and again been conclusively shown to have been carried out by the Rejectionist polytheists.
They slaughter their own women and children for two main reasons, one of which relates to the domestic audience, and one to the international audience.
1)In Iraq, the main purpose of the bombings is to convince the Shia civilians that they need the death squads, that they need to put up with all the crimes and abuse these thugs carry out, or they will all by slaughtered by the 'evil Sunnis'.
2)In the rest of the world, these bombings form part of the wider Rejectionist plan to attract symptahy and support. The Rejectionists have successfully managed to convince the majority of the Disbelievers that they are the innocent victims of all the violence in Iraq.
The ones who invented all kinds of false evidence to exhort the Americans to invade Iraq, the ones who have slaughtered literally tens of thousands of Ahlus-Sunnah have somehow emerged looking like the innocent party!!
How can this be??
They have only been able to do this because the Americans have taken up this cover-story as a last resort. Their stories about Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iraqi links to September 11, and the need to capture Saddam and his sons were all exposed as lies. So the only lie they had left to cling onto was the greatest lie of all: that the Shia were the innocent ones in Iraq, and needed American protection!
So the Americans have perpetuated this myth, and the rest of the world has been happy to go along with it.
And so, the world forgets about (or doesn't even brother to report!) the hundred dead Sunnis who turn up on the streets of Baghdad, showing signs of torture before their execution, when they hear about five Shia children killed when their classroom was bombed.
So the Americans have perpetuated this myth, and the rest of the world has been happy to go along with it.
And so, the world forgets about (or doesn't even brother to report!) the hundred dead Sunnis who turn up on the streets of Baghdad, showing signs of torture before their execution, when they hear about five Shia children killed when their classroom was bombed.
The pictures of the crying women and children sifting through the rubble, the burnt textbooks, the blood on the blackboard: all this looks much better on television than the grim dignity and despair of Sunni wives and mothers, choking back their tears as they describe how men in police uniforms took their son away just yesterday - and now here is Uthman or Umar, lying dead on the streets of Baghdad.
The Americans claim that they oppose Iran, and of course Iran tries to paint itself as the most anti-American place on earth.
It is true that they have some areas of disagreement, but they have one thing which binds them tightly together - their fear of, and hatred towards, Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah!
Winston Churchill once said, when criticised for looking into the possibility of forming an alliance with Joseph Stalin: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
It is true that they have some areas of disagreement, but they have one thing which binds them tightly together - their fear of, and hatred towards, Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah!
Winston Churchill once said, when criticised for looking into the possibility of forming an alliance with Joseph Stalin: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
In other words, the Disbelievers will work with anyone at all (including Satan himself!) if they think it will assist them in the war against their real enemy.
And so these two parties, who hurl abuse at one another in public, have entered into a Satanic alliance in private, with the subjugation (and eventual annihilation!) of Ahlus-Sunnah wal Jamaah as its primary objective!
O Ahlus-Sunnah! When will you wake up??
When will you listen to the command of Allah:
"So fight ye against the friends of Satan: feeble indeed is the cunning of Satan" [4: 76]
O Ahlus Sunnah! Just look at the evidence in front of you!!
Why is that al-Qaim, Fallujah and Ramadi were subject to unrelenting brutality, while Basra, Nasiriyah and Najaf remained untouched?
Why is it that many thousands of Crusader forces still rampage across Helmand and Marjah, while Bamyan and Mizar-i-Sharif have only a handful of troops, who can walk around freely, without fear of attack from the local (Shia) populace?
It was part of the understanding between the Crusaders and the Rejectionists that when the Crusaders pour into a Muslim land - under the pretext of 'liberating' the Arab Rejectionists in Iraq or their Hazara brethren in Afghanistan - they will not send their forces into the areas controlled by the Rejectionists.
Indeed they help the Rejectionists 'cleanse' areas like Baghdad - which previously had a mixed population - and make them into new strongholds for the Rejectionist polytheists.
And so these two parties, who hurl abuse at one another in public, have entered into a Satanic alliance in private, with the subjugation (and eventual annihilation!) of Ahlus-Sunnah wal Jamaah as its primary objective!
O Ahlus-Sunnah! When will you wake up??
When will you listen to the command of Allah:
"So fight ye against the friends of Satan: feeble indeed is the cunning of Satan" [4: 76]
O Ahlus Sunnah! Just look at the evidence in front of you!!
Why is that al-Qaim, Fallujah and Ramadi were subject to unrelenting brutality, while Basra, Nasiriyah and Najaf remained untouched?
Why is it that many thousands of Crusader forces still rampage across Helmand and Marjah, while Bamyan and Mizar-i-Sharif have only a handful of troops, who can walk around freely, without fear of attack from the local (Shia) populace?
It was part of the understanding between the Crusaders and the Rejectionists that when the Crusaders pour into a Muslim land - under the pretext of 'liberating' the Arab Rejectionists in Iraq or their Hazara brethren in Afghanistan - they will not send their forces into the areas controlled by the Rejectionists.
Indeed they help the Rejectionists 'cleanse' areas like Baghdad - which previously had a mixed population - and make them into new strongholds for the Rejectionist polytheists.
Certainly the Rejectionists killed some American soldiers in Iraq - the Americans are more than willing to allow a few of their miserable soldiers to be killed to ensure continued the co-operation of Iran!
Meanwhile, the Rejectionists know that they need to kill a few Americans to ensure the continued support of their allies. Why do you think Ahmadinejad spends so much time visiting leaders like Hugo Chavez?
The Rejectionists (with the full support of America) are trying to position themselves as a regional power, and are making alliances with Disbelievers of all persuasions to achieve this goal. They fight for not for the sake of Allah, to make His Word Supreme, but to be seen as an anti-colonial, anti-Western power.
Meanwhile, the Rejectionists know that they need to kill a few Americans to ensure the continued support of their allies. Why do you think Ahmadinejad spends so much time visiting leaders like Hugo Chavez?
The Rejectionists (with the full support of America) are trying to position themselves as a regional power, and are making alliances with Disbelievers of all persuasions to achieve this goal. They fight for not for the sake of Allah, to make His Word Supreme, but to be seen as an anti-colonial, anti-Western power.
They are not even ashamed of the fact that Allah has said of them:
"Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who Disbelieve fight in the cause of Idols" [4: 76]
The handful of Rejectionists the Americans dared to arrest (such as Laith and Qais al-Khazali) have long since been released, while countless thousands of Sunnis remain imprisoned in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conclusion:
Having achieved virtually all of their short-term goals in Iraq, especially the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, the Rejectionists have less motivation to carry out these wide scale indiscriminate bombings than before. But their hatred of Ahlus-Sunnah has not decreased at all: indeed the heroic way in which the greatly outnumbered Sunnis fought the Rejectionists, and the painful blows the Sunnis inflicted on them have only increased their hatred.
The Rejectionists are biding their time, waiting for the American withdrawal, before they move into the next phase of their war against Ahlus-Sunnah. But in order to keep a large standing army ready for the coming conflict, they need to keep on providing reasons why the militias (ie death squads) are needed, hence they need to carry out sporadic attacks similar to the ones that have been mentioned.
So the next time you hear about a bombing in a Shia civilian area, ask yourself: who really benfits from this attack?
And brothers, remember what Allah has said:
“O you who believe! If an evil-doer comes to you with any news, verify it, lest you should harm people out of ignorance…” [Al-Hujurat: 6]
O Allah! Foil the plots of the Spiteful Rejectionists and their Crusader Allies!
O Allah! Expose what they have done in secret to the whole world!
O Allah! Cause enmity and hatred to grow between them!
O Allah! Punish them for their crimes against the Muslims in this world, and the next!
Open the eyes of the people! Soften their hearts to their Mujahideen brothers who have left their homes and their families to defend the Muslim women and children!
O Allah! Grant victory to the sincere Mujahideen fighting all over the world!
And our final prayer is that all praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
Having achieved virtually all of their short-term goals in Iraq, especially the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, the Rejectionists have less motivation to carry out these wide scale indiscriminate bombings than before. But their hatred of Ahlus-Sunnah has not decreased at all: indeed the heroic way in which the greatly outnumbered Sunnis fought the Rejectionists, and the painful blows the Sunnis inflicted on them have only increased their hatred.
The Rejectionists are biding their time, waiting for the American withdrawal, before they move into the next phase of their war against Ahlus-Sunnah. But in order to keep a large standing army ready for the coming conflict, they need to keep on providing reasons why the militias (ie death squads) are needed, hence they need to carry out sporadic attacks similar to the ones that have been mentioned.
So the next time you hear about a bombing in a Shia civilian area, ask yourself: who really benfits from this attack?
And brothers, remember what Allah has said:
“O you who believe! If an evil-doer comes to you with any news, verify it, lest you should harm people out of ignorance…” [Al-Hujurat: 6]
O Allah! Foil the plots of the Spiteful Rejectionists and their Crusader Allies!
O Allah! Expose what they have done in secret to the whole world!
O Allah! Cause enmity and hatred to grow between them!
O Allah! Punish them for their crimes against the Muslims in this world, and the next!
Open the eyes of the people! Soften their hearts to their Mujahideen brothers who have left their homes and their families to defend the Muslim women and children!
O Allah! Grant victory to the sincere Mujahideen fighting all over the world!
And our final prayer is that all praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
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.
Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.
No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.
By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.
Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.
Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”
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.
Economic Decline: Present Situation
Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.
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.
Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.
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.
Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”
Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”
Economic Decline: Scenario 2020
After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.
Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.
Oil Shock: Present Situation
One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”
By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”
Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.
Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise -- and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66%.
Oil Shock: Scenario 2025
The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.
With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region -- logistics, exchange rates, and naval power -- evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.
Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.
Military Misadventure: Present Situation
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.
Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014
So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.
It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.
Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.
Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.
World War III: Present Situation
In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.
With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”
Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.
To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones -- reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.
Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.
World War III: Scenario 2025
The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.
It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.
The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.
Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.
As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.
A New World Order?
Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.
As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.
Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.
As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S.
In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.
Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region -- Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.
All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.
If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.
If only 17 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.
Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author, most recently, of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009). He is also the convener of the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings at Madison, Sydney, and Manila were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State and the findings from their latest conference will appear next year as “Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and the Decline of U.S. Global Power.”
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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.
Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.
No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.
By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.
Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.
Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”
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.
Economic Decline: Present Situation
Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.
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.
Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.
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.
Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”
Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”
Economic Decline: Scenario 2020
After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.
Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.
Oil Shock: Present Situation
One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”
By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”
Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.
Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise -- and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66%.
Oil Shock: Scenario 2025
The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.
With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region -- logistics, exchange rates, and naval power -- evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.
Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.
Military Misadventure: Present Situation
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.
Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014
So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.
It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.
Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.
Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.
World War III: Present Situation
In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.
With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”
Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.
To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones -- reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.
Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.
World War III: Scenario 2025
The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.
It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.
The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.
Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.
As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.
A New World Order?
Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.
As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.
Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.
As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S.
In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.
Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region -- Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.
All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.
If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.
If only 17 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.
Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author, most recently, of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009). He is also the convener of the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings at Madison, Sydney, and Manila were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State and the findings from their latest conference will appear next year as “Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and the Decline of U.S. Global Power.”
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Violence in Tajikistan
By Joshua KuceraA wave of violence in Tajikistan is raising fears that the government is losing control of parts of the country. It’s a dangerous development in unstable Central Asia.
Tajikistan's current crisis began on August 22, when a group of 25 prisoners escaped from a top-security prison in the capital city of Dushanbe, killing five guards in the process. The escapees included several high-profile opposition figures, including some with Islamist sympathies. And, while a handful were apprehended, most of them disappeared.Since then, there have been a number of dramatically violent incidents across the country. On September 3, a pair of suicide bombers drove an explosive-laden car into a police station in Khujand, the second city of Tajikistan, killing four people and injuring dozens more. On September 19, 26 government troops – mainly young, poorly trained conscripts – were killed in an ambush in the Rasht Valley, a narrow stretch of Tajikistan between the Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan borders. On October 6, at least 27 government troops were killed in a military helicopter crash in the Rasht Valley; residents say that the helicopter was shot down. And earlier this month, police said a woman in the far northern Isfara region blew herself up when they tried to arrest her.
All this has been an unwelcome reminder of the civil war of 1992-1997, where different government factions, backed by rival clan groups, fought and killed as many as 100,000 people. The war ended in a power-sharing agreement, with the winning faction, led by President Emomali Rahmon, a former collective farm boss, ceding some positions in the government and security forces to the losing factions, which included both Islamists and liberals.
But as the years have passed, Rahmon has increasingly lost interest in sharing his power, and has consolidated authority around a small group of family members and allies from his home region of Kulyab, shutting out not only the Islamists and liberals but more and more of his former allies. He has cartoonishly put forward his children as potential future leaders: his daughter has been a TV news presenter – aged 16. His eldest son is a member of the Dushanbe city council, owns (as well as plays on) the national champions soccer team, and heads the Youth Union of Tajikistan and an investment-promotion agency. He’s 22. Meanwhile, many parts of the country have electricity for only an hour a day, and young Tajik men migrate abroad, especially to Russia, in droves to find jobs.
As a result of the narrowing of the circle of power, Rahmon has accumulated plenty of enemies, and so it's not clear who’s behind the recent rash of violence, or indeed if any single group is responsible.
The government has tried to pin the violence on transnational Islamist terror groups and attributed the suicide bombing in Khujand to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The IMU, while initially made up of Islamist opponents to the government of Uzbekistan, has focused more recently on Afghanistan and Pakistan than Central Asia. It remains, however, a favourite bogeyman for Central Asian leaders who want to claim that their opponents are implacable international jihadis rather than homegrown political opposition, so many observers are suspicious of the government's blaming of the IMU.
Meanwhile, a previously unknown group calling itself Jamaat Ansarullah in Tajikistan, with apparent ties to the North Caucasus, claimed responsibility for the attack, and Rahmon said in a news conference that the group may in fact exist and that it is tied to the IMU. Government officials also attributed the suicide bombing in Isfara to the IMU; the woman who killed herself was the widow of a former IMU regional commander killed in 2006. (It appears unlikely at this point, however, that the incidents in Khujand and Isfara are connected to the uprising in Rasht.)
And the IMU itself claimed responsibility for the ambush in Rasht, though many local analysts believe that it may not be the work of the IMU proper, but instead local Islamists with loose allegiances to the organisation, and that the IMU may be trying to inflate its importance by claiming a presence in Central Asia that it doesn't actually have.
There’s no doubt, however, that the uprising in Rasht is the work of disillusioned Tajiks. The government has blamed the ambush in Rasht on a group of former fighters in the civil war, including Mirzokhuja Ahmadov, Abdullo Rahimov (known as Mullo Abdullo) and Alovaddin Davlatov. Abdullo refused to abide by the peace deal of 1997 and instead fled to Afghanistan; the government now claims that he may have re-entered Tajikistan, though other sources claim that he was killed in Afghanistan in the early 2000s but that the government continues to use him as an Islamist whipping boy. (Taliban sources in northern Afghanistan, however, did tell Newsweek that between 70 and 150 of their members have crossed into Tajikistan in recent months.)
Ahmadov, by contrast, did take part in the power-sharing deal and was brought into the government security structures as a colonel in charge of a division combating organized crime. But he had clearly grown dissatisified with the direction of the government. In late August, Ahmadov gave an interview with Der Spiegel in which he expressed his discontent with Rahmon. ‘The leadership promised the former opposition land and loans, but we got nothing,’ he said. ‘Instead we are being watched around the clock. They apparently don't trust us at all anymore. Our fighters' old camps in the mountains are filling up again. It's very possible that the civil war will be reignited soon.’
Rasht's residents are embittered by the government's malevolent neglect of their region, and by the brutality of military conscription. All young males are supposed to serve two years in the armed forces, but the experience is so miserable that many refuse, and the government has resorted to press-ganging. That has created a young populace that’s receptive to calls by leaders like Ahmadov to resist the government. And while religion isn't the focus of the uprising, it has taken on a tint of Islam, the only ideology available to most Tajiks that provides a framework to understand the injustice of their government.
‘The outbreak of violence is only partially about Islam and the state. It’s also about central control over regions which have never been fully under the control of Dushanbe,’ writes John Heathershaw, an expert on Tajikistan at the University of Exeter, in the upcoming issue of the Caucasian Review of International Affairs. ‘It is about the brutality of conscription as an institution, the hopelessness generated by the difficulties of migration and the hidden resentment against the government in many peripheral regions.’
The Institute for War and Peace Reporting reported that a government delegation went to Rasht in September to try to gain Ahmodov's cooperation in capturing Abdullo. But if that was the case, it apparently failed, and government officials subsequently named Ahmadov as the ringleader of the ambush, and claimed that he and Abdullo had been running Islamist terror training camps for youth.
Although the conflict's roots are primarily local, it could have regional implications. While the rebels don't appear to have the ability to take over the central government in Dushanbe, nor does the central government appear to have the capacity to defeat the rebels. That suggests the possibility a long-term power vacuum in a part of Tajikistan that borders northern Afghanistan and southern Kyrgyzstan, both of which are themselves becoming more and more unstable.
It could also draw in the big powers. Russia maintains a large military base outside Dushanbe and while Tajikistan's relationship with Russia has lately deteriorated, some in Dushanbe believe that the government may eventually have to call on Russian help. The United States, too, has announced plans for a counterterror training facility in Tajikistan.
This month, the government announced that it was withdrawing troops from the Rasht Valley, and Rahmon said the situation is ‘under control.’ At this point, that seems a little optimistic.
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The Institute for War and Peace Reporting reported that a government delegation went to Rasht in September to try to gain Ahmodov's cooperation in capturing Abdullo. But if that was the case, it apparently failed, and government officials subsequently named Ahmadov as the ringleader of the ambush, and claimed that he and Abdullo had been running Islamist terror training camps for youth.
Although the conflict's roots are primarily local, it could have regional implications. While the rebels don't appear to have the ability to take over the central government in Dushanbe, nor does the central government appear to have the capacity to defeat the rebels. That suggests the possibility a long-term power vacuum in a part of Tajikistan that borders northern Afghanistan and southern Kyrgyzstan, both of which are themselves becoming more and more unstable.
It could also draw in the big powers. Russia maintains a large military base outside Dushanbe and while Tajikistan's relationship with Russia has lately deteriorated, some in Dushanbe believe that the government may eventually have to call on Russian help. The United States, too, has announced plans for a counterterror training facility in Tajikistan.
This month, the government announced that it was withdrawing troops from the Rasht Valley, and Rahmon said the situation is ‘under control.’ At this point, that seems a little optimistic.
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