The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Economic Decline, Military Misadventure, New World Order
13 December 2010By 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 15 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."
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a
weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady
flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom
Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder
of the American Empire Project, author of The End of
Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of
Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of
War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket
Books).]
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