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2 Sleepwalking into the imperial
dark By Tom Engelhardt
This can't end well.
But then, how
often do empires end well, really? They live
vampire-like by feeding off others until, sooner
or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to
suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out.
Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our
case, economically stressed and militarily
extended in wars they can't afford to win or lose.
Historians have certainly written about
the dangers of overextended empires and of endless
war as a way of life, but there's something
distant and abstract about the patterns of
history. It's quite another
thing to take it in when you're part of it; when,
as they used to say in the overheated 1960s,
you're in the belly of the beast.
I don't
know what it felt like to be inside the Roman
Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before
it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of
the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing
dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first
began to set, or even of the Soviet empire before
the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan,
but at some point it must have seemed at least a
little like this - truly strange, like watching a
machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as
odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly
mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at
home even as it staggers on blindly with its
war-making abroad.
The United States is,
of course, an imperial power, however much we
might prefer not to utter the word. We still have
our globe-spanning array of semi-client states;
our military continues to garrison much of the
planet; and we are waging war abroad more
continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who
doesn't sense that the sun is now setting on us?
Not so many years ago, we were proud
enough of our global strength to regularly refer
to ourselves as the Earth's "sole superpower". In
those years, our president and his top officials
dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana,
while making speeches and issuing official
documents proclaiming that the United States would
be militarily "beyond challenge" by any and all
powers for eons to come. So little time has passed
and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?
A country in need of Prozac Have
you noticed, by the way, how repetitiously our
president, various presidential candidates, and
others now insist that we are "the greatest nation
on Earth" (as they speak of the US military being
"the finest fighting force in the history of the
world")? And yet, doesn't that phrase leave ash in
your mouth? Look at this country and its
frustrations today and tell me: does anyone
honestly believe that anymore?
It wasn't a
mistake that the fantasy avenger figure of Rambo
became immensely popular in the wake of defeat in
Vietnam or that, unlike American heroes of earlier
decades, he had such a visibly, almost risibly
overblown musculature. As eye-candy, it was pure
overcompensation for the obvious. Similarly, when
the United States was actually "the greatest" on
this planet, no one needed to say it over and over
again.
Can there be any question that
something big is happening here, even if we don't
quite know what it is because, unlike the peoples
of past empires, we never took pride in or even
were able to think of ourselves as imperial? And
if you were indeed in denial that you lived in the
belly of a great imperial power, if like most
Americans you managed to ignore the fact that we
were pouring our treasure into the military or
setting up bases in countries that few could have
found on a map, then you would naturally
experience the empire going down as if through a
glass darkly.
Nonetheless, the feelings
that should accompany the experience of an
imperial power running off the rails aren't likely
to disappear just because analysis is lacking.
Disillusionment, depression, and dismay flow ever
more strongly through the American bloodstream.
Just look at any polling data on whether this
country, once the quintessential land of
optimists, is heading in "the right direction" or
on "the wrong track," and you'll find that the
"wrong track" numbers are staggering, and growing
by the month. On the rare occasions when Americans
have been asked by pollsters whether they think
the country is "in decline", the figures have been
similarly over the top.
It's not hard to
see why. A loss of faith in the American political
system is palpable. For many Americans, it's no
longer "our government" but "the bureaucracy".
Washington is visibly in gridlock and incapable of
doing much of significance, while state
governments, facing the "steepest decline in state
tax receipts on record", are, along with local
governments, staggering under massive deficits and
cutting back in areas - education, policing,
firefighting - that matter to daily life.
Years ago, in the George W Bush era, I
wanted to put a new word in our domestic political
vocabulary: "Republican'ts." It was my way of
expressing the feeling that something basic to
this country - a "can do" spirit - was seeping
away. I failed, of course, and since then that
"can't do" spirit has visibly spread far beyond
the Republican Party. Simply put, we're a country
in need of Prozac.
Facing the challenges
of a world at the edge - from Japan to the Greater
Middle East, from a shaky global economic system
to weather that has become anything but
entertainment - the United States looks
increasingly incapable of coping. It no longer
invests in its young, or plans effectively for the
future, or sets off on new paths. It literally
can't do. And this is not just a domestic crisis,
but part of imperial decline.
We just
don't treat it as such, tending instead to deal
with the foreign and domestic as essentially
separate spheres, when the connections between
them are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull
into your nearest gas station and fill up the
tank. Of course, who doesn't know that this
country, once such a generator of wealth, is now
living with unemployment figures not seen since
the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels
of debt, that it's hooked on foreign energy (and
like most addicts has next to no capacity for
planning how to get off that drug), or that it's
living through the worst period of income
inequality in modern history? And who doesn't know
that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate
honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been
fattening themselves off the faltering body
politic?
And if you don't think any of
this has anything to do with imperial power in
decline, ask yourself why the options for our
country so often seem to have shrunk to what our
military is capable of, or that the only
significant part of the government whose budget is
still on the rise is the Pentagon. Or why, when
something is needed, this administration, like its
predecessor, regularly turns to that same
military.
Once upon a time, helping other
nations in terrible times, for example, would have
been an obvious duty of the civil part of the US
government. Today, from Haiti to Japan, in such
moments it's the US military that acts. In
response to the Japanese triple disaster of
earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, for
instance, the Pentagon has mounted a large-scale
recovery effort, involving 18,000 people, 20 US
Navy ships, and even fuel barges bringing fresh
water for reactor-cooling efforts at the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear complex. The effort has been given
a military code name, Operation Tomodachi
(Japanese for "friend"), and is, among other
things, an obvious propaganda campaign meant to
promote the usefulness of America's archipelago of
bases in that country.
Similarly, when the
administration needs something done in the Middle
East, these days it's as likely to send Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates - he recently paid
official visits to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
and Egypt - as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
And of course, as is typical, when a grim
situation in Libya worsened and something
"humanitarian" was called for, the Obama
administration (along with NATO, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization) threw air power at
it.
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