Is the American empire already over?

All we [in Canada] seem to do these days is argue about the United States. And the arguments are awfully sparse, aren't they? Either our neighbour is the most powerful nation on Earth, a menacing imperialist intruder that we must resist, or it's the most powerful nation on Earth, a beneficial force of democracy and peace that we must join and support.

Under this school of thought, the United States stopped being the world's dominant nation years ago, and has quietly collapsed into being Just Another Country. We haven't really noticed this, the theory goes, because most other countries still act as if the United States has its old military and financial power, an assumption that could be stripped of its invisible clothes in the event of a protracted Iraq war.

This is not a fringe theory. It comes from within the United States, from respected political scientists on the Ivy League campuses. Why does it get such little play? Both the left and the right have their entire houses built on the notion of a fixed and immutable American hegemony, pro- or anti-. Somewhere between these poles is this small community of thinkers, declaring that the end has already occurred.

"The United States has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this decline." So says Immanuel Wallerstein, the Yale University political scientist who is by far the most outspoken member of this camp. A gravelly old contrarian with little time for the orthodoxies of the left or the right, he may have gained his remove by teaching at McGill University in the 1970s.

In a forthcoming book, to be titled Decline of American Power, he describes his country as "a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control."

In his view, America gave up the ghost in 1974, when it admitted defeat in Vietnam and discovered that the conflict had more or less exhausted the gold reserves, crippling its ability to remain a major economic power. It has remained the focus of the world's attention partly for lack of any serious challenger to the greenback for the world's savings, and because it has kept attracting foreign investments at a rate of US $1.2 billion per day.

But if it comes to a crunch, the United States can no longer prevail either economically or -- here is the most controversial statement -- militarily. In Mr. Wallerstein's calculus, of the three major wars the United States has fought since the Second World War, one was a defeat and two (Korea and the Gulf War) were draws.

Iraq, he told me recently, would be an end game. "The policy of the U.S. government, which all administrations have been following since the seventies, has been to slow down the decline by pushing on all fronts. The hawks currently in power have to work very, very hard twisting arms very, very tightly to get the minimal legal justification for Iraq that they want now. This kind of thing, they used to get with a snap of the fingers."

You don't have to agree with Mr. Wallerstein's hyperbolic view to be a member of the Over camp -- and many do disagree: When he first brought it up in the journal Foreign Policy this summer, half a dozen editorial writers in the United States attacked him. But more moderate thinkers have joined the club, including Charles Kupchan at Georgetown University, whose forthcoming book The End of the American Era makes a similar point in more subtle terms.

Joseph Nye at Harvard, a friend of Henry Kissinger's, argues in his new book The Paradox of American Power that "world politics is changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone" -- a tacit acknowledgment of Mr. Wallerstein's thesis.

This is how great powers end: Not by suddenly collapsing, but by quietly becoming Just Another Country. This happened to England around 1873, but it wasn't until 1945 that anyone there noticed.

Outsiders do notice. Spend some time talking to a currency trader or a foreign financier, and you'll glimpse the end of the almighty dollar: Right now, about 70 per cent of the world's savings are in greenbacks, while America contributes about 30 per cent of the world's production -- an imbalance that has been maintained for the past 30 years only because Japan collapsed and Europe took too long to get its house together.

A Japanese CEO told me this in blunt terms the other day: "It was Clinton's sole great success that he kept the world economy in dollars for 10 years longer than anyone thought he would. But nobody's staying in dollars any more."

There are other signs: The middling liberals, who in the 1960s would have sided with the left in opposing U.S. imperialism, are today begging for an empire. Michael Ignatieff, the liberal scholar, argued at length recently that the United States ought to become an imperial force -- on humanitarian grounds. Would this argument be necessary if the United States actually dominated the world?

I'm not sure whether to fully believe the refreshing arguments of Mr. Wallerstein and his friends, but they do have history on their side. In their times, Portugal, Holland, Spain, France, and England all woke up to discover, far after the fact, that they were no longer the big global powers, but Just Another Country.

Like the bewildered Englishmen in Robert Altman's Gosford Park, they struggled to maintain their dignity while wondering just what those strange visitors from abroad were talking about.

Thanks for your reply. You've made some excellent points. Perhaps since me and my friends was in the military in the mid-sixties we are somewhat out of date with our thinking, although we like to stay abreast of the lastest happenings with our armed services.

Certainly there are no countries present which can match our total military power and modern technology and the weakening of the russians has most certainly decreased our needs in numbers of manpower and equipment.Though a reduction of both where certainly called for and prudent I'm afraid the reduction has gone too far especially since we are talking about putting troops in Iraq.

The Gulf war proved that we still had need of a fairly strong conventional force of men and equipment. I think our up front number of men and equipment are good and of good quality. However, one of the most vital things a military needs to assure victory has always been is a good readily available reserve of men and equipment. As we are spread pretty thin around the world in some farily vital ares this is what concerns me.

We've already had in the last number of years of complaints from the backbone of military the NCO's of lack of manpower,lack of properly maintained equipment,lack of parts even to the point of large number of them retiring in frustration. We have had air force, navy and marine pilots retiring because of being overused and stretched to thin. We have the same complaints with the guys who man our aircrat carriersabut long tours at sea.

I just hope we don't get several thousand troops in a hostile country and they end up cut off and us unable to extract or re-enforce them. There are times we you are attempting to occupy by force which is what it seems we are talking about, when because of proximity of our troops we cannot use nuclear waepons. If saddam doesn't step down on his own or is not eliminated by one close to him our troops are going to be facing a madman who doesn't care who he takes with him.

I just don't like relying on kurds, republican guard deflections and allies like France and arabs for the safety of our troops if we happen to hit a rough spot. I don't want another Somalia.

Good idea we general do the same with the checkbook. This scam is somehting they seem to do only when you ask for a payout and they know that you are cancelling you card and will not be doing any more business with them. Then they don't give you the correct payoff and hold back a few dollars.

Then they won't send you a bill for several months letting the charges build up and you're not expecting any bill because you think you have paid it off. That way they can pick up a couple of hundred bucks of pure profit at no risk because they already have your payoff and you have closed your account and can't charge anything. Since you have already closed your account they are not losing a customer either.

You either have to pay it or let the charges keep adding up every month and hurting your credit.They know you are not going to get a lawyer and take them to court for a couple of hundred dollars because it would cost you too much up front and if you lose it could cost you several thousand.

The problem for our friends north of the border is twofold:

1. With the current exchange rate betweent the American vs. Canadian dollar, the entire country of Canada can be bought lock, stock, and barrel for about $4,000.

2. A well armed boy scout troop could cross the border into Canada and within about 30 minutes declare victory. Canada's swiftness in surrendering to the U.S. would be surpassed only by the damn' Frogs (France.) And France would surrender if we invaded Canada too!

Need I remind the author of this trash, if it weren't for us here in the U.S. visiting Niagra Falls on the Canadian side like we've been (because we all know the U.S. side of the falls SUCKS!!) their country might just well be broke.

And then we could probably buy it on the Country Auction Block for about $200.

.../humor

I don't remember saying anything about international law. There are international bodies responsible for nonproliferation that don't require Great Powers to be effective. Instead they rely on carrots and small sticks (trade sanctions) to goad countries into not proliferating nuclear weapons. It works pretty well. It has kept the world from becoming a nuclear hodge podge which would have certainly benefitted terrorists by now.

As for all those historical details, I think you are looking at things from the wrong perspective. Your arguments against Hitler and Japan would have fallen pretty flat back then. The plain and simple fact is that war against Hitler and the Japanese wasn't justified even by the propaganda of the day, only some of which turned out to be true. Only later facts and convenient historical emphases justified our entry into the war.

Finally you are missing the point that war eventually leads to more war. WWI helped create communism and WWI and communism helped create Hitler.

The first generation almost never assimilates.

I've lived in the Midwest and saw Dutch, Greek, Italian, Polish, Vietnamese and other first generation immigrants speaking English well enough. They may not fully assimilate in all ways but they did all seem eager to learn the common language of this country. You don't see much of that in the SW with many of the immigrants from Mexico who have no interest in learning English. I recently saw a Vietnamese father speaking with his son in heavily accented English but you rarely see Mexican parents speak English with their children. If the children learn English it has to be the government teaching --but now the schools offer classes in Spanish. One third of the people here don't speak English and only one fourth were born in Mexico. A certain percent born in Mexico speaks English so many US born aren't learning English.

Firstly, our native population is replacing itself at a greater rate than you suspect.

I had read that "natives" (not really, but there's no one word for not-recently-immigrated) were at fertility levels of about 1.9, well below replacement, which is 2.1. (Europe is currently at 1.5-1.6.) Not that this makes a particular difference, though, as affluence has brought down fertility rates worldwide. It was doing so even before the wave of immigration early in the last century.

Secondly, this may surprise you, but hispanic immigrants are learning English. [...]The Islamic immigrant thing is a bugaboo.

I may have given the wrong impression, but I happen to agree with you on both points. I don't like seeing many others on FR playing both sides of the immigration issue when it suits them to do so. Nor does it make sense to ignore the immigrants' entrepreneurial element, and I'm not talking about drug dealing.

I see constant advertising for "Ingles" courses on the many L.A.-area Spanish-language channels. They're impossible to miss, even if one only surfs past them. I see Hispanic folk reading such books, or carrying such tapes, in nearly every Jack-in-the-Box. It's a market phenomenon that has gone completely under the radar of most political commentators. As you say, most know the way the linguistic bread of success is buttered.

The Islamic immigration will take decades to even begin to approach the proportion of Jews on this continent. Assimilation is neither as simple nor as universal as those who want an Enemy Among Us tend to assume.

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