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Alfred McCoy, Climate Change as the End Game for U.S. Global Power

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Imagine this: were Donald (“Drill, Baby, Drill”) Trump to become president again in 2025, perhaps the greatest nightmare to follow would be his urge to reward the country’s major fossil-fuel companies for aiding him in his win and lend a painfully helpful hand in taking this planet down in a truly big-time way. After all, his surprise victory in 2016 was already a signal that the U.S. age of imperial dominance was ending. And as Alfred McCoy made strikingly clear in this “best of” TD piece, first published in 2019, Trump’s election then was a signal that America’s global imperial era was in distinct decline, as had been those of other great imperial powers in the course of history. The difference this time was that the decline and fall of American power globally wasn’t the only thing at stake, but the decline and fall of the planet itself to which Trump remains all too happy to lend a distinctly helping hand. That sense of double decline, imperial and planetary, historian McCoy caught brilliantly in this piece five years ago. If you didn’t read it then (and even if you did), read it (again) now! And keep in mind that, while my 2019 introduction to it is below, I did cut the note above it calling for TD readers to visit our donation page and help keep this site going. But don’t for a second doubt that TD needs you to do that no less (and perhaps more) today than it did then, so please consider lending a hand (or if you helped then, another hand!). Tom]

If you think of the age of Trump as a spectator sport, then perhaps the truly riveting show isn’t on the president’s Twitter feed or in his latest shout-outs to the press or at another of those “cabinet meetings” where everyone is obliged to publicly praise you-know-perfectly-well-who (and so does he).  I wouldn’t for a second claim that any of those weren’t spectacles in a media world in which the very word “spectacle” is now spelled D-o-n-a-l-d-T-r-u-m-p.  Still, if you’re into such things, I don’t think there’s a better one around than watching the president and his crew assiduously working to dismantle, piece by piece, an American imperial system, a genuine world order, that was almost three-quarters of a century in the making.

From his regular swipes at NATO to those threatened tariffs on German cars, from the ditching of the Iran nuclear pact to the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, from the cutting of U.N. peacekeeping funds to leaving the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, from the threats against the international criminal court to those leveled at just about any trade pact in sight, America First has turned out to be a curious kind of America Second policy.  After all, the structure of much of our planet since the middle of the last century has been an America First one (even if Donald Trump is clueless on the subject).  Now, it’s being ditched and, in doing so, The Donald seems to be speeding up a process that, historically speaking, was already underway.

In that context, TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, offers a monumental look at what American decline is likely to mean in the context of the collapse of past world orders and on a planet that, thanks to climate change, seems to be in its own kind of decline. Tom

What Does It Take to Destroy a World Order?

How Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

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Once upon a time in America, we could all argue about whether or not U.S. global power was declining. Now, most observers have little doubt that the end is just a matter of timing and circumstance. Ten years ago, I predicted that, by 2025, it would be all over for American power, a then-controversial comment that’s commonplace today. Under President Donald Trump, the once “indispensable nation” that won World War II and built a new world order has become dispensable indeed.

The decline and fall of American global power is, of course, nothing special in the great sweep of history. After all, in the 4,000 years since humanity’s first empire formed in the Fertile Crescent, at least 200 empires have risen, collided with other imperial powers, and in time collapsed. In the past century alone, two dozen modern imperial states have fallen and the world has managed just fine in the wake of their demise.

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Tomgram

Juan Cole, A Centrist Muslim Alliance Against an Extremist Israel?

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Here’s a strange connection between Israel and the United States. Let me put it to you as a kind of quiz: Which two leaders on this planet have, at least in part, organized their political lives to avoid trial convictions and/or possible jail time? Yes, in case you hadn’t guessed, I’m thinking of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former American president and once again candidate Donald Trump.

With that in mind, consider the mayhem, the literal hell on earth, that one of those two has already caused due, at least in part, to his desire not to find himself convicted in a corruption trial — and don’t hold your breath waiting for the other to repeat that, in his own fashion, whether he wins or loses the American presidency in November. At least Benjamin Netanyahu has only one trial, still ongoing in the background of the present war in Gaza and the West Bank. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has so many of them that it’s hard to count. Only the other day the judge in his New York State bribery trial, where he has indeed been found guilty of 34 felony counts, put off his sentencing from September 18th to November 26th, after the election is over. That means on Election Day, despite facing 91 felony counts across four criminal cases, he will remain a “free” man.

Of course, should Donald Trump win this November, he can shut down the ongoing federal trials completely (a good reason for him to deny losing, no matter what the vote count may be) and, like Netanyahu, potentially distract us all from his personal problems by, starting in January 2025, committing mayhem on this planet.

And with that in mind, consider it a kind of hell on Earth that Benjamin Netanyahu’s all-out war on a strip of land 25 miles long and only four to seven miles wide is about to enter its 12th month and, as TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, suggests today, is causing both chaos and a changing set of alliances in the Middle East (in which the United States could prove to be a big loser). Tom

The Sphinx and the Sultan

How Biden’s Bear Hug of Netanyahu Caused Washington’s Mideast Policy to Crash and Burn

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At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: the Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a "rules-based" international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

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Tomgram

Stan Cox, It’s Not Music to Our Ears (or Our World)

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Once upon a time, there was something thrilling in record-breaking events like Babe Ruth’s 60th home run of the 1927 season. But today, maybe not. After all, we’ve just lived through the hottest summer on record globally and, though we’ve only made it to September, this year, too, could (like last year) set a new global heat record. It’s already setting them locally, that’s for sure. Take Phoenix, Arizona. With a record-breaking heat wave continuing across the American West, that city only recently set a new record of its own: 100 straight days (yes, you read that right!) of temperatures of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher (and still going strong as I write this). Phoenix also shattered another record, experiencing the 56th day in which the temperature reached 110 degrees. (I have a feeling I should be putting exclamation points after both of those records, although count on one thing: in the years to come, they’ll undoubtedly be broken again — and again and again!)

This is the planet that we’re now on. And it’s a world that should, in every sense, take your breath away. It’s a place where, increasingly, nothing will be unaffected by climate change. And yet, with all that (and more) in mind (or do I mean out of our minds?) on a planet ever more clearly in trouble, we simply can’t stop making war and it matters not at all that war-making has a special ability to toss yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In other words, the human response to climate change is, in significant part, to ignore it or even add to its horrors. And war isn’t the only way we have of doing that, as TomDispatch regular Stan Cox makes strikingly clear today.

In fact, with all of that in mind, let him take you into another world — the universe of noise pollution and how it’s related to this (over)heating planet of ours.  Cover your ears and read on.  Tom

We’re Getting Sick of Noise Pollution

Keeping Our World Cooler Will Also Make It Quieter

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The most pressing environmental crisis of these times, our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world -- and it's not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.

Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable.

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