[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
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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