Alfred W. McCoy on the the causes and consequences at home and abroad of U.S. global decline.
President Donald Trump with advisers at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, on Feb. 28, the day they started the U.S.-Israeli aggression on Iran, (White House/Daniel Torok / Public Domain)
By Alfred McCoy
TomDispatch.com
While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it’s becoming increasingly clear that U.S. military might is no longer capable of subduing even a mid-sized power like Iran, much less holding the rest of the world in its thrall.
Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events in the Persian Gulf — dynamics best seen by comparing two newspaper editorials with revealing similarities despite the 80 years separating their publication.
Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience.
With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.”
Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent — naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states” — faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.
Writing in a May 2026 edition of The New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of U.S. global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago.
Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”
At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.”
Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.” Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”
To test the probability of Caldwell’s prediction coming true, we need to go beyond the immediacy of the Iran crisis to explore both the deeper causes of U.S. global decline and its likely long-term consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world.
Explaining US Imperial Decline
Since most Americans came late (if at all) to the realization that their country was indeed an imperial power, and a stunningly powerful one at that, they have generally remained oblivious to its aging and the inevitable erosion of global power that accompanies such aging.
Ever since, in the late 18th century, English scholar Edward Gibbon published his monumental, multi-volume study, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, succeeding imperial rulers have tended to assume that their imperial realms would last, like ancient Rome’s, half a millennium or more. Adolf Hitler, with his dream of “the Thousand-Year Reich,” was hardly the only one to share such an illusion.
But the modern age, with its rapid economic and technological change, has only accelerated imperial decline. Britain’s sprawling global empire lasted just 90 years (1857-1947) and France’s African empire, covering a quarter of that continent, was about the same, while the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe barely lasted 40 years (1945-1989). So, for the U.S. global imperium to have survived for 80 years (1945-2026) should be considered the most anyone could realistically expect for a modern empire.
Since the U.S.-led global order — exemplified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) — had indeed presided over 80 years of sustained global economic growth, there is a distinctly American twist to the British concept of the “self-liquidating concern.”
As the rest of the world enjoyed a rapid economic recovery from the ravages of World War II, America’s share of the global economy declined from an overwhelmingly dominant 50 percent in 1945 to less than half that figure today.
Using an index called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that measures the real value of economic growth, the IMF calculates that, in 2026, China is producing 20 percent of global economic output, the U.S. just 15 percent and the European Union (EU) 14 percent.
Dormant steel stacks of Bethlehem Steel at the company’s manufacturing headquarters in Bethlehem. In 2007. (Maurice Jon /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
But the relative economic decline of the United States should by no means be the crucial measure of its failure. Quite the opposite, in fact. It should be considered a tribute to Washington’s success in leading the world economy to unprecedented prosperity.
In those 80 years since the end of World War II, the U.S. economy has grown fast, but many other nations have grown faster still. An economic giant that could structure the global economy as it wished in 1945, the U.S. must now negotiate the terms of trade with a host of peer rivals — whether economic powers like China, major players like India and Japan, or a growing number of regional blocs like the European Union, South America’s Mercosur and Asia’s ASEAN.
Probe deeper for the forces now driving America’s decline and you’ll notice an underlying geopolitical dimension. As I explained in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, the U.S. achieved its global hegemony after World War II by maintaining an unwavering geo-strategic dominance over the Eurasian land mass. Through its military alliances at both axial ends of that vast continent — the multilateral North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West and five bilateral defense pacts with countries ranging from Japan to Australia in the east — the U.S. imposed an “Iron Curtain” of 5,000 miles of anti-communist containment across Eurasia.
Using those axial ends as anchors, the U.S. encircled the continent with three naval armadas, hundreds of military bases and thousands of jet aircraft. With Moscow geopolitically isolated and Beijing still a developing power, Washington could simply sit back and wait for the Soviet Union’s increasingly stagnant socialist economy to collapse and its dozens of restive satellite states to break free — as they all did between 1989 and 1991.
In the 35 years since that great Cold War victory, Washington’s foreign policy elites have pursued policies that might all too accurately be branded “bipartisan mismanagement” of the U.S. geopolitical position in Eurasia.
Eurasia, orthographic projection. (Keepscases, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
As home to 70 percent of the world’s population and an even greater share of its productivity, that continent remains the epicenter of global power (as it has been for the past 500 years). No nation can contend for world leadership without competing for geopolitical influence there.
From 2001 to 2021, both Democratic and Republican administrations oversaw long-term military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of American lives, millions of civilian deaths, and trillions of dollars in treasure. While Washington was wasting an estimated $5.8 trillion on those pointless, profitless wars, China’s foreign currency reserves surged from just $200 billion in 2001 to a massive $4 trillion by 2014.
Drawing on such unprecedented reserves, President Xi Jinping launched his trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative that quickly laid down a grid of railroads, roads, pipelines and ports across Eurasia from the Baltic to the South China Sea.
By the time American troops finished their humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021, China had become the dominant power in Central Asia and the U.S. position in Eurasia was starting to crumble.
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In his second term, President Trump’s foreign policy has further weakened the U.S. global position. At the western axial end of the Eurasian continent, he compromised NATO, the largest and longest-lasting alliance in modern military history, by pressing Denmark, a founding member of the alliance, to cede its sovereign territory of Greenland, creating a serious crisis and compelling the Europeans to begin acting autonomously when it came to both trade and defense issues.
At the eastern end of Eurasia, Trump’s intervention in Iran and the blocking of key oil supplies to Asia, thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, weakened longstanding bilateral alliances with Australia, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea.
The thousands of missiles the U.S. has fired at Iran have also reduced its ability to defend the island of Taiwan and forced Washington to begin withdrawing stocks of missiles from South Korea — exposing both the limits of its military power and Asia’s lowered priority.
As The New York Times editorial board put it after Trump’s recent Beijing summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (where the U.S. president showed a “worrisome lack of interest” in Taiwan), “America’s inability to defeat Iran’s much smaller military has raised questions about whether it could help defend Taiwan from a mainland invasion.” If China ultimately takes that island, the U.S. defensive perimeter in the Pacific would be pushed back from the “first island chain” (Japan-Taiwan-the Philippines) to the “second island chain” (Japan-Guam) — inflicting a major geopolitical blow on the U.S. by crippling its capacity to aid its Asian allies.
More broadly, the Trump administration’s plans, as stated in its recent National Security Strategy, for “a readjustment of our global military presence” by shifting forces into the Western Hemisphere would be tantamount, if fully implemented, to a unilateral surrender in what foreign policy experts have come to call “the new Cold War” with Beijing and Moscow.
Imperial Energy
The China Energy Engineering Corporation’s 50 MW Hami concentrated solar power tower in the Gobi Desert has eight hours of molten-salt storage. (Csp.guru /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Probe deeper still for the causes of the ongoing all-American imperial decline and you’ll come to the most fundamental but generally least noted factor in the rise and fall of every world empire for the past 500 years: energy innovation.
In the 16th century, Spain and Portugal maximized the caloric output of the human body by developing the slave plantation, whose phenomenal profitability allowed a uniquely cruel form of commercial agriculture to spread from West Africa along the coast of Brazil to the Caribbean and then, of course, to the American South.
A century later, the Dutch mastered wind power, using windmills to saw uniform planks to build efficient sailing ships that won them a commercial empire stretching from the Spice Islands of Indonesia to the island of Manhattan.
In the 19th century, Britain’s industrial revolution developed coal-fired steam engines for factories, trains and ships that facilitated its conquest of colonies covering a quarter of the globe.
After 1945, America’s ascent to global hegemony would be synonymous with the rise of petroleum, quickly supplanting coal as the world’s primary form of energy and leading to repeated U.S. interventions in the Middle East for the past 70 years.
In recent years, however, Beijing has launched a revolution in green energy from the sun and wind whose accelerating pace, driven by its sheer economic efficiency, has the potential to transform much of the global economy, while simultaneously making China the world’s preeminent economic power. With surprising speed, solar-powered electrical generation has become 41 percent less expensive (and wind 53 percent cheaper) than the least expensive form of fossil fuel.
In addition, engineering innovations in battery design for both driving and electrical storage are likely to make the cost of carbon-fueled power prohibitively expensive within a decade or less.
Under the Biden administration, Washington invested a trillion dollars to fund America’s baby steps toward a green-energy future. However, as soon as Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he began working to smother that infant initiative in its cradle beneath a sheaf of executive orders — canceling coastal wind farms, voiding the tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs) and opening vast stretches of U.S. offshore waters for yet more oil and natural gas drilling.
Meanwhile, China increased its total power generation by 16 percent in 2025, with solar and wind energy accounting for half of its total capacity. And just as China already produces 80 percent of the global supply of solar panels, so its recent innovations in EV battery design have allowed it to rack up 70 percent of global electric vehicle production.
Green license plates such as these, seen in Beijing in September 2025, are issued to “new energy vehicles,” which include hybrids and electric vehicles. (Corinna Barnard/Consortium News)
While China’s auto industry surged in the last five years to capture 24 percent of global car production in 2025 (and is projected to reach 35 percent in just four more years), Detroit’s share has fallen to only 16 percent, driven in part by its costly retreat from EV production since Trump’s return to office.
Given rapid advances in battery range, charge time, and temperature range, it’s only a matter of years before the low-cost cars rolling out of China’s vast robotic factories supplant legacy brands and come to dominate the global auto market. With the Detroit vehicle industry, America’s largest manufacturing sector, now struggling to survive (along with other industries wedded to overpriced carbon-generated fuel), the future of much of U.S. manufacturing looks increasingly dim.
The Consequences of America’s Decline
Yes, the world of a Pax Americana in the previous century (though imperial America never could fully avoid wars) is gone. And a world without active U.S. international leadership will not necessarily be a better place.
Without a single superpower or set of superpowers to backstop otherwise toothless resolutions from the United Nations, international relations in a post-American world order will likely be both more complex and possibly more conflict-ridden as well.
In the new multipolar world likely to emerge in the next decade (if not sooner), even major countries like the United States and China will undoubtedly find themselves exercising their asymmetric power ever closer to home.
While some global areas will suffer from localized rivalries –- Beijing versus Tokyo in East Asia, Ankara versus Cairo and Riyadh in the Middle East –- regional associations like ASEAN, Mercosur, and the European Union are likely to play an increasingly important role in forging diplomatic consensus and mediating local conflicts.
Instead of the bipolar rivalry of the old Cold War era or American-led interventions in places like Afghanistan, Panama, or Kuwait during the more recent decades of its unipolar power, in the future regional rivals will likely wage bitter local wars in hot spots around the globe over boundaries, the control of minerals, water rights, or climate-change refugees.
To take but one example, Ethiopia, an arid, landlocked, overcrowded nation of 140 million people in East Africa, faces potential conflicts with Egypt over the Nile’s headwaters, with Eritrea over port access and with Somalia over the fate of the breakaway state of Somaliland.
Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, April 2021. (Nina R / Flickr/ CC BY 2.0)
Though their scope might be narrow, regional wars can potentially cause massive human carnage, as shown by the Second Congo War (1998-2003) that ravaged eastern Congo, as neighboring states like Rwanda and warlord armies like the murderous M-23 militia battled over mineral rights, killing an estimated 5.4 million people. That made it the world’s bloodiest (if least noticed) armed conflict since World War II. Even today, more than 20 years later, warlord armies are still battling for control of the eastern Congo, capturing cities and displacing more than a million refugees.
On the wider world stage, the international institutions that the U.S. created at the peak of its power in the 1940s (the U.N., the IMF, and the WTO) might survive.
However, the liberal international principles that once inspired Washington’s world order — human rights, humanitarian aid, respect for refugees, women’s rights, and immutable national sovereignty — are likely to fade, even as aspirational ideals. (They already are, of course, in Donald Trump’s America.)
And that will undoubtedly prove to be a genuine loss. After all, even under our current world order, a combination of Western foreign aid, Chinese economic growth and World Bank loans led to a significant reduction in the percentage of the world’s population living under “extreme poverty” (less than $2.00 a day) from 44 percent in 1981 to just 9 percent in 2019.
Now, of course, while leading the West in shifting funds from foreign aid to military defense, the second Trump administration has already abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting food and medication aid globally that could cause an extra 14 million deaths by 2030.
Such humanitarian efforts and their supporting principles are already giving way to a far more transactional world order, exemplified by China’s current foreign policy, grounded in mutual self-interest and largely devoid of ethical concerns.
One of the major achievements of Washington’s old order, the avoidance of a world war among the superpowers for more than eight decades, could face increasing strain in the coming years.
Instead of pooling scarce resources to cope with the challenge of climate change, the planet’s leading nations are continuing to raise their military budgets, producing a 13 percent increase in spending on nuclear weapons in 2023 alone.
To keep pace with China and Russia in a great power rivalry that is clearly in danger of becoming a new Cold War, the U.S. began revamping its nuclear triad in 2010 at a projected cost of $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms, potentially producing a dangerous proliferation of such world-ending weaponry.
Weighing all the changes likely to accompany Washington’s Trump-era retreat from global leadership, I suspect that, surprisingly enough, the world may have good reason to regret the passing of Washington’s world order in the years to come.
Maybe it was growing up on U.S. Army bases where patriotism was pervasive; maybe it was the way I hero-worshipped my dad when he came back from fighting communism in the Korean War; or perhaps it was saluting the U.S. flag every day in Mrs. Stabler’s sixth-grade class. Whether my view comes from those personal wellsprings or from my professional training as an historian of empires, I’m pretty sure that, within the narrow limits imperialism allows, America’s imperial era did give the world at least some chance for progress.
Despite its many excesses and a frequent failure to honor its own principles, imperial America did offer this planet more chances for change than the great powers that preceded it and possibly the ones likely to succeed it as well. For all those reasons, I say, “Requiescat in pace (rest in peace), Pax Americana, you will be missed.”
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books). His new book is Cold War on Five Continents: The Geopolitics of Empire & Espionage.
This article is from TomDispatch.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Forgot to mention your references to the war in DRC (Congo”) and USAID. We should not forget the U.S. role in assassinating Lumumba, as I think that country would be in a much better position and more peaceful if he had not been murdered. U.S. corporations want the resources of the Congo so bad they are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way. USAID, while some small portion of it’s funding goes towards things that improve people’s material lives, the majority is used to destabilize and overthrow governments that do not bend the knee to the U.S. empire. There are many sources of evidence for this including State Department memos publicized by Wikileaks. I really can’t think of many nations that will be sad when the Empire finally dies. The sooner the better.
There appears to be a nagging ethical conscience at the back of your mind when you try to justify the view of the U.S. as a “force for good in the world” when you provide a litany of possible reasons for your viewpoint that is in contradiction to the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Your article is a tetament to the power of U.S. propaganda forced on it’s own citizens. I know, because I was fed the same garbage from an early age. The U.S. has destabilized or overthrown or invaded almost every country in the world. You cite the World Bank as a positive when in reality it was designed to limit any economic growth in many countries. The WB had a policy to never provide funding for any agricultural development that would help feed their populations since that would compete with subsidized U.S. farm goods. You state “It should be considered a tribute to Washington’s success in leading the world economy to unprecedented prosperity”. The countries that HAVE had tremendous economic growth, and has brought millions of their peoples out of poverty are those nations that broke away from the U.S. hegemon – China and Venezuela as two examples. You state that the U.S. centered world government has prevented a war between superpowers-I think most observers would say the absence of superpower wars is mainly due to the fact they all have nuclear weapons. Lastly, you repeat the lie that we have been fed for my entire lifetime “However, the liberal international principles that once inspired Washington’s world order — human rights, humanitarian aid, respect for refugees, women’s rights, and immutable national sovereignty — are likely to fade, even as aspirational ideals”. The Brown University Cost of War project and many others clearly prove that is a cover for the brutal and horrific wars initiated by the U.S., resulting in millions of needless, pointless deaths at our hands. Do you really think anyone in Washington cared about women’s rights in Afghanistan? You state that the U.S. could not “avoid all wars”. The only war with justification I can think of would be WW2. All the others, from the genocide of Native Americans, to the other wars of imperialism, such as the Phillippine-American and Cuban-American wars and most recently to the genocide in Palestine and the attack on Iran, served only the interests of the donor class. The long, long trail of blood left by our nation cannot be justified in any sense. Based on your past authorship, educational level, and intellect, I cannot see how you can still, at this point in your life, not realize we are NOT the good guys.
A technical point, evoked by McCoy’s beginning: the easiest way to grow, especially in relation to others, is by starting small. This is simple arithmetic: a million is 100% of a million, but only 50% of two million. Hence the rest of the world was always fated to “catch up,” unless the US successfully sabotaged them. Similarly, China’s present predominance is mostly a function of their size. Of course the next-to-largest country in the world is hegemonic. To their credit, they have mostly refrained from shooting themselves in the foots – better than India, the now-largest, anyway.
Of course, US policy, called “corporate globalization”, actively promoted China’s industrialization and the de-industrialization of the US, with consequences we now see. Notably, that was originally a Republican/Conservative policy, until Bill Clinton adopted it and foisted it on the Democrats. There were even riots over that.
And a further point, about the impact of the Strait of Hormuz: the more a country has adopted organic food production and renewable energy, the less it’s affected. That, too, was predictable and predicted.
…”Washington’s success in leading the world economy to unprecedented prosperity.”…??
How many innocent civilians did the u.s.- “elites” brutally mass murder during the last 80 years?
And why is the author smearing China?
…”by China’s current foreign policy, grounded in mutual self-interest and largely devoid of ethical concerns.”…
China is truly demonstrating best practice in about any thinkable way!
And relentlessly inviting everyone to join in, cooperating on a win- win basis.
Finally, I cannot see anything good at all, what the u.s.- “elites” severely criminal syndicate, called u.s.a., could have been done in the past and the present.
Pervert mass murderers, they are; to be held accountable!!!
Please explain this continuously pushed view thst renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. Here in the UK we are festooned in windmills and solar (yes solar in a country 57 degrees north that rarely sees the sun in winter when we need power) and yet our bills continue to rise, power is the most expensive in tbe world and the more renewables we get the more expensive it gets. If they are so efficient and effective why are they subsidised? Billions each year in direct wealth transfers from taxpayers to shareholders of these companies. China is an expert in renewables because they saw an opportunity to fleece the stupid west, they still build coal power stations for themselves, lots of them.
Empty talk, endlessly repeated to keep the greatest insider trade ever divised on track to immiserate us all.
Did you ever think about the electricity corporations making the profit from cheap renewables, not passing any of the benefits to the end-users?
Please educate yourself a little, than you will see that old fossil is truly far more expensive.
Especially including the externalized cost of it.
The 500 plus years of Western colonialism will not be missed by those who have been enslaved and brutalized by the invaders. This author’s admiration for his father’s participation in the devastating destruction of North Korea is misplaced. That country posed no danger to the US yet it was flattened to prove no country has the right to resist US/Western control. That policy persists to this day. Good riddance to this empire of chaos and death. May humanity find a way to finally get back to living on this planet peacefully and sustainably.
The runaway protection racket of the western military religious technological system of 2000 years is no longer sustainable as a waste or resources putting civilization and planetary ecosystem at more risk in protecting only the world wide wealth complex built on the stolen resources as inheritance of empires.
Give me a break.
“…imperial America did offer this planet more chances for change than the great powers that preceded it and possibly the ones likely to succeed it as well. For all those reasons, I say, “Requiescat in pace (rest in peace), Pax Americana, you will be missed.””
What’s important to note here is that us regular working citizens of the U.S. really get no benefit from the Washington-Zio militarist empire.
What “offers the planet chances” truly means is riches, stock options, giant defense [sic] contracts, massive dividends and profits for our parasitic ruling class. A ruling class that would pay you $4 per hour and work you six days per week at the drop of a hat if they could get away with it.
Of course, us regular working citizens still suffer under absurd inflation, high housing costs, ridiculous student loan debt, and suicidal medical bills. The mandarins in charge of running our empire never gave a rip about the bleeding heartland of our country and the suffering working citizens therein. Today industrial nations with decent public programs for their citizenry are generally (generally) not imperialist whatsoever.
Conversely, if the empire’s folded back, it would mean reinvesting the public treasury into the public good, not wasting it on bloody ventures abroad. It would mean saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents overseas. It would offer the planet chances that it never had under serfdom, structural adjustments, occupations, and corporate exploitation.
Yes. This nostalgia for the good old days of US hegemony is startling coming from the author of books like ‘The Politics of Heroin’ and ‘A Question of Torture.’ But this has been a theme of Dr. McCoy’s work for a while now. He seems to be growing more mellow toward our postwar “liberal” empire in his twilight years. His memory also seems to be waning; when he tells these stories now there seems to be some rather crucial elements left out of the story. Trump is blamed for threatening to abandon NATO. But I did not see any discussion about the US/NATO thirty year march to Russia’s border following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Certainly that, and its culmination in the current Ukraine conflict, has contributed greatly to our current global uncertainties. (Was Ukraine even mentioned here?) Trump is also blamed for his attack on Iran, because of its negative effects on US power projection. But I did not see any acknowledgement that, however reckless, this is simply the last stage of another thirty year plan, by the neocons and Israel that has been carried out by both Democrat and Republican administrations since the Bush I years. (Was Israel even mentioned here?)
There were many other rather surprising statements as well, for example:
“… the liberal international principles that once inspired Washington’s world order — human rights, humanitarian aid, respect for refugees, women’s rights, and immutable national sovereignty — are likely to fade, even as aspirational ideals. (They already are, of course, in Donald Trump’s America.)”
In *Trump’s* America? Once again, I’m wondering what happened to the author of ‘Politics of Heroin’ and ‘A Question of Torture’? Even his recent magnum opus (‘In the Shadows of the American Century’) presented a more realist, or at least more balanced, portrait of the US empire.
There are many other example of what others here have called McCoy’s rose-colored history. But as someone who has read a lot of his work over the years, this recent turn has me perplexed.
Great point. “Politics of Heroin” is an outstanding work.
Has he forgotten his magnum opus?
Well summed up ^^
Thank you.
“The World After America”
Let Freedom Ring! Praise God Almighty, Let Freedom Ring!
The United States is not “America”. It is one country on the North American continent, along with Canada and Mexico. To refer to the U.S. as encompassing the entire western hemisphere supports the U.S. claim that it owns the whole place, and it does NOT. I am consciously trying to avoid using the word “America” when I mean the United States. Everyone should.
Indeed!
Really disappointing, when educated people like the author do not pay attention to such essential differences.
Merica will not be missed — the other global member’s are speeding past so quickly, they don’t even notice the hasbeens.
A simple prayer ? for the ? orange Jabba the Trump and his ilk and co fascists: Fuck off and don’t let the prison doors hit you on your way out!
It’s not America. It’s the United States.
Thank you!
Thank you. I know enough people who refer to America as the hemisphere instead of as just the USA to know better. Yet, I tend to fall into the same trap. But it should indeed be pointed out to the above writer who grew up on the military bases of the American Empire and thus has that view of the world. Hint: Simon Bolivar is a hero in America, even if most Yankees don’t know who he was or what he did.
Even given his scholarly training, I feel that Mr. McCoy is looking at America’s contributions to humanity through rose-colored glasses. There certainly were real contributions that could have led to true greatness, a leader of humanity. It was certainly in America’s hands to lose. And so it did, mostly out of zero/sum, me-first, me-only self-interest.
What you have in the last 20 or 30 years, say from Reagan on, in America and in the West in general is the rise of an incompetent and self-serving political elite whose North Star is profit above all through the spread of neoliberal economic values. The biggest tell, I think, is completely ignoring the overwhelming and overwhelmingly pernicious effect of wealth concentration into fewer and fewer hands. At present it is astronomical and still accelerating as we speak. Of particular note is that this is not an unintended consequence of neoliberal economic principles (thank you for nothing, Mr. Friedman!) but rather, their intent. And it is working beautifully for the <1%. There are of course many factors for the decline and decadence that has overtaken America and the West in general but this one, overriding factor makes any fundamental solution or course correction impossible.
As horrible as Trump may be, he is not the cause so much as the effect. If anything, he perfectly represents what America and American political values and institutions have become over the last three decades in which the despicable and self-destructive neocon ideology has come to power in US government and business. And now, the cherry on top is the Zionist ideology which seems to share the same demented values seems to be aiming for the takeover of America. For starters, who now owns all of mainstream media and, for what purpose? News and information by the fourth-estate to keep power in check and the public informed..? Yeah, right.
As I said, for me he seems to have a bit too much of a rose-colored and drifting above it all perspective that undermines his otherwise accurate historical perspectives.
Since WW2, to be correct. America came out of that war with a feeling that it now ruled the world. That was something different from all earlier visions of America. From Truman onwards, through Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran, America now believes that it rules the world and can tell everyone in the world what to do and how to do it. This was set as America’s course and mindset after WW2.
Reagan was only a counter-revolution against the Americans with functioning human souls who had objected to this empire in the 1960’s and 70’s. But one has to see their objections as the exception to the general course set on a bi-partisan basis from the end of WW2 to today. There was a brief moment when Americans tried to express values beyond being a world conquering hegemon, but the leaders of that movement were assasinated, and that moment was crushed. Today those people are shunned as the worst sort of Americans who can never be mentioned in polite conversation. Goddamned hippies. Consider how the leaders and soldiers who killed 2 to 3 million Vietnamese are remembered today, compared to the people who tried to stop that killing machine?
I could not agree more ^^
The true goal is to cut fossil fuel supplies to China via blockade/piracy. Though the ensuing worldwide slowdown will hurt the USA the idea is that it will hurt China more. It would save the petrodollar. This is their idea of victory. The weakness of this plan is that the depression goes on forever, otherwise China starts growing once more.
Half the cars sold in China in the last year have been electric. The spiking price of gasoline from Trump’s policies is now spurring sales of Chinese EV’s in the rest of the world. China, experts in green tech from solar panels to vehicles to batteries will do just fine in this new world. But, the Americans, with their government-forced reliance on dirty old tech, and as the place where Chinese EV’s and solar panels are heavily tarriffed in protectionist policies, will be the ones to fall behind. Remember, America is the nation where Trump, Big Auto, and the UAW all collectively shut down the transition to making EVs last year. Oops. And that does not even mention the reputations of the two lands, one as a place of stability and harmony while the other is known for violence, chaos, genocide and war.
This is like getting a monopoly on horseshoes at the time when people shift from horses to vehicles. Sounds great, if you believe the world will always revolve around horseshoes.
The U.A.W. isn’t against EVs; there are efforts right now to organize these workplaces, too. What they’re against is subsidizing anti-union factories under the guise of green or alt. energy.
Unless like the Dem elite neolibs, you dismiss us mere workers and our organizations as ‘stupid’ just because we’re angry about being ignored by their party for decades. Or unless you’re a dogmatic leftist who believes we need a self-appointed elitist vanguard because we’re too stupid to lead ourselves. To h*ll with that! Like my grandpa the Wobbly, (I.W.W.) I’m for decentralized workplace decisions. As Eugene Debs said, “I would not lead you into paradise even if I could. If someone could lead you into paradise, someone else would lead you out. Learn to use your heads as well as your hands.”