Twilight of the Empire: Is America As We've Known It on Life Support?

We could be only three years away from superpower collapse.

Perhaps nothing has impacted my thinking about the future of the United States more than this article. It was authored by Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don't bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003. [bold mine]

Note the date this article was published: December 6, 2010. A dozen years ago, a heavily-credentialed scholar from one of America’s major public universities, as opposed to some quack from the dark corners of the Internet, was predicting the country’s collapse. Equally telling, the article was published in Salon, a flagship mouthpiece of the Regime.

It’s really strange reading this article in retrospect, if only because it hearkens back to a time when seemingly “crackpot” ideas were being published in mainstream circles. It seems unlikely today that Salon or anyone else would be talking collapse - with the Left fully in control of the country’s major institutions, the last thing they’d want to tell their audience is, Hey, we actually don’t have a grip on things and it’s all going to fall apart real soon. Good luck!

More:

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration's rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030. [bold mine]

It’s important to understand what McCoy means by “collapse.” He’s not referring to a “hard stop” for the U.S., but the cessation of the country as a superpower. In other words, America as we’ve known it since at least 1945 and, certainly, as every living person today has known it their whole lives. To some, this may seem less cataclysmic than a total collapse, but, make no mistake: the end of the U.S. as a superpower would be devastating at home and the consequences would be felt throughout the world.

If McCoy’s assessment from 2010 holds up, we could be only three years away from superpower collapse. It’s hard to believe and distressing to contemplate, but, given recent events, is it really far-fetched?

McCoy gives several examples demonstrating how quickly the end came for history’s greatest empires. Establishing timing is an imperfect science, since it’s difficult to pin down exactly when an empire went into terminal decline McCoy believed, at the time, America’s decline commenced in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. Though there’s room for debate, the Iraq War did damage America’s global standing, strained the country diplomatically and militarily, fractured the public, and demoralized Americans to a degree we’ve never recovered from. Granted, Iraq never proved quite as socially destabilizing as Vietnam was, but, in the context of everything that has occurred the past generation, it was certainly one of the most significant events, whose consequences are still felt today.¹

The role of foreign policy and military misadventures plays a major role in the demise of an empire. 17 years after entering World War II, the British Empire led a coalition (including another fading empire, France) to Egypt to release the latter’s stranglehold on the Suez Canal. Despite achieving military success, it drew a harsh rebuke from two new superpower arrivals: the U.S. and Soviet Union. In the face of overwhelming pressure, the British and French had no choice but to acquiesce. Going back to the question of timing, perhaps Suez isn’t an example of when an empire collapsed, but an example of when an empire realized it’d collapsed. Anyone contemplating the end of the American empire needs to consider that, perhaps the collapse has already occurred and we’re just waiting for someone to let us know.

A particularly acute variant of superpower collapse was that of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Soviets held on for only two more years before the bottom fell out. There were many reasons why the once seemingly untouchable colossus proved so fragile in the end, making it a poor example for Americans to consider, but my point is that superpower collapse is something that can happen very suddenly. This is because status is something conferred, making it the most volatile. A country cannot simply prop up its status the same way it could prop up its economy through deficit spending and printing money. Superpowers are often what they are because there are no viable alternatives or counter-weights to offer any kind of resistance. A body continues in its state of rest, or in uniform motion in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force.

Collapse of any sort is still a stretch too far for most Americans to conceptualize. While economic and political collapse (civil war, fracturing, secession) may not come for a long time, the U.S. is certainly at risk of losing superpower status in our lifetimes, as Alfred McCoy suggested. Worse, it might come sooner than we think. In fact, there are currently many indicators we may be on the brink. If Russia goes on the attack in Ukraine, the U.S. will take a huge hit to its credibility, as it has failed, for the second time since 2014, to halt Russian aggression, something Washington has beat the drum on constantly for the last several years. Arguably, doing nothing is probably the best course of action, as there exists nothing of value to American interests worth losing lives or money over. The problem is, the Regime has already spent so much time, money, and intellectual energy over keeping Russia in its place that there’s no way to stay out of the crisis without a considerable loss of credibility in the process.

Likewise, should China choose to move on Taiwan, or otherwise increase its influence throughout the world, that could further push the U.S. down the power rankings. The under-girding assumption that aggressive actors, even great powers like China and Russia, were successfully deterred from taking such drastic actions was the basis of a U.S. superpower-led world order. That world order, to the extent it’s ever existed, is clearly on the ropes. If the U.S., still with the world’s biggest, most vibrant economy, and plenty of “hard” (military) and “soft” (cultural, diplomatic) power in its corner, cannot deter Russia from moving on Ukraine or China on Taiwan, then none of it matters - America isn’t a superpower and it certainly left its hyperpower phase long ago.

Again, this hardly means the end of the American story. Like McCoy says in his 2010 article, it’s merely the end of America as we’ve known it. There will still exist a country called the “United States” and it’ll look much the same as it did the day before it collapsed as a superpower. But, eventually, it’ll start turning into something we don’t recognize.

Consider Germany following World War I. The end of the conflict marked the dissolution of the German Empire, which had stood for almost a half-century and, at least in Europe, served as a rival to other powerhouses like the British and Russian empires. The entire German state and society didn’t collapse, however. It transformed into the Weimar Republic, though it did so with great tumult. In the next 11 years, the economy collapsed twice, first due to hyperinflation in the early Weimar years, then due to the 1929 financial crisis. Nazi Germany followed, culminating in a total state collapse in 1945 resulting from defeat in World War II.

In 27 years, Germany experienced superpower collapse, economic collapse (twice), then state collapse. Going back to the Soviet Union, after superpower collapse in 1991, Russia suffered an economic collapse in 1998, less than seven years later. This followed a prolonged period of economic turmoil that undeniably began during the communist era.

The important lesson here is that, for a superpower, loss of status is devastating. This is what McCoy means by there being no “soft” landing for a superpower. A wounded giant is still a giant, meaning it can absorb blows like most countries cannot. However, once knocked out, it falls in a heap and becomes very vulnerable. When that happens, all things, including the more nightmarish scenarios like civil war and, of course, economic and state collapse, become possible. But, we’re not getting to the latter without the former, meaning that anyone obsessing over civil war and economic and state collapse are putting the cart before the horse.

But that’s what makes the current moment unsettling, especially in light of McCoy’s projections. Not all have panned out, but his timeline certainly has parallels with history has played out thus far: he imagined a disastrous exit from Afghanistan, for example, albeit seven years earlier than in reality. China is closing the gap militarily with the U.S. The U.S. economy is currently skating on thin ice, due in part to inflation and a worsening supply-chain crisis, but also due to an over-reliance on money printing and state spending for sustenance. Political tensions at home portend a serious crisis in the 2022 mid-term elections and the 2024 presidential election. Currently, a confrontation with Russia looms over Ukraine, a situation where the U.S. cannot afford to appear impotent, but is also incapable of doing much of anything about without risking a major war. It’s a lose-lose situation, with a loss of credibility and compounding problems at home possibly weakening the dollar as well, which qualifies as a must-not-happen scenario.

We may be far from the economy and the state collapsing. Neither one is likely to occur this decade, though there exists an outside chance it could occur in our lifetimes, at least in mine. However, it’s also increasingly apparent the U.S. may very well not continue on in its current form for much longer. Are we really just three years from a major collapse? Will the superpower be dead in 2025? Who knows, but McCoy’s timeline not only seems on track, it also seems to be accelerating. If we don’t know the answer by 2025, we should know for sure by 2030.

When the end does come for imperial America, we’ll face a cloudy, uncertain future of many unpleasant possibilities we never thought could happen here.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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1. U.S. military operations have actually gone on longer in Iraq than it had in Vietnam. The U.S. military’s involvement in the latter began in 1963, ending in 1973, coupled with a total withdrawal in 1975. In the former, U.S. military operations began in 1991, ended briefly in 2011, then resumed in 2014 and have yet to cease since.