Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il crollo dell'impero americano

Click here: Kirkpatrick Sale: the Collapse of the American Empire
http://www.counterpunch.org/sale02222005.html
Collapse of the American Empire
4 signs of USA's Decline:
     1. environmental degradation
     2. economic meltdown
     3. military overstretch
     4. domestic dissent
February 22, 2005
Imperial Entropy
Collapse of the American Empire
By KIRKPATRICK SALE
It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United
States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and
left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American
empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And
indeed it is now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about,
its collapse.
The neocons in power in Washington these days, those who were
delighted to talk about America as the sole empire in the world
following the Soviet disintegration, will of course refuse to believe
in any such collapse, just as they ignore the realities of the
imperial war in Iraq. But I think it behooves us to examine seriously
the ways in which the U.S. system is so drastically imperiling itself
that it will cause not only the collapse of its worldwide empire but
drastically alter the nation itself on the domestic front.
All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah,
Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai,
Mongol, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish,
Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they
all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not
really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably
makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure
and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial
reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and
inequalities.
In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four
reasons that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's
new book Collapse also has a list of reasons for societal collapse,
slightly overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than
empires.) Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present
American empire.
First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the
lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they
build and farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even
if we have yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature.
Science is in agreement that all important ecological indicators are
in decline and have been for decades: erosion of topsoils and beaches,
overfishing, deforestation, freshwater and aquifer depletion,
pollution of water, soil, air, and food, soil salinization,
overpopulation , overconsumption, depletion of oil and minerals,
introduction of new diseases and invigoration of old ones, extreme
weather, melting icecaps and rising sealevels, species extinctions,
and excessive human overuse of the earth's photosynthetic capacity. As
the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said, after lengthy examination
of human impact on the earth, our "ecological footprint is already too
large for the planet to sustain, and it is getting larger." A Defense
Department study last year predicted "abrupt climate change," likely
to occur within a decade, will lead to "catastrophic" shortages of
water and energy, endemic "disruption and conflict," warfare that
"would define human life," and a "significant drop" in the planet's
ability to sustain its present population. End of empire for sure,
maybe end of civilization.
Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource
exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away
from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted
or become too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the
path we are on-peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted
to come in the next year or two-and our economy is built entirely on a
fragile system in which the world produces and we, by and large,
consume (U.S. manufacturing is just 13 per cent of our GDP). At the
moment we sustain a nearly $630 billion trade deficit with the rest of
the world-it has leapt by an incredible $500 billion since 1993, and
$180 billion since Bush took office in 2001-and in order to pay for
that we have to have an inflow of cash from the rest of the world of
about $1 billion every day to pay for it, which was down by half late
last year. That kind of excess is simply unsustainable, especially
when you think that it is the other world empire, China, that is
crucial for supporting it, at the tune of some $83 billion on loan to
the U.S. treasury.
Add to that an economy resting on a nearly $500 billion Federal budget
deficit, making up part of a total national debt of $7.4 trillion as
of last fall, and the continual drain on the economy by the military
of at least $530 billion a year (not counting military intelligence,
whose figure we never know). Nobody thinks that is sustainable either,
which is why the dollar has lost value everywhere-down by 30 per cent
against the euro since 2000-and the world begins to lose faith in
investment here. I foresee that in just a few years the dollar will be
so battered that the oil states will no longer want to operate in that
currency and will turn to the euro instead, and China will let the
yuan float against the dollar, effectively making this nation bankrupt
and powerless, unable to control economic life within its borders much
less abroad.
Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition
colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther
and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more,
until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended,
troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately
revolts. The American empire, which began its worldwide reach well
before Bush II, now has some 446,000 active troops at more than 725
acknowledged (and any number secret) bases in at least 38 countries
around the world, plus a formal "military presence" in no less than
153 countries, on every continent but Antarctica-and nearly a dozen
fully armed courier fleets on all the oceans. Talk about overstretch:
the U.S. is less than 5 per cent of the world's population. And now
that Bush has declared a "war on terror," instead of the more doable
war on Al Quada we should have waged, our armies and agents will be on
a battlefield universal and permanent that cannot possibly be
controlled or contained.
So far that military network has not collapsed, but as Iraq indicates
it is mightily tested and quite incapable of establishing client
states to do our bidding and protect resources we need. And as
anti-American sentiment continues to spread and darken-in all the
Muslim countries, in much of Europe, in much of Asia-and as more
countries refuse the "structural adjustments" that our IMF-led
globalization requires, it is quite likely that the periphery of our
empire will begin resisting our dominance, militarily if necessary.
And far from having a capacity to fight two wars simultaneously, as
the Pentagon once hoped, we are proving that we can't even fight one.
Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up
collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without,
and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the
point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing
repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland
security" and to the success of our modern version of bread and
circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television,
internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that
effectively deadens the general public into stupor. But the tactics of
the Bush II administration show that it is so fearful of an expression
of popular dissent that it is willing to defy and ignore
environmental, civil-rights, and progressive groups, to bribe
commentators to put out its propaganda, to expand surveillance and
data-base invasions of privacy, to use party superiority and backroom
tactics to ride roughshod over Congressional opposition, to use lies
and deceptions as a normal part of government operations, to break
international laws and treaties for short-term ends, and to use
religion to cloak its every policy.
It's hard to believe that the great mass of the American public would
ever bestir itself to challenge the empire at home until things get
much, much worse. It is a public, after all, of which, as a Gallup
poll in 2004 found, 61 per cent believe that "religion can answer all
or most of today's problems," and according to a Time/CNN poll in 2002
59 per cent believe in the imminent apocalypse foretold in the Book of
Revelation and take every threat and disaster as evidence of God's
will. And yet, it's also hard to believe that a nation so thoroughly
corrupt as this-in all its fundamental institutions, its boughten
parties, academies, corporations, brokerages, accountants,
governments-and resting on a social and economic base of intolerably
unequal incomes and property, getting increasingly unequal, will be
able to sustain itself for long. The upsurge in talk about secession
after the last election, some of which was deadly serious and led on
to organizations throughout most of the blue states, indicates that at
least a minority is willing to think about drastic steps to "alter or
abolish" a regime it finds itself fundamentally at odds with.
Those four processes by which empires always eventually fall seem to
me to be inescapably operative, in varying degrees, in this latest
empire. And I think a combination of several or all of them will bring
about its collapse within the next 15 years or so.
Jared Diamond's recent book detailing the ways societies collapse
suggests that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole,
once it is aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from
the failures of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never
happen, and for a reason Diamond himself understands.
As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland
that collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people
cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values
that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over
adversity." If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it,
then we can isolate the values of American society that have been
responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to
them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism,
individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the
dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no
matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we
will abandon those.
Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.

mi fate sempre fare un sacco di risate
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 mi fate sempre fare un sacco di risate
Sempre meglio che ragionare, eh?
Namib

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a chi ragiona - commmunista!!! - il generale pattum spara .
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
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Namib wrote:
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blablabla. si ragiona se c'è un discorso per cui vale la pena ragionare

Namib ha scritto:
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Parlare di crollo o collasso dell impero americano mi pare assurdo,al
limite "declino" ,ammesso che poi sia tale.........
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