Reference no: EM132882955

Decline of U.S. Global Power/Possible Scenarios

Dynamics of U.S. Decline

Discussions by covering Alfred McCoy's argument on dynamics of U.S. decline and possible five scenarios for global society.

McCoy in, "the Rise and Decline of US Global Power," argues:

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. 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 US 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...

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted (Links to an external site.)trillions of desperately needed dollars ... the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Alfred McCoy predicts different scenarios for the fall of U.S. empire, one of which is the rise of China:

We are certainly witnessing the end of the US empire, but not empire as a form of global governance. If you look behind the headlines in the daily press over the past 18 months, the signs are increasingly clear that Washington's world dominion is crumbling with the sort of cascading setbacks that often accompany imperial decline. In its periodic futurology reports, the National Intelligence Council, Washington's supreme analytic body, has been blunt that US hegemony will end by 2030. But it doesn't really have a clue about what will replace it. At the risk of joining that long line of historians who made fools of themselves by using the past to predict the future, here goes my leap into ignominy. My money is on China with its trillion-dollar infrastructure program to integrate Eurasia into an economic powerhouse, another trillion to develop and dominate Africa, and a resurgent, tech-savvy military to slice through Washington's encirclement of their continent and push the US navy back across the Pacific toward Guam or Hawaii. Naysayers can point to China's restive population, its aging demographics, its shaky economy, or its still neophyte technology to argue it's a paper tiger that will never surpass America. But they miss the main point: with the emerging economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe into a unified "world island" with China at its epicenter, the tides of trade and geopolitical power will all flow, as if by natural law, away from Washington and toward Beijing... And even if Beijing falters, thanks to a decline in economic growth or a surge in popular discontent, there are still a dozen rising powers working to build a multipolar world beyond the grasp of any global hegemon.

Attachment:- Global Power.rar