The Empire Is NOT In Decline?

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Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about.
   — Barack Obama, SOTU January, 2012

As I was working on yesterday's post, I overheard On Point's Tom Ashbrook talking about America's decline.

Is America in decline?  It’s become almost assumed in recent years.  China, India, Brazil, others — up. America — down. Humbled. Less than it was. Now comes the pushback. “The Myth of American Decline,” goes one headline.

And the theme becomes political just as fast as you can breathe. America in decline?  No way, said the president last week.  Not on his watch.

Well, which is it?  Are we up, down or sideways?  Is decline a myth?  Or is that idea just a kind of denial?  American dreaming?

This hour, On Point:  Truth or dare. We’re debating American decline.

The first guest was Michael Beckley, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s international security program. His recent article China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure in the journal International Security "contends that America is not in decline and that both its international power and hegemony are increasing." He started off like this—

I think if you just look across any of the indicators of national power, whether it's wealth, innovation, military power, you see the U.S. staying pretty much where it's been for the last 20 year or in some cases, increasing its lead. It remains the wealthiest major power, and these wealth gaps have been increasing. The average American citizen in 1990 made $20,000 more than average Chinese citizen. Today that wealth gap is $40,000...

Beckley continues in this vein. You see, America is not in decline because we stack up so well vis-a-vis the Chinese! If you look at the other sources cited by Ashbrook, a telling pattern emerges.

• Beckley, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
• Not Fade Away: Against The Myth of American Decline by Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe
• Whether or not America is declining is the wrong question, by Stephen M. Walt, co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security

What do these guys and others not mentioned have in common? They are mouthpieces for the Imperial elites. The question of America's decline is framed in terms of its foreign policy, the projection of American military power and economic interests all over the world, how we compare with China, and so on. We always to need to consider the source.

All of these clowns have what Mark Twain called corn-pone opinions—you tell me where a man gets his corn pone, and I'll tell you what his opinions are. Where do these guys get their corn pone? From places like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Center on the United States and Europe. It's very likely these people have never even met an ordinary American unless that poor schmuck was serving them cocktails or cleaning their bathroom.

But if you ask one of these average Americans (who one never runs into at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government) whether this country is in decline, the answer is likely to be Yes. Here is a list of the trends these representatives of the Imperial elites fail to mention.

• very high levels of household, private (corporate) and government debt
• the peak and decline of American crude oil production
• astonishing income inequality and even more astonishing wealth inequality
• skyrocketing health care costs in a country in which over 45 million Americans have no coverage at all
• skyrocketing college tuition costs and student debt burdens
• stagnant real wages for 80% of Americans over the last 30 years, the falling median income
• the "financialization" of the economy and the rent-seeking behavior of the 6 largest banks, who are now even bigger than they were before the meltdown in 2008
• the obvious failures of the public education of "average" Americans
• the growing role of special-interest money in politics and crony capitalism (corruption)
• America's decaying infrastructure, including bridges, public transit, water and sewer lines, etc.
• the alarming downward spiral of popular culture (on the TV, on the radio, in music and movies)

Even this relatively long list is incomplete. It is disingenuous for an Imperial sycophant like Micheal Beckley to refer to the wealth of the average American. Apparently, none of this comes up very often at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Or if it does, it is dismissed as unimportant because the elites view these growing problems as orthogonal to Imperial interests, which are indistinguishable from their own interests.

When I talk about America's decline on this blog, I am talking about what is happening domestically, what is occurring inside the United States. America is rotting from within. We are just one big financial crisis (or severe recession) away from complete economic catastrophe in the United States. We're living on the edge. As things stand now, we can expect increasingly worse outcomes for these "average" Americans over the next decade and beyond.

I also think it is naive for those in the Imperial elites to cling to the self-serving belief that what happens within America itself will not eventually limit the Empire's foreign policy options, its ability to keep the oil flowing, it's insatiable need to kill brown people with predator drones, and it's maintenance of the so-called Pax Americana.

So when Barack Obama tells you that anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn't know what they're talking about, you might want to keep all this in mind. And you might also remember that he is not talking about the living standards of average Americans. He is talking about the Empire, whose previous policies he has done so much to uphold and extend.

Comments

[John D]

I definitely think that the indicator of a country in rise or decline is the welfare of its citizens. I think our influence in the world is still somewhat lofty as we are the reserve currency; but that has one foot on a banana peel and the other on a recently waxed floor. Once we lose that status there will be no doubt of the decline. The rest is all arguable.

For my mental health, I stopped watching the State of the Union speech several years ago, so I didn't catch Obama make that statement. My condolences if you had to sit through it and listen in your journalistic capacity.

[eugene12]

For me, I ceased to question decline a long time ago. All I had to do was watch our international standing in health care, education, state of our infrastructure, life expectency, infant mortality and, virtually, every other measurement one can think of. The only place we seem to be truly powerful is in our ability to kill people. There we are truly number one.

And my basic premise is way too much time is spent spouting how wonderful everything is for it to be true. Put more simply, any person who spends all their time telling me how honest they are is telling me the opposite.

[Scott]

Perhaps this is a temporary resurgence or the appearance of one. If memory serves, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I successfully reaquired some of the "lost" parts of the Western Roman Empire in the 6th Century C.E. through military force. Had the Roman glory days returned?

Of course, the ensuing wars in the east with the Sassanid Persians weakened the Byzantines, and left them vulnerable to the Muslim armies of the Ummayyad Caliphate, who overran much of the Empire in the late 7th Century C.E.

Ooo, ponder the irony!

[sharonsj]

I agree with you completely.

I never watch any political speeches because what they say doesn't matter, only what they do.

[Bill Hicks]

My response to Obama's SOTU is really very simple: just STFU already.

Sadly, far too many average American's still believe the exceptionalism nonsense despite the fact that the suck embraces them every day and just grows deeper every year.

[Chris]

Most people dont realize it is happening because they themselves may not feel it personally and because it is gradual.

[Wanooski]

My family is starting to feel the squeeze as whole these days, whereas before it was mostly just me as I watched my disposable income disappear, no more fancy toys for me. Now I look around with truly open eyes and see the world for what it really is, and not as what politicians and PR flaks tell me it is.

[Brian M]

I think that the point you make is excellent. As empires decline the tendency is probably always for the elites to focus on potential threats to their existence. Potential threats include external competition, internal breakaway elites, or internal popular uprising (military overthrow would likely fall into the middle category). Logically, these people will prioritize these threats by their view on the potential likelihood of each. For America, the elites see no imminent threat of the latter two (they may or may not be correct) and so are focused on the former. One of their goals would be to use this focus on external comparisons/threats to distract attention from internal conditions, thus reducing the likelihood of danger from either internal source.

Thus, we seem to increasingly find ourselves in the times of "barbarians at the gates" and "bread and circuses". External threats are publicize, internal conditions are compared not within, but externally. We frequently hear supposed officials telling us that some "they" are a threat, but "don't worry, because, see, you still earn more than they do." "Things here are great. Just compare average wages, earnings, wealth, gross trade volumes, etc. America is stronger and better and more just than anybody else and will be forever. ..."

Whatever you do, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

[xraymike79]

Just saw this headline in my daily brief:

Almost Half Of U.S. Households Live One Crisis From Poverty, Study Says

Also, if you have not seen the documentary entitled "The War You Don't See", I highly recommend it. It answers many questions that often tangentially come up around here. You won't see it in America because it's been banned(for good reason), although DemocracyNow briefly aired it a few months ago. The movie was scheduled to make its debut last summer at the Lannan Foundation in Sante, New Mexico, but was curiously cancelled.

[Honesty]

I don't know what's more terrifying the underlying message that any challenge to U.S. domination is to be met with force, or the disconnection from reality ....

[David Bolduc]

Dave,

Thank you for your awesome blog. I have been lurking some time now and reading you daily for about 6 months. Though I enjoy the sense of see the macrocosm in the daily plant closures that so often characterize Bill Hick's blog, I enjoy the look at the large picture in yours also.

Please keep writing, and -- yes -- take the occasional day off.

[xraymike79]

Another soothing email in my box:

Tick, Tock... Tick, Tock...

[Xi'an]

@Scott:

As someone who is fairly well red on the Byzantine Empire, I can tell you that Roman revival during the reign of Justinian was just a facade. By stretching the empire's military resources to a near breaking point, he actually hastened the decline of the empire. Undermanned frontier outposts could not guard against multiple 'barbarian' incursions in the Balkans, Italy, and North Africa and urban civilization practically disappeared in these places. In fact, the costs of maintaining a 250,000 man army to guard depopulated provinces exceeded tax revenue.

If you were a member of Justinian's court who lived inside the walls of the imperial capital in Constantinople, everything probably seemed great. To the average citizen who lived in an overtaxed and crumbling polis in the East or a peasant who saw a multitude of rebel tyrants and barbarian kings savage the countryside, 'Roman Peace' was a joke.

Maps of Justinian's conquests look impressive but the empire was still rotting at its core.

[Dr. C]

As often mentioned in the British TV comedy "Yes, Minister", you can never believe anything about the government until it has been officially denied. Then you can assume it's true. I think Obama denying America's decline in the SOTU certainly qualifies as an official denial.

They wouldn't deign to acknowledge the possibility of decline -even when only mentioned by "others" who supposedly "don't know what they're talking about"- if they weren't surreptitiously scared shitless about it. The fact that it was brought up at all tells you every thing you need to know.

[step back]

"Decline" is just another word for Past Peak.

Therefore, what Obama is saying is, anyone who thinks America is Past Peak in

1) Oil
2) Clean water
3) Naturally fertile agricultural lands
4) Toxin-free food and air
5) Wisdom

well, that person just doesn't know that of which he speakith about.

[Scott]

@ Xi'an:

Yes that's correct, all of it, 100%. That was my point. Then, as now, the outcome will be the same.