10/27/09

6 Signs That the American Empire Is Coming to an Early End

"The day of America's global pre-eminence is over" so says Michael Klare. Is that a bad thing? Is that a scary thing? Is that a good thing?

Did America use its decades of global pre-eminence to advance good causes? to advance world peace? to advance global justice? Peacenik doesn't think so. So Peacenik doesn't think the collapse of America's pre-eminence is a bad thing. But it could be scary.

Can America be irrelevant when America is sitting on enough military power to blast the world apart many times over. In hindsight the Soviet Union seems to have accepted it's fall from co-global pre-eminence. But will the United States. The U.S. military and political class is already full of wingnut, religious crackpots. How are they going to adapt to the new reality? Not to mention the simultaneous collapse of their economic might. Scary indeed.

by Michael Klare

The day of America's global pre-eminence is over. We must face the new global realities.

Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained."

Read on...