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."

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Rx: Depression

John Michael Greer

By the time you read these words they will have been sitting on my computer for most of a week; the chance to attend the annual ASPO peak oil conference in Sacramento was too good to pass up, and I’ll be on the road during the window of time I normally use to compose these essays. It’s an interesting time to be second guessing the future, too, for as I type these words, the world’s financial markets are in chaos. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the longest established brokerage houses in the New York market, followed by the forced sale of Merrill Lynch and the near-collapse of insurance giant AIG, seem finally to have made it clear to the world’s investors that the mountain of unpayable debt weighing on the global economy is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

Just how bad that problem will become is anybody’s guess. Stock markets worldwide are down steeply but, at least as of this writing, not yet in freefall, and massive government intervention in the credit markets has staved off a liquidity crunch. Over the longer term, though, investments supposedly worth trillions of dollars are going to have to be written off, and companies that padded their balance sheets with those investments are now facing a scramble for survival that many will fail. An entire economy built around the exchange of exotic IOUs is coming apart at the seams, and the economic structures that will replace it are not yet in sight.

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While Punditman plays hockey, Peacenik will sneak in this post from the Archdruid Report. Peacenik loves counter-intuitive points-of-view, and in this article Greer points out some of the possible benefits that might result from a depression. Peacenik doesn't think there will be a depression, but it is time to start looking creatively at how the present financial chaos could be harnessed for some postive outcomes.