The cracks are showing. The US empire is in decay. What will the world look like once it’s no longer able to bully everyone? What do we have to look forward to both inside and outside the imperial core?
China and India
Unless there’s some critic event like a civil war, I’m guessing it will be a slow decline of the U.S. I don’t think any country stands to replace it, at least not in the same amount of dominace that the United States had. I think two or three countries, including the U.S., will dominate economic and military power for quite a number of years with a great deal of shuffling between them.
A multi polar world will surely emerge. The empire will crumble slowly and gradually cede power to other forces.
I think the reality is the US will still be one of the most powerful countries but in a world where they seriously have to operate in diplomacy and not just imperial shows of force will be a net positive for the world overall.
The hope there is other nations that are polar powers and are nominally engaging in anti capitalist behavior will spread that ideology and help lift the the tides of revolutionary fervor to wholesale replace capitalism as the global economic system.
Unless the US does the thing where they decide to violently lash out (as empires do in the past collapses) and nukes the world a few times over. I don’t think this is likely but also it is assuredly not non zero which is insane.
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You said it so much better than I did.
Naw I just expanded on your already great points
Lmfao, we’re not going to make it another 3 years. This system is designed to implode immediately, and even if it doesn’t, our highschoolers are already functionally illiterate and plagued with learned helplessness.
Agriculture, housing, medical, finance, all guaranteed to collapse shortly. All on top of our already fragile shipping networks, it’s not looking good.
Right I think a lot of this is going to collapse and STILL the US will be one of the most powerful countries. That is how disgustingly evil we have been at suppressing the rest of the world. Once our oppressive boot is less potent there are some beautiful developments in this world waiting to happen.
We just gonna have other bully. That’s how power vacuums works
My hope is that when the USA falls, it will take global capitalism with it. I’ve been speculating about the post-capitalist world on Mastodon lately.
I’ll give it a read.
My hope is that Russia balkanises. At least enough to no longer threaten Europe.
The US Empire has a small chance of Balkanizing, which the map drawers would love. The global south would develop far more rapidly, though this process has already started thanks to countries like the PRC. Europe will be forced into working with Russia and/or China. Countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and the DPRK that are heavily sanctioned will do a lot better with the US Empire out of the way, and Korea may even reunify down the road. Countries with strong socialist sentiment in the populace will better be able to become socialist and rapidly develop.
The coasts will be wealthy and independent. The middle will be poor and warlike. Two coastal countries and a lot of warlording in the middle.
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In the short (next couple lifetimes) term, the US will continue receding from different geopolitical arenas, followed by some political jostling to change that region’s power balance.
As the empire shrinks, the politics of scarcity will become more pervasive, entrenching clientelism and mistrust in an already fairly low-trust society.
It’s not a hot take to say that mask-off fascism is on the menu given how fascism-shaped the US is, but given how autocanibalistic this particular right wing wave is, I have no idea what to expect.
Don’t know whether the new boss will be the same as the old boss; while India and China don’t seem particularly empire-inclined, few countries do until they’re the one with the biggest stick. Both have been drumming up nationalism internally for the last decade, so if they can’t defuse it safely they’ll point it at each other, to everybody’s detriment.
The US must have been thinking about China at least since 1990. Now they fumble the hardest when they need to be the wittiest?
I don’t buy it. The US are preparing to contain China. At best they have AI and robotics first and retake global productions. But I expect a war. Edit: And unless the USA lose, the empire will remain for a long time.
It’s difficult to say what the winner will do with a most likely radioactive world. I would expect that there is no need for disinformation, especially if robots do the policing. So those people who survive will have a physical constrained, but intellectually rich life.
However, without AI and destroyed knowledge from bombing the civilization centers, technology could also fall back to the 1960s or even 1860s, but with internet.
They are fumbling now because of their hubris, overextension, and the contradictions of the system.
In the '90s, they believed that exposing China to capitalism would naturally and inevitably cause the fall of the Communist system, so they threw the doors wide open.
2001 is when China joined to the WTO and also when…9/11 happened, crippling and distracting the Western empire for two decades.
When Hillary Neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she unveiled with much fanfare the “pivot to Asia”. The Obama administration spent the next 8 years trying to replicate the EU and NATO in Southeast Asia. (TPP and the Quad).
Trump-1 came into office and immediately withdrew the US from the TPP. He did some blustering and flailing around with tariffs, which people seemed to think constituted containment of China at the time.
Biden came into office and he and the other Western leaders sabotaged and escalated their way into the Ukraine war. (Read up on the Istanbul process before you get annoying in the replies, Libs). You can read The New Atlas for excellent analysis about how this is a substrategy for Chinese containment, which is an argument that I agree with. However, it had the effect of once again paralyzing, weakening, and distracting the Western imperial alliance.
Now we are in Trump-2. He committed perhaps the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the US empire when he went on the attack against India with tariffs to try and separate them from Russia. This blew black in the most spectacular fashion by driving them closer to Russia and kicking off a rapprochement with China that is still bearing diplomatic fruit to this day. Therefore, we can say that Trump severely weakened the overall strategic plan for the Asia Pacific region by single-handedly preventing TPP and the Quad from coming into force as tools of the US empire (for the forseable future), unlike NATO and the EU.
At the present day, the empire is struggling to extricate itself from Ukraine without having a Kabul / Saigon moment. The Western armories are bare, having sent everything they can spare and very much they could not spare in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the proxy conflict. The F-35 fighter jet is STILL NOT OPERATIONAL ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM’S OWN DEFINITION. By contrast, at the 80-year commemoration parade, the Chinese unveiled no fewer than a dozen new weapon systems, many a generation or more ahead of their US counterparts.
They are failing everywhere and cannot admit it. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, now the only question is whether the Russians will end up with Odessa. American warships are powerless against Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles. Japan tried to ramp up the rhetoric on Taiwan only to get slapped down by the US. We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego. Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it’s a very dangerous time for all of us.
What‘s your perspective on Trump‘s motion to increase and secure US rule over the Americas?
Fascinating question, and highly relevant.
A few points:
- I think it follows from the great power geopolitics logic except they are already too late. They failed to contain Brazil, and they can’t even confidently bully Venezuela.
- it seems like there is a division between North and South America. The Mexicans and Canadians have offered up essentially no resistance. Lots of failed States and vassals in Central America and the Caribbean. By contrast, it seems like South America is proving more difficult to subdue. By that same geographic logic, I think they will end up with domination over Greenland if they keep pursuing that strategy
- it’s possible that it is a short-term or rhetorical-only shift and the empire will continue overextending trying to control the whole world
We are also seeing peak China. Their demographic problems will be a severe drag going forward. It’ll be a multi-power world, not a Chinese hegemony.
First off, the Chinese don’t seek global hegemony like the Western powers, no matter what the projection and propaganda says. (This is far too big of a topic for short comment but the Chinese have never done Roman-style imperialism in all of their history. Also, according to my research, China hasn’t made a new territorial claim in over 70 years, since the KMT era)
Second off, I did some comparisons on this website. I honestly wasn’t sure what I was going to see but China’s pyramid is better than all the “developed” countries and it really blows their East Asian neighbors out of the water. Therefore, I don’t buy the argument that China is doomed by its demographics, unless we are saying that all the peer comparison nations are even more doomed.
I happen to believe that the Chinese are right and we are entering a New Chinese Century, with the Middle Kingdom once again the economic center of a prosperous and powerful Asia. They are on the cusp (speaking in years) of completely defeating “containment”, and have built an industrial ecosystem unlike anything the world has ever seen. Of course that all goes out the window if the nukes start flying.
China also has a huge gender imbalance. All those excess men count differently than men in other countries with a balanced gender dynamic. Also, China’s demographics (according to the website) do not compare favorably to the US. That said, it’ll be India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and places like this that production shifts to as China ages.
All the other countries in Asia do sex-selective abortion too, it’s not unique to China
The whole demographic crisis in China is largely based on misinterpretation of the data for the benefit of low intellect racists
We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego.
Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it’s a very dangerous time for all of us.
So we agree on what is going to happen?
So we agree on what is going to happen?
Well nobody knows the future but the times are extremely dangerous. I’m not personally yet seeing signs that the logic of MAD is failing, but things could change very quickly, especially if there was a direct hot war and US forces were facing humiliating defeat.
I think our best hope lies in incompetence exceeding malevolence… Hardly comforting
I’m not personally yet seeing signs that the logic of MAD is failing
Reagan called for a system that would end MAD and render nuclear weapons obsolete.[2] Elements of the program reemerged in 2019 under the Space Development Agency (SDA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Add to that the thoughts behind tactical nukes.
I totally agree that strategic missile defense technology is very destabilizing and dangerous. However like always, the enemy gets a vote.
Myself and others believe that in developing and announcing these weapon systems the Russians have achieved their goal of restoring their nuclear deterrent.
On that basis I would agree that I think tactical nukes would be the way the taboo is broken if it happens in our present cycle of instability.
They’ve never been witty, they’ve been playing on easy mode since the end of WWII and now the tutorial level is over.
I expect there will be more wars as countries no longer have a nation to enforce current borders. My guess is that the next international order will look more like the Concert of Europe with varying spheres of influence.
