An empire in decline

[eridani]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/27/the-us-empire-is-in-decline/

US global domination, which could be said to have begun with the collapse in the early 1990s of the former Soviet Union, was destined to be a short-lived affair. By 1990, the Soviet Union had been bankrupted by President Reagan’s massive military spending campaign, and the USSR’s political and economic implosion did leave the US, by default, as the world’s last and only “superpower,” but left unremarked was that this country’s massive military spending had also effectively hollowed out the US economy, too. And instead of turning inward at the end of the Cold War, and investing in a revitalization of America’s crumbling physical, social and educational infrastructure, which might have rectified things, the problem was made worse by two more decades of continuous war economy, driven by the very neoconservative ideology that Krauthammer still espouses.

At the same time that the US empire was bankrupting itself through extravagant military spending, it has been relentlessly pushing its weight around everywhere in the world, subverting or trying to subvert democratically elected governments in places like Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Haiti and Venezuela, and even seeking to undermine governments in states like Russia, Ukraine and Iran.

Something had to give, and as Krauthammer correctly notes, something finally has given. America’s bluff is being called.

Fed up with the clumsy bullying of American foreign and economic policy, angered by the imperial over-reach of America’s National Security Agency, and emboldened by the weakness of both the American dollar and America’s bloated, bureaucratic and over-stretched military (as evidenced by its inability to defeat minimally armed and trained patriotic forces in Afghanistan and Iraq), Russia and China, and perhaps Iran too, are realizing that they “don’t have to take it anymore.”

Krauthammer correctly sees the US in “retreat” and “decline” as a global power. Where he goes wrong is in seeing this as “Obama’s choice.”

Obama really had no choice. The decline of America as global hegemon has been the result of choices made by Washington leaders dating back really to the 1960s and the disastrous war against the people of Vietnam, or perhaps even earlier, to the US-orchestrated Korean War. History is replete with empires that crumbled under their own hubris and ambition, and the United States is no different. The only real disagreement I have with Krauthammer is in seeing this decline of US empire as a tragedy