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
With international banking freely printing money in much of the world (debt and taxation via inflation), I’m guessing we will have more and more frequent boom/bust cycles followed by a massive rug pull that will finally break the system’s back, death by banking.
Then China will run the show for our lifetimes, which means we’ll finally get fast rail.
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.
You said it so much better than I did.
We just gonna have other bully. That’s how power vacuums works
A global hegemon on the scale of the British and then US empire is kind of a blip historically though — it’s not obvious that another state will continue in the same role
Safer, regardless of whatever atrocity-defending propaganda y’all have been eating. And once the dollar goes from reserve currency to just another coin to exchange with, America’s privileges will be gone. That’s gonna be interesting to see.
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.
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 over two decades.
When Hillary Neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2016, 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?
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?
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.
The whole demographic crisis in China is largely based on misinterpretation of the data for the benefit of low intellect racists
The capital you rely on in your argument has a asymptote, and as China approaches this line, growth will happen at a diminishing rate. How much technical progress can they squeeze out of the tube? Is it enough to deal with demographic collapse? Probably not.
Yup, because it’s absolutely impossible for China to change policies that would encourage higher birth rate or open up immigration. Enjoy masturbating to your China collapse fantasies.
