Superpower Conundrum: The Rise and Fall of Just About Everything
Thursday, 02 July 2015 00:00 By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
The rise and fall of great powers and their imperial domains has been a
central fact of history for centuries. It's been a sensible, repeatedly
validated framework for thinking about the fate of the planet. So it's
hardly surprising, when faced with a country once regularly labeled the
"sole superpower," "the last superpower," or even the global "hyperpower"
and now, curiously, called nothing whatsoever, that the "decline" question
should come up. Is the US or isn't it? Might it or might it not now be on
the downhill side of imperial greatness?
Take a slow train - that is, any train - anywhere in America, as I did
recently in the northeast, and then take a high-speed train anywhere else on
Earth, as I also did recently, and it's not hard to imagine the US in
decline. The greatest power in history, the "unipolar power," can't build a
single mile of high-speed rail? Really? And its Congress is now mired in an
argument about whether funds can even be raised to keep America's highways
more or less pothole-free.
Sometimes, I imagine myself talking to my long-dead parents because I know
how such things would have astonished two people who lived through the Great
Depression, World War II, and a can-do post-war era in which the staggering
wealth and power of this country were indisputable. What if I could tell
them how the crucial infrastructure of such a still-wealthy nation -
bridges, pipelines, roads, and the like - is now grossly underfunded, in an
increasing state of disrepair, and beginning to crumble? That would
definitely shock them.
And what would they think upon learning that, with the Soviet Union a
quarter-century in the trash bin of history, the US, alone in triumph, has
been incapable of applying its overwhelming military and economic power
effectively? I'm sure they would be dumbstruck to discover that, since the
moment the Soviet Union imploded, the US has been at war continuously with
another country (three conflicts and endless strife); that I was talking
about, of all places, Iraq; and that the mission there was never faintly
accomplished. How improbable is that? And what would they think if I
mentioned that the other great conflicts of the post-Cold-War era were with
Afghanistan (two wars with a decade off in-between) and the relatively small
groups of non-state actors we now call terrorists? And how would they react
on discovering that the results were: failure in Iraq, failure in
Afghanistan, and the proliferation of terror groups across much of the
Greater Middle East (including the establishment of an actual terror
caliphate) and increasing parts of Africa?
They would, I think, conclude that the US was over the hill and set on the
sort of decline that, sooner or later, has been the fate of every great
power. And what if I told them that, in this new century, not a single
action of the military that US presidents now call "the finest fighting
force the world has ever known" has, in the end, been anything but a dismal
failure? Or that presidents, presidential candidates, and politicians in
Washington are required to insist on something no one would have had to say
in their day: that the United States is both an "exceptional" and an
"indispensible" nation? Or that they would also have to endlessly thank our
troops (as would the citizenry) for... well... never success, but just being
there and getting maimed, physically or mentally, or dying while we went
about our lives? Or that those soldiers must always be referred to as
"heroes."
In their day, when the obligation to serve in a citizens' army was a given,
none of this would have made much sense, while the endless defensive
insistence on American greatness would have stood out like a sore thumb.
Today, its repetitive presence marks the moment of doubt. Are we really so
"exceptional"? Is this country truly "indispensible" to the rest of the
planet and if so, in what way exactly? Are those troops genuinely our heroes
and if so, just what was it they did that we're so darn proud of?
Return my amazed parents to their graves, put all of this together, and you
have the beginnings of a description of a uniquely great power in decline.
It's a classic vision, but one with a problem.
A God-Like Power to Destroy
Who today recalls the ads from my 1950s childhood for, if I remember
correctly, drawing lessons, which always had a tagline that went something
like: What's wrong with this picture? (You were supposed to notice the
five-legged cows floating through the clouds.) So what's wrong with this
picture of the obvious signs of decline: the greatest power in history, with
hundreds of garrisons scattered across the planet, can't seem to apply its
power effectively no matter where it sends its military or bring countries
like Iran or a weakened post-Soviet Russia to heel by a full range of
threats, sanctions, and the like, or suppress a modestly armed
terror-movement-cum-state in the Middle East?
For one thing, look around and tell me that the United States doesn't still
seem like a unipolar power. I mean, where exactly are its rivals? Since the
fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the first wooden ships mounted with
cannons broke out of their European backwater and began to gobble up the
globe, there have always been rival great powers - three, four, five, or
more. And what of today? The other three candidates of the moment would
assumedly be the European Union (EU), Russia, and China.
Economically, the EU is indeed a powerhouse, but in any other way it's a
second-rate conglomeration of states that still slavishly follow the US and
an entity threatening to come apart at the seams. Russia looms ever larger
in Washington these days, but remains a rickety power in search of greatness
in its former imperial borderlands. It's a country almost as dependent on
its energy industry as Saudi Arabia and nothing like a potential future
superpower. As for China, it's obviously the rising power of the moment and
now officially has the number one economy on Planet Earth. Still, it remains
in many ways a poor country whose leaders fear any kind of future economic
implosion (which could happen). Like the Russians, like any aspiring great
power, it wants to make its weight felt in its neighborhood - at the moment
the East and South China Seas. And like Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Chinese
leadership is indeed upgrading its military. But the urge in both cases is
to emerge as a regional power to contend with, not a superpower or a genuine
rival of the US.
Whatever may be happening to American power, there really are no potential
rivals to shoulder the blame. Yet, uniquely unrivaled, the US has proven
curiously incapable of translating its unipolar power and a military that,
on paper, trumps every other one on the planet into its desires. This was
not the normal experience of past reigning great powers. Or put another way,
whether or not the US is in decline, the rise-and-fall narrative seems,
half-a-millennium later, to have reached some kind of largely uncommented
upon and unexamined dead end.
In looking for an explanation, consider a related narrative involving
military power. Why, in this new century, does the US seem so incapable of
achieving victory or transforming crucial regions into places that can at
least be controlled? Military power is by definition destructive, but in the
past such force often cleared the ground for the building of local,
regional, or even global structures, however grim or oppressive they might
have been. If force always was meant to break things, it sometimes achieved
other ends as well. Now, it seems as if breaking is all it can do, or how to
explain the fact that, in this century, the planet's sole superpower has
specialized - see Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere - in
fracturing, not building nations.
Empires may have risen and fallen in those 500 years, but weaponry only
rose. Over those centuries in which so many rivals engaged each other,
carved out their imperial domains, fought their wars, and sooner or later
fell, the destructive power of the weaponry they were wielding only
ratcheted up exponentially: from the crossbow to the musket, the cannon, the
Colt revolver, the repeating rifle, the Gatling gun, the machine gun, the
dreadnaught, modern artillery, the tank, poison gas, the zeppelin, the
plane, the bomb, the aircraft carrier, the missile, and at the end of the
line, the "victory weapon" of World War II, the nuclear bomb that would turn
the rulers of the greatest powers, and later even lesser powers, into the
equivalent of gods.
For the first time, representatives of humanity had in their hands the power
to destroy anything on the planet in a fashion once imagined possible only
by some deity or set of deities. It was now possible to create our own end
times. And yet here was the odd thing: the weaponry that brought the power
of the gods down to Earth somehow offered no practical power at all to
national leaders. In the post-Hiroshima-Nagasaki world, those nuclear
weapons would prove unusable. Once they were loosed on the planet, there
would be no more rises, no more falls. (Today, we know that even a limited
nuclear exchange among lesser powers could, thanks to the nuclear-winter
effect, devastate the planet.)
Weapons Development in an Era of Limited War
In a sense, World War II could be considered the ultimate moment for both
the narratives of empire and the weapon. It would be the last "great" war in
which major powers could bring all the weaponry available to them to bear in
search of ultimate victory and the ultimate shaping of the globe. It
resulted in unprecedented destruction across vast swathes of the planet, the
killing of tens of millions, the turning of great cities into rubble and of
countless people into refugees, the creation of an industrial structure for
genocide, and finally the building of those weapons of ultimate destruction
and of the first missiles that would someday be their crucial delivery
systems. And out of that war came the final rivals of the modern age - and
then there were two - the "superpowers."
That very word, superpower, had much of the end of the story embedded in it.
Think of it as a marker for a new age, for the fact that the world of the
"great powers" had been left for something almost inexpressible. Everyone
sensed it. We were now in the realm of "great" squared or force raised in
some exponential fashion, of "super" (as in, say, "superhuman") power. What
made those powers truly super was obvious enough: the nuclear arsenals of
the United States and the Soviet Union - their potential ability, that is,
to destroy in a fashion that had no precedent and from which there might be
no coming back. It wasn't a happenstance that the scientists creating the
H-bomb sometimes referred to it in awestruck terms as a "super bomb," or
simply "the super."
The unimaginable had happened. It turned out that there was such a thing as
too much power. What in World War II came to be called "total war," the full
application of the power of a great state to the destruction of others, was
no longer conceivable. The Cold War gained its name for a reason. A hot war
between the US and the USSR could not be fought, nor could another global
war, a reality driven home by the Cuban missile crisis. Their power could
only be expressed "in the shadows" or in localized conflicts on the
"peripheries." Power now found itself unexpectedly bound hand and foot.
This would soon be reflected in the terminology of American warfare. In the
wake of the frustrating stalemate that was Korea (1950-1953), a war in which
the US found itself unable to use its greatest weapon, Washington took a new
language into Vietnam. The conflict there was to be a "limited war." And
that meant one thing: nuclear power would be taken off the table.
For the first time, it seemed, the world was facing some kind of power glut.
It's at least reasonable to assume that, in the years after the Cold War
standoff ended, that reality somehow seeped from the nuclear arena into the
rest of warfare. In the process, great power war would be limited in new
ways, while somehow being reduced only to its destructive aspect and nothing
more. It suddenly seemed to hold no other possibilities within it - or so
the evidence of the sole superpower in these years suggests.
War and conflict are hardly at an end in the twenty-first century, but
something has removed war's normal efficacy. Weapons development has hardly
ceased either, but the newest highest-tech weapons of our age are proving
strangely ineffective as well. In this context, the urge in our time to
produce "precision weaponry" - no longer the carpet-bombing of the B-52, but
the "surgical" strike capacity of a joint direct attack munition, or JDAM -
should be thought of as the arrival of "limited war" in the world of weapons
development.
The drone, one of those precision weapons, is a striking example. Despite
its penchant for producing "collateral damage," it is not a World War
II-style weapon of indiscriminate slaughter. It has, in fact, been used
relatively effectively to play whack-a-mole with the leadership of terrorist
groups, killing off one leader or lieutenant after another. And yet all of
the movements it has been directed against have only proliferated, gaining
strength (and brutality) in these same years. It has, in other words, proven
an effective weapon of bloodlust and revenge, but not of policy. If war is,
in fact, politics by other means (as Carl von Clausewitz claimed), revenge
is not. No one should then be surprised that the drone has produced not an
effective war on terror, but a war that seems to promote terror.
One other factor should be added in here: that global power glut has grown
exponentially in another fashion as well. In these years, the destructive
power of the gods has descended on humanity a second time as well - via the
seemingly most peaceable of activities, the burning of fossil fuels. Climate
change now promises a slow-motion version of nuclear Armageddon, increasing
both the pressure on and the fragmentation of societies, while introducing a
new form of destruction to our lives.
Can I make sense of all this? Hardly. I'm just doing my best to report on
the obvious: that military power no longer seems to act as it once did on
Planet Earth. Under distinctly apocalyptic pressures, something seems to be
breaking down, something seems to be fragmenting, and with that the familiar
stories, familiar frameworks, for thinking about how our world works are
losing their efficacy.
Decline may be in the American future, but on a planet pushed to extremes,
don't count on it taking place within the usual tale of the rise and fall of
great powers or even superpowers. Something else is happening on Planet
Earth. Be prepared.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
TOM ENGELHARDT
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of "The
United States of Fear" as well as "The End of Victory Culture," runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick
Turse, is "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050".
RELATED STORIES
Infrastructure Sticker Shock: Financing Costs More Than Construction
By Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt Blog | News Analysis
Iraqi Army: Then and Now
By Khalil Bendib, OtherWords | Cartoon
________________________________________
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Superpower Conundrum: The Rise and Fall of Just About Everything
Thursday, 02 July 2015 00:00 By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
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. The rise and fall of great powers and their imperial domains has
been a central fact of history for centuries. It's been a sensible,
repeatedly validated framework for thinking about the fate of the planet. So
it's hardly surprising, when faced with a country once regularly labeled the
"sole superpower," "the last superpower," or even the global "hyperpower"
and now, curiously, called nothing whatsoever, that the "decline" question
should come up. Is the US or isn't it? Might it or might it not now be on
the downhill side of imperial greatness?
. Take a slow train - that is, any train - anywhere in America, as I
did recently in the northeast, and then take a high-speed train anywhere
else on Earth, as I also did recently, and it's not hard to imagine the US
in decline. The greatest power in history, the "unipolar power," can't build
a single mile of high-speed rail? Really? And its Congress is now mired in
an argument about whether funds can even be raised to keep America's
highways more or less pothole-free.
Sometimes, I imagine myself talking to my long-dead parents because I know
how such things would have astonished two people who lived through the Great
Depression, World War II, and a can-do post-war era in which the staggering
wealth and power of this country were indisputable. What if I could tell
them how the crucial infrastructure of such a still-wealthy nation -
bridges, pipelines, roads, and the like - is now grossly underfunded, in an
increasing state of disrepair, and beginning to crumble? That would
definitely shock them.
And what would they think upon learning that, with the Soviet Union a
quarter-century in the trash bin of history, the US, alone in triumph, has
been incapable of applying its overwhelming military and economic power
effectively? I'm sure they would be dumbstruck to discover that, since the
moment the Soviet Union imploded, the US has been at war continuously with
another country (three conflicts and endless strife); that I was talking
about, of all places, Iraq; and that the mission there was never faintly
accomplished. How improbable is that? And what would they think if I
mentioned that the other great conflicts of the post-Cold-War era were with
Afghanistan (two wars with a decade off in-between) and the relatively small
groups of non-state actors we now call terrorists? And how would they react
on discovering that the results were: failure in Iraq, failure in
Afghanistan, and the proliferation of terror groups across much of the
Greater Middle East (including the establishment of an actual terror
caliphate) and increasing parts of Africa?
They would, I think, conclude that the US was over the hill and set on the
sort of decline that, sooner or later, has been the fate of every great
power. And what if I told them that, in this new century, not a single
action of the military that US presidents now call "the finest fighting
force the world has ever known" has, in the end, been anything but a dismal
failure? Or that presidents, presidential candidates, and politicians in
Washington are required to insist on something no one would have had to say
in their day: that the United States is both an "exceptional" and an
"indispensible" nation? Or that they would also have to endlessly thank our
troops (as would the citizenry) for... well... never success, but just being
there and getting maimed, physically or mentally, or dying while we went
about our lives? Or that those soldiers must always be referred to as
"heroes."
In their day, when the obligation to serve in a citizens' army was a given,
none of this would have made much sense, while the endless defensive
insistence on American greatness would have stood out like a sore thumb.
Today, its repetitive presence marks the moment of doubt. Are we really so
"exceptional"? Is this country truly "indispensible" to the rest of the
planet and if so, in what way exactly? Are those troops genuinely our heroes
and if so, just what was it they did that we're so darn proud of?
Return my amazed parents to their graves, put all of this together, and you
have the beginnings of a description of a uniquely great power in decline.
It's a classic vision, but one with a problem.
A God-Like Power to Destroy
Who today recalls the ads from my 1950s childhood for, if I remember
correctly, drawing lessons, which always had a tagline that went something
like: What's wrong with this picture? (You were supposed to notice the
five-legged cows floating through the clouds.) So what's wrong with this
picture of the obvious signs of decline: the greatest power in history, with
hundreds of garrisons scattered across the planet, can't seem to apply its
power effectively no matter where it sends its military or bring countries
like Iran or a weakened post-Soviet Russia to heel by a full range of
threats, sanctions, and the like, or suppress a modestly armed
terror-movement-cum-state in the Middle East?
For one thing, look around and tell me that the United States doesn't still
seem like a unipolar power. I mean, where exactly are its rivals? Since the
fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the first wooden ships mounted with
cannons broke out of their European backwater and began to gobble up the
globe, there have always been rival great powers - three, four, five, or
more. And what of today? The other three candidates of the moment would
assumedly be the European Union (EU), Russia, and China.
Economically, the EU is indeed a powerhouse, but in any other way it's a
second-rate conglomeration of states that still slavishly follow the US and
an entity threatening to come apart at the seams. Russia looms ever larger
in Washington these days, but remains a rickety power in search of greatness
in its former imperial borderlands. It's a country almost as dependent on
its energy industry as Saudi Arabia and nothing like a potential future
superpower. As for China, it's obviously the rising power of the moment and
now officially has the number one economy on Planet Earth. Still, it remains
in many ways a poor country whose leaders fear any kind of future economic
implosion (which could happen). Like the Russians, like any aspiring great
power, it wants to make its weight felt in its neighborhood - at the moment
the East and South China Seas. And like Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Chinese
leadership is indeed upgrading its military. But the urge in both cases is
to emerge as a regional power to contend with, not a superpower or a genuine
rival of the US.
Whatever may be happening to American power, there really are no potential
rivals to shoulder the blame. Yet, uniquely unrivaled, the US has proven
curiously incapable of translating its unipolar power and a military that,
on paper, trumps every other one on the planet into its desires. This was
not the normal experience of past reigning great powers. Or put another way,
whether or not the US is in decline, the rise-and-fall narrative seems,
half-a-millennium later, to have reached some kind of largely uncommented
upon and unexamined dead end.
In looking for an explanation, consider a related narrative involving
military power. Why, in this new century, does the US seem so incapable of
achieving victory or transforming crucial regions into places that can at
least be controlled? Military power is by definition destructive, but in the
past such force often cleared the ground for the building of local,
regional, or even global structures, however grim or oppressive they might
have been. If force always was meant to break things, it sometimes achieved
other ends as well. Now, it seems as if breaking is all it can do, or how to
explain the fact that, in this century, the planet's sole superpower has
specialized - see Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere - in
fracturing, not building nations.
Empires may have risen and fallen in those 500 years, but weaponry only
rose. Over those centuries in which so many rivals engaged each other,
carved out their imperial domains, fought their wars, and sooner or later
fell, the destructive power of the weaponry they were wielding only
ratcheted up exponentially: from the crossbow to the musket, the cannon, the
Colt revolver, the repeating rifle, the Gatling gun, the machine gun, the
dreadnaught, modern artillery, the tank, poison gas, the zeppelin, the
plane, the bomb, the aircraft carrier, the missile, and at the end of the
line, the "victory weapon" of World War II, the nuclear bomb that would turn
the rulers of the greatest powers, and later even lesser powers, into the
equivalent of gods.
For the first time, representatives of humanity had in their hands the power
to destroy anything on the planet in a fashion once imagined possible only
by some deity or set of deities. It was now possible to create our own end
times. And yet here was the odd thing: the weaponry that brought the power
of the gods down to Earth somehow offered no practical power at all to
national leaders. In the post-Hiroshima-Nagasaki world, those nuclear
weapons would prove unusable. Once they were loosed on the planet, there
would be no more rises, no more falls. (Today, we know that even a limited
nuclear exchange among lesser powers could, thanks to the nuclear-winter
effect, devastate the planet.)
Weapons Development in an Era of Limited War
In a sense, World War II could be considered the ultimate moment for both
the narratives of empire and the weapon. It would be the last "great" war in
which major powers could bring all the weaponry available to them to bear in
search of ultimate victory and the ultimate shaping of the globe. It
resulted in unprecedented destruction across vast swathes of the planet, the
killing of tens of millions, the turning of great cities into rubble and of
countless people into refugees, the creation of an industrial structure for
genocide, and finally the building of those weapons of ultimate destruction
and of the first missiles that would someday be their crucial delivery
systems. And out of that war came the final rivals of the modern age - and
then there were two - the "superpowers."
That very word, superpower, had much of the end of the story embedded in it.
Think of it as a marker for a new age, for the fact that the world of the
"great powers" had been left for something almost inexpressible. Everyone
sensed it. We were now in the realm of "great" squared or force raised in
some exponential fashion, of "super" (as in, say, "superhuman") power. What
made those powers truly super was obvious enough: the nuclear arsenals of
the United States and the Soviet Union - their potential ability, that is,
to destroy in a fashion that had no precedent and from which there might be
no coming back. It wasn't a happenstance that the scientists creating the
H-bomb sometimes referred to it in awestruck terms as a "super bomb," or
simply "the super."
The unimaginable had happened. It turned out that there was such a thing as
too much power. What in World War II came to be called "total war," the full
application of the power of a great state to the destruction of others, was
no longer conceivable. The Cold War gained its name for a reason. A hot war
between the US and the USSR could not be fought, nor could another global
war, a reality driven home by the Cuban missile crisis. Their power could
only be expressed "in the shadows" or in localized conflicts on the
"peripheries." Power now found itself unexpectedly bound hand and foot.
This would soon be reflected in the terminology of American warfare. In the
wake of the frustrating stalemate that was Korea (1950-1953), a war in which
the US found itself unable to use its greatest weapon, Washington took a new
language into Vietnam. The conflict there was to be a "limited war." And
that meant one thing: nuclear power would be taken off the table.
For the first time, it seemed, the world was facing some kind of power glut.
It's at least reasonable to assume that, in the years after the Cold War
standoff ended, that reality somehow seeped from the nuclear arena into the
rest of warfare. In the process, great power war would be limited in new
ways, while somehow being reduced only to its destructive aspect and nothing
more. It suddenly seemed to hold no other possibilities within it - or so
the evidence of the sole superpower in these years suggests.
War and conflict are hardly at an end in the twenty-first century, but
something has removed war's normal efficacy. Weapons development has hardly
ceased either, but the newest highest-tech weapons of our age are proving
strangely ineffective as well. In this context, the urge in our time to
produce "precision weaponry" - no longer the carpet-bombing of the B-52, but
the "surgical" strike capacity of a joint direct attack munition, or JDAM -
should be thought of as the arrival of "limited war" in the world of weapons
development.
The drone, one of those precision weapons, is a striking example. Despite
its penchant for producing "collateral damage," it is not a World War
II-style weapon of indiscriminate slaughter. It has, in fact, been used
relatively effectively to play whack-a-mole with the leadership of terrorist
groups, killing off one leader or lieutenant after another. And yet all of
the movements it has been directed against have only proliferated, gaining
strength (and brutality) in these same years. It has, in other words, proven
an effective weapon of bloodlust and revenge, but not of policy. If war is,
in fact, politics by other means (as Carl von Clausewitz claimed), revenge
is not. No one should then be surprised that the drone has produced not an
effective war on terror, but a war that seems to promote terror.
One other factor should be added in here: that global power glut has grown
exponentially in another fashion as well. In these years, the destructive
power of the gods has descended on humanity a second time as well - via the
seemingly most peaceable of activities, the burning of fossil fuels. Climate
change now promises a slow-motion version of nuclear Armageddon, increasing
both the pressure on and the fragmentation of societies, while introducing a
new form of destruction to our lives.
Can I make sense of all this? Hardly. I'm just doing my best to report on
the obvious: that military power no longer seems to act as it once did on
Planet Earth. Under distinctly apocalyptic pressures, something seems to be
breaking down, something seems to be fragmenting, and with that the familiar
stories, familiar frameworks, for thinking about how our world works are
losing their efficacy.
Decline may be in the American future, but on a planet pushed to extremes,
don't count on it taking place within the usual tale of the rise and fall of
great powers or even superpowers. Something else is happening on Planet
Earth. Be prepared.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of "The
United States of Fear" as well as "The End of Victory Culture," runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick
Turse, is "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050".
Related Stories
Infrastructure Sticker Shock: Financing Costs More Than Construction
By Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt Blog | News AnalysisIraqi Army: Then and Now
By Khalil Bendib, OtherWords | Cartoon
Show Comments
