*I like this author's blunt title but realizing if this comes true in my lifetime, I still don't care. To a polymath opportunist, this is no more than another challenge to overcome. I live for new challenges and bore very easily once I overcome obstacles.
All empires fall. The American one is already well into its terminal phase.
America has its flaws. Countless books examine them, but they often conclude their grim analyses with a chapter on “how to make things better.” Rarely is the feasibility of these proposed solutions considered.
What if the flaws in our principal institutions, from Capitol Hill to the National Security apparatus to the Federal Reserve, are unfixable? What if they exacerbate one another, resulting in an unsolvable nightmare? Is the reality that America has already begun its irreversible decline, after only 250 years, staring us in the face?
All empires fall, after all. It’s just a matter of time before America goes the way of Rome.
In 2014, a study partly funded by NASA warned that global industrial civilization could implode in the near future.
The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.
Excess resource extraction and unequal wealth distribution were crucial to every civilizational collapse of the past 5,000 years. Privileged elites rapaciously exploited the environment and labor while shielding themselves from the consequences. The lives of commoners ultimately descended into chaos, creating a destructive vacuum that obliterated the foundational pillars of society.
Excess resource extraction. Unequal wealth distribution. Are these not the problems currently plaguing America, and for which there are few proposed solutions? Expecting our notoriously venal politicians or our overworked, heavily distracted citizenry to resolve these issues is absurd. Identity politics, among other things, has stifled our ability to unite and address imminent dangers.
In 2008, Thomas Fingar, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, stated that US global leadership will “rapidly deteriorate in political, economic, and arguably cultural arenas.” NIC’s Global Trends 2030 says that in the coming decades the US will be mired in internal crises as a result of low economic growth. Despite the cheery optimism of America’s politicians, the Intelligence community seems certain that ticking debt-bombs and social instability will mightily diminish America’s global standing.
Morris Berman’s trilogy on the American Empire and William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail offer astute analyses on why America’s problems are irreparable and reminiscent of past empires. I’ll briefly explain why America is “down for the count” for those unwilling to read the books.
1) The era of U.S. Dollar hegemony is coming to an end
In 1944, the Allied Powers constructed the post-war monetary order at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. Because America had cemented itself as the world’s preeminent superpower, it was agreed that the U.S Dollar would officially be the global reserve currency (it had unofficially held this status since 1925). The bulk of international transactions would now be conducted in U.S. Dollars. The world’s central banks would also hold massive quantities of USD. As of today, the U.S. Dollar constitutes 60% of global reserves and 80% of global payments.
According to Global Trends 2030:
Historically, US dominance has been buttressed by the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. The fall of the dollar as the global reserve currency…would be one of the sharpest indications of a loss of US global economic position, equivalent to the sterling’s demise as the world’s currency, contributing to the end of the British Empire in the post-World War II period.
Simply put, the current monetary system allows America to pay for goods and services with printed dollars. If other countries printed giant sums of their money to buy imports, their currency’s value would crash on the foreign exchange market. Because the USD’s reserve currency status creates an unlimited demand for dollars, America has been merrily churning the printing presses to bolster its military and buy foreign goods.
All of the “Made in _______” goods being sold at American retailers, as well as American made products using imported materials, should be 2–5x more expensive than they are now. The US runs trade deficits with virtually every country in the world. Other countries give us goods and we give them printed money. That the U.S has spent the past century debasing its currency is obvious; the prices of everyday goods are more expensive than in the 1950’s by several orders of magnitude.
The US Dollar is not the world’s first reserve currency, nor will it be the last.
