2025: The End of US Dominance

[Pawn Power]

Sun sets on US power (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/20/barack-obama-president-intelligence-agency)

Intelligence report says that the US as a world power will come to an end by 2025.


The United States (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa)' leading intelligence organisation has warned that the world is entering an increasingly unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of western-style democracy is no longer assured, and some states are in danger of being "taken over and run by criminal networks".
The global trends review (http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_home.html), produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) every four years, represents sobering reading in Barack Obama (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/barackobama)'s intray as he prepares to take office in January. The country he inherits, the report warns, will no longer be able to "call the shots" alone, as its power over an increasingly multipolar world begins to wane.
Looking ahead to 2025, the NIC (which coordinates analysis from all the US intelligence agencies), foresees a fragmented world, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions, while nuclear proliferation, particularly in the Middle East, and even nuclear conflict grow more likely.

[GPDP]

I've thought for some time now that, within the next two decades, global geopolitics will take a radical turn. I truly do see the US considerably waning in power within that time frame, and conflicts over resources such as oil could very well flare up.

[Drace]

Oh boy I hope to live that long!

[Abluegreen7]

This is the best thing I have heard in a while.

[The Douche]

This is not a good thing, this means more war, not revolution.

[Abluegreen7]

This is not a good thing, this means more war, not revolution.

How so?

This could open up the Age of Revolution.

[Cult of Reason]

I think it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on this. They, the NIC (or whatever their name is), make a report for the President after each election IIRC, and the one they made in 2004 was starkly different. In addition, the purpose for the report is not as a prediction as much as a "what COULD happen" statement.

In 2004 they said US power was gaining, and now they say it is shrinking. Whoop-di-doo. We are currently in a period of crisis, literally; the definition of a crisis is, from Wiktionary:









A crucial (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crucial) or decisive (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decisive) point (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/point) or situation (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/situation); a turning point (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/turning_point).
An unstable (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unstable) situation, in political (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/political), social (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social), economic (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/economic) or military (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/military) affairs (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affair), especially one involving an impending (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/impending) abrupt (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abrupt) change (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/change).
A sudden (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sudden) change in the course (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/course) of a disease (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disease), usually at which the patient is expected to recover or die.
(psychology) A traumatic (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/traumatic) or stressful (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stressful) change in a person's life (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/life).
(drama) A point in a drama (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drama) at which a conflict (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/conflict) reaches a peak (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peak) before being resolved (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/resolved).

It is all very well to speak of "could"s, but it is best not build up any hopes or dreads for the long term at this point.

[Tatarin]

If these predictions, in any case, do come true - then I guess there are potentials for new progressive and eventually revolutionary groups to form. For example, they mention wars and such over resources left (kind of evident then that they need to cut down on their spending, no?) then more and more people could and probably would want to join groups who fight for a world where resources are shared, not fought over...

[The Douche]

How so?

This could open up the Age of Revolution.

Because there is no revolutionary left of note in the US or in many of the countries which the US would/will go to war, and we're not gonna create a serious movement in 15 years.

[redguard2009]

That's only 16 years away. Although some of the blokes on this board aren't even that old, it'll come soon enough (too soon).

It is good news, however. Although the oppressive influence of the United States and its foreign policy has contained a lot of violence, it has also contained a hell of a lot of progress. Think of the dozens upon dozens of movements, governments and revolutions that the United States has directly interfered with -- and the violence and bloodshed they caused in the wake of that involvement. I do honestly believe that the rate of global violence is in a way "bloated" beyond what it "should naturally be" -- in large part due to the foreign policy of the US. Places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, most of South America, most of Africa, the Middle East, eastern Europe and Russia, some parts of Asia -- all of them are washed in instability and violence mainly due to interference in political and economic affairs by American and European interests. When the strength of that influence dies down and gradually disappears then all the progressive forces that have been suppressed for 60 years will be able to exert more of their own influence.

Atleast that's what the optimist in me has to say. There is a chance that the world will be washed in blood from one pole to the other as millions take up arms against one another in an enormous world war which has no winners or losers, or even sides. In which case, we're so fucked.

[Reclaimed Dasein]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/20/business/imf.php[/URL]"]Iceland finally got international backing on Thursday for its bailout plan, while Turkey appeared to be heading for its own rescue package.

Nordic countries followed up on the $2.1 billion loan to Iceland approved by the International Monetary Fund with additional funding of $2.5 billion. The finance ministers of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden said in a joint statement that the funds would help Iceland stabilize its economy and exchange rate, and reduce its public debt over the medium term. Additional funds from Russia, Poland and the Faroe Islands, bring the value of the package to about $5.2 billion.
The IMF said late Wednesday that its board had approved the deal for Iceland, making $827 million immediately available to the country. The remainder of the loan will be paid out in eight equal installments, subject to quarterly reviews.
Germany, Britain and the Netherlands had held up the international aid package in a dispute over compensation payments for overseas depositors in Icesave, a unit of Lansbanki. The three countries have agreed to extend additional credit to Iceland that will enable it to repay the depositors about $26,000 each, in line with European Union law.


Poul Thomsen, the head of the IMF mission to Iceland, said during a conference call with journalists that the total compensation for Icesave customers would be $5 billion to $6 billion.


I used to believe that the United States was on its way out from the Global Superpower scene, but it doesn't look that way anymore. The IMF, WTO, and World Bank serve the United States as instruments of economic oppression and imperialism. Iceland is hardly a third world nation, yet it too will be subject to the "restructuring" required by the IMF. It seems that this crisis will serve to crack open the previously protected areas of European welfare state capitalism to the more vicious American version.

[peaccenicked]

Cailean Bochanan



22nd November, 2008



Born out of our opposition to Washington and London’s drive for global hegemony and the wars which stemmed from it iransolidarity.org, endofempire.org and inthesenewtimes.com have sought to highlight, above all, both the sovereign nation state, as a barrier to empire, and the emerging multipolar world order. There is now no doubt that this multipolar world order is now becoming a reality before our eyes. The latest NIC US intelligence assessement (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3cc151f6-b76e-11dd-8e01-0000779fd18c.html) appears to take this fact on board. Or rather, it pays some lip service to it whilst actually gloating over the prospect of a world in which none of America’s competitors can displace it as global leader. One gets the sense that global anarchy is the prefered option now that the dream of global empire has perished in Iraq and Afghanistan. In rather the same way the senatorial elite in the late Roman Empire reconciled themselves to the empire’s demise, even helping to bring it about by the look of it, confident that they could “handle’ the new Germanic kingdom’s and reinventing themselves as a feudal landowning class. Obama’s advent could well herald this new phase of US power: Obama the handler as opposed to Bush the bomber.




The descent into a sort of medieval chaos may appeal to the survival instincts of the Anglosaxon-oligarchy but it is not what we had in mind for a post-imperial, multipolar world order. The NIC report has highlighted not only a certain destructive mindset amongst the elite, but a real need in the partial vacuum resultant from the eclipse of US power: the need for global leadership.



It is true that no single power can take on the role of the USA as global leader. Nor is it desirable. We are, however, seeing some striking examples of leadership from Moscow, from Peking, from Caracas and from Tehran. We are seeing growing regional groupings such as Mercosur, Asean, the SCO and Europe is gradually fumbling towards an independent foreign policy which will bury NATO. These groupings point to growing political and economic integration on a regional level. The new poles of the multipolar world are crystallising.



The new balance of forces has been highlighted by the urgency of the financial crisis. The G8 is dead: a fact of some importance which has received scant recognition from those who spent so much time protesting against it. G20 is a definite advance and those twelve extra voices went a long way to preventing the summit falling prey to the Brown agenda of reinforcing the IMF as an agency for global chaos. At least, I could find no evidence in its statement (http://inthesenewtimes.com/2008/11/18/november-15-2008-declaration-of-the-summit-on-financial-markets-and-the-world-economy/) supporting the claims of some, mainly on the left, who seem to live in a permanent state of awe of US power, that the summit had indeed simply ratified an IMF dictatorship. On the other hand, it is true that the summit failed to provide the leadership required in answer to the simple question: who is to to prevent entire nations sinking into economic chaos and how is it to be done? That there is a common interest in doing this is clear when we consider that the USA and Britain, the worlds most highly armed states, are leading candidates for economic implosion, paying , as they will, a terrible price for their failed imperial project.



What we are seeing then is emerging and reemerging nations acting together as a check on US/UK power. They are also seeking to make their weight felt (http://inthesenewtimes.com/2008/11/18/the-imf-needs-fixing-and-china-wants-a-say/) within international bodies such as the IMF. These bodies are a product of the post-1945 world in which the US was the leading power, checked to a degree by the Soviet Union until the collapse of the latter. The notable failures of these bodies reflects their distortion by a unipolar order. It is questionable whether, they can now survive at all, and certain that, if so, they must be reformed root and branch. However, the multipolar world reality makes one thing as achievable as it is necessary: global institutions which genuinely reflect the diversity of the world and in which all nations will have influence.



This article from our website (http://inthesenewtimes.com/) sums up the direction I am thinking. 2025? Remember this is the same source that gave us "Weapons of mass destruction".

The author has another relevant article
The Empire is over! (http://inthesenewtimes.com/2008/11/15/the-empire-is-over/)

[Elway]

I agree with cmoney.

There is no good revolutionary news coming from this report. In fact, there's just the opposite built into it. It forsees a world with powers similar to medieval feudalism, and chieftans basing their power on the collection of resources, not direct democratic movements.

Interesting, such societies, or, such a world society, will only serve to make the USA more desirable a place to live, compared to such regimes. People will want to escape from such places as they did from pre-Revolutionary Russia, or post-Soviet expansion Armenia. The world will not become a happy place, and I don't see "the Age of Revolution" springing from all of it, more than I see, the age of repression and something like clanism and egocentric leaders.

If tomorrow, the USA remained as it were now, and the rest of the world became a society similar to, let's say, the Incas, the United States would "lose influence and world power". But the remaining world would hardly be "good news".

[Dimentio]

Don't mix the Incas into this. They had a glorious, well-organised and hyper-centralised state, which had a considerably better standard of life than most of contemporary Europe. And that, they achieved without written language, wheels or advanced mathematics.

[Elway]

The Incas had slavery and a slave code to match it.

When they conquored a people, they separated them, and placed them into houses that were watched for 3 generations by loyal Incans until those people and their culture were integrated (read: destroyed).

Their method of hegemony makes the USA look like supporters of individual culture.

Sorry, Serpent, but those are historical facts.

Their society, of course, had one of the most fair systems of distribution of wealth and shared benefits, and they killed governors who didn't know if certain people in their community were healthy or in need of food.

However, most people throughout the socialist world view slavery, war and forced invasion and hegemony as a "bad thing"; and in fact, something we would fight against. And announcing, "Don't worry; in the end you'll all be better off for this, wouldn't make you any friends, nor serve socialism.

[peaccenicked]

I would take the report itself with a pinch of salt after all it is written by the debris of the neo-cons. We have to look at what is really happening in the world. Supporting the US as world's policeman is not option for the revolutionary left.
What is emerging is not simply a collection of feudal warlords by any means. We have to remember that bourgeois democracy is a form not a content. We need only look at the billion or so spend on the recent US election and the delusions peddled by many on the left (http://inthesenewtimes.com/2008/11/23/obama’s-“left”-cheerleaders-and-the-right-wing-transition/)

What is vital has been the resistance to US unipolar imperialism. This means the strengthening of blocs of nations who are drifting away from neoliberalism and seeking to reform the IMF. Even Sarkozy criticised the IMF's "imperialist" approach. China has been giving interest free loans to to African countries.
The danger is that Nations turn on each other at the instigation of the fading US/UK
imperialist power. This is by no means inevitable.
The revolutionary left cannot insist that it is otherwise its claim to "another world being possible" becomes laughable.
The left is generally stronger outside the Anglosphere particularly in latin America, though neoliberalism has much sway the forces against it are growing. Chavez nationalized the largest goldmine (http://inthesenewtimes.com/2008/11/06/venezuela-to-nationalize-largest-gold-mine/) in Venezuela this month.
They have the world's ear and that of Russia, China, Brazil and India, the leading powers in the emerging new world. This relationship might prove decisive.

The left in general must do its usual job of vigilance against all war and issue pre-emptive warnings while galvanizing people onto the streets if war breaks out.

One of the reasons the revolutionary left should welcome the fall of the US is that it has played such an oppressive role in countries of latin America , toppling Allende's left reformist government and assassinating Che Geuvara.

Are we to act like the US and the UK have been angels on the world stage?
Let us get our bearings right!