The Ghion Journal
The United States has reached a point where its entire claim to global hegemony is based on a series of increasingly fragile geopolitical alliances, and on a worldwide military presence that can’t be sustained for much longer. As the political writer Dmitry Orlov said in an interview last month:
“I think that the American empire is very much over already, but it hasn’t been put to any sort of serious stress test yet, and so nobody realizes that this is the case.”
The last few years of military budget expansions, war campaigns against Iran and Venezuela, and attempts to strong-arm Russia and China are all part of the American empire’s reaction to this fragility. So is the fact that the United States has, with the “War on Terror”, been at war for the last 18 years. Throughout this time, the American empire has been in a state similar to that of the British empire after it attacked Egypt in 1956, or to that of the Athenian empire during the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 B.C. When these empires launched their great military adventures, each experienced a rapid decline in their ability to maintain the power structures they’d created, and soon they were no longer dominant. The same has been happening to the U.S. since the start of its disastrous invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.