'The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China's economic ascent at its expense.'
The end of 2021 and the beginning of a new year is a convenient time to take stock of the causes of America's decline.
This might, however, be a futile enterprise. Tolstoy said that all families are unhappy but each of them is unhappy in its own way. The same thing might be said of the end of empires. All empires end, but each exits in its own distinct unhappy fashion. At the beginning of the 1990s, the U.S. had staved off the economic challenge of Japan and seen the political and military challenge posed by the Soviets dissipate. Moreover, it seemed to have thrown off the"Vietnam Syndrome" with its victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. The American Empire appeared to be experiencing a second wind.
Bin Laden puts paid to those historians who belittle the role of personality in history. For what he did, probably without intending it, was direct U.S. military power to Afghanistan and the broader Middle East with his attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China's economic ascent at its expense.
Even before China came into the picture in the 1990s, two"superstructural" factors were decisive in conditioning the way capital would respond to the crisis of profitability, one that would clear the way for the massive migration of U.S. jobs there. In any event, it was the virtually unopposed neoliberal counterrevolution that made possible the corporate capture of public policy in the 1980s and 1990s, a development that set the stage for the large-scale transfer of American factories and jobs to China over the next two decades. Moreover, with their assertion, more by fiat than by proof, that market forces had"determined" that the U.S.
While the Republican Party had exploited the racial insecurities of the white population successfully since the late 1960s through the so-called"Southern Strategy" and racist dog whistle politics, it was not predetermined that white supremacy would become the dominant stream in conservative, right-wing politics that would subordinate and fuse with other streams such as cultural and religious conservatism, anti-liberalism, and populist disdain for scientific expertise.
That conjuncture came with the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008. Its volatile mix of high unemployment and high inequality provided an indispensable context for white supremacy's breaking out to become the driving force of the politics of the white population, a development that took liberals and others by surprise.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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