| Title | : | In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Dispatch Books) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1608467732 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781608467730 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 359 |
| Publication | : | First published August 15, 2017 |
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Dispatch Books) Reviews
-
Since the financial crisis in 2008, I have read many, many books about the American Century and the widely-shared perception that American Empire is in the midst of a terminal decline. But never have I read nearly so cogent an explanation of both the rise of American global dominance and a blueprint for its end.
To be clear, McCoy touches on many familiar topics hit by books on my bookshelf. The rise of China, the rot of America’s heartland wrought by global capitalism, the looming specter of climate change — all those are present and accounted for.
But what really makes this book a success is the larger framework that McCoy assembles to tell the story, borrowing heavily from Halford Mackinder’s theory of the Geographical Pivot of History.
The gist of it is that there are two principle models of empires vying for global domination. There are land powers, anchored in the richly-appointed Eurasian landmass (or World-Island) around which the world turns. From its heavily-defended position, such a land power — whether Russia, the Soviet Union, a Russo-Germanic alliance or modern China —can control a plurality of the world’s resources, creating an empire of the world.
Traditionally, this land power has been checked by a maritime power whose greater mobility and control of the axial points of the World-Island both in the west (Europe) and in the east (Japan and the South China Sea) allows it to counter the land power. This role has been played by European naval powers — most especially Britain — as well as their successor hegemon in the United States.
The fight of the 21st century, then, will be waged between a declining United States — struggling to maintain it’s hold on the ring of fortifications it has around the World-Island — and China —which appears to finally be realizing the grand vision of using rail transport to unify the Eurasian continent under their leadership.
What I find so compelling about this vision is that it renders so much about 20th century and even contemporary history suddenly explicable. It explains Hitler’s seemingly suicidal bid to capture Eastern Europe. It explains the importance of the Cold War policy of containment.
And it even casts President Barack Obama's pivot to Asia and attempts to push through the TTIP and TTP trade agreements in a new light. Indeed, McCoy is effusive in his praise of Obama as a tactician — not something you often read, especially amid all the criticism about his inability to get the country out Afghanistan and the reliance on drone warfare.
There are pieces of it that didn’t register quite as useful for me. The long explanation of CIA torture tactics and the Pentagon’s feckless strategy of triple canopy domination is thorough, but I felt was covered in more depth and range elsewhere. It was only when McCoy pivoted back to his scenarios for the decline of American empire that the book felt like it was getting back on track.
As for those, I think they’re enough to give anybody pause. You can find a full spectrum of scenarios that will suit your specific level of anxiety. Personally, I’m hopeful though not expectant that the United States can stage some kind of climate change-induced tactical withdrawal, setting up a Westphalian global regime of regional powers controlling spheres of influence.
But as McCoy aptly criticizes our president for early in the book, there’s no reason to believe that the U.S. can continue to enjoy the benefits of a global empire without investing the resources in maintaining it. If we give up on NATO and try to foist defensive costs on allies while blithely ignoring the benefits that we derive from our global leadership — not least of which is the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency — we are going to pay for it.
But then, how do you maintain a global empire when the domestic economy that is supposed to underpin the enterprise has been gutted by global capitalism? So much to think about!
And that’s really the best thing recommending this book, in my opinion, is that it will make you think a LOT about both history, contemporary politics, and the road ahead to 2030. -
This is a really interesting and unsettling book. I think its diagnoses are more interesting than its prognoses. Americans don't like to consider themselves as the global empire, but it clearly is. McCoy believes the reign is coming to an end. I am not so sure we can measure the future as we have the past, but he makes a convincing case.
A few really fascinating tidbits:
--The tools of empire that are used abroad come eventually come home to diminish homegrown rights (like NSA surveillance)
--Obama as master of foreign policy--this was new. He sees Obama as one of the great statesmen of the era. This is not a compliment here because he critiques the sort of state-building that Obama engaged in, but he says his foreign policy was much smarter and more deft than contemporaries have realized.
--McCoy's personal history is fascinating. Seems as though he's always been a "troublemaker" and has been censured by the FBI and CIA. -
Even before the election of Donald Trump, it seemed clear that the United States was experiencing a serious decline in its global influence relative to emerging powers on the Eurasian continent. The election of Trump has set this process into overdrive and seems to open the possibility of the U.S. devolving into a genuine second-rate power. With the Chinese economy set to surpass the size of the United States and its military spending not far behind, America is facing the possibility of an imminent eclipse of its power, perhaps as soon as 2030. With Trump inexplicably taking a sledgehammer to a liberal international system that was already wobbling after the Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis, its no longer clear what the world is going to look like within even 5-10 years.
In this history of America's imperial rise and decline, Alfred McCoy charts the path American global hegemony from the era of the Spanish-American War, through to the Cold War and up to the present period of "small wars" in the Middle East. McCoy was a muckraking investigative writer during the Vietnam era but also shows himself to be a very able historian here. His analysis of American empire is not a polemical one and he acknowledges that empires are a fact of human history. He charts the emergency of the U.S. empire across different periods of the past century and notes how it was formed in the crucible of wars, developing almost accidentally at first following the war with Spain and with little direct consciousness among most Americans. The three "grandmasters" of American empire in his telling are Roosevelt's secretary of state Elihu Root, who helped laid the ground for the modern U.S. armed forces as well as a set of international governance organizations, Zbigniew Brezinski who helped engineer the defeat of the Soviet Union, and finally, somewhat idiosyncratically, Barack Obama, who initiated the last coherent effort to try and save the empire by repositioning it to try and contain a rising China.
McCoy identifies with the view held by Peter Francopan and others that the key to global imperium has historically lain in control of the vast "world island" of Eurasia. For the past two centuries, control of this landmass was held by naval-based civilizations which were able to move men and materiel at a speed far in excess of land-based empires such as Russia, China and the Ottoman Turks. British imperium was made possible by the strength of the British Navy, a force which allowed a small island nation to control Eurasia by dominating its oceans and coastlines. Today, the United States controls that same area through the retention of U.S. forces on sea, land and air. Where the British had gunships and caravels, the U.S. has carrier groups, aircraft, drones and marines capable of projecting power anywhere across the Eurasian landmass. In addition to network of hundreds of military bases, the "world island" is held in place by the United States through major political nodes on its far Western and far Eastern axes: namely the NATO alliance in Western Europe and the U.S.-led alliance system incorporating South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in east Asia. Free trade agreements like the TTP and TTIP also play a key role by orienting the economies of member states towards the United States, (however such agreements may be detrimental to the American working class).
But as McCoy points out, the American empire is not held up by weapons and money alone. In addition to soldiers, aircraft, drones and trade, U.S. empire also relies on cultural suasion and the promotion of liberal values to help bind other countries to its orbit. These values are generally popular, and help create force multipliers when emerging states attempt to attack the liberal order. As such the abandonment of "our values" over the past several years is something that McCoy sees as a genuine a step towards imperial decline, as it was with past empires.
As he argues, America's post-2003 use of torture and the abrogation of the rules-based order entailed in the invasion of Iraq both seriously impeded America's ability to employ soft power across the imperium. Although torture may seem like a personal practice without much importance to geopolitics on a macro scale, its use by ostensibly enlightened powers is often a sign of greater internal rot and lack of confidence. Torture came into widespread use during the decline of the French and British empires, which systematically brutalized detainees during their late-imperial wars in Algeria, Malaya and Kenya, episodes which torpedoed the legitimacy of the empire with local elites. The support of such elites is vital to maintaining any global imperium, as these local intermediaries are the ones who actually know how to navigate their own societies and orient them for or against the United States. When local elites started turning against the British the empire unraveled with remarkable speed, famously helping it become a "self-liquidating concern." Managing so many different constituencies is difficult even in the best of times, and the United States has done a poor job of that in recent years. In addition to undermining the attraction of U.S. values by rendering them hollow, American diplomats and politicians have shown limited effectiveness at managing relationships in countries like Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea and the Philippines, losing potential allies as local elites turn towards emerging power centers for support. McCoy predicts that the period of 2003-2030 will be known as the 27 years of America's imperial decline, as more and more local elites turn to China or Russia for economic and political support. While the situation seemed potentially salvageable for America under a competent administration, the bellicose and incompetent Trump administration seems like it will make McCoy's prediction a reality, perhaps even sooner than expected. Given the speed with which past empires declined, it could really be "all over but the finger-pointing" for the U.S. empire far sooner than we expect.
There was a lot in this book that was familiar to me, particularly the analysis of U.S. drone warfare which drew on much contemporary reporting. But a few things that I found unique were his analysis of the important role that global satellite systems play in modern great power politics, as well as the importance of the growing educational gap between the United States and rising Asian powers. While the U.S. may maintain a significant edge in terms of battleships and F-15s, China is aiming for supremacy in the stratosphere and may achieve this as soon as 2020, when its own global satellite system becomes operational. China will also soon be the only country with an active space station, when it launches in 2019. Meanwhile a highly-educated generation of American scientists will die and retire by 2030 without an equally sizable or talented generation to replace them. Chinese scientists meanwhile are on average younger and more numerous than their U.S. counterparts today and achieve better results in key fields of study, as per international comparative testing. A growing disparity in educational standards and results, particularly in vital STEM research fields, means that the U.S. will likely face a major talent shortfall in the near future, while China enjoys an abundance of highly-motivated and talented young people able to provide research advantages relevant to modern warfare. Using cyber and space warfare, the People's Liberation Army could make the current U.S. supremacy of arms an irrelevance by wiping out critical military infrastructure during a conflict, a scenario in which McCoy says that the side with superior technology could win a war in the South China Sea without firing a shot. This part of the book is well-researched and captivating, and shines a light on the importance of China seeking supremacy in the next realm of interstate combat, rather than foolishly trying to train more Marines or build more battleships as a path to victory. While the U.S. is by no means taking these Chinese efforts lying down, its supremacy in this emerging realm of warfare is far from assured.
The overall history of America's global rise and decline that McCoy recounts is compelling, but can sometimes get bogged down while recapping details of specific episodes like Vietnam and the current drone war. But despite this his overall thesis is nuanced and well-argued. While McCoy makes clear his belief that America is in terminal decline, he caveats his argument to take into account the inherent uncertainties entailed in any such prediction, while articulating some steps that the U.S. could take to manage such a decline. Despite being a fervent critic of America's imperial crimes, he also generously acknowledges the benefits of American imperium, including the gains in global human rights over the past century and the genuine popularity of liberal international values around the world. Empires are a fact of life and not necessarily worse than their modern nemesis, the nation-state. While the 21st century may see an eclipse of U.S. hegemony, if its leaders play their cards right (which seems like a big "if" to be honest) the country could still have a soft enough landing to remain an important player globally, as well as an anchor state within the Americas. -
McCoy is not some chicken little. He is a serious academic. And he has guts.
During the Vietnam War, McCoy was ambushed by CIA-backed paramilitaries as he investigated the swelling heroin trade. The CIA tried to stop the publication of his now classic book, “The Politics of Heroin.” His phone was tapped, he was audited by the IRS, and he was investigated and spied on by the FBI. McCoy also wrote one of the earliest and most prescient books on the post-9/11 CIA torture program and he is one of the world’s foremost experts on U.S. covert action. -
The clue is in the title: the author, professor Alfred W. McCoy, believes that what he calls the American “Empire” has lasted about a century and is drawing to an end. This is his account of why and how this will come about.
If it’s Elon Musk take-no-prisoners optimism about the future that you’re looking for, you’ve clearly come to the wrong place. The author dedicates a full chapter to explain why: he’s the baby boomer son of a WWII veteran who never demobilized, never allowed the scars of war to heal, joined the “best and the brightest” in the space program / cold war and lost his marriage and life to his coping mechanism, alcohol. The author himself, perhaps in reaction to his father’s fate, is quite literally the man who wrote the (1972) book on how the CIA picked up where the French had left off and conducted the lion’s share of the opium trade during the Vietnam War.
The yardstick for this book, then, is not really Kennedy’s work on empires. An academic treaty this ain’t. Rather, you should compare it with works of the more personal, more “conspiratorial” genre, such as John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” If that’s your cup of tea, you’ve definitely come to the right place. It’s not mine, but I powered through it regardless, and I actually managed to learn a whole lot from it, much as I could not quite fight off the idea of John Goodman’s character in the Big Lebowski narrating it in my head.
Probably the key idea in this opus is Halford Mackinder’s “Geographical Pivot of History,” a view expressed in 1904, according to which world domination is based on the control of Eurasia. The nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first century are seen and interpreted through the prism of this premise. So Germany, Russia and China are viewed as the guys sitting in the pound seats, with the naval powers of Great Britain, Japan and the US looking to encircle, contain and undermine them from the “axial” position in the seas and, latterly, space, but also from up close, for example via the expedient of radicalized Islam, which Zbigniew Brzezinski is “credited” with originally weaponizing.
You don’t need to buy the theory. You can plough through the book merely by accepting that the last couple centuries in the military history of the planet have been dominated by people who did. That’s not terribly far-fetched and as good a premise as any. It’s tyrants who go to war, in the main, rather than democratically elected leaders, and some type of domination has got to be what they’re after. The harder-to-accept premise (the author would call me an “American exceptionalist” for saying so) is that the US thinks along those lines. On the other hand, people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (never mentioned in the book, that’s me talking here) do not arise in a vacuum.
There’s a full chapter on how America became a colonial power via the conquest of the Philippines. The controversial claim in this chapter is that the US had never had secret services or surveillance skills of any kind, but developed them to stay on top at the Philippines and then imported them to the US to conduct, in the runup to WWI, the surveillance of its own German-speaking citizens, which was at the time deemed necessary. Thus, the author asserts, was the secret service born.
The chapter that follows is the ubiquitous in the literature chapter regarding how, if this isn’t an Empire we’re talking about, it’s making a pretty good job of behaving like one, what with 800 bases around the world, tens of covert operations taking place around the globe at the same time and scores of regimes toppled worldwide and replaced by “our S.O.B.’s,” in Ike Eisenhower’s words. An exhaustive list of such tyrants is provided. Significantly, the author does not care to give any credit to Eisenhower for flagging the risks borne by the military industrial complex. Rather, he very much considers him to be an important architect.
The covert netherworld of the CIA comes under the microscope next, with two case studies: the support given to the Contras in Nicaragua and our adventures in Afghanistan. I actually thought this was an unsatisfying and deeply muddled chapter. The morale of the story is that we had success in Nicaragua because we were swimming with the tide of the drug trade, we had initial success in Afghanistan again when we were swimming with the tide of the drug trade and against the Russians and our efforts were met with failure when we last intervened in 2003 when we fought the tide of the drug trade. Well, sorry, I don’t get it. First, there’s zilch to celebrate from any success we may have had in doing business with the rather reprehensible Contras and second, since when does the “principled” approach measure itself on success? What is success when there is no great geopolitical enemy to defeat? Was it the Russians or the Chinese who defeated us in Afghanistan? Were we right to go to Nicaragua? Were we right to get involved in Afghanistan? Once or both times?
This brings me to the main criticism of the book: the author actually is fully captured by the very framework he laments. He can only think like one of the scheming geopolitical plotters he decries, but (not to sound like Jack Nicholson) he then feels entitled to criticize them; indeed, he alternates between criticizing their ethics and criticizing their results.
Three chapters follow, one each on what the author considers to be “secret weapons” employed by the American empire:
1. A chapter on global surveillance, starting with the good work of one Captain Ralph Van Deman in the Phlippines and later in California, how this segued into McCarthyism and its apotheosis in the Obama era of total surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden, one of 13,000 people with access to every phonecall and email you were ever part of (and none of them on the payroll of the foreign powers we’re meant to be protected from, needless to say!)
2. A chapter on the topic of torture, on which the author has written other works. If I’d never heard of waterboarding vomit my life would not have been any worse, but this was a reminder of the fact that the US has not done its stature in the world any great favors by cultivating people who are happy to employ torture to meet their goals. Also, the point is made that we (the domestically democratic “west”) find ourselves morally bankrupt when these people turn against us, because we put them there in the first place. And that if it continues to act along these lines (for example in Egypt where it was happy to install Al-Sisi following a brief spell in government for the Muslim Brotherhood) the US will eventually suffer the fate of the British Empire, which at some point discovered it had exhausted the supply of local tyrants who would do its bidding.
3. A, frankly mesmerizing, chapter on all the most recent space-based weapons systems that are currently under development. As a guy who would check into the library to study but would instead end up reading back issues of Aviation Weekly, I must say this was right up my alley. Again, though, I was left unclear as to whether the author was celebrating or decrying the development of all these systems. (For the record, I found them cool, but that’s the geek in me talking)
The final section of the book is dedicated to the current bogeyman in the great geopolitical game, the rising power that is China and her apparently unstoppable effort to claim back the South China Sea. (Funny how that is deemed unacceptable, but it’s rather axiomatic in this book that China should be prevented at all costs of controlling the South China Sea)
There’s a chapter on the three “grandmasters” of the great geopolitical game (Elihu Root, Zbigniew Brzezinsky and Mr. “pivot to Asia’ himself, the Hawaian-born and Jakrata-raised Barack Obama) and a chapter on the five ways the final reckoning for the American Empire could come to a head, with a fair few pages dedicated to, erm… global warming.
Yeah, it kind of peters out this book… -
What is said about bankruptcy might be said about the fall of empires: it happens gradually, then suddenly. For all their power, empires have a way of disintegrating rapidly, with the slide past the point-of-no-return underway before their leaders and citizens realize it. Moreover, disintegration can begin when an empire appears to be at its apex, unchallengeable economically, culturally, and militarily.
In his persuasive comparative study,
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, historian
Alfred W. McCoy argues the U.S. is on a trajectory of near irreversible decline as a global hegemon just two decades after it appeared to be the most powerful nation in history. The Cold War had ended, the 'evil empire' was no more, an international coalition had expelled Saddam from Kuwait, and the U.S. was the world's sole military and economic juggernaut with no major enemies.
Contrast that position with today: two ruinous, destabilizing wars in the Middle East have killed hundreds of thousands of people while displacing millions more at the cost of trillions of U.S. dollars. A surveillance state whose scope is unparalleled in human history has damaged our credibility the world over. The use of torture, sanctioned by the highest levels in the U.S. government, "is both the sign of a dying empire and a cause of imperial retreat." p. 156
Despite the public's mostly indifferent response to the crimes committed by the Bush administration, the damage inflicted by the torture program was real and lasting, McCoy writes.
"By focusing its might and majesty on breaking hapless individuals through torture, any empire -- whether British, French, or American -- reveals the gross power imbalance otherwise concealed with the daily exercise of dominion... Just as any modern government loses legitimacy among its citizens for such abuse, so an empire sacrifices its hard-won cultural suasion among both allies and subjects when it demeans its moral stature by torture." p. 157
What are other signs of imperial decay? Subordinate allies (or client states) become insubordinate, no longer willing to play along by the rules of the U.S. game, but also unwilling to cede an inch of their own power to their people, thereby merely delaying their own inevitable collapse. McCoy cites two examples of insubordinate subordinate allies: Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai.
Looking back over the past 17 years, as I think about how my own views have changed, the U.S. response to 9/11 appears ever more disastrous. The terrorist strikes at the World Trade Center and Pentagon exposed a deep sense of insecurity in the minds of the nation's leaders, while creating an opening for aggressive neoconservatives eager to impose U.S. hegemony over the Greater Middle East.
Out of fear that countless terrorist plots were about to be hatched, they resorted to torture. Fearful of a relative handful of jihadists, hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan and apparently wielding power totally disproportionate to their numbers, the U.S. launched not one but two land invasions into complex societies. If these moves did not seem strategically and morally bankrupt in 2001 or 2003 or 2005, they do now. Indeed, in McCoy's view, if future historians pick a year for when the U.S. began its descent, it will likely be 2003 and the invasion of Iraq.
To assess the imperial playing field, McCoy uses a geopolitical framing from the early 20th century. In 1904, Harold Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, argued that the future of global power lay not "in controlling the planet's sea lanes but instead inside a vast landmass he called 'Euro-Asia.'" p. 28
In Mackinder's formulation, Africa, Asia, and Europe are not three distinct continents but one unitary landform, a "veritable world island." This "broad, deep 'heartland' -- 4,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Siberian Sea -- was so vast that it could only be controlled from its 'rimlands' in Eastern Europe..." and from the surrounding seas. The U.S. established this control by seizing the "axial ends of the world island" after the Second World War. p. 29
NATO in Western Europe and bilateral agreements with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia in the western Pacific "contained" Soviet Russia and Communist China for the next 50 years through the end of the Cold War. McCoy now sees China as the world's ascendant power and chief threat to U.S. hegemony. But the U.S. still has cards to play.
Any bid to perpetuate its waning power will involve the massive surveillance apparatus. "The Pentagon will deploy a triple-canopy aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare, and digital surveillance meant to envelop the earth in an electronic grid capable of simultaneously monitoring millions of private lives and blinding entire armies on the battlefield." p. 133
"This sophisticated technological regime... will require the integration of the Pentagon's evolving aerospace array into a robotic command structure that will coordinate operations across all combat domains -- space, cyberspace, sky, sea, and earth." This "technological regime" is mind-boggling in its scope and capabilities. Its destructive power is different than anything powerful countries have had at their disposal, and in some ways can be used as a substitute (if that is the right word) for conventional war-making.
Yet at the same time, for instance, the deployment of high-tech drones throughout the atmosphere, capable of attacking Chinese space satellites as well as incinerating terrorists hiding in Pakistan, can also be seen as a sign of overreach and weakness. Far from preserving power, this technology can further delude U.S. leaders into thinking they are not, in fact, losing their grip.
McCoy seems convinced China will soon have the world's largest economy and the U.S. dollar will no longer be the world's reserve currency. China's military power will not exceed the U.S. anytime soon, but it will be strong enough to command the South China Sea and control Mackinder's "axial" points on the eastern side of the Eurasian landmass. As the U.S. slips into second place, with India a close third, a generation or two of Americans will suffer through demoralization and economic malaise.
Our best chance at confronting China, McCoy argues, may have been lost when Obama's pivot to Asia failed. Unable to fully extricate the U.S. from the Middle East (a region correctly viewed as of marginal importance as U.S. domestic energy production increased), Obama could not transfer adequate troops and military hardware to the Pacific, specifically to the fulcrum of growing Chinese power, the South China Sea. Obama's sedulous work to cement the Trans-Pacific Partnership also came to no avail, undone by populist concerns that the economic pact would destroy jobs and compromise our sovereignty. Even before anti-TPP Trump won the November 2016 election, Hillary Clinton turned against TPP.
McCoy knows war is not inevitable between the U.S. and China, but he contends some form of military and economic confrontation is. But after reading this solid, insightful book, I am not sure where McCoy stands on what might be the most important question of all. If he does have an answer to this question, he failed to explicitly explain it:
If U.S. hegemony is in fact on the wane, and the U.S. will soon no longer be the sole super power, is that such a bad thing for the rest of the world? Observers left, center, and right agree U.S. power was the linchpin to the post-war liberal international order. But along with this definition of order came invasions, proxy wars, coups d'etat, assassinations, election interference, torture, etc. The U.S. has callouses on its fists from pulverizing the Third World. If the end of U.S. hegemony means an end to all this, sign me up. Indeed, there is already evidence that the CIA cannot so easily replace troublesome (at least from the U.S. point of view) figures, like Chavez or Karzai, anymore.
Does China's rise (if we grant McCoy's argument that China could soon be No. 1) necessarily equal decline for the United States? Simply put, is not the world large enough and its leaders smart enough to foster cooperation instead of confrontation? In McCoy's view, we should know the answer to these questions in the next 15 to 20 years. -
9.2/10. One to re-read in the decades to come to compare how McCoy's fantastic analysis compares with how the decline of American global hegemony transpires
-
Empires used to be simple: The Romans got grain from Africa, the Spanish took gold from the Americas, the Dutch acquired spices in Asia, the British gained cotton in India, etc. (Sort of)
The simple answer is that the American empire takes oil from the Middle East, but there is more to it. For one, it’s the first empire that doesn’t want to acknowledge being an empire.
My hope was that McCoy would demystify this riddle by breaking down how the American empire came to be, how it functions, and what threats it faces. It pretends to do this but barely delivers on that promise.
The book is poorly structured and skips over important parts (Europe/Japan, reserve currency, pop culture) while lingering on details (Afghan opium, Vietnam drones, CIA torture). I was hoping for a Tony Judt-style epic, but it’s overall more filler than signal. Conjecture as opposed to research.
The one redeeming quality is the discussion of Mackinder’s heartland vs island theory of geopolitics, even though it is a very unscientific one.
So what explains its high average reader rating? Most positive reviews seem to be from Americans who never thought of being an empire citizen, but that’s obvious if you ever lived in a client state. Once you’re past that realization, the book offers little substance.
(I also wish someone would explain to McCoy that a supercomputer isn’t some magical device that will win future wars…) -
The author is critical of the worse excesses of US imperialism while remaining some sort of liberal apologist giving suggestions on how the empire in decline can retain some power amidst rising inter-imperialist competition and rise of a multi-polar world. The last chapter giving possible endgame scenarios for American global domination based on intelligence establishment reports is a fascinating read.
-
What a great title! But...
This is a muddled regurgitation of Mackinder’s 1904 geopolitical theory about dominating either the seas or the eurasian landmass to create an empire. Loses the big picture to focus on intelligence services and personal experience. Lacks structured thinking on whether this early 20th century theory remains valid or whether it’s just the shared subjective reality of world leaders. Whichever the answer, neither would be convincing.
DNF at 5 chapters in, there are better uses of time. -
Some good analysis of the reasons for the decline of the US and likely rise of China, but he gives Obama way too much credit for his foreign policy.
-
Alfred W. McCoy, which is a Southeast Asia History Professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, opens the book by telling his personal story and how that relates to why he
wrote the book. Decades ago he had the opportunity to write a short paperback talking about
Vietnam and why they were having an opioid epidemy there. So, after traveling to Vietnam, he
ended up finding that the CIA was deeply involved in the scheme of heroin trafficking in the
region, and after McCoy wrote about it, he was persecuted by CIA and FBI agents who did not
want such scandals to go public. In the end, after dodging threats and harassments, he
managed to get his book published. This experience stimulated his interest in US foreign policy,
CIA covert operations, and other topics he covers in his recent book.
After his background clarification, the author moves on to the origins of geopolitical
studies dating back to English geographer and politician Sir Halford Mackinder, who advocated
for the thesis that global power lay not, as the British then imagined (circa 1900), in controlling
Earth’s sea lanes but instead in a vast landmass he called Eurasia. His main argument is that
history shows us that empires throughout humanity have sought power and control over the
region and that has been the cause for innumerable conflicts there. Moreover, he advances to
analyze the United States’ empire nature: is it an imperium (word rooted from Roman Latin that
stands for “dominion enforced by a single power”) or hegemonic (Greek-origin term to designate
a world power that rests on cooperation, not exclusively on force and domination)?
The US began its world aspirations by the end of the 19th century with the conquest of
world islands such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Nonetheless, it was only
after the British empire declined with the world wars that the United States rose as the new
dominant nation with distinctive characteristics from previous global empires, such as
clandestine operations, high-tech surveillance, space and cyberspace warfare battlefields. Once
this history is briefly presented, McCoy moves toward his thesis: the United States takes certain
actions which are historical signs weakening democracy and legitimacy home, leading to
dissatisfaction and rebellions, destabilizing the country’s economy and political structure, and
finally leading to its ruins.
Surrogate states the United States have dominated for years have been losing its
subordination either by incompetence or anti-imperialism feelings. He cites examples like
Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959), Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam (1963), Anastasio Somoza
in Nicaragua (1979), and more recently Kurmanbek Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan (2009), Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt (2011) and Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan (2014). For some of those and other
examples, the CIA had to ally with drug traffickers in order to influence political and economical
outcomes in the surrogate states, and that not only leads to scandals but lead to the loss of
popularity of the administration in the domestic scene. Moreover, this illegal financing of drug
lords also results in the rise of future opposition as well, as it happened with Taliban in
Afghanistan during the 1980s after the Soviet invasion and led the US to spend trillions in a two decade long military failure in the South Asian nation.
Beyond the drug infamous issue, important warfare tactics such as massive surveillance
and torture methods that are used worldwide to enforce American dominion are key to weaken
the colonial state both at home and abroad. First, because it undermines international support, a
critical factor of healthy and prosperous empires. Secondly, mass protests and opposition, both
at the US and where these war tools are applied, strongly opposing the American ruthless and
anti-democratic imperialism contributes to the strength and credibility loss that is so important
for a nation to be seen and accepted as a global leader.
McCoy claims that there have been three geopolitics geniuses in the United States’
history: Elihu Root, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Barack Obama. All of them were believers in
Mackinder’s Eurasian theory of global dominion and all three proposed measures that walked in
a path toward its conquest. However, they were all surprised by future leaders who undermined
their efforts and impeded their achievements from being long-lasting. More recently, Trump has
been the responsible for undoing Obama’s policies such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
with Asia, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe, bilateral
relations with key allies in both ends of the vast Eurasian landmass: Western powers and on the
other end South Korea, Australia, and Japan. All of these issues facilitate the power loss that is
occurring of American hegemony and allowing China’s rise.
I certainly agree with McCoy’s point that the United States is an empire that has been
declining, and all the factors he mentioned are valid and worth taking into consideration. The
last chapter, in which he presents five different scenarios to how the world might look like by
2030. McCoy seems to want American power to be truly waning so much, that he forces some
scenarios that I find deeply unrealistic, such as a World War III and the climate change
catastrophe. Even the military misadventure seems like pushing it too hard.
Some alternatives he suggests I believe to be way more down to Earth, such as the
ascension of a new hegemonic power, or the existence of several spheres of influence led by
the US, China, Russia, United Kingdom, and maybe some other ones. However, if we consider
the former possibility, McCoy pays little attention to the principal reason why China might rise as
a new superpower. He focuses too much on satellites and military bases on the region but does
not elaborate on how China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping is using technology and soft power
to reach world dominance.
As argued in Foreign Affairs (2018), throughout the years, Chinese domestic and foreign
policy blunders were confronted with sanctions by the United States that made China realize
how dependent it is on American and European technology manufacturing such as
semiconductors, microchips, and other parts. It is exactly for that reason that the Chinese
government has been spending massively to become self-sufficient in terms of three main
present and future technologies: semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum computers.
Eric Schmidt, former Chief Executive Officer at Google, has said during an artificial intelligence
summit in 2017 the Chinese, “by 2020, they will have caught up. By 2025, they will be better
than us. And by 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI”. While McCoy focuses on drone
warfare technology and satellites, China is using these new powerful and cutting-edge
technologies, developed by spending 20% of world’s total share on R&D, to persecute
minorities and groups that it identifies as enemies or threats such as the Uighur Muslim minority,
and they are sending them to “reeducation camps” based on absurd reasons, such as one’s
beard is too long. Beijing is already a fully monitored city that is using their surveillance
technology to make sure all people are abiding by Xi Jinping’s doctrine. Not to mention China’s
Great Firewall which is responsible for blocking Chinese web users from accessing harmless
and popular internet applications such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Furthermore, beyond Chinese total internal control, China’s Belt and Road Initiative
deserves huge attention if considered its full potential. As beautifully pointed by McCoy, for the
first decade of this century the United States was mired in a trillion-dollar adventure in the
Middle East with the War on Terror while China expanded its businesses around the Eurasian
region and Africa. There are several predictions that the world’s largest population will reside in
Africa in a few decades, a region that Americans have forgotten for years since the end of the
Cold War. China’s financing of countries and projects in Africa allows it to get political support
and economic alliance, which is key for Xi Jinping’s plan to get ahold of Taiwan again and to
enhance its preponderance globally. As Trump took office in 2017, his foreign policy tends to
show that the United States will get more and more distant from its previous allies, setting the
perfect opportunity for China’s power consolidation.
For the second plausible outcome, in which there are several spheres of influence, a
policy analyst at RAND Corporation Ali Wayne wrote an incredible article for the National
Interest magazine earlier this year, claiming that neither China nor Russia will supplant the
United States as a hegemonic geopolitical actor. Russia’s population is declining and its natural
gas leverage over Europe is not nearly as significant as it were by the end of Cold War, and
even though this opportunistic state tries to meddle in affairs such as Abkhazia and South
Ossetia in 2008, Crimea and Ukraine in 2014, and exploiting the ongoing Syria conflict to
reassure itself in the Middle East, Russia still has limited influence and little international appeal,
unlike communism did in the 20th century. On the other side, China’s ascension has been clear
in two facets: economically by displacing American dominance over global trade and having
renminbi being added to IMF’s basket that allows it to become a global reserve currency;
militarily by investing heavily in upgrading and modernizing its warfare capabilities and placing
military bases around the strategic South China Sea (which accounts for over 20% of world’s
maritime trade movement), and other relevant regions, including its first overseas military base
in Djibouti. We can also point out the growing importance of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. Nevertheless, Wayne argues, economic interdependence between the two
countries and the nature of their confrontation is more economic and technological than
ideological, leaving room for the two to cooperate as they have in the past four decades. China
and the US have now more contact than they have ever had in the past. In addition, China has
been facing setbacks with international criticism against human rights violation, domestic
repression, and even in its Belt and Road Initiative project with Malaysia. Wayne admits the
unpredictability of the future but does present good arguments for an eventual multipolar world,
the outcome I tend to believe the most. -
In early 1941, Henry Luce proclaimed in Life Magazine that the next century was bound to be the American century, and if people didn't believe him then, they would soon after World War II with America's economy booming and its military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine influence felt over most of the world outside the Soviet bloc. And while many geopolitical scholars and historians believe the U.S. will remain a global hegemon indefinitely, Alfred McCoy, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and teacher of the tenacious journalist Jeremy Scahill, believes otherwise. According to McCoy (with backing from the National Intelligence Council), the U.S. empire began its downhill journey in 2003 with the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq and will lose its power and status around the world by 2030.
The book is broken up into three essential parts: the U.S.'s ascension to power, its strategies used to maintain that power, and five possible scenarios for its decline. The first and third sections are by far the most engaging. The U.S. began its rise to power around the turn of the twentieth century by acquiring various islands in the Pacific, the Philippines being the most consequential in this account. Not only did this lead to an expanded federal government, it opened the path for the U.S. to control the first of two axial points surrounding Eurasia.
It would acquire power in western Europe (the second axial point) later after World War II, leading to the beginning of its global domination. To maintain this power, the country would utilize vast surveillance, torture, and accelerated spending on arms and technology among other strategies. This middle section, while helpful in showing that some of the U.S.'s techniques paralleled those of the flailing empires of the past, suffers the most because it focuses on the standard story of the U.S. in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Glenn Greenwald, James Risen, Jane Mayer, and many others have covered these topics extensively. If this section offered me anything new, it was the new understanding that all of the CIA operations and coup attempts that began in the 1950s were so necessary because outright colonization had become a liability.
The final section provides different scenarios for the U.S. decline, which not only includes the country being forced to turn its military spending inward to domestic issues at some point, but also that its military capabilities might be far weaker and more susceptible than anyone currently thinks because of rapidly increasing Chinese cyber warfare strategies, which could cripple U.S. weapons and forces before they can even be deployed.
I'm certainly not qualified to judge if and when the U.S. empire has officially eroded, but McCoy's gravitas and extensive research (there are over one hundred pages of notes) along with my cynical nature and the current horrid state of U.S. affairs makes me believe that even if he doesn't know the exact year, he's still probably right. -
In the Shadows of the American Century is a bit of a schizophrenic work. This is mostly because Alfred McCoy tries to occupy several conflicting moral and political positions concerning U.S. foreign and domestic politics when really only one would be consistent and coherent. He tries to be both an apologist and critic of the Ameican empire. It is clear he favors the latter position, but knows it will be entirely unpersuasive to the broad American audience and is also trying to avoid devolving into polemic. The Chomskyite arguments, popular in venues like The Intercept, are doomed to irrelevancy because no matter how hard these memes are pushed or how many social institutions they dominate, Americans writ large aren't interested in self-flagellating and ultimate self-annihilation. Top Gun and Saving Private Ryan (hell even Independence Day) will always hold more sway over the popular imagination than Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now. Moreover, the agencies and actors that McCoy is so critical of now almost exclusively share his worldview and perspective.
To McCoy, U.S. foreign policy post-WWII has been both negligently fumbling and maniacally evil, somehow requiring both less intervention abroad yet more consolidation and projection of world power. How can we both be so bad yet there be a need for U.S. dominance? How can our civil liberties and social programs be strengths, while they are seen as strategic weaknesses by the counties supposedly eating our lunch? He asserts that these foreign policies mistakes are important to the purported decline of America, and then goes on to game out what that decline would look like. However, in the five years since this work was published, we can see that many of these scenarios are already unlikely or just outright incorrect. For instance, we have witnessed the near complete withdrawal of the U.S. from the Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia (in tacit alliance) becoming the regional powers instead of Iran, micro-militarism from Russia (a nation much further along in its decline than the U.S.), consolidation of Western foreign policy interests (despite the hyperfocus on local nationalist trends and because of rogue behavior from China), and the COVID-19 pandemic threatening to destabilize China's domestic politics while its aging demographics present an even more formidable challenge than those of the U.S. -
I only read about half the book. It wasn't what I was looking for. The author was really political and his analysis of events from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to Iraq are too muddled in left/right wing talking points for me to take seriously. I read the end about possible ends to the US empire. These didn't make sense or seem well thought out. Take this with a grain of salt as I am no expert in foreign policy.
The author claims that Kissinger extended the cold war for 15 years. I wonder is this a widely held view? Also claims that the Bay of Pigs was Eisenhower's fault even though it was carried out by Kennedy. Obama is a foreign policy expert because he removed troops from Iraq and worked with Russia to stabilize Syria. I don't see Syria as being stabilized. The whole Arab spring was disorderly. The administration blamed part of the protests on a video - a complete fabrication.
I don't mind reading alternative views but the analysis did not seem to come from a credible or reasonable mind. And credibility is key. -
McCoy's analysis of the rise and conduct of the "American Empire" is revealing, disturbing, and damning towards the security state and intelligence agencies that have been instrumental in the formation of our hegemony.
On the flip side his predictions for the future fall of the "Empire" are extreme for sure, ultimately it is good that he spends most of the book on analysis, where he truly shines.
Regardless, this book is a dire warning that the path the nation is on leads only to the loss of "Pax Americana". Highly recommend. -
Prof. McCoy researched in a scholarly way the imperialism of the U.S.A. He uncovered the Heroin trade in S.E. Asia as well as the connections around the globe. Imperialism has a history of its own from the Stone Age to the Modern Age. Our oceans connect us and we have a tendency to put down roots in new places. Exceptionalism is really imperialism. Whether it's rubber tree farming or coffee beans, we want the natives to do the work. The Roosevelts were in the opium trade; Queen Victoria was in the jewelry looting business and the opium trade. The Belgians exploited the Congo. It's the human tendency to exploit others usually with a religious component. Bibles, soap, guns.
-
The Centuries are Getting Shorter
This is a book of international relations written from a realist perspective. In other words, it is a book about how the world is, not how it ought to be or how we might desire it to turn out. Overall, it is a very engaging if not grim and terrifying history of American covert war and espionage from the late 19th Century through the early 21st Century (2017).
The new American definition of a century might be 85 years or so: (1945 – 2030). The question is not whether there will be a world order with a hegemonic power, it is a matter of which country or countries will be that power. The author leaves no doubt that some sort of extranational arrangement has governed the known world, such that it was and is, for the last four thousand years and there is no reason to think the future will be any different whether that arrangement is called an empire, a pact, a bloc, a commonwealth, the world order etc.
Four distinct phases of American Imperial growth:
1. 1898 – 1935. With the end of the Spanish-American War and the interventions in Central America, through trial and error, the U.S. gained experience and expertise in colonial rule. This was also the beginning of the now omnipresent surveillance state that grew in fits and starts from this first imperial experiment as well as the development of torture techniques that would become tired and true.
2. 1945 – 2000. Liberal global leadership achieved through a new global order complete with diplomatic, covert, economic and military dominance as the leading superpower of the western alliance and then as sole superpower and global hegemon.
3. 2001 - 2020. With fading economic dominance began the extension of hegemony through covert operations, cyberspace, artificial intelligence and technological dominance. Cyber operations and surveillance became most distinctive features of U.S. strategy in this period due to the never ending and amorphous war on terror. But this strategy was also extended to economic spying, social control and diplomatic manipulation both domestically and abroad. When else fails, there is always the ‘proven’ techniques of torture.
4. 2020 – 2030?. The American role as global leader in the face of an aggressive rising challenger to world leadership, China. The U.S. may have initiated its own long-term decline with an immense waste of resources, lives, leadership credibility and moral high ground as well as the attendant opportunity cost of being distracted from events in Asia with the 2001 and 2003 wars of choice and continuation in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. For how much longer can the U.S. substitute brute military force for economic strength, diplomatic skill and political leadership? The author estimates to about 2030 unless the U.S. is able to extend its hegemony with the economy of force offered by cyberwarfare and digital surveillance capabilities. The year 2003, with the needless and draining war of choice and aggression in Iraq, is where the author marks the binging of the end.
What is, if any, the correct historical model for the U.S.? Following is just a sample of the closest approximations to the American position in the world today. Naturally, there are many other models of land based and maritime extended empires.
The Roman Imperium – The U.S. as a later day Rome with the reality of military domination, internal decay and outside pressure. Untying the Gordian knot of the contradiction found in a republic running an empire by becoming an empire.
The Greek Hegemony – The U.S. as a later day Athens leading a coalition of allies and partners with each becoming less willing as such over time.
The British Empire – The U.S. as the inheritor and guardian of freedom, trade, order and civilization (on its own terms) in a world consumed with increasing amounts of illicit trade and human tracking.
The risk for the U.S. from 2020 forward is to meet the growing challenge of China in all areas of global importance (economics, diplomacy, politics, technology, education and military capability) while suffering from its own increasing social divisions, economic disparities, political gridlock, education failures and social polarization. At the same time, U.S. foreign policy has alienated key allies and become unstable by oscillating between an approach based on alliances with diplomacy and one of unilateral, often military, intervention.
The great risk for the U.S. is in China being able to link Asia, Europe and Africa into a unified geopolitical and economic union through a comprehensive physical, financial, technological and virtual infrastructure. The U.S. will be on the outside looking in. China is currently building its own parallel or shadow set of international institutions with itself as hegemonic arbiter. The extraordinary events of the 20th Century, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, two world wars and the Cold War, only slowed but will not prevent the progress of a Asia-Europe-Africa geopolitical union. Other than internal dispute, there is nothing that can prevent the immense potential of an Asia-Europe-Africa unified geopolitical and economic union from becoming a reality and the new center of world events. Add to this the election in 2016 of an American President who was no more than an apprentice in world affairs with woefully out of date views.
Five Paths to the End of the American Century:
We have to realize that Romans living in the late fourth century did not realize they were living in the last years of the Roman Empire, at least in the west. It may indeed be the same with the end of the American Century, nobody will realize what has happened until after it is over. That is, empires by their very nature, tend to unravel quickly once the process starts. The following are the author’s five scenarios, plus one, of possible decline in order of increasing severity and disadvantage to the U.S. The decade of the 2020s might be the U.S. equivalent to Rome’s fourth century. Whether any of the following scenarios emerge as such, every significant and measurable trend of importance points toward declining power and influence in the world for the U.S. over the decade of the 2020s.
1. A multipolar world-order of shared governance emerges. A new international order arises in the form of a new concert of great powers with China, the U.S. and Europe as the global arbiters.
2. A slow and methodical decline reducing the U.S. to a partner in, rather than a dominator or arbiter of, world affairs.
3. A neo-Westphalian world of reginal powers dominating their respective area of the globe with the U.S. as nothing more than one of these regional hegemons. Other regional hegemons could include Brazil, China, Russia, India.
4. The U.S. falls behind China and potentially India in terms of education, GDP, growth, innovation, technology, military preparedness and in due course the U.S. dollar loses its privileged position as the global reserve currency. This means the U.S. losses the ability to run what is effectively unlimited deficits financed by the rest of the world. This will create rising economic disparities and social asymmetries within the U.S. with a radical contraction in standards of living at home and power abroad. I believe that this is the most likely outcome.
5. WWIII. War between the U.S. and China consisting of remote strikes, cyber-attacks, information disruptions, network corruptions and resource destruction. The casus belli of war, navigation of the South China Sea of course.
6. Climate change changes everything for everyone. The author’s near-term worries are that the staggering cost of mitigation and remediation, prevention and repair, of climate change events will strain the U.S. budget, add staggering amounts to U.S debt and shift spending properties from foreign operations to domestic emergencies. However, this book was written prior to Covid-19 and this is exactly what has transpired in response to the coronavirus. Trillions have been spent on this domestic emergency with no financial impact or consequences for the U.S. because the U.S. currently holds the global reserve currency. With this, the U.S. has the ability to borrow up to the limit of the world’s accumulated wealth and it would seem beyond - with the additional help of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the major investor in the debt, the cost of this debt is zero with interest rates near zero. Retreat from global hegemony for financial reasons does not seem to be as much of a threat as the author fears as long as the U.S. can continue to use an abuse the global financial system to its advantage with its endless supply of debt.
Still global changes from a string of climate disasters could drive the world back into a state of regional hegemons with China emerging as the first among equals in a world dominated only by chaos.
Critical Comment:
The author presents the use of torture as the last dying and desperate gasp of a flaying, failing and falling empire. He adduces the examples of British and French use of torture in their last days of colonial rule in a last bid effort to hold off imperial collapse. Of course, the use of torture is an inhuman crime in which only a psychopath can indulge, but from here he claims that the use of torture to fight terror by the U.S., e.g., the Abu Ghraib scandal is a sign of the same imperial collapse. The problem is the U.S. has engaged in torture from its first tentative flirtation with empire in the Philippians (1898). The U.S. CIA has used torture on as needed basis in places such as Europe with MKULTRA etc. (1950s), South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988), Abu Ghraib (2003) and Guantanamo (2014). Torture is more likely endemic to the nature of empire than it is a sign of imminent collapse. Though I will admit, the American use of torture is becoming too frequent. Actually, once is too frequent. The U.S. has forfeited moral leadership by adhering to junk thought (that torture is effective) resulting from the general anti-intellectual climate in which American thinking takes place. Terror does not produce actionable intelligible which is actually the least of its evils. -
“A study published right after World War II by two army doctors reported that sixty days of continuous combat turned 98% of soldiers into psychiatric casualties, vulnerable to what would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder.” American Exceptionalism is as exceptional as the other sixty-nine previous empires. The never discussed National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency lives in a $2 billion-dollar building, the third biggest federal building in DC and has 16,000 employees working with intelligence “data from spy planes, drones and orbital satellites.” U.S. removal of Diem in South Vietnam was such a mistake it gave Saigon nine different governments in thirty-two months and none of them worked. The message to the world was that in sacrificing “democratic principles for determined leadership”, the U.S. achieved neither. Fast forward decades and Condoleezza Rice says in Cairo in 2003, “The United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.” Eisenhower authorized 170 covert CIA missions and Kennedy said yes please to 163 more in only three years. Let’s look at the counterproductive Drug War: 1,200 tons of opium world-wide in 1972 at the beginning of it and 8,870 tons annually by 2007. Afghanistan shows that given unlimited $ and time, our military still can’t even “pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations.” Afghanistan’s opium poppies have 500,000 acres just devoted to them; its most significant commodity is illegal. Because we counterproductively refuse to financially support the re-emergence of its agriculture, Afghanistan remains the world’s leading narco-state. All torture info gleaned from the 50’s and before was distilled into the 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence manual which emphasized the “interrogator as father figure.” Vietnam was the biggest air war in world history. When we began relentlessly bombing Laos, it was already ranked the world��s poorest nation. Many mention 58,000 dead U.S. soldiers and fewer mention the millions of dead Vietnamese, but Alfred mentions the “$100 billion in wasted capital” and the business community wanting out of the war.
MQ-9 Reapers cost 30 million dollars each and annual operating costs are a whopping $5 million per plane. RQ-170 Sentinel drones are $200 million each, Global Hawk drones are $223 million dollars each, and the new RQ-180 drone is 300 million dollars each. The U.S. plan is by 2025 to “envelope the earth in a robotic matrix theoretically capable of blinding entire armies or atomizing an individual insurgent after tracking his eyeball, facial image, and heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela, with equal ease.” With our army of over 100 military satellites, “by the 2020s, the Pentagon hopes to patrol the entire planet ceaselessly via its triple canopy aerospace shield reaching from sky to space, secured by an armada of drones with lethal missiles of Argus-eyed sensors, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored through an electronic matrix, and controlled by robotic systems.” I really liked this book, I strongly recommend it. -
Alfred McCoy has written a stunningly prescient text that from 2017, has remained fairly on-the-mark with respect to outlining the decline of US global influence, and providing a conceptual framework to understand the determinants of that decline, which is the relative (and absolute) recession of US intelligence network, primarily the party-counterparty relationships cultivated by the CIA of various international business and political elites that were within the sphere of the “Western”/US alliance structure during the US/USSR Cold War of 1945-to-1991.
McCoy also makes a compelling argument that “learnings” from subjugations of overseas communities and peoples, like those of the US on the pro-independence Philippines in the late 19th/early-20th century, were brought back to the core of the nation, informing the policing and domestic security apparatus, and how this has a deteriorating effect on the potency of our democracy. Further, we can see this effect play out not only in distant historical examples, but in our modern era, with the militarization of local policing, and with consulting/contracting services from former military/veterans that seek to port wartime-training and “best-practices” learned in the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to local policing operations, and the pernicious effects this has had to domestic policing, especially on minority and poorer communities.
However, it is McCoy’s focus on the intelligence network that serves as the superstructure for his theory of the US imperial/security system of the last 70 years, and he makes a good case suggesting that the WikiLeaks debacle of the early teens struck a grievous blow to that network, from a prestige and transparency standpoint, which allowed near-peer competitors like Russia and China to supplant that network once it’s workings were understood. Further McCoy outlines that beyond US control was the simultaneous consolidation and expansion of China’s comprehensive national power throughout Eurasia primarily through economic development via the Belt-and-Road initiative (BRI) as well as the development of it’s indigenous scientific and technological development capacity. All of these things have since become common talking points in US think-tanks as well as the broader public media, which now endlessly speculates on how US policy may retard or diminish either dimensions of China’s burgeoning comprehensive national strength.
It is however, the final piece of McCoy’s thesis, which is integration of the old Halford Mackinder theory of the Eurasian World Island which nicely solidifies his broader argument for apparent decline, and makes it robustly convincing (much more so than more standard theories of “empire” or hegemony espoused in political science or international relations literature). Here he states that the construction of infrastructure throughout Eurasia to move commodity across the landmass from Asia to Europe, and vice versa, and later from Asia to Arabia, then Africa, will enable the construction of a integrated market that is less dependent on maritime trade, and that such a system will be robustly resistant to peripheral intrusion from traditional maritime powers, like the United States or Great Britain.
It is here that the geography does seem convincing, not because of merits of the conceptual framework, but for what we have witnessed just a few weeks ago (it is now late fall of 2021), with the founding of the AUKUS axis, which is a compact of maritime powers. Ex post facto, it now seems obvious why it it was the case that these nations found comity (besides the common Anglo-Saxon elite/cultural connection) in resisting China’s (and to a lesser extent Russia’s) construction of this system, as it makes the channel of maritime trade less relevant, at least a little (even if the cost-speed factor is not as favorable as seafaring trade). This can also partially explain Japan’s resistance (as well as South Korea and the EU’s nominal support of the project despite being US-aligned nation-states).
Yet for large continental powers like Russia, China, or the EU (and some future conglomeration of African nations), this internal market will be almost inherently propitious for their mutual development. Thus, explaining the generally positive response of almost all regions on the “world island” to the large capital infusion the PRC has invested in the initial few phases of the program.
Beside these, McCoy also outlines the lopsided progress of US domestic talent in the technical fields as possibly another major factor in US’ precipitous decline vis-a-vis China. Indeed, the US cannot operate it’s innovation economy without this talent, many of whom are actually Asian emigres, with a large percentage of those Chinese in origin or ethnicity. Further, this is not a new development, it has always been the case for all of the 20th century. Although America has had a fair number of bright minds in the sciences and engineering, some large percentage of those have always been from immigrants, it’s just the source of those immigrants that have changed throughout the decades. First from eastern Europe in the early 20th century, then Asia from mid-century to now. Yet, it’s unclear how profoundly the Trump years of 2016-2020 have damaged the attractiveness of the US system in this regard, but it’s clear that America’s institutions of higher education will experience a “great contraction” if international student enrollment does exhibit a slowdown or outright drop because of both poor domestic politics as well as the new geo-political Cold War making studying in the US less attractive to both Chinese and the broader east and southeast Asian communities who now experience more direct and frequent racist interactions from the majority (and a much smaller subset of the minority) domestic population.
McCoy has inserted all of these threads together in this book to paint a fairly bleak picture for those who support continued US hegemony, or otherwise known as the US alliance and security system, though now being conflated with the notion of the “rules based order” (though to be clear, the two notions are distinct). Any of these trends would be a profound challenge to the US, but all of them simultaneously point towards an almost deterministic assurance that some level of decline will be felt, and that is being borne out with the actions of the US in the past year (2021) via the Biden administration. The fact is that US policy makers have acknowledged that the US cannot challenge China alone, this acknowledgment itself was not only presaged by McCoy (and others much earlier), but is a tacit admittance of the decline experience by the US vis-a-vis it’s comprehensive national power relative to any other nations, including China and Russia.
Whether it is China that emerges triumphant, or it’s a concert of global powers, which McCoy outlines in possible futures, neither trend contradicts the fundamental premise of his namesake thesis from his title, that US global power is in decline, it is a real phenomena, and despite the boosterism we see in domestic media, there are real indicators in many different dimensions which point to this being a long-term trend (though McCoy believes that most empires decline fairly quickly). There are certainly critiques that can be made about the argument, but I’ve yet to read many convincing ones. Recommended. -
An excellent and copiously referenced analysis of the rise of American power into a global empire/hegemon, it's tactics to maintain that position and it's most likely downfall from the position as the planets sole superpower. He then goes on to project a handful of scenarios that potentially face America in the upcoming decades as its waning economic power reduces it's influence on global politics and it’s military advantage is fast eroded. He weaves the military, societal and the economical spheres of American power into a coherent and pretty stark picture of American decline.
One of the central ideas of the book is that whoever controls the Eurasian landmass whether via land or sea, holds the keys to superpower status. He then goes onto describe how a global empire manages this through local subordinates and a covert netherworld of diplomacy and spies. The author also goes into detail on how the rise of America's ascent into a global power and its projection overseas started to be increasingly practised on home soil, particularly in areas of surveillance.
A major criticism I have is of its rose tinted view of the British empire by saying, paraphrased, putting aside the exploitation and colonialism the British empire left behind its ideas of political system and rule of law. Who says that these regions couldn't have come up with a moral code and parliamentary system that was suitable for themselves and perhaps even better than the currently malfunctioning system of British rule. And somehow the US bought it's ideals of democracy and respect for human rights to the world, something I have rarely seen the US itself observe in the past century.
Overall though it is a fabulous book particularly for those who like their geopolitics and geopolitics which isn’t shaded with so much western bias, though of course that is still somewhat present. -
This book was a little disappointing. I had heard the author talk on a podcast, and then heard about the book somewhere else, and thought it would be a good overview of current American military and foreign policy and into the future, but it didn’t really deliver. Most of the book is a history of American military transgressions, focusing on some of the worst aspects, like our recent developments in torture and cyberwarfare. This part of the book was interesting, but not really what I wanted. When he finally got around to talking about the supposed coming decline of American hegemony, it had some interesting bits, but most of it read like bad apocalyptic sci-fi. In the end it was mostly a magnum opus by an aging military wonk who wanted to get his rambling, although certainly well-educated, thoughts into a book.
-
The quality of the book's analysis declines as it approaches the present. Its discussion of possible future paths the US may follow is especially bad (e.g., Russia is somehow supposed to go from an economic basket case to a having superior naval power to the US in about 15 years).
Knock off a star if repetition is something you find especially annoying, add a star if you know nothing about the history of US foreign policy.
If you want a more detailed (and mainstream) introduction to the rise and fall of empires, I'd recommend, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000" by Paul Kennedy, though the section on Japan is hilariously out of date these days... -
If you're interested in meeting understanding the US shifting role in the world, this offers some valuable insight. While fascinating the countless revelations of a present empires overt and covert actions to rule the world alongside with the grim outlook doesn't necessarily make it a pleasant reading.
-
The American Empire is ending and we're not making plans to make the landing soft when it ends, so my middle age to old age is going to suck.
I must also say that the endless details about drones and satellites and other military hardware became tedious at times and I got lost in the minutiae and lost the thread of the argument. -
3.5 stars - intriguing read, if familiar in many ways, with unique insights around how repressive tools deployed abroad can come home. His ending note about wasting time in the Middle East instead of confronting everything happening in Asia was sobering and right on the money.
-
Wake up and see beyond the propaganda to the real reasons for America's wars in the Middle East. This book will give you the knowledge and understanding to see the truth underneath all the rhetoric of the war on terror.
-
An important dissection of how global power works, what methods are implemented, and how the balance of power is already shifting away from America.
