The quarrel over resources and 21st century global politics

The contrasts between the euphoria of the last decade of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st are as worrisome as they are dramatic:
• Economically, celebration has been replaced by attempts to cope, sugared with the recurring notion that all will be well soon enough, that “prosperity is just around the corner.”
• Politically, the leaders of both the major and minor countries are faced at home with citizenries mixing apathy with outrage and uneasiness as seemingly intractable disputes in all realms persist.
• Militarily, long-standing conflicts over the globe are coming to be overshadowed by what threatens to become an enlarging strife in the Middle East and Central Asia. Even as the term “quagmire” has resurfaced, fears grow that matters could become much worse than that. Although mortifyingly, the U.S.A. did finally manage to extricate itself from Quagmire #1, but as the bloodshed continues and worsens in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, apprehension is expressed that the United States can neither “win” nor leave, with who knows what related consequences.
Such troubling concerns are only the most prominent among many now demanding attention; none can be dealt with here more than summarily. Some of the most pressing questions will be raised, which, in being so, will point to matters deserving continuing and serious investigation:
1) Do the collapse of “the new economy” of the U.S.A. and ongoing erratic developments of the world economy portend a replay of the 1930s? Put differently, whence the source(s) of healthy growth and stability for the predictable future?
2) Can the deepening and spreading socioeconomic stresses and struggles within and between nations be made manageable, or will the political extremes and conflicts of the interwar decades reappear, if also in different forms?
3) Are the numerous internecine and “small wars” and deepening tensions on all continents the prelude to one or more major outbreaks between nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan, the U.S.A. and North Korea or even between the U.S.A. and China?
4) Asking essentially the same questions, but from a different standpoint, if the hegemonic position of the United States is now in decline, as now seems entirely possible, what then?
The complexities and their interactions of today’s world preclude reliable answers to those questions. What can be said is that whatever happens over the next decade or two, its specific causes, nature, and resolutions will necessarily be different in both degree and kind from the past: possibly for better, probably for worse. But “probably for worse” because of the heightened abilities of those both in and out of power around the globe to do harm, and the greater difficulties of restraining them from abusing those abilities — all that made more problematic if, as, and when the hegemonic power, as now, becomes unilateralist.
The ensuing and truncated responses to the those questions will be mostly concerned with the ongoing U.S. and global political economies, and their similarities with and differences with the relevant past; after that, a brief comment on related global political and military troubles.
Global Economies: Easy Come, Easy Go
The framework within which the troubles of the 19th century moved toward crises and convulsions was imperialism; today’s is that of globalization. Neither of those came to be in a vacuum; both were created by the existing capitalist powers, steered by nationalism, and energized by the technologies of their time; although there were many differences between the two eras, they had in common that in neither era could the weaker regions withstand the demands of the powerful.
Like imperialism, globalization has been a heedlessly destabilizing set of processes; both entailed the substantial and ubiquitous changes essential for the flourishing of capitalism:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, ever-lasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. (Marx, 1967c, 38)
That was written more than 150 years ago; today’s swift rates of change — and what is changed — make the earlier era seem like a stately waltz in comparison. Much of the recent acceleration can be explained by the extraordinary leaps ahead of the technologies of communication, production, and transportation; but their way was paved for them by the institutional “clear cuts” of imperialist interventions. In both the imperialist nations and those they exploited, traditions of social cohesion and stability were all but dismantled before World War I; the interwar years and the second world war sent them to the rubbish heap. The jazzy technologies of the past half century were free to do what they would, where they would, come what may.
The normal functioning of all social systems produces some who gain more than others; today’s capitalist globalization does so spectacularly, producing winners and losers in ways such that the initial gaps between them widen irreversibly. The constituent and interacting elements of that gap are at once economic, political, and military, affecting all nations and all of their peoples.
Those presiding over these processes, whether past and present, do not concede that the game is one of winners and losers; their constant theme has been that “a rising tide lifts all boats” — some higher than others, to be sure; but to the benefit of all “in the long run.” Never is it acknowledged that the “rising tide” has the destructive force of a tidal wave for all but a minority; never is it recognized that most of the people in the world have never had “boats” or, that when they have, that it has consisted of the land taken from them by that same “rising tide” — as with the enclosures in Britain during the industrial revolution; never is it understood that what the “long run” has brought has been socio-economic upheaval weakening the already weak.
Nor is more than token attention paid to the already large and growing number of those in the globalizing countries who, having prospered in its earlier stages, have more recently seen their good jobs disappear in a less dramatic but steadily “rising tide” at home. As will be discussed more fully below, in being restructured to meet the needs and possibilities of capital, the socioeconomies of the rich nations have enfeebled the lives of many millions of their own people.
Consider the dynamic meanings of terms such as “downsizing” and “outsourcing” for the laid-off skilled workers of the richer nations: their dignity as well as their wages and benefits have gone down the drain. Try to imagine the plight of the masses of those in the “emerging economies” whose “agribusiness,” “export platforms” and “modernization” have meant for most the irrevocable devastation of their villages, their cultures, their livelihood and, once more, their dignity — leaving them with a future of hard work at dirt wages in hostile cities in their own or other lands, with who knows what new dangers and horrors.
None of that — or the accompanying environmental damage — is or ever has been a matter for concern on the part of the giant companies that so enthusiastically bring them about; consider the factual experience of the crowning glory of globalization — NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement, 1993), where the possibilities for realizing globalization’s favorable consequences were at their most promising for all concerned.
The maquiladoras on Mexicos’s northern border were a central product of the NAFTA accord. The following details are taken from the scholarly study of James Cypher, the leading student of Mexican-U.S. economic relations, “NAFTA’s Lessons….” (2001, emphases added.)
NAFTA established policies between the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico, but it began in 1993 as a bilateral trade agreement between the United States and Mexico, supported by four basic claims:
1) it would be a trade agreement, not a project to shift production to Mexico; 2) it was a binational search for efficiency, not a government/corporate-led strategy to regain the steady loss of U.S. economic dominance from the 1980s on; 3) it would reduce consumer prices in the USA; 4) it would quickly create 170,000–200,000 jobs in the USA, as a result of balanced trade.
In fact, as Cypher shows, barriers to trade had never been problem between the two countries; barriers to investment had been. With NAFTA, U.S. capital managed to eliminate all constraints to the placing or practices of their factories in Mexico; indeed, Cypher declares, such unlimited investment was “the core of NAFTA.” The eliminated barriers were those that might set floors to wages and working conditions or protect the environment: for U.S. companies, it was a free pass to recreate the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution.
Item: U.S. auto workers’ wages in the 1990s averaged
$19/hour, plus benefits; in the Mexican maquiladoras they were well under $2/hour, usually with no benefits.
Item: already by 1996, as the U.S. car models produced in the maquiladoras amounted to half the models’ total output, their prices in the United States rose by 20 percent.
Item: More jobs? “NAFTA was responsible for the loss of approximately 316,000 jobs by 1999, due to both trade and investment effects.”
Still, at least it was beneficial for the landless and otherwise desperate Mexicans? Not quite: “Mexico, far from developing its industrial base, has become an assembly site for [primarily] U.S. corporations, which thrive on a workforce whose worklife averages ten years” — a workforce with 10 hour + days, living in badly-overcrowded slum shelters, whose average life span has been shortened (like that noted for English workers in the early 19th century). But, surely the Mexican economy has grown more rapidly and will do so even more, and things will improve for all? Hardly: Before NAFTA, 1960–1980, Mexico’s GDP had grown at an average of four percent annually; since 1993 it has grown at just one percent.
And worse is on its way. In “Maquiladora Bosses Play the China Card” (Dollars & Sense, September 10, 2003) one learns that Mexican workers are told they must accept even lower wages and lose what meager benefits they may have had, lest their factories be moved to China or India — a repeat play of the threats issued to U.S. workers regarding a move to Mexico in earlier years; and, after unions caved in, factories continued to be shut down — most recently for several more U.S. auto plants. Significantly, the once powerful auto union (UAW) acquiesced, in order to keep benefits for continuing workers — at least for a while.
Like imperialism, globalization stems from the interaction of capital’s opportunities and its needs. Contemporary opportunities arose from:
• the extraordinary rise in the mobility of physical capital plus
• rapid transportation and instant communications plus
• the elimination of political barriers to the production in the weaker nations — all going well beyond the possibilities of the world presided over by Britain.
However, companies have become always more gigantic and always more “transnational” not only because they can but because they must; survival, as much as the lust for profits and power, is a driving force.
Giant businesses now possess giant political as well as economic power; however, of the few hundred transnational companies that effectively control world production, trade, and services — and politics — it is those of the United States that generally prevail, imperiously. So far.
There is no failure like success
As with Britain more than a century ago, the very source of what are seen as the triumphs of ongoing globalization are likely to be the cause of its breakdown in the looming future: the U.S. empire has probably “shot itself in the foot” in confronting the possibilities and the needs of its overweening power.
Earlier it was noted that history cannot repeat itself, least of all in specifics; but certain general patterns of change can occur, and have. Previous chapters have noted the ways in which the Dutch in the 17th–18th centuries and the British in the 19th century “did themselves in.” The reader is referred back to them and to the discussions of the reconstruction and emergence of “global economies II and III” since World War II. Here we treat of the destabilizing forces of the very recent past and the present, as they both compare and substantially contrast with their colonial and imperialist predecessors.
1) Just as the technology of the 19th century made it both possible and necessary for Britain to take a quantitative leap beyond the Dutch, that could and did happen also because of enormous qualitative changes. Britain brought more territories under control, penetrated them much more deeply geographically and economically, and was both able and required to gain explicit political control. But Britain and the other imperialists of that age exploited “their” territories almost exclusively for resources and, in a lesser way, for markets; that is still vital, but imperialism’s hot core is now the global spread of production.
2) Although the politics of the post-World War II era did not allow the continuation of direct political control over imperialized societies, the political economy and the technology of the past half-century have enabled even further geographic and socioeconomic penetration without direct political control, facilitated by the always greater economic dependency of the poorer nations and by the susceptibility to corruption of their rulers.
But now, as earlier, something has gone awry. The main difficulties of 19th century imperialism arose from the conflicts between the major powers, all competing to gain control over the resources, markets, and strategic locations of the weaker societies. The latter, now politically independent, confront the ruling powers with numerous and always changing stresses and strains both in their own societies at the same time as conflicts arise among and between contending transnational companies and, therefore, their nations.
In addition, the successes of globalization, in entailing the shoving aside of traditional cultures and their ways and means, have produced a wave of turbulence and anger that might easily accelerate out of control. That development will be examined further below; here it is pertinent to call the reader’s attention to Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld, which explores the explosive relationships between what is seen as economic progress by the richer nations but as a socioeconomic catastrophe by large numbers of those in the poorer societies. (See Klein, No Logo, and Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents.)
In what now follows, the prospects for sufficient rates of economic growth will be seen as dim; at least as important, and as will be discussed at some length in the Epilogue, the economic growth viewed as the cure-all society’s for ills and needs not only is not, but is likely to be the very source of major problems.
Be that as it may, presently rising difficulties were potentially present from the beginnings of the postwar era, but were temporarily muffled or deflected by substantial global reconstruction and recovery from the 1950s on. Three to six percent economic growth rates were then the rule; now one to two percent is seen as encouraging.
The first signs of enduring trouble emerged in 1991 in Japan, the second largest national economy; it has yet to recover. Since 1991, Japan “has turned the corner” countless times; as I write in late 2003, once more its “economic growth is likely to exceed one percent this year.” Such “growth” was once described as stagnation.
What has been true for Japan for more than a decade has taken hold since 2000 for the other six members of the “Group of 7″ (U.S.A., Germany, France, Italy, the U.K. and Canada): rates of Unemployment for the Europeans hover just above or just below 10 percent; Canada’s and Britain’s, until recently fairly low, are now rising; the United States has lost about three million jobs since 2000, and its unemployment rate is stuck above six percent. (It would be over 10 percent if measured in the European way.) Such unemployment will continue until growth rates average 3.5 percent.
As happened in the 1930s and again in the 1970s with the word “stagnation,” the vocabulary of economics has altered to account for these phenomena, most recently in the United States: “jobless recovery” — or, more recently “jobloss recover.” That process itself is the result of something else new, and is expected to persist: the relationship between increases in productivity and unemployment. Consider the following:
Productivity is rising at the fastest rate in 30 years…more than twice the pace of the 1970s and 1980s and slightly faster than in the postwar era from 1947 to 1973…[the] golden age of productivity improvements….Since the recovery began more than two years ago…the United States has still lost more than a milllion jobs. (“‘Jobless reovery’ — how it’s possible,” Boston Globe, October 14, 2003)
The “fault” is not that of productivity, as such, but that its increases take place in a period of persisting low growth. In turn, that is but one part of a larger development, first and foremost in the United States. Its constituent parts are
1) the now widespread adoption of the advanced technologies of the “new economy” of the 1990s by the “old companies” as a positive opportunity to enhance profitability and the need
2) to meet the general increase of global competition; meanwhile,
3) both blue and white collar jobs move from the richer to the poorer countries at an escalating rate. At the same time, especially in the United States,
4) there is a surge in income inequality within the labor force itself between the shrinking number who have been able to retain skilled jobs (and benefits) and the rising number of those who have become part of the always enlarging unskilled, low-pay, no benefits workforce — a transition already well underway in the United States in the name of “a flexible labor force” — while, at the same time, the Bush administration finds ways to widen the gap between the very rich and all others. Nor does it help that the West Europeans powers are seeking to make their own workforces “more flexible.”
To those developments, another must be added, again with special force in the United States (but spreading elsewhere) — never forgetting that it is “the consumer of last resort” for other nations’ exports. The reference is to the already high levels of economic fragility brought about by vast increases in all realms of debt, which, along with exorbitant speculation, have been both cause and consequence of the financialization of the U.S. economy since the 1980s. The “realms of debt” comprehend households, financial and non-financial companies, federal and state governments, and U.S. foreign debt.
The fragility arises not just from the record-breaking levels of indebtedness, but from the necessity that all forms of it must continue to rise to keep the U.S.A. and the global economy “healthy.” However, the U.S. population of “consumers of last resort” cannot function satisfactorily without a steady rise in median real incomes — not just merely those of the top 10 percent.
It is not only the “jobless recovery” which constitutes a problem in that respect, nor only the rising inequality of income; harmful though both are, there is a considerably deeper problem needing attention: If current globalization processes continue on their present track, the United States faces a continuous weakening of its manufacturing sector, the historic ccnter of its economic strength — a process already well under way.
In recent decades, U.S. global dominance has trodden the path taken by the British more than a century ago, if with variations. Britain, utterly dominant in industrial production up through the 1880s, enhanced its wealth and strength by massive lending abroad, most especially to Germany and the United States; as they became more advanced technologically and stronger industrially, they emerged as Britain’s devastating competitors. In his Imperial Germany…, Veblen wrote with irony about this process as the “advantages of borrowing and the penalty of taking the lead”: Britain had been “hoist by its own petard.”
There are vital differences between Britain’s devolution and what is likely to occur for the United States. We are the world’s (and history’s) largest borrower not, as Britain was, its greatest lender; Britain did very little of its manufacturing abroad; the U.S., combining the latest technology with very low wages, does a great deal and always more.
But the key difference between now and then is that the while globalization has given the richer nations easy access to the cheap labor and abundant resources of the poorer countries, it has also done something else. It has also made it possible for those countries themselves to develop their own industry — most notably China and India. While making ample room for outside investors, they are also rapidly making modern industries of their own — not only in the classic realms of textiles, clothing and non-durables, but the entire gamut of industrial production, up to and including computer software.
The growth of manufacturing in previously non-industrial countries can become — as, for example, it has been in Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan — a beneficial development for the richer countries, if and only if the world economy is expanding at a goodly rate and their governments, not “the free market,” shape their economic development.
The essential expansion is distinctly improbable for several reasons:
1) It could occur only if stimulated by substantial increases in real investment (that is, productive capacities), and/or
2) substantial increases in average levels of consumption.
Neither is likely.
Item:
Overcapacity Stalls New Jobs” (New York Times, October 19, 2003): “Much of the public outcry over America’s failure to generate jobs has focused lately on a surge in the outsourcing of work to China and India. But another dynamic closer to home is weighing on job creation — the slow process of working through a glut of boom-era investment that contiues to litter the economy with underused factories…U.S. manufacturers are using less than 73 percent of their capacity.
China has been and remains the most rapidly growing economy in the world and the most tightly controlled; and India is rapidly catching up. Taken together, their populations well exceed a third of the globe’s; the largest percentage of both live in extreme poverty and work under the abysmal working conditions — and thus have the dynamism — of the British industrial revolution.
Expanding at the rate of roughly eight percent annually, China and India (expanding at seven percent) may be expected to have a combined gross domestic product at least equal to that of Japan and Germany combined — or that of the United States?
Meanwhile, the “flexibility” of the U.S. workforce is gutting the ability of its own population to maintain consumption levels, with or without rising household debt — whose average monthly level is already higher than that of household income. Tellingly, a recent headline states that, “Necessities [education, health care, housing, prescription drugs], not luxuries [durable consumer goods], are driving Americans into debt.” (New York Times, September 4, 2003)
It seems to have escaped the attention of business — not for the first time — that for modern industrial economies to prosper in the fabled “long run” it is essential that a goodly portion of their own population be well enough off to purchase a goodly percentage of the domestic production of “non-necessities.”
Alongside and connected to that ominous development, troubles have surfaced in the realms of foreign trade and foreign exchange. Since 2002, the dollar has weakened substantially against the the yen and the euro. Initially, that sounds like good news for U.S. businesses: our goods are cheaper, so others will buy more of them; for the same reasons it is bad news for those “others.” Question: on balance, will foreigners be buying more U.S. goods if their economies are weakened by reductions in our imports from them?
The cheapening of the dollar was preceded and has been accompanied by a rising wave of protection for both agriculture and industry by the United States, as it simultaneously preaches “free marketry” for others. The Europeans and the Japanese are furious at that Janus-faced policy, made all the more so by the sustained attempts of the U.S.A. to promote a weaker dollar (while President Bush publicly promises the opposite).
Significantly, China has wisely tied its yuan (or renmindi) to the dollar, no matter the appeals from the United States to “let it float”: “China stands firm on keeping yuan at current rate” (International Herald Tribune, October 30, 2003), one of the policies enabling China to become a major player in the world economy.
Item: In 2002, “for the first time, Japan’s imports from China surpassed its imports from the United States. At the same time, Japan’s exports to China surged… China has [also] become South Korea’s largest trading partner.” (“China: U.S. Losing Status in Asia,” New York Times, October 17, 2003)
Tremors are also being felt in the arena of global finance because of the trillions owed by the U.S.A. to foreigners, making us now also the world’s “borrower of last resort.” The U.S. started its journey to that position decades ago, when we were the Rock of Gibraltar in a relatively shaky world; in addition to becoming U.S. bondholders, foreigners became U.S. stockholders in vast quantities as part of the “irrational exuberance” of the “new economy” in the 1990s.
The economic slowdown and the corruption scandals of the U.S.A. in the past few years — and now its skyrocketing deficits — have badly shaken foreigners’ confidence in U.S. investments. In that more than one-third of all U.S. government bonds are held by foreigners, that is no small matter: Any suspicion of a rise in interest rates creates a fall in bond prices, and/or any sell-off of bonds leads to a rise in interest rates. And once such processes take hold, the threaten to become runaway. Probable? Not yet. But as recently as 1999, it would have been deemed impossible.
We have now arrived at the intersection of political economy and global politics.
All together now: quarrel!
Like business strategies for companies, politics for nations is a matter of opportunity and need, with even higher stakes. The global structure of power and, to a significant extent, the structures of power within nations were able to be vitally shaped by the United States in the wake of World War II, which, as we have seen earlier, flattened virtually all other societies in all ways.
In the ensuing half century of reconstruction and development, the relative power of all others set against that of the U.S.A. naturally increased substantially in the economic realm — leaving them, however, still effectively subservient both economically and politically.
In the past few years, most especially but not only in Europe, attempts have begun to surface for many of those nations to find ways of working together in opposition to the United States, instead of doing our bidding without protest. It is easy to see this as having been prompted by what they see as a combination of simpleminded, arrogant, selfish, and dangerous military policies in especially (but not only) the Middle East and Central Asia; but those policies have been “last straws,” following many precursors in recent years.
The issues causing the Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans to become increasingly disgruntled with the U.S.A. now include the economic, political, social and military realms:
• our refusal to sign even the mild Kyoto Treaty for environmental constraints — even though, or because, we are the major culprit;
• our refusal to join the International Criminal Court unless it exempts our own citizens — most notably, Henry Kissinger — from prosecution;
• our piddling contributions to (or withdrawal from) global health programs, usually because of fundamentalist religious groups’ pressures regarding abortion or sexual conduct;
• our continued substantial economic and military support of Israel in a conflict requiring evenhandedness; and, of course, our resort to the policy of “preemption” in Iraq, and the fear that it is just a beginning.
The carrots and sticks of U.S. policy over the past half century have been used continuously. Now, we have fewer carrots to offer, and to kneel to our sticks is coming to be seen as more dangerous than to resist them. There is no way any one nation can effectively resist us, unless it is a China (or, as a special case, a Malaysia); strong regional and interregional alliances are necessary. That path for both the rich and the poor nations is strewn with imposing obstacles.
Such can be no more than cold comfort for the United States; withal, the efforts are not only under discussion in Europe and in Asia and in Latin America, but have gone beyond mere grumbling to proposals: Romano Prodi, President of the European Union, rarely lets a week go by without making public comments on the need for Europe to lessen its dependence upon the U.S.A., by strengthening and reshaping the European Union — itself a product of U.S. pressures going back to 1950.
Even more striking is what is happening in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the eight nations of South America, only Chile can be a cause of merely minor concern for the United States (and even there, memories of the U.S. role in the fascist coup of 1973 remain a poisonous thorn in that relationship). The headline in the leading newspaper in Italy, La Repubblica, tells it all: “Challenge to the hegemony of the U.S.A., following the dream of Lula.” (October 19, 2003) The day before, Bolivia’s president had been forced to flee to Miami, lest a worse fate befall.
“Lula,” president of that continent’s largest and, in terms of resources, its richest nation, well aware of the ability of the United States to bring its economy down, is pursuing a slow but sure path to making Brazil’s economy part of a regional alliance which would qualitatively reduce the economic dependence of the entire region on the U.S.A. Chavez, despite bitter opposition from the United States (very probably including its participation in some attempts to overthrow him) has wrested control over Venezuela’s oil resources — as an important first step in the same direction.
The new president of Argentina, Kirchner, is at one with its population in seeking to rid the country of the IMF — that is, U.S. finance’s — stranglehold, and to move also toward finding strength in regionalism. In one degree or another, long-suppressed anger with the northern behemoth has surfaced increasingly as well in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and, now, Bolivia. In all those countries, significant percentages of the people have long been fed up with being used by the U.S.A., in whatever name: for free markets, against cocaine, you name it — ways and means always benefitting the United States at the expense of South America.
What happens now is not because the peoples of the South have of a sudden become absolutely stronger; it is that the U.S.A. has become relatively weaker. It is likely to become always more so as its economic strengths decline and its military priorities rise. It does not help the United States that its attempts to get rid of Castro, in whatever form for whatever reasons, have not only failed, but have, if anything, widened support for Cuba and deepened animosity to war itself, throughout the Caribbean and also in, for example, Europe.
The peoples of Central America are not likely ever to forget or to forgive the United States for its murderous activities in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama, whose effects do and will endure; nor, as Mexico’s economy shrinks, are the Mexicans likely to support any government that supports NAFTA.
Although the unfolding processes in Asia are in great flux, it seems certain that Japan’s economy domination in Asia is on its way out, and economic and other forms of domination by China are on their way in. To what degree and it what ways that phenomenon will emerge cannot be known. Suffice it to say that events will almost certainly leave the United States as a bystander concerning (at least potentially) the entire Asian continent — or even the world, dependent upon our preponderant military strength, not on our once great prestige and power.
Those are merely tendencies, signs of U.S. decline, rather than the emergence of a different “new world order.” If the future will even roughly be similar to the past, unfortunately, any such new order will arise only on the ashes of the present order.
The Epilogue says more on that crucial matter; and it also goes on to suggest alternatives worth working toward.