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An Empire Self-Destructs

May 23, 2024

An Empire Self-Destructs

Empires are built through the creation or acquisition of wealth. The Roman Empire came about through the productivity of its people and its subsequent acquisition of wealth from those that it invaded. The Spanish Empire began with productivity and expanded through the use of its large armada of ships, looting the New World of its gold. The British Empire began through localized productivity and grew through its creation of colonies worldwide—colonies that it exploited, bringing the wealth back to England to make it the wealthiest country in the world.

In the Victorian Age, we Brits were proud to say, “There will always be an England,” and “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” So, where did we go wrong? Why are we no longer the world’s foremost empire? Why have we lost not only the majority of our colonies, but also the majority of our wealth?

Well, first, let’s take a peek back at the other aforementioned empires and see how they fared. Rome was arguably the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Industrious Romans organized large armies that went to other parts of the world, subjugating them and seizing the wealth that they had built up over generations. And as long as there were further conquerable lands just over the next hill, this approach was very effective. However, once Rome faced diminishing returns on new lands to conquer, it became evident that those lands it had conquered had to be maintained and defended, even though there was little further wealth that could be confiscated.

The conquered lands needed costly militaries and bureaucracies in place to keep them subjugated but were no longer paying for themselves…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Concise History of the Global Empire

May 20, 2024

A Concise History of the Global Empire

Like all past empires, the Global Empire has gone through its parable of growth and glory and is now starting to decline. There is not much we can do about it; we must accept that this is how the universe works.

For everything that exists, there is a reason, and that’s true also for that gigantic thing that we sometimes call “The West” or perhaps “The Global Empire.” To find that reason, we may examine its origins in an older but similar empire: the Roman one.

As someone might have said (and maybe someone did), “Geography is the mother of Empires.” So, the Romans exploited the geography of the Mediterranean basin to build an empire based on maritime transportation. Rome was the center of a hub of commerce that outcompeted every other state in the Western region of Eurasia and North Africa. It was kept together by a “Lingua Franca,” Latin, and by a financial system based on coinage, in turn based on the availability of gold and silver mined from the Empire’s mines in Spain. More than all, it was based on a powerful military system created by the Roman wealth.

Like all empires, the Roman one carried inside the seeds of its own destruction: the limited amount of its mineral resources. Roman gold and silver were used to pay not just for the legions but also for expensive commodities coming from China that the Empire couldn’t produce in its territory. As long as the Romans could keep producing precious metals, the amounts lost to China to pay for silk and spices didn’t matter so much…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Falling From Grace

April 30, 2024

Falling From Grace

Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”

Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.

I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.

As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”

This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.

And it never will.

If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.

But of what importance is this to us today?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

April 5, 2024

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

In the late eighteenth century, Bishop George Berkeley posed the question,

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Since that time, generations of university philosophy professors have required their students to consider the question. Countless classroom time has been taken up in pondering it. In many cases, students would be required to write a report containing their answer and they might even be graded on it.

Of course, this is the world of academia, which consists almost entirely of theory, not practical application. But, in the functioning world, it makes not the slightest difference whether the tree makes a sound or not. The lumberjack who actually encounters the tree is unconcerned with the philosophical question. He only cares that he has a tree he can cut.

He represents those who produce, rather than those who theorise.

And so it is with the field of International Diversification. It can be described as taking place in three stages:

People Leave an Empire Quietly

Typically, when a country (or empire) has been corrupted by its leaders to such a degree that it’s reaching its sell-by date, some people begin to see the writing on the wall. Although many remain at home, complaining bitterly that their leaders are selling them out, a smaller number of people recognise that the country has passed the point of no return and make the choice to leave the dying leviathan rather than go down with it.

We’re presently passing through such a period in which a significant number of people will be leaving the countries of their birth, particularly those countries that were once referred to as the “Free World.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Alfred McCoy, Living in a Quagmire World

March 13, 2024

Alfred McCoy, Living in a Quagmire World

Americans have never liked to think of themselves as part of the West’s imperial history that began with the Roman empire and may now quite literally be ending, as historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy suggests, in a distinctly un-American moment. The author of a classic history of empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, McCoy has previously suggested that, in symbolic terms, if Donald Trump were to win the 2024 presidential election (or even lose it and once again contest it, possibly, thanks to his most fervent followers, in an ominously well-armed fashion), he could prove to be the end of empire personified.

Certainly, as McCoy explains today, it’s hard not to imagine that, from Ukraine to Gaza to Asia, this country is on a dramatic imperial downward slide. His own findings only serve to reinforce a view taking root among America’s European and Asian allies that the United States, globally dominant since 1945 and triumphantly the lone superpower on Planet Earth in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now experiencing an epoch-ending terminal failure. The global Pax Americana (that proved to have all too much war in it) is, it seems, crumbling amid two grim conflicts, one in Europe and the other in the Middle East, and a political and military stand-off with China that could, at any moment, take a turn for the worse.

And let me add: it’s strange to see the American Moment (and yes, historically speaking, I do think that should be capitalized!) potentially ending here at home with two elderly men locked in an electoral knife fight that could blow the American imperium sky-high from the inside out. Tom

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Pepe Escobar: How the West Was Defeated

January 20, 2024

Pepe Escobar: How the West Was Defeated

US and European flags float in front of the European Commission headquarters in Brussels 22 February 2005 - Sputnik International, 1920, 18.01.2024
© AFP 2023
Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.
The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.
At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.
Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.
Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.
Considering the toxic NATOstan environment where Russophobia and cancel culture reign supreme, and every deviation is punishable, Todd has been very careful not to frame the current process as a Russian victory in Ukraine…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The World’s Top Industrial Countries Are in Treacherous Waters

October 12, 2023

The World’s Top Industrial Countries Are in Treacherous Waters

waterfalls

Sometimes, after reading a slew of news articles from around the world, I feel confused and weary. But occasionally patterns seem to emerge. I say “seem” because the human brain is all too eager to see patterns where there are none (hence humanity’s fascination with false conspiracy theories). Nevertheless, these days I can hardly escape the sense that current events are accelerating toward . . . something troubling.

Of course, we all bring preconceptions to bear on new information, and those preconceptions tend to shape the patterns we see. My own preconceptions have emerged from a few decades of studying humanity’s systemic problems—climate change, resource depletion, pollution, economic inequality and fragility, authoritarianism, war, and so on—and how these evolved through many centuries up to the present in response to new energy sources and technological innovation. The cornerstone of my preconceptions is a limits-to-growth perspective that sees the last few decades of fossil-fueled rapid expansion of population and per-capita consumption as profoundly unsustainable, and the decades of the 2020s and 2030s as the likely turning point in humanity’s overall trajectory from rapid growth to just-as-rapid contraction.

So, I guess you could say I’m a short-term, big-picture pessimist. You can judge for yourself whether focusing that particular lens on the Rorschach inkblot of current events is helpful.

The world is a complex place, and some countries are always doing better or worse than others. But occasionally, as was the case with the Great Depression and World War II, the whole world seems to falter or erupt at once. If the pattern I think I see is really there, we may be approaching a similarly pivotal moment.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Western Civilization has become a never-ending Jerry Springer episode

May 13, 2021

Western Civilization has become a never-ending Jerry Springer episode

Early in the 2nd century AD, around the year 101, the Roman humorist Decimus Junius Juvenalis began publishing a collection of satirical poems poking fun at the Empire.

Rome was already in serious decline by the time Juvenalis wrote his first poem. In the first century AD alone, Romans suffered the tyrannical insanity of Caligula, the destructive extravagance of Nero, multiple civil wars, and the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ in 96 AD.

Needless to say, Juvenalis had plenty of inspiration for his satires.

He was like the George Carlin of his day– making fun of everyone, even the most sacrosanct institutions. And he didn’t pull any punches.

Juvenalis made fun of the Senate for their endless hypocrisy. He made fun of wealthy noblemen for acquiring their wealth by sucking up to the Emperor.

He made fun of the merchant class and its constant obsession with status. He made fun of the military for acting as if they were above the law.

He made fun of how the Imperial government pretends to give a damn about the common folk. And he made fun the common folk, saying “the mob cares for nothing but bread and circuses. . .”

Most of all, Juvenalis made fun of the extreme decay in Roman morality.

By the 2nd century AD, the Roman virtues of ‘strength and honor’ had been replaced by deceit, idleness, apathy, and corruption.

Edward Gibbon echoed this sentiment in his work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776.

Gibbon’s primary thesis is that Rome became a victim of its own success– its extraordinary wealth and prosperity made people lazy, complacent, and entitled.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Falling From Grace

September 2, 2019

Falling From Grace

Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”

Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.

I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.

As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”

This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.

And it never will.

If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.

But of what importance is this to us today?

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Accelerating Imperial Decline

June 24, 2019

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Accelerating Imperial Decline

Washington’s foreign policy towards Iran is driven by desperation rather than a reasoned understanding of a world in historically significant flux. That can lead only to a continuing succession of failures.

The kinetic events of the past week in Washington, Tehran, and the Persian Gulf were nothing if not revealing. President Donald Trump proved the keeper of the peace, warmongers all around him, when he aborted an airborne attack on Iran Thursday evening. The Iranians continue to act with admirable restraint in the face of incessant provocations.

More such provocations are sure to come. Trump announced over the weekend that he will impose yet another layer of “major new sanctions” against Iran on Monday. After a minor cyber-attack against an Iranian intelligence agency last week, the Pentagon has developed a list of Iranian entities it is considering for a more extensive cyber-war campaign.

Trump: New sanctions and more provocations to come.  (The White House/Shealah Craighead)

But there are more fundamental truths to derive from the swift escalation of Washington’s hostilities toward Tehran. They come to four. Taken together, they offer a snapshot of an imperial power in accelerating decline.

Paralyzed Elites

First, Trump’s determination to avoid pointless new wars of adventure has divided Washington to an extent that is unprecedented at least as far back as the Vietnam debacle. In addition to hawkish factions within the administration and the national security apparatus, an apparent majority on Capitol Hill — liberals as well as Republicans — favors war as the principal instrument of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Self-Destructive Trajectory of Overly Successful Empires

June 12, 2019

The Self-Destructive Trajectory of Overly Successful Empires

It’s difficult not to see signs of this same trajectory in the U.S. since the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1990.A recent comment by my friend and colleague Davefairtex on the Roman Empire’s self-destructive civil wars that precipitated the Western Empire’s decline and fall made me rethink what I’ve learned about the Roman Empire in the past few years of reading.

Dave’s comment (my paraphrase) described the amazement of neighboring nations that Rome would squander its strength on needless, inconclusive, self-inflicted civil conflicts over which political faction would gain control of the Imperial central state.

It was a sea change in Roman history. Before the age of endless political in-fighting, it was incomprehensible that Roman armies would be mustered to fight other Roman armies over Imperial politics. The waste of Roman strength, purpose, unity and resources was monumental. Not even Rome could sustain the enormous drain of civil wars and maintain widespread prosperity and enough military power to suppress military incursions by neighbors.

I now see a very obvious trajectory that I think applies to all empires that have been too successful, that is, empires which have defeated all rivals or have reached such dominance they have no real competitors.Once there are no truly dangerous rivals to threaten the Imperial hegemony and prosperity, the ambitions of insiders turn from glory gained on the battlefield by defeating fearsome rivals to gaining an equivalently undisputed power over the imperial political system.

The empire’s very success in eliminating threats and rivals dissolves the primary source of political unity: with no credible external threat, insiders are free to devote their energies and resources to destroying political rivals.It’s difficult not to see signs of this same trajectory in the U.S. since the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1990.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump, Gorbachev and the fall of the American empire

November 8, 2018

Trump, Gorbachev and the fall of the American empire

“The only wealth you keep is wealth you have given away,” said Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), last of the great Roman emperors. US President Donald Trump might know of another Italian, Mario Puzo’s Don Vito Corleone, and his memorable mumble: “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Forgetting such Aurelian and godfather codes is propelling the decline and fall of the American empire.

Trump is making offers the world can refuse – by reshaping trade deals, dispensing with American sops and forcing powerful corporations to return home, the US is regaining economic wealth but relinquishing global power.

As the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) led to the breakup of its vast territory(22 million square kilometers). Gorbachev’s failed policies led to the dissolution of the USSR into Russia and independent countries, and the end of a superpower.

Ironically, the success of Trump’s policies will hasten the demise of the American empire: the US regaining economic health but losing its insidious hold over the world.

This diminishing influence was highlighted when India and seven other countries geared up to defy Washington’s re-imposition of its unilateral, illegal sanctions against Iran, starting Monday.

The US State Department granting “permission” on the weekend to the eight countries to buy Iranian oil was akin to waving the green flag at a train that has already left the station

The US State Department granting “permission” on the weekend to the eight countries to buy Iranian oil was akin to waving the green flag at a train that has already left the station.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could Donald Trump be the Last World Emperor? States and Empires After the End of the Fossil Age

October 7, 2018

Could Donald Trump be the Last World Emperor? States and Empires After the End of the Fossil Age

Empires are short-lived structures created and kept together by the availability of mineral resources, fossil fuels in our times. They tend to decline and fall with the decline of the resources that created them, and that’s the destiny of the current World Empire: the American one. Will new empires be possible with the gradual disappearance of the abundant mineral resources of the past? Maybe not, and Donald Trump could be the last great emperor in history.

A warlord named Sargon of Akkad was perhaps the first man in history to rule a true empire, around mid 2nd millennium BC in Mesopotamia. Before him, humans had been warring against each other for millennia, but the largest social structures they had developed were no larger than city-states. Gradually, new forms of social aggregation emerged: kingdoms and empires, structures kept together by a central government that, normally, involves a larger than life male figure, emperor or king, who keeps the state together using a combination of force, prestige, and gifts.

Sargon’s Empire went through the normal destiny of the empires that came after it: glory and plunder at the beginning, then struggle, destruction and, finally, collapse. Nothing unusual for a cycle that would span millennia of human history. Taagenpera shows how empires come and go (image source)

The rise and fall of empires looks like a chemical reaction, flaring and then subsidizing, as a reaction running out of reactants — then restarting when new reactants have accumulated. For empires, the reactants might have been mineral resources — it may well be that Sargon’s empire was the result of silver having become a standard medium of exchange in Mesopotamia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dynamics of Decadence

October 5, 2018

The Dynamics of Decadence

In the present era of decadence, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the modern equivalent of Bread and Circuses.

The dynamics of decadence are easy to understand: as affluence becomes the norm that is widely assumed to be permanent, shared purpose and sacrifice for the common good is replaced by self-absorbed decadence and an ethos of maximizing personal gain.

In his seminal essay The Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb listed these core dynamics of imperial decline:

(a) A growing love of money as an end in itself.

(b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization.

(c) Selfishness and self-absorption.

(d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good.

Glubb included the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence:

— An increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity.

— A loss of social cohesion.

— The willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state.

Glubb’s list may at first glance be largely psychological–self-aggrandizement and a focus on hedonistic pursuits–but the dynamics of decadence have economic, political and social ramifications.

First and foremost, the aristocratic financial and political elites secured their position at the expense of social mobility by erecting barriers that protect them from competition and accountability. In effect, they eliminated the risk posed by change by rigging the system to their benefit.

To fund their extravagant lifestyles, they took more of the earnings of those below them, widening the inequality between the aristocracy and commoners to extremes. Historian Peter Turchin reports that where the patricians of the Roman Republic had 10 or 20 times the wealth of an average Roman citizen, by the late Empire the elites possessed up to 200,000 times the wealth of the average commoner.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Telltale Signs of Imperial Decline

August 20, 2018

The Telltale Signs of Imperial Decline

Nothing is as permanent as we imagine–especially super-complex, super-costly, super-asymmetric and super-debt-dependent systems.

Check which signs of Imperial decline you see around you: The hubris of an increasingly incestuous and out-of-touch leadership; dismaying extremes of wealth inequality; self-serving, avaricious Elites; rising dependency of the lower classes on free Bread and Circuses provided by a government careening toward insolvency due to stagnating tax revenues and vast over-reach–let’s stop there to catch our breath. Check, check, check and check.

Sir John Glubb listed a few others in his seminal essay on the end of empiresThe Fate of Empires, what might be called the dynamics of decadence:

(a) A growing love of money as an end in itself: Check.

(b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization: Check.

(c) Selfishness and self-absorption: Check.

(d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good: Check.

Glubb included the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence:

— an increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity (paging any Kardashians in the venue…)

— a loss of social cohesion

— willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state

Historian Peter Turchin, whom I have often excerpted here, listed three disintegrative forces that gnaw away the fibers of an Imperial economy and social order:

1. Stagnating real wages due to oversupply of labor

2. overproduction of parasitic Elites

3. Deterioration of central state finances

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

To these lists I would add a few more that are especially visible in the current Global Empire of Debt that encircles the globe and encompasses nations of all sizes and political/cultural persuasions:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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