He’s the man of the hour (and you can choose your hour), win, lose, or draw. I mean, who can deny it? Certainly not the crowd at his debate with Kamala Harris that, as he reminded us recently, absolutely “went crazy” over what he had to say. (And it couldn’t matter less that the event had no live audience whatsoever.) In a sense, he isn’t wrong. After all, it’s still all too possible that, in a couple of weeks, he could once again be elected — yes! — president of the United States.
Indeed, it’s as yet unclear whether American voters will decline The Donald, but what is increasingly clear — there can’t be a doubt on the subject — is that he himself is on the decline in a typically wild and mad sort of way. And yet he might indeed still be elected to lead (even if that hardly seems the right word anymore) this country. And what exactly does that tell us about this all-American world of ours?
All too much, I fear. Above all, that it’s increasingly anything but all-American.
Can you believe that only 30-plus years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed, this country, the very one Donald Trump might once again preside over, was considered (at least in Washington) the “lone superpower” on planet Earth? And in some sense, it actually was. After all, the great European imperial powers were ancient history by then, the Russians in a state of post-Cold War devastation, and Communist China had yet to truly begin its rise. But like all great imperial powers, it should now be far clearer that, in the wake of a seemingly endless series of lost wars abroad, its global “moment” has long been ending. Its ability to command or direct the world now seems largely a thing of the past. There can be little question any more that the (increasingly dis-)United States is an imperial power on the decline.
Make America Grotesque Again?
Don’t misunderstand me. This country remains all too powerful when it comes to its military and nuclear forces. Just check out the latest Pentagon budget or the more than 40,000 American military personnel, battleships, aircraft carriers, jet fighter planes, and who knows what else deployed to a Middle East that Israel is now blowing sky-high. But if you want a measurement of just how far the Lone Superpower has fallen, keep in mind that, once upon a time not so terribly long ago, an Israeli leader like Benjamin Netanyahu would never have dared to pay so little attention to the desires of Washington when it came to his actions in the Middle East. Once upon a time, a figure like Netanyahu couldn’t have ignored the wishes of the top officials of the very country still arming his own in a staggering fashion, while doing whatever he damn well pleased to tear his region to shreds….
Originally published in TomDispatch.com
https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/the-empire-is-going-down-but-what-isnt/
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth book is A Nation Unmade by War.
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