Attempts to revive and save the Emprire foreclose opportunities to shift towards The Global Community.

There is now general agreement among scholars, social activists, and many thoughtful political leaders around the world that the US Global Empire is in decline, despite its militarily dominant position. This is the assessment of many realist theorists who argue that America’s relative power position has been slowly, but inexorably eroding for several decades. In attempting to address the problem of the erosion of its relative power, the architects of the US Global Empire have sought to shore up its declining hegemony by placing an even greater reliance on the use of military threat and force. However, by exercising this force, the US Global Empire has intentionally engaged upon a course of action leading to the deterrence of development options for the Global Community. This trend has been coupled with deepening military investments and widening sales in the global arms market. A culture of war and armaments constitutes the predominant thrust of the US Global Empire’s strategy for maintaining its hegemony. The sale of conventional arms and weapons has become an over $900 billion dollar annual plague on humanity. While claiming that it is concerned about nuclear proliferation, the Bush-2 regime did nothing to advance the work of those seeking to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty at a United Nationals NPT Conference in May 2005. At the same time, the Bush administration has continued efforts to upgrade the nuclear capabilities of the US arsenal—including “bunker busters”—to threaten Iran and North Korea. In fact, Bush has actively worked to undermine the NPT when, in early 2006, he agreed to share nuclear technology with India, thereby opening the door to even greater proliferation throughout Asia in an effort to contain China as a rising global power. Despite its attempts to maintain global hegemony it may be that the enterprise will fail. The reasons for the failure are multifaceted, but what can be asserted is that a global culture of violence is not sustainable. The foreign policies of the US Global Empire have contributed dramatically to global violence. For example, it has undermined efforts of Third World nations and social movements throughout the global South to escape the financial domination of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. In so doing, it has warped trade policies and its potential benefits to such a great degree that civil wars have erupted between the excluded and those who have positioned themselves in elite positions. As a consequence of civil war, coupled inequitable socioeconomic imbalances, and the effects of exclusionary governance, have led to more so-called failed states. Certainly, there have been failed or incomplete democratic transitions. Key examples are Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Peru. In these states, the institutions needed for a successful transition to democracy were weak and democratization remained incomplete. Despite this reality, it did not halt the efforts of the governing elites of the US Global Empire from working through the WTO and IMF to impose economic programs that would contribute to an ever-widening gap between those groups and classes that held elite decision-making positions versus those who were excluded from an equitable sharing or distribution of the nation’s wealth. In the decade of the 1990s, Latin America’s negative growth rates and incomes inequalities worsened. Structural adjustment programs and their costs fell disproportionately on the middle- and low-income groups. Yet, the top 5 percent of the population retained or even increased its standard of living. From this vantage point, the basic thrust of Realist theories is that “relations among the Western states will return to the patterns of the 1930s and early 1940s, in which the problems of anarchy dominated: economic rivalry, security dilemmas, arms races, hyper-nationalism, balancing alliances, and ultimately the threat of war.”5 Many of the predictions contained in Realist theories have already materialized. Europe and China have become economic rivals to the US Global Empire, threatening its role as a twenty-first century superpower that is capable of maintaining an unrivaled hegemony. Part of the reason for this trend transcends pure economics and political maneuvering. It reflects something about the world of ideas and how the idea of another American Century is not acceptable to the Global Community. Yet, with Fukuyama-esque assurance mixed with neoconservative arrogance, Paul Wolfowitz argued that history had in fact ended, and that the world was left with “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”6 Despite this imperial assumption, security dilemmas plague the empire’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, even as it seeks to buttress its collapsing position in the Middle East under the guise of a democracy crusade to liberate the Arab world from tyrannical regimes.7 Arms races and the development of a nuclear weapons capacity have been accelerating among various Third World states from Iran to North Korea. In the case of Iran as well as North Korea, the rationale for building a nuclear weapons capacity appears to be a reaction to the Bush-2 regime’s proclivity for planning and preparation for aggressive wars—justified by the doctrine of preemption. Hence, it may be argued, that if these two states have engaged in building up their nuclear weapons programs, such a build-up has been undertaken in order to deter the US Global Empire from its apparent willingness to engage in preemptive wars.8 From the Nixon era to the Bush-2 regime, the US Global Empire has continued to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into military technologies that would allow it to deter major socioeconomic and sociopolitical change throughout the Global Community. Believing that the American model should remain supreme, the architects of the US Global Empire have dedicated both national wealth and national security investments into military spending so as to guarantee such an outcome. This phenomenon constitutes the US Global Empire’s actual doctrine of deterrence. The US Global Empire employs its vast military might to preserve this order and enforce its rules.9 It is ultimately designed not to deter potential terrorists, but to deter other countries from pursuing national development options that would reduce the profit margins of US-based corporations. While claiming to pursue its own security and fight terrorism, the empire’s actual strategy has been increasingly premised upon creating and implementing policies that will ensure that change will not occur in the international order that would in any way threaten its current supremacy. In order to maintain this supremacy, interventions by the US Global Empire throughout the global village have made the world a more violent place—ravaged by seemingly endless civil wars and armed conflicts. Even with the end of the Cold War the US Global Empire did not alter the nature of its conventional arms sales that became even more competitive and less accountable.10 In terms of the buyers of these arms, there was no litmus test for whether the regimes that purchased the arms were developing states that supported human rights and democracy or authoritarian regimes that paid attention to neither.11 In this respect, as well as others, the Bush-2 regime’s war on terror has unleashed more terror on the world than it has either eliminated or contained. Between 2003 and 2005, US military forces have inflicted casualties on the Iraqi civilian population that exceed 100,000 people and then call it “collateral damage.” In 2003, various human rights charities noted that on average 500,000 people were killed each year by armed violence—roughly one victim a minute.12 In this global environment approximately 300,000 children are fighting in conflicts around the world. The future of a rising Global Community is seriously compromised with the harsh realities of children placed into conflict as both armed combatants and victims. The new and un-addressed tragedy of the global commons is that the use of children as soldiers and as terrorists is one of the new aspects of twenty-first century warfare.13 The US Global Empire’s logic of deterring global change through the sale of arms and conventional weapons may be seen as just one element in a larger picture of US attempts to engage blocking development options throughout the Global Community in order to retain its current hegemonic position. For example, as civil wars rage across the African continent, from Sudan to Niger, it is in the interest of US oil and mineral companies to support those social forces that are willing to accommodate US corporations by allowing access to and the exploitation of the nation’s resources. At the close of a civil war, those who are the “winners” share in the spoils of war. In this way, a sociopolitical group that captures the state is the beneficiary of the civil war. Once in power, this sociopolitical group constitutes an elite that has succeeded in not only “state capture” but has also been positioned to engage in a course of inequitable development. Those groups that are excluded suffer from human rights abuses and fail to enjoy an equitable share of the nation’s wealth. Exclusionary states (ES) are supported by US business and military interests because they are able to guarantee US access to markets that would otherwise be denied to them. The unsettling reality is that the logic of deterring global change has had a blowback effect within the homeland of the empire. Attempting to deal with this blowback effect also accounts for the spread of hypernationalism in the United States. As a result of foreign wars abroad the Bush-2 regime has defined many persons with a Middle Eastern background as potential enemies of the empire. Racial profiling of persons who are of Middle Eastern origin comes under increased scrutiny by both the FBI and CIA. On this basis, military tribunals have been set up to evade constitutional restrictions. The CIA has been empowered to engage in the techniques of torture. The CIA has also engaged in the kidnap of suspects in a process called renditions, and then taken these suspects to what are referred to as black sites. The Bush-2 regime’s domestic reaction to the events of 9/11 has wound up creating a near-fascist state of affairs. Certainly the passage of the USA Patriot Act offers substantial credence to such a proposition. Also, George W. Bush appointed an attorney general closely associated with the legalization of torture and nominated a UN ambassador who believes that there is no such thing as international law that constrains the United States from acting unilaterally.14 Under Bush, an effort is being made to remake the global order subservient to the US Global Empire’s designs. As a result, internationally, the empire’s hypernationalism has furthered a global trend toward anarchy—as predicted by Realist theories. At the present moment, given this record, there is little hope that there will be a humane management of the US Global Empire’s decline. Rather, it appears that global conflicts will continue to be on the rise because of the empire’s intention to engage in the preemption of development options for the majority of humankind. Threats to both global environmental security and human security grow as the US Global Empire resists the call to engage in multilateral procedures that could strengthen a rising Global Community.