I want to start out with a little game, called "How Do You Know When
Your Empire Is Collapsing?" – invented in a little different form by a
political scientist on Long Island.

Let me give you a few
examples of how it works.

Let’s say for starters, you know your empire is collapsing when the
empire that is your fiercest rival buys up a total of 26 percent of
three of your major Wall Street firms for $9 billion, and declares that
it has another $200 billion that it is looking to invest.

[Since we’re going to be doing some numbers here, I should pause
to give a little reference for the concept “billion.” A billion seconds
ago was . . . 1959, which means some of you here haven’t yet lived a
billion seconds. A billion minutes ago Jesus was walking along
the Sea of Galilee – more than 2 millennia ago. A billion hours
ago, about 100,000 years before the present, the classic Neanderthal
peoples were wandering Europe and the Middle East, and Homo sapiens
started to move out of Africa. We throw the term around a lot,
but a billion is a big, big number.]

Next, you might figure your empire is collapsing when its total debt
obligations amount to $50.5 trillion. That is so big that it’s about
the same as the total household income of everyone in the country,
including the billionaires. In other words, we owe almost more
than we make.

Or, take one more: You know your empire is
collapsing when you start a war half the world away, on complete
fabrications and in total ignorance, slog on for five years with no
success (2007, you may have noticed, had more people in uniform killed
than at any time since the war began) with an army half of which are
lawless mercenaries and the rest are under-trained, ill-equipped, and
unmotivated youth, and whose presence is not only making your homeland
less secure but is damaging your reputation around the rest of the
world.

Just like Nineveh, just like Tyre. In fact, it’s classic
– just like all the empires that have preceded it, from Akkad to
Hapsburg, from Babylonian to Dutch, from Persian to Ottoman, from Roman
to Soviet, the American empire is collapsing, collapsing around us, and
the consequences will not be pleasant.

You
know your empire is collapsing when the UN, comparing a number of
measures of child well-being in the industrial world, ranks you
twentieth out of 21, behind Poland, Portugal, and Hungary, ahead only
of Britain.

Or when the World Health
Organization ranks your healthcare system overall as thirty-seventh in
the world, below Cyprus, Columbia, Morocco, and Costa Rica, just
above…Slovenia.

Or when scholars, measuring
worldwide standards of living, including health, wealth, happiness, and
stability, give Norway a rating of 37, the highest, followed by Iceland
at 35, Sweden at 30, and the Netherlands at 27 – and give the U.S. 19.
In other words, by this ranking the best country in the world is twice
as good as America.

Ingredients of Decline

I have studied empires pretty carefully
over the last few years, and I have figured out the basic nature of
these systems and concluded that all empires collapse, and usually
within less than a century, because of their inherent nature.
They not only make mistakes but usually the same set of mistakes,
simply because of the inevitable character of the imperial structure,
which ultimately fails because of its size, complexity, territorial
reach, social stratification, economic disparities, heterogeneity,
domination of people and nature, hierarchy, and environmental ignorance.

There are, to my reading, four basic reasons that empires
collapse, and I’d like to set them out, particularly in reference to
the modern American empire.

First, environmental degradation. Empires end by destroying the
lands and waters they depend on for survival, largely because they
build and farm and grow without a sense of limits. As Sumeria
collapsed when its irrigation systems drained and salinated its
waters, as the Roman collapsed when it turned the fruitful
African littoral into the Sahara Desert, so the American is engaged in
the massive destruction and pollution of its environment,
worldwide. Science is in agreement that all the important systems
upon which human life depends are in decline and have been for decades:
the erosion of topsoils and beaches, over fishing of every ocean
fishery, deforestation, freshwater and aquifer depletion, pollution of
water, soil, air, and food, overpopulation, over consumption, depletion
of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and invigoration of
old ones, extreme weather, global warming, rising sea levels, species
extinctions, human overuse of the earth’s photosynthetic
capacity. A lengthy Defense Department study two years ago
predicted “abrupt climate change” was likely to occur within a decade,
will lead to “catastrophic” shortages of water and energy, endemic
“disruption and conflict,” and a “significant drop in the planet’s
ability to sustain its present population.” The Harvard biologist
E.O. Wilson said it more simply: our “ecological footprint is
already too large for the planet to sustain, and is getting larger.”
That way to end of empire, for sure, maybe end of civilization.

Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive
resource exploitation, in their heartlands and then in colonies farther
and farther away from the center, because their populations become
large and their armies too extensive. And when the resources fail, the
economy fails.

In addition, imperial trade systems are so widespread that they
are not well controlled, with many booms and busts, and it is the
imperial elites who prosper at the expense of merchants and
farmers. As Teotihuacán collapsed in the 7th century AD because
it deforested its hills for building and agriculture, as the Byzantine
empire failed when it used up resources and found its economy eroded by
inflation and its unpaid armies in revolt, so the American empire has
built a fragile imperial economy that is unsustainable and is already
on the verge of crumbling, as the recent stock crashes
attest.

Unsustainable? We have a trade
deficit of $763 billion. And crumbling? The dollar has lost value
everywhere – it is down by nearly 40 percent since 2000 – and the
credit crisis is so vast that it is only by the most extraordinary
financial contortions that anyone keeps any faith in the dollar at
all. It will not take long before the oil states will no longer
want to operate in that currency and the petro-euro will supplant the
petro-dollar; and it won’t take long for China to dump its worthless
dollars, as it is already starting to do, in the process of buying up
our banks.

[You know your empire is
collapsing when those who have lost faith in its currency bid the price
of an ounce of gold to a record high in January of $901, and you have
to dump gold from your reserves to get it down.]

Add
peak oil. You know your empire is collapsing when it is willing
to pay $100 a barrel for the oil it has unwisely built its whole
economy on, can’t find a way to limit consumption (and slaps down those
who try), and has about as much clue on how to develop an alternative
as the Norse in Greenland did when they knew their herds were
destroying the land but kept on using them until that society collapsed
in the 15th century.

Third, military overstretch. Empires are by definition
colonizers, and trying to keep control over hostage peoples by force
inevitably leads to large and often uncontrollable armies, massive
drains on the economy, and ultimately rebellion on the
periphery. As the Roman empire collapsed when the
“barbarians” at its frontiers revolted and the Roman legions, stretched
from Germany to Africa to Persia and grown unruly and corrupt, were
defeated, as the Persian empire fell in the 5th century BC because it
was unable to maintain the colonies it had established from India to
Africa and the peripheries rose in revolt, so the American empire is
overextended, weakened at the peripheries, forced to use ill-equipped
and undertrained troops to maintain it, and even the generals admit
that it can’t be sustained.

We have 547,000 – more than half a million – active troops,
based at (this is amazing and little understood) more than 725 admitted
military bases in at least 40 countries around the world, plus a formal
“military presence” in no less than 153 countries, on every continent
but Antarctica, and nearly a dozen fully armed carrier and missile
fleets on all the seven seas.

We are now fighting in four admitted wars from Eritrea to the
Philippines and winning none of them. The cost is enormous and
draining the treasury at $3 billion a week – total cost an estimated
$609 billion so far, another $200 billion next year, and a projected
$2.1 trillion even if some troops are withdrawn by 2013. And that
does not include the mercenary budget, for the Blackwaters and such,
paid by the State Department, estimated at $100 billion a year, or the
troops run by the CIA out of its unknown black budget. It is a
cost that is putting a severe strain on the American treasury, whether
we acknowledge it or not, and its effect of undercutting all other
domestic discretionary spending – for example, on education,
infrastructure, homeland security, and food and drug inspections – has
already had severe social consequences and will continue to have more.

[You know your empire is collapsing when you spend billions of
dollars that you don’t have, to create a missile system that doesn’t
work, to use against an enemy that you don’t have either.]

And all of that to try to maintain an empire that is already
shrinking. Latin America, which used to have U.S. colonies from
Cuba to Argentina, has thrown off most American influence, installed
governments hostile to America and welcoming to the Chinese, and mostly
refused to bow down to the “structural adjustments” that the World Bank
used to be able to use to manipulate their economies. [You know
your empire is collapsing when the leader of one of those South
American countries that we used to have in our pocket, and whom we
couldn’t pull off a coup to oust, comes to the United Nations and makes
fun of your emperor, saying he smells sulphur where the emperor just
was standing.] All of the Moslem world is hostile to American interests
and policies, including the Saudis leading the jack-up of oil prices;
so is much of South Asia, and American prestige and influence has
fallen considerably in Europe, central Asia, and Japan. We are
good friends with Slovenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, that’s about it.

For all of our 725 bases, we no longer control the world, and our attempt to do so has been a disaster.

Fourth: empires fall because of domestic dissent and upheaval.
Crashing economies, food shortages, political repression, military
drain, and increasing disparities between the rich and poor create
domestic discontents that, lasting long enough, lead to rebellion and
civil war. As the Mughal empire of India collapsed when excessive
taxes to support the military led to armed resistance, as the Aztec
empire collapsed when its population showed no interest in defending
the central government that had been bleeding them of tribute when the
Spanish arrived, so the American empire faces a prospect of increasing
dissent and division, malaise and disaffection – even a growing
movement toward outright secession, now with organizations in at least
30 of the 50 states. It is not yet revolt and rebellion, but the
institutions of this nation – presidency, vice presidency, Pentagon,
Congress, the lot – are held in greater disdain and disrepute today
than any time since opinion polls began to measure this, and rightly so.

[You know your empire is collapsing when, according to a poll
taken in the fall of 2006 by the Opinion Research Corporation and
broadcast by CNN on October 23, 71 percent of your citizens agree that
“our system of government is broken and cannot be fixed,” and another 7
percent agree it is broken but “hoped” it could be fixed.]

Get out while there’s time

Well it’s not rebellion, thanks to the increasing sweeping and
illegal repression of dissent by the Bush regime – leading up to, by
the way, the vicious McCarthyistic House Resolution 1955 passed 404 to
5 and sent to the Senate, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act, nothing less than the establishment of
thought police to find and jail anybody that thinks unpleasant and
subversive thoughts about this nation.

Thanks also, I should note, to the success of the system’s
modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of
entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption,
drugs, liquor, and religion that has so far successful deadened most of
the general public into apathetic stupor.

But it is hard to believe that a nation that is, first, so
thoroughly corrupt as this – in all its fundamental institutions, its
boughten parties, military contractors, academies, corporations, banks,
brokerages, accountants, governments – and, second, so thoroughly
economically unequal (2005 figures show that the income of the 3
million Americans at the top was equal to that of the 166 million at
the bottom) can survive without revolt.
The Bush Administration has shown, in fact, that it is not capable of
governing a population of this size and complexity – Katrina above all,
energy deregulation (Enron etc.), subprime credit collapse, unregulated
housing boom, gasoline mileage, FDA inspections, mine-safety
inspections, no-bid contracts to favorites, misuse of wiretapping,
Abramoff-Delay bribery, consumer product safety… the list of failures
go on – and there’s no imaginable successor that could; the empire is
too vast and intricate, the homeland is too immense and diverse, the
systems are too complicated and fragile. The citizens will
someday rise in protest, I predict.

Those four processes by which empires inevitably fall –
environmental, economic, military, and civil – are inescapably
operative now, in this latest empire. I would be willing to make a
sizeable bet that a combination of several or all of them will bring
about its collapse within the next 10 years. The lesson from Jared
Diamond’s recent book Collapse is that almost no society is capable of
escaping the kinds of peril that an empire like this faces.

Unless you secede from it, and the sooner the better.

You know your empire is collapsing when that idea just makes plain good sense.