(In our “Mud Season” issue, published in March 2008, Vermont Commons presented Part I of
Kirkpatrick Sales’ “Dispersion” column – “You Know Your Empire Is
Collapsing When…” Sales wrote, “Empires usually make the same set of
mistakes,” and observed from his historical reading that there were
four basic reasons that empires collapse. First was environmental
degradation (examples, Sumeria and the Roman Empire). Harvard
biologist E.O. Wilson has written of the U.S. that its “ecological
footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain.” Second was
economic meltdown (examples, Teotihuacán and the Byzantine Empire). “We
have a trade deficit of $763 billion,” Sales wrote, and the dollar has
grown so weakened that “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.” In this issue we pick up Sales’ commentary
at the third reason that empires collapse.)

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$2.1 trillion even if some troops are withdrawn by 2013.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.

Kirkpatrick Sale, editor-at-large and author of a dozen books,
including After Eden: Evolution of Human Domination (Duke), is the
director of the Middlebury Institute.