American Decline Will Be Worse Than U.S. Intelligence Agencies Fear

American intelligence agencies project that the United States will lose its position of world dominance by the year 2025. Their report is titled “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” and is far more pessimistic about the United States’ future role in the world than a report written in 2004. Back then, when the Iraq War was still young, U.S. intelligence agencies believed American dominance would continue through the year 2020. What a difference has been wrought by the revolt of developing nations against U.S and European global economic dictatorship, the unraveling of America’s own economy, and two major American wars of attempted conquest.

U.S. intelligence analysts now foresee a world in which America is the “single most powerful actor,” but where Washington will no longer be in a position to impose its will on the entire planet.

This is a curious conclusion, because it in effect predicts the end of U.S. imperialism, which is a system maintained only by artificial U.S. economic advantages backed up by an overpowering military – more costly than all the other militaries in the world, combined. Once the United States loses its artificial advantages, such as dollar dominance in the world monetary system, or the capacity to militarily seize the resources of other nations, its decline will be far more profound than Washington’s intelligence agencies can fathom. When the mechanisms of imperial dominance fail, the headquarters countries of Europe and North America will lose their capacity to extort or outright seize most of the value of the world’s resources.

Since the health of their economies is inextricably connected to unfair advantage and other legacies of Euro-American imperialism, the end of that imperial system will cause convulsions that will rock the so-called “western world.” We may well be seeing the beginnings of the Great Unraveling, in the form of the current economic meltdown.

There should be little doubt that America’s ability to bludgeon the rest of the world into economic submission, is over. Unless Washington is willing to roll the dice militarily to hold on to its advantages by force – a doomed project, but one that American ruling circles may believe is their only option – the economic dislocations caused by imperial collapse will have far deeper repercussions than U.S. intelligence analysts are capable of imagining.

The report also predicts that Al Qaeda’s influence in the world will decay due to its “unachievable strategic objectives, inability to attract broad-based support and [its] self-destructive actions.” Actually, those same words can be used to describe Uncle Sam’s problems in holding on to world dominance. The report’s author claims that “the appeal of terrorism is waning.” But what do these American spooks mean by “terrorism.” Certainly Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization. But the Americans, like the European colonizers in decline, have applied the terror label to virtually every national liberation group that has opposed them. The report predicts “widening gaps between rich and poor, the uneven impact of global warming,” and food and water scarcities – conditions that are largely the result of United States policies.

If U.S. imperialism loses its grip on the world – as it must, and as the U.S. intelligence report seems to predict – then huge flocks of chickens will be coming home to roost in America, between now and the year 2025.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com