THE NATURE OF HISTORY
Beyond human awareness or control, history is the synergetic outcome of thousands upon thousands of seemingly unrelated decisions and developments coming together to form the evolution of societies and nations. It is nature and planet charting the course. We live through an extraordinary moment in that endless history – precarious beyond all past, yet filled with unprecedented hope.
Empires have come and gone through the ages. They tend to evolve westwardly around the globe and each has a shorter lifespan than the empire that preceded it. All were to be the power to end all powers – the greatness and glory that would outlast time. Yet all failed – of their own accord – from within. History’s current hegemon, the United States, will be no different. Nature honors no “exceptional”.
Two of the strongest indicators that an empire is nearing its end are excessive militarism and financialization of the economy. Militarism drains the physical and intellectual resources of the hegemon, while financialization renders it parasitic. Nature does not long tolerate. It defines the United States today.
We now watch the westward march of empire as it leaves America and returns after millennia to China and the east. This is inevitable – nature and planet chart the course. Although there are no individual events which mark the beginning of the end, one could argue that the United States entered its downward spiral with the wars based on lies in North Korea and Vietnam, and with the financial deregulation begun under Ronald Reagan and placed in hyperdrive under Bill Clinton.
America’s final, self-inflicted blows to its own standing in the world community are the deliberately provoked U.S. war to “weaken” Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. backed Israeli murder of thousands of children in Gaza, and the endless financial sanctions the dollar’s reserve currency status permits the U.S. to use as an economic weapon to inflict poverty and misery on people throughout the world.
The citizens of America are kept in a state of blissful ignorance by our corporate media – now little more than willing accomplices to the military/industrial/congressional complex and the billionaire predators of Wall Street. But the world’s people know better. They know the history of U.S. lies that led, and continue to lead, to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands in Ukraine. They know of the brutality Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians since the Nakba in 1948. They know how the U.S. has used Israel as its unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East for over half a century to control the vast energy resources of the surrounding nations. They know what U.S. sanctions and countless violent coups have done to their nations, their families, their children.
There are now two critical questions: How much damage will the United States inflict upon the global community of nations as it learns to accept it is just one member – 4.5% by population – of that community, and what will be the nature of the incoming global center of power?
Given the existence of nuclear weapons and the growing threat from global warming, the flailing decline of the American Empire presents a historically unprecedented danger for our planet. The current dearth of wisdom and vision in the leadership of both of America’s major political parties makes matters even more precarious. We must depend upon the collective wisdom of nature and the rest of humanity to safely guide the transition of the United States from hegemon to cooperative member of the world community.
Regarding the nature of the upcoming center of world power, the same lack of wisdom and vision in American leadership causing so much human tragedy, is remarkably also defining the future center of human gravity. U.S. aggression in Ukraine and Taiwan has united Russia and China beyond anything in previous history. India, Iran, North Korea, and much of the Middle East were already favorable to this alliance, but the U.S. backed Israeli genocide in Gaza has “sealed the deal.” Africa, South and Central America, and the Global South in general now see the destructive ugliness of what the American hegemon has become. Along with this, America’s use of the dollar and sanctions as an economic weapon of mass-destruction, is sounding the death knell of the dollar as the global reserve currency. Nature and the world’s people are moving on.
The U.S. is self-destructing – rendering itself a pariah state. The UK and the European Union are doing the same by cutting themselves off from the future – from the East and Global South. This separation will not, and cannot, last forever. It will take decades in precarious transition from hegemonic past to cooperative future, but the road is being paved.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS Nations, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and the Belt and Road Initiative are leading the way to a collective, cooperative future. We live through an extraordinary moment in history – precarious beyond all past, but filled with unprecedented hope.