The Collapsing U.S. Empire

Eric Zuesse

The US military is in decline. Neither its numbers nor its ubiquitousness, nor the expensive weapons they brandish can hide that fact. (CC)

As I documented in my “ChinUssia Will Likely Become the World’s Dominant Nation”, “China is already the nation that leads the world in its human capital, and Russia is already the nation that leads the world in its physical capital.” Even if those two countries — which border each other — won’t ultimately join together as I expect them to, there is going to be a difficult period of adjustment by the publics in U.S.-and-‘allied’ nations (or in the U.S. and its vassal-nations) to the radically different world order that is now emerging with increasing rapidity, in which America and Europe are fading as leading world powers. China now leads the entire world already in the number and quality of new patents, as well as in the number of new graduates with PhDs in the fields of Science, Technology, and Engineering. It already leads the world in the performance of its high-school students on standardized tests of proficiency in Science, Math, and Reading. Already, international polling simultaneously of the populations within a large number of countries so that they can be compared with one-another are consistently finding that the public’s trust of Government, and of trust in the nation’s news-media, and in the percentage of the public who believe that their Government is a democracy — all of these are higher in China than anywhere else (and far higher than in America). Unlike in all other nations, where life-expectancies rise virtually every year, America’s life-expectancies have been falling ever since 2014, and are now down to where they were in 1996.

The U.S. has called Russia “a gas station with nuclear weapons”, but, for some reason, ever since Putin came into power, in the year 2000, Russia’s life expectancies and GDP per capita have been rising not only faster than in most of the world but much faster than in America. This has continued even after the U.S. regime and its allies started applying sanctions against Russia in 2012, and then escalated them after Russia resisted America’s take-over of Ukraine in 2014. And, corruption at the very top in America is massive enough so that now there are even scientific studies which back up what former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on 28 July 2015 when asked about the Government’s corruptness:

It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we've just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. ... At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.

On 20 December 2022, the retired U.S. politician Dennis Kucinich was interviewed about how America’s arms-makers such as Lockheed Martin came to have their lock-hold over American foreign policies, and he said that when he was in Congress the kickbacks and other corruption were totally controlling, and only few members were not bought — it’s hard to stay in Congress without being bought. There are plenty of buyable candidates for the arms-companies to fund to replace you, if you won’t cooperate. It’s the way the arms-manufacturers control their markets — which are mainly the U.S. Government, but secondarily also the U.S.-‘allied’ Governments, such as in NATO. For the sellers, it’s all about controlling their markets. That’s what political competition has now come down to, in today’s America — serving not the American people, not the voters, but the sellers to the Government.

Moreover, because there is far less corruptness at the top in both Russia and China (both of which have socialized their armaments firms — which consequently are controlled by their Governments, instead of controlling their Governments), Russia’s, and also China’s, military technologies are racing ahead of those in the West, notwithstanding that America spends half of the entire world’s military expenditures — most of the U.S. expenditures are just getting skimmed off in all that corruption.

These are the new realities. And this is how they came to be so. The corruption that has brought it about is now starting to bring it down.