The Waning Colossus: Empire, Overreach and the Unraveling of American Power

It seems to me that this diagnosis is absolutely correct... 

'An empire divided against itself cannot sustain coherent external power. Its adversaries need not defeat it militarily. They can simply wait........Empires do not decline only through material exhaustion or military failure. They also decay symbolically. Prestige - what earlier generations called gravitas - is not ornamental. It is a form of power. When it erodes, coercion increasingly substitutes for authority, and vulgarity replaces legitimacy. The conduct and language of senior American political figures in recent years are symptomatic of this deeper erosion of US prestige. The casual use of expletives, threats and street vernacular by White House officials and political elites is not merely a stylistic departure from earlier norms. It reflects the loss of confidence in the moral authority of office itself........Empires at their height are careful with words. Empires in decline are careless, because they increasingly rely on threat rather than persuasion, and on spectacle rather than credibility....The late American political scientist Chalmers Johnson warned that empires lose legitimacy before they lose capability. The collapse of dignity at the highest levels of American governance is part of that process. When leaders no longer speak as custodians of a republic but as enforcers of an empire, decline has already moved from structure into culture. The loss of prestige is not a side effect of imperial decline. It is one of its clearest early indicators....Blowback, in his formulation, is not limited to foreign retaliation. It is the internal corrosion of political norms, civil liberties and social cohesion that follows imperial overstretch. The tools developed to control distant populations are eventually redeployed to manage dissent at home...Empires do not fall because they are attacked. They fall because they cannot stop expanding. The logic governing the American empire is not unmistakable. Unless restraint replaces compulsion, the United States will follow the same path as every empire before it, not as an exception to history, but as its confirmation.



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