The Breaking Point
Page 48
The basic assumption of common interests and social affinities between hundreds of millions of people who happen to live within the confines of a continental economy like the United States is, at best, an exaggeration—as is so clearly illustrated by the recurring fiscal impasses in Washington.
As the terminal crisis of US hegemony unfolds, it will become increasingly evident that efforts by the US security state to eavesdrop on every conversation and monitor every email on Earth represent not only a departure from the rule of law but a vast overreach that is destined to fail. To the extent that US leaders persist in attacking every manifestation of global privacy, it will make it an unalloyed disadvantage to be domiciled in the current version of the United States (as IBM and Oracle found in Q3 2012 when their sales in the BRIC countries plunged).
I can only cross my fingers and pray that the collapse of US hegemony, unlike the three immediately preceding cases, will not entail an additional “thirty years’ war.” Peter J. Taylor has identified the “thirty years’ war” as an important milestone of transitions of power in the world system. He writes: “As well as being on the winning side, the hegemon has a ‘good war’ economically. This is the case with the Dutch during the Thirty Years War, and it also fits the British during the Napoleonic war and the Americans during World Wars I and II.”37 I would hope that the passing of the United States as the world’s hegemon does not entail another thirty years’ war on the scale of those in the past. For one thing, such an all-out conflict in the age of nuclear weapons would cause incredible destruction and loss of life.
Of course, one could argue that the “thirty years’ war” of American decline is actually the half century of war that began in 1965 with the deployment of American ground troops in Vietnam and has continued more or less ever since, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States has squandered trillions chasing, according to the head of the CIA, one hundred or fewer al-Qaeda operatives.
A seemingly conservative and measured calculation in the Kabul Press by Matthew J. Nasuti suggests that it has cost American taxpayers $50 million for each Taliban fighter killed in the war.38 A close read of his calculations, however, shows this to be woefully underestimated. For one thing, Nasuti’s estimates of the costs of the war could be on the low side by a magnitude. He includes only the Pentagon’s published costs. The highest credible estimates I have seen (from Nobel Prize–winner Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes of Harvard) put the current out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars around at least $6 trillion.39 According to a report in Defense One, a military newsletter, covered by RT, after holding at about $1.3 million, “The cost of keeping each American soldier in Afghanistan” nearly doubled to $2.1 million.40 Furthermore, Nasuti’s estimate of Taliban killed annually could be exaggerated by as much as three times over. When the costs of pensions for war widows and caring for hundreds of thousands of wounded and injured troops are compiled, along with compound interest on amounts borrowed to pay these bills, the all-in cost to kill each Taliban fighter could easily be $500 million.
Such incredibly expensive and inconclusive wars have emphatically demonstrated the inability of the US Armed Forces to project power against small groups of squalid terrorists. There could scarcely be a more emphatic demonstration that American hegemony is in its twilight. So a question to be answered in projecting the next phase of capitalism is, “Will there be a next phase of capitalism?” Or will a bureaucratically organized world empire crush economic freedom?
There have been alarms aplenty about black helicopters and dangers posed by the threat of one world government. While the fact that the leading governments have been losing control over crucial aspects of the world economy for decades may help explain the longing for world government on the part of some control freaks (i.e., the big crony capitalists), it also underscores why the US government is unlikely to be able to convert its disintegrating hegemony into a world empire. Megapolitical conditions—as reflected in the ghastly expenses incurred by the United States in its ongoing war on terror, conducted not against any state but against ragtag nonterritorial groups—testify to the collapsing scale at which violence can be effectively organized.
A report from Brown University concluded that the total US costs for wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan over the past decade (the Afghan conflict has continued for thirteen years—longer than the Civil War, World War I, and World War II combined) is at least $3.2 to $3.4 trillion.41 While this is 50 percent lower than the Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate, it is ruinously high.
It is pertinent here to consider the grotesque incompetence evidenced in the prosecution of US intervention in the Middle East. When I say “grotesque incompetence,” consider the Obama administration’s “Train and Equip” program announced in May 2015. It was to train and equip an army of 5,400 moderate Syrian fighters by the end of 2015—at an expense of $500 million. But by the autumn, General Lloyd Austin of the US Central Command told Congress that the total number of Train and Equip troops actually fighting was “four or five.” Not four thousand or five thousand; four or five. But the grotesque incompetence may have been marginally less astounding than it at first seems. You see, it did not cost $100 million each to outfit and deploy as many as five moderate Syrian rebels. The cost could have been no greater than $77 million per fighter, because only $383 million of the earmarked $500 million was actually spent.
Perhaps more important than the skyrocketing costs for projecting power (plunging returns to violence) is the fact that technological developments have dramatically reduced the scale at which enterprise must be organized. Technological innovations have created a new nonterritorial realm where money can be made: the virtual reality of cyberspace.
It might be good to recall that for 99 percent of human existence, when megapolitical conditions offered no leverage for predatory violence, government did not exist. Some experts believe that, anatomically, modern humans have inhabited the earth for as long as one million years. During 990,000 of those years we lived in relative peace, if not abundance, as hunters and gatherers in the “Garden of Eden.” (Or was that the “City Garden of Eden”?)
The Football Fan’s View of History
If the saga of human existence on Earth were mapped on an American football field, the introduction of farming about ten thousand years ago was an event happening on the one-yard line. The height of the Roman Empire at AD 117 would have occurred on the seven-inch line. The advent of the Industrial Revolution would have taken place one inch from the goal line—the equivalent of the width of a golf ball resting on a football field. Perhaps the next stage of capitalism will be played out in the end zone?
After long centuries in which power was organized in hegemonies of ever-greater scale organized by nation-states, megapolitical conditions now point to the devolution of power to a smaller scale. The Information Age implies a radical devolution of power. It will expose diseconomies of scale embodied in anachronistic forms of big business capitalism. And it will even more emphatically undermine the returns to complexity embodied in the anachronistic nation-state. It is beyond the scope of this analysis to detail a full litany of the implications of this revolution in human affairs. But broadly and simply, as epitomized by 3-D printing, information technology will ensure that economic and political power devolve back toward the individual. Market forces will replace politics and crony capitalism in determining the distribution of income.
Res Publica Romana
It is all very well to recognize that the arc of history has turned and that the big government nation-state has outlived the megapolitical factors that gave it existence. But that doesn’t tell you when the other shoe will drop.
In the mid-1980s, when I mustered the nerve to begin forecasting the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was a prelude to something amazing. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the last president of the Soviet Union and declared his office extinct. At 7:32 p.m. that ev
ening, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. The Soviet Union ceased to exist.
I later regretted that I had not gone to Ladbroke’s or another legal betting agency to wager a million-dollar bet that the Soviet Union would collapse. A few years earlier, I probably could have gotten great odds. And with the evidence of December 25, 1991, I would have collected. There could have been no argument about whether I was right.
It might have been a different story, however, if you were a rogue Roman who had bet a million denarii in 42 BC, after the Battle of Phillippi, that the Roman Republic would cease to exist within fifteen years. I think it highly unlikely that your counterparty would have paid when the Senate granted Octavius extraordinary powers in 27 BC and he assumed the title “Augustus.” That could have postponed settlement of your winnings for as long as 1488 years.
Notwithstanding the fact that Wikipedia tells us that the Roman Republic ended in 27 BC with the establishment of the Roman Empire, it is merely reporting the current consensus among historians of the de facto end of the Roman Republic. Professor Anthony Kaldellis tells us in his provocative new history, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome, that Byzantium, as the Eastern incarnation of the Roman Republic has been known since the sixteenth century, was indeed “a Roman republic.”42 (The term “Byzantine Empire,” unknown to the supposed Byzantines themselves, was invented in 1557, about a century after the fall of Constantinople by German historian Hieronymus Wolf, in his work Corpus Historiae Byzantinae). The use of “Byzantine” to describe the Eastern remnants of Rome was further popularized by the eighteenth-century French political philosopher, the Baron de Montesquieu.
The Byzantines thought themselves the surviving expression of the Roman Republic.43 In a de jure sense, the Roman Republic soldiered on for another millennium and a half until July 1461, when the last garrison of the Roman army defending the Castle of Salmeniko, in the Peloponnese region of Southern Greece, capitulated to the forces of the Ottoman Turks. As Gibbon confirms, in their minds, the people we now call “Byzantines,” thought of themselves as Romans. “They alleged a lineal and unbroken succession from Augustus and Constantine; and, in the lowest period of degeneracy and decay, the name of ROMANS adhered to the last fragments of the empire of Constantinople.”44
Without venturing further into the lowercase b byzantine complexity evidenced in the evolution of the institutional character of the Roman Republic over the 1488 years between its de facto end in 27 BC and its final de jure extinction in July 1461, you will recognize the highlighted difference between the de facto and the de jure.
Bearing this in mind may help to better understand the many potential permutations of the wind down of the nation-state. Ponder, if you will, the vast difference between the rapid and permanent de jure collapse of the Soviet Union and the protracted de jure afterlife of the Roman Republic.
A review of the history of republican Rome shows that the system underwent many radical changes, with the commoners, or plebians, gradually achieving some protections from the law. For example, after several gestures of secession, in which plebeians walked out of Rome, the principle was established that debtors could no longer be executed for failure to pay. Anyone confirmed by the courts as owing a debt would be given thirty days to pay—only after this could he be sold into slavery by his creditors.
The specifics of Rome’s republican political contentions are less important than the fact that Rome had already thrived for twice as long as the United States has existed when the Senate granted Octavian the title Augustus. Res Publica Romana had a good reputation, so it made sense for Octavian and other autocrats who followed to conserve that good name. So they did.
Also note that, almost from the beginning of the Roman Republic, there had been intervals of authoritarian rule. The first dictator was appointed in 501 BC, less than a decade after the founding of the republic. Equally, it is notable that Marcus Furius Camillus, who was the five-times-appointed dictator of Rome, was also celebrated as “the second founder of Rome.” With this background, it was less contradictory to republican tradition than it may seem to a modern observer to have Octavian appointed as essentially “dictator for life.”
While Rome enjoyed a good reputation that may have seemed worth preserving, the Soviet Union did not. Its reputation was bad and getting worse with its population, and because the Soviet republics were organized along ethnic lines, a Soviet breakup predictably opened the door to more power for many of their leaders. Consequently, men like Boris Yeltsin and Nursultan Nazarbayev, leaders of the two largest Soviet Republics, were only too glad to explore de jure as well as de facto change. Today, it seems likely that the distinction between de jure and de facto transformation could play a role in this century of crisis.
The Devolution of Nation-States
As the breakdown of nation-states works its way like a contagion from the periphery to the core, we can already see overt campaigns for devolution to split the sovereignty of even advanced nation-states. There was a closely divided referendum for Scotland to withdraw from the United Kingdom. The “no” side carried the day by 55 percent to 45 percent.
An apparently popular campaign for Catalan independence from Spain works its way into the headlines sporadically. Indeed, there is such a headline as I write on September 27, 2015: Catalan independence claimed a decisive victory in regional parliamentary elections. According to Reuters, secessionist parties secured 72 of 135 seats in the region,45 which consists of 7.5 million people and includes Barcelona.
In Canada, the elected government in Quebec has several times sought to split the country with the Bloc Québécois favoring independence for Quebec. That outcome was only narrowly defeated in 1995.
And the United States?
By contrast, there have been fewer contemporary efforts to dissolve the United States. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in 2014 showed that local sentiment for withdrawing from the United States was strongest in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, where one in three favored the move.46 In a report on that poll, under the headline “A Third of Texans Support Seceding from the Union?!,” the Dallas Morning News reported that the national average in support of dissolving the United States is 24 percent, as compared to one-third of Texans.47
Unlike the situation in most states, there is already a movement for Texas independence that has gathered signatures for a nonbinding 2016 ballot initiative endorsing independence. In 2012, a petition to the White House asking for Texas independence sported 125,746 signatures. James Gaines, Reuters global editor-at-large, analyzed follow-up phone calls with a small random sample of prosecession respondents to the Reuters national poll. He reported that the people he spoke with did not fall along simple red or blue lines: their signatures were a form of protest against a lack of jobs postrecovery, low-paying jobs, mistreatment of veterans, war, political corruption, assault on marriage, assault on same-sex marriage, the government in general, the president, both political parties, and more.48
Gaines stated, “By the evidence of the poll data as well as these anecdotal conversations, the sense of aggrievement is comprehensive, bipartisan, somewhat incoherent, but deeply felt . . . this should be more than disconcerting; it’s a situation that could get dangerous.” The status quo is on a slippery slope when it is held in pervasive contempt for a multitude of often contradictory reasons. About which, here are a couple of observations:
1. The polychromatic complaints of the proponents of secession, apart from gripes about a recovery that has not yet produced jobs and against jobs that don’t pay, underscore the growing challenge of trying to run a one-size-fits-all continental economy. Smaller polities could better appeal to people on the basis of otherwise divisive policies. For example, those opposed to same-sex marriage could enjoy living with others sharing their views while leaving those who don’t to prosper with alternative arrangements in other venues.
2. Presumably, the fact that the United States has enjoyed one
of the world’s highest standards of living and nonetheless manifests extraordinary levels of discontent suggests that support for the status quo will be less than stalwart in the aftermath of the coming terminal crisis of US hegemony.
I admit that I am surprised that support for the status quo seems so shallow, with up to 34 percent of respondents in a reputable poll opting in favor of decisive institutional change even before terminal crisis strikes home. The level of disaffection is greatest among young men. Whether it is pervasive enough to lead to Soviet-style de jure collapse, rather than a de facto reorganization a la the Roman Republic, will be a matter of great interest in the years to come.
Madison and Jefferson Ride Again?
While the macro logic makes a powerful case for the greater efficacy of smaller jurisdictions in the Information Age, the prospects of de jure devolution seem problematic. Not the least reason is because there is no particular tribal or ethnic leverage to accelerate independence projects in the United States as there was in the former Soviet Union and there is in Scotland, Quebec, Catalonia, and to a lesser extent, the North of Italy.