Imperial Decay

"At the vey pinnacle of US global-political and military power during the 1990s, with all the major Latin American regimes enveloped in the empire-centred neo-liberal warp, the seeds of decay and decline set in. The economic crises of the late 1990s led to major uprisings and electoral defeats of practically all US clients in Latin America, spelling the decline of US imperial domination. China's extraordinary dynamic and cumulative growth displaced US manufacturing capital and weakened US leverage over rulers in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The vast transfer of US state resources to overseas imperial adventures, military bases and the shoring up of clients and allies led to domestic decline.

"The US empire, passively facing economic competitors displacing the US in vital markets and engaged in prolonged and unending wars which drained the treasury, attracted a cohort of mediocre policymakers who lacked a coherent strategy for rectifying policies and reconstructing the state to serve productive activity capable of 'retaking markets'. Instead the policies of open-ended and unsustainable wars played into the hands of a special sub-group (sui generis) of militarist American Zionists. They capitalized on their infiltration of strategic positions in the state, enhanced their influence in the mass media and a vast network of organized 'pressure groups' to reinforce US subordination to Israel's drive for Middle East supremacy.

"The result was the total 'unbalancing' of the US imperial apparatus: military action was unhinged from economic empire building. A highly influential upper caste of Zionist-militarists harnessed US military power to an economically marginal state (Israel), in perpetual hostility toward the 1.5 billion Muslim world. Equally damaging, American Zionist ideologues and policymakers promoted repressive institutions and legislation and Islamophobic ideological propaganda designed to terrorize the US population. Equally important, Islamophobic ideology served to justify permanent war in South Asia and the Middle East and the exorbitant military budgets, at a time of sharply deteriorating domestic socio-economic decisions. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent unproductively as 'Homeland Security' which strived in every way to recruit, train, frame and arrest Afro-American Muslim men as 'terrorists'. Thousands of secret agencies with hundreds of thousands of national, state and local officials spied on US citizens who at some point may have sought to speak or act to rectify or reform the militarist-financial-Zionist-centered imperialist policies.

"By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the US empire could only destroy adversaries (Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan), provoke military tensions (Korean peninsula, China Sea) and undermine relations with potentially lucrative trading partners (Iran, Venezuela). Galloping authoritarianism fused with fifth column Zionist militarism to foment Islamophobic ideology. The convergence of authoritarian mediocrities, upwardly mobile knaves and fifth column tribal loyalists in the Obama regime precluded any foreseeable reversal of imperial decay." (From Networks of Empire & Realignments of World Power, James Petras, lahaine.org, 1/2/11)