OT| The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century

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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by
2025

by Alfred W. McCoy

Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Posted: December 6, 2010 12:22 PM

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as
the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming
of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and
global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the
shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that
they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go
truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the
Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and,
in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that
year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of
so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this 21st-century imperial
collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or
cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: When Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily
reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen
European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact
on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools,
political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global
power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no
later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II,
will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that
America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic
reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power
now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary
factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm.” Like
many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for
American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique
military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind
China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India
by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied
science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of
brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger
generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying
empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents
Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By
that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most
powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent
platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or
cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems
to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle and partial. In his State of the Union
address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place
for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea
that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a
great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly,
writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign
policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing
“misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power
was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their
cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65 percent of Americans believed the
country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military
allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China.
Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to
China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy
New York Times headline summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World
Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged
global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's
wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to
suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could
reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today).
The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War
III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even
collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of
economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological
innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with
just 11 percent of them compared to 12 percent for China and 16 percent for the European Union.
There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was
still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing
fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400 percent increase since 2000. A harbinger of further
decline: In 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the
Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based
competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October
China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful,
said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and
innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25 to
34 year olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic
Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its
university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the
sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as
once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical
shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the
world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S.
knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the
International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4
trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to
end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global
reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as
signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued,
“to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long
expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency.
Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued
Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under
pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas
bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other
powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and
cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in
real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over
remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right
patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority
and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as
the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding
by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy
consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for more than a century. Energy specialist
Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global
future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will
potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the
mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia
and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum
reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil
disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone
saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what
Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers.
Even if fossil-fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are
almost certain to rise -- and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat
aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The
United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources
while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and
2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66 percent.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the
global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when
prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's
plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a
“basket” of yen, yuan, and euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the
same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis
stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the yuan. Meanwhile, China pours
countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of
the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the
Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new
Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol
the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to
cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by
the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a
homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which
U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the
elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region --
logistics, exchange rates, and naval power -- evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover
only an insignificant 12 percent of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry,
and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights,
making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been
declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With
thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return
for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal
pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas
bases.

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on
the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military
misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems
to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by
occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even
from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that
only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into
military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships
to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be
massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige
by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the
hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to
100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting
disasters large and small in this guerrilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon
outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and
tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis
abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan
is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a
blinding sandstorm. Heavy losses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war
commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are
believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with
devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long
trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters
then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the
country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S.
helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new
oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers
of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and
refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize
oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of
pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly
denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's
Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western
Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such
a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's
global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the
U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways
of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long
dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the
South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official
Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea
issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack…
[U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the
continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare
capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the
information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the
powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and
another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides
toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and
reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new
digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic
surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid
capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or
favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of
space drones -- reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a
resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly
launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B
is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of
space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish
scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort
of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can
gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to
imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best
Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the
Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens
suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand's operations center in
Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the
distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics
aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima
Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous
400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea,
effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident
that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in
California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above
the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites.
Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an
arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to
fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly
inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those
second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals
crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets
begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly
aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States
loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the
military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III
without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend
points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington
now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the
cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally
forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race
to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making
military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above
will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such
negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected
ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy
into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At
one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled
out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts,
regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for
global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to
succeed the U.S.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations,
multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a
single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of
national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would
assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban
and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up.
He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to
two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive
battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the
empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk
enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with
suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020
and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers
like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to
the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the
international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world
order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would
dominate its immediate region -- Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria
in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control
of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons,
controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that
Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will
not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already
frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term
problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the
president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up
the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our
bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies,
will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might
maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the
United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that
protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.
_____

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch
regular, he is the author, most recently, of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009). He is also the convener of the “Empires
in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four
continents. The results of their first meetings at Madison, Sydney, and Manila were published as
Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State and the findings from their
latest conference will appear next year as “Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and
the Decline of U.S. Global Power.”

Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy