“No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend’s were. Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.” (John Donne – For Whom the Bell Tolls)

Just as Donne’s words were meant to set out the truth that for every individual death is inevitable, so it applies equally to Empires. They all rise, are hegemonic to a greater or lesser extent and then fall, to be replaced by another. That has been the lesson of the last five thousand years of human history. The US is unquestionably the world hegemon for the last 33 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US became the sole unipolar hegemon. The question that arises is are world events increasingly proving that the US empire has begun a terminal decline to be replaced by a multipolar world composed of the People’s Republic of China, India, Russia, Brazil and Africa?

To ask that question does not imply that the US will sink into irrelevance, but is simply about whether by its own actions, the US has rendered itself vulnerable to displacement at the helm of world events. I will examine that question without in the least suggesting that the US won’t remain, if it acts sensibly, an important player in world events, but simply that it will no longer dominate those events.

The facts suggest that the most important international player in coming decades is the People’s Republic of China, but it seeks not to dominate all others, but to simply be recognised for its importance in such a multi-polar world. There are obvious reasons for them to assume that. At 1.4 billion citizens and with an economy that has vastly exceeded the rates of growth of all other significant sized countries, there can be little room for doubt that, if even at a fraction of those rates of growth over coming years, that it will vastly exceed in size and complexity any other economy on the planet. Not only is it growing fast but it is also improving the position of its population in health, longevity, education, public transport and vital infrastructure.

The logic of this is not hard to grasp. China has since opening up in 1978, made it it’s fundamental goals to eliminate poverty and bring its people’s standards of living up to and surpassing those in the West. With multiplies of the population of every country except for India, logic tells you that in order to achieve those goals the size of the economy must vastly exceed that of other countries. The numbers do not lie, and those goals are well within sight given current and past growth rates.

Of course as these facts emerge, tensions arise in international relations as the current hegemon seeks in every possible way, to prevent China’s progress towards those goals. The range of measures being deployed by the US in pursuit of this goal range from economic through to military and political means. It’s economic warfare with China has been announced by Presidents Trump to Biden and back to Trump.

It has involved sanctions and punitive tariffs whose effects are the reverse of those intended. Due to deliberate US de-industrialisation policies over the last fifty years the US now makes very few industrial products and those they do make are more expensive and cannot compete with China on either quality or price. The best examples of that are EV’s and solar panels, both of which the US was well in the lead on but are now very much a second or third rank supplier. That tariff warfare has contributed to higher inflation in the US and increasing supply chain problems.

The US has also been threatening China over what the US calls “intellectual property theft” by China. The truth of course given the US propensity for what Winston Churchill described as “terminological inexactitudes”, is somewhat different. The US over that half century sought to enter China as a major supplier but also to place its manufacturing facilities there due to the exceptionally cheap labor costs available in China. Deng Xiaoping offered the US investors a deal that was hard to resist. They got a vast supply of cheap labor and access to a rapidly growing and enormous market. In exchange they were to provide access to US intellectual property and manufacturing expertise. Nobody forced the US companies to do these deals. They were mutually suitable.

That is not to say that China, like the US, Europe, Japan and Great Britain in their respective rises to power, did not purloin some intellectual property from other countries, but that sort of theft has a long pedigree in the West. Of course now, as China has placed an enormous emphasis on educating its population, it now leads the world in the filing of patents, way above any other nation. As has happened so often in the history of empires, mature empires increasingly move away from productive enterprise to display and other unproductive activities like financialization. Such is the case with the dying empire of the US.  Productive industrial activity has been in decline in the US for decades now as much of what was the most productive industries in history are now rust belts of unemployment, poverty, crime and social breakdown.

China by contrast has focussed heavily on productive industries, futuristic infrastructure, first rate and available health care for all and dramatic improvements in educational facilities and systems. Their sponsorship of the BRICS institutions and their vast Belt and Road initiative are, on an international scale matching their achievements locally. Its middle class is now in excess of 300 million and growing rapidly whilst the US middle class has almost disappeared as wages stagnate and social cohesion disintegrates.

Meanwhile the US ramps up military threats to China using the alleged aggression by China against Taiwan, despite the fact that the world including the US, has recognised for decades that Taiwan is an integral part of China. China has not evinced any intention to re-claim Taiwan militarily unless it is made the home for US missiles aimed at China. In addition the US has surrounded China with well over a hundred military bases in implementing their “first island chain” security theory with a “fence stretching from the Japanese islands to Taiwan, the Philippines, and the island of Borneo (split mainly between Malaysia and Indonesia). Most of those bases remain active today and are capable of cutting off the lifeblood of the Chinese economy. By contrast China has not one single base within thousands of kilometres of the US borders, and indeed has only one military base distant from mainland China in Djibouti.

The ability of the US to project military power amounting to a full scale invasion of China will not succeed, as demonstrated by dozens of military exercises aimed at exploring that possibility. So the US has attempted to engage in “soft power” attacks on Chinese sovereignty through fomenting terrorist groups in North Western China and in a number of the Stans on the Chinese western borders. Much of the US war-making against Afghanistan was driven by the theories of the war-monger par excellence, who saw Asia as a chess board on which the US could manipulate countries into submission to the US in a grand strategy to completely surround China. We all know how well that worked. Those efforts have come to nought as China begins to develop strong diplomatic and cultural relationships throughout Asia, Africa and South America.

It seems the US is failing to heed the admonition of John Donne and is seeking to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for them!!!

https://johnmenadue.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-empires-for-whom-the-bell-tolls/

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR0eAJYcYYc 

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5OrThp57k

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4vtiiIo_Bc

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