As always, Greer is a fascinating read.What does a post-American future look like? To begin with, here in America, it’s a future in which the vast majority of us will be much less wealthy than we are today. The American standard of living has been propped up since 1945 by the systemic imbalances that gave a quarter of the world’s energy resources and a third of its raw materials and industrial product to the five per cent of humanity that lives in the United States. Everything we consider normal in American life today is a function of that flow of imperial tribute, and as that goes away, most of what we consider normal in American life is going to change. The economic troubles that have been ongoing since 2008 are the foreshocks of that seismic shift, which will see most American incomes drop to Third World levels.
Those of my readers who are incensed by the extreme disparity in wealth between the rich and the rest in this country should remember that most of that disparity consists of paper wealth, much of it of very questionable value. Trillions of dollars worth of dubious derivatives, asset-backed securities backed by wholly insecure assets, loans that will never be paid back, and equally hallucinatory stores of wealth currently pad the notional net worth of America’s rich; in any imaginable post-American future, all that will be reassessed at its real value, which in most cases amounts to zero. Just as the Great Depression saw huge income and net worth disparities in American society drop like a rock as vast amounts of paper wealth turned into mere paper, the Greater Depression that will follow the end of American empire will almost certainly see the same phenomenon on an even larger scale. One moral to this story is that any of my readers who have their wealth tied up in paper assets of any kind might be wise to think, hard, about how long they want to leave it there.
Outside the United States, circumstances will no doubt vary. Those nations that have linked their welfare or their survival too closely to American empire will be dragged down in their turn; those who align themselves with one or another contender for America’s replacement will rise or fall with their choice, while those that have the good sense to step back into neutrality until the smoke clears, and then make arrangements with the new hegemon, will doubtless do well. I suspect, though, that Japan and western Europe in particular will be in for a rough awakening. For decades now, they’ve reaped the benefits of having their national defense backstopped by gargantuan US defense budgets, and the end of that cozy arrangement will force them to choose between spending a great deal more money on their own militaries, accepting a new overlord who may be a good deal less congenial than the one they have now, or accepting a position of extreme vulnerability in an epoch where that may turn out to be an exceptionally risky thing to do.
Still, all these concerns are secondary to the most crucial factor, which is that the post-American future will still have to deal with the head-on collision between a global economic system that requires perpetual growth, on the one hand, and hard planetary limits on the other. The end of America’s empire does not mean the end of industrial civilization; nor, for that matter, will it solve the twin problems sketched out decades ago in the prescient and thus profoundly unfashionable pages of The Limits to Growth: the exhaustion of necessary but nonrenewable resources, particularly fossil fuels, and the buildup in the biosphere of ecologically and economically damaging pollutants, particularly carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Those forces are still the dominant fact of our time, and the end of America’s empire—traumatic as it may well be, and not only for Americans—is simply one more roadbump along the route of the Long Descent.
The collapse of the American empire (this decade?) will surely be a great moment but industrial civilisation itself will carry on for decades to come.
Can't help but think the UK will be stuffed to a certain extent but maybe it will be a blessing in disguise. The sooner our ruling class realise that they can't afford military adventures the better.
Neutrality and relative isolationism will be a smarter move in the future.
