Saturday, January 16, 2010
Fate of Empire
I have been saying for 25 years now that the US empire will start to crumble around 2050, and the reason for that is the same that Sir John Glubb espoused in an essay called The Fate of Empires. He looked at ten historical empires ranging from Assyria through Britain, and tried to find a pattern in their growth, decay and collapse. The book is essentially unavailable in print (Amazon shows two at $175) but a scanned version is temporarily available online. It's an interesting line of thought, particularly if you see a parallel between UK history and the US history of a hundred years later.
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5 comments:
Everyone predicts the American Empire will end X years later. When eventually someone is right, I guess everyone is vindicated then for saying that, no matter how wrong they were at the time.
Saying all Empires will eventually fail is almost like saying 'it will rain... someday.... somewhere....'.
I think the G8 are losing their dominance in the world as the second world comes along (and as China emerges). But I don't think the G8 are going to vanish or collapse, they'll just become less of an Empire than they were (prior examples: England, France - still big powers, but not what they once were).
The challenge for this sort of transition is figuring out how to live with having once been the big dog and having lost that role.
"When eventually someone is right, I guess everyone is vindicated then for saying that, no matter how wrong they were at the time."
Nope, if they expected the American Empire to collapse in, say, 1850, 1900 or 1950, they were wrong, even if I'm right later on. Although if I'm right, the ability to say "I told you so" will be cold comfort; I'd a lot rather be wrong too.
The G8 won't cease to exist but they won't be dominant. I suspect the new superpowers will be China, India, Brazil, about in that order.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a two-stage war, phase 1 from, say, 2015-2020 and phase 2 from 2035-2040, with the US winning a pyrrhic victory over China in phase 1, and then India taking the lead against China in phase 2.
China is odd. It has the potential to break down because of (oddly) its paranoiac fears about movements like the Falun Gong. The post-Maoist bureaucrats really haven't got much of an ideolog other than 'hang onto power'.
Now, this has sort of worked a few times in the USA and Canada (no real plan, just go with the flow), but the Chinese haven't figured that out yet.
They're instead trying to cling to an ideology or at least the political and legal trappings of one that even they don't really believe in. And as they get more desperate to convince people they do believe in it, they have to do more and more authoritarian things to prove it.
China could give its head a shake and fully confront and embrace modernity - I can see the younger generations doing that. But it could also sabotage itself and really hobble its progress by acting afraid of itself and its own people (despite being the 800 pound gorilla).
I'm not convinced Brazil will be a superpower, ever. Oil only gets you so far and corruption and classism and creeping socialism will keep them from true greatness.
I'd be surprised if there was a need for China to go to war. If they can continue technical and economic dominance (technical in the production sense, but growing in the engineering sense as they buy up stuff and have developed their own talent), they don't need a war. Wars cost money.
On the other hand, if they have one, we'd better watch out. I read an article I think in Jane's that pointed out they studied Western forces, discovered by they kicked Eastern ones (training of the individual soldier and especially of the NCO Corps) and put a vast sea-change style program into their NCO schools.
They are finally getting that right (giving their NCOs some independence and authority as well as the tech/leadership training) in the last few years. And graduating 50,000 of these new breed every year. They may well not be a second rate force when any war does come.
New site for the Glubb pamphlet:
http://www.arlev.co.uk/glubb/index.htm
It's about 2.5MB so may take a while to load.
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