French historian predicts the American Empire will fail

Back in the 70's this guy apparently wrote a book predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union. He claims to see parallels between the USSR just prior to its collapse and current conditions in the USA.

07/26/03: The power and influence of the United States is being overestimated, claims French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd. "There will be no American Empire." "The world is too large and dynamic to be controlled by one power." According to Todd, whose 1976 book predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no question: the decline of America the Superpower has already
begun.

Emmanuel Todd compares the US to 16th century Spain, arguing that US economic power is being undermined by the decline of its industrial base and its increased dependence on other countries to feed its consumption. The power and influence of the United States is being overestimated, claims
French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd. "There will be no American Empire." "The world is too large and dynamic to be controlled by one power."

According to Todd, whose 1976 book predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no question: the decline of America the Superpower has already begun.

<snip>

Most apparent is how clumsy the US has been to date, and how far they have moved away from any notion of universality. They don't see the world as it really is anymore. They are failing in any balanced and fair approach to their allies. All of this reminds me of Germany under Wilhelm II. The US is losing allies steadily. One gets the impression that an office somewhere in Washington has been tasked with the duty to daily prepare a scheme to develop new enemies for the US.

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4381.htm

Homer Simpson would be a better choice for Governor.

as much as it pains...

we do have inept madmen at work...

we need to regain our country...

the country we were promised in our youth...

it's hard to know your youth and what you were taught was a lie (or would turn out to be a lie).

These people in charge are thieves...they are stealing-ruining.

We are only a certain per cent of the inhabitants of this earth and no one asked us to be the world police for the rich..For them its the ruler-kings-nazis versus the ignorant-submissive=obedient-lied to-surfs.

How could this guy have known about the coming collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976. Now, everyone knows that Ronald Reagan single handedly brought down the Soviet Union. Ask Limbaugh ask Coulter. RR wasn't even elected until 1980.

Seriously, this is a fascinating aricle everyone should read.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Unless we change the direction the country has been going lately, he will be proved right. But there is a long history of effective dissent against America becoming such a decadent empire. Late in the 19th century, their was a corrupt "Guilded Age" when people from Mark Twain to Teddy Roosevelt feared America might be going that way. But they did something about it. The whole Progressive Movement did something about it. They put in anti-monopoly regulation which served this country well until it was undermined by "deregulation" in the 1980's. They started working out why there was so much deep poverty developing in this rich country. They were willing to activate to make the world a bit more fair. We can do the same.

When the Libertarians start turning against the Republicans, you know there must be some broad public concern about the kind of decadent and deceptive Emipire we are becoming. It's turning up among intelligent people all across the political spectrum. The time for bold activism is now, the only other alternative is DOOM.

The Spanish Empire was just getting started in the early part of the 16th century, and before 1588 Spain was recognized to be one of the two world naval powers (Portugal being the other one). Although the destruction of the Armada in 1588 lessened Spain's status as a naval power, she still controlled, by that time, nearly everything in the Western Hemisphere from Mexico southward, the Philippines, Guam, and other territories around the world. At one time, Spain even controlled the Louisiana Territory and Florida.

The Spanish Empire did not start falling apart until the 19th century, when Mexico and other Latin American colonies began gaining their independence in rapid succession. The Spanish king at the time, Ferdinand VII, was an imbecile nonpareil.

So perhaps the author actually meant to say 19th century Spain.

I understand your point of view, and of course looking from the mainly military angle as you seem to be doing, the later days of the Spanish Empire are a more obvious parrallel. I'm more centered on the internal social, economic and political state of the country, and also of course at whether those in power really understand the larger world, where people are now actually much more inter-dependent than they were during the Spanish Empire. But today as always, unreasonable arrogance comes before the fall, and our leaders show every sign of it. And Bush and Rumsfeld have no better an understanding of how much of this enormous world the U.S. military could actually OCCUPY over the long run, than Adolf Hitler did! Iraq is already exposing their delusion, and that is just one very small tip of the iceberg that will sink the neo-cons Titanic plans. Americans are really a very small percentage of the worlds population. Are there six times as many Chinese now, or more? China is very rapidly catching up to the U.S technologically. And that is only one example why the Bush administrations "Project for a New American Century" is impossible.

Spain (and, indeed, every colonial power in the 16th and later centuries) depended in large part on exploiting its colonies to keep the economy of the mother country running. What's more, the Spaniards and others had little understanding of, much less empathy for, the indigenous peoples they subjugated. This arrogance towards non-Europeans was, in fact, one of the reasons why Japan kicked out all Westerners (with the limited exception of the Dutch) in the 17th century.

As a result of gaining an empire in the Americas, Spain became extremely wealthy without actually having to do any work. The Spanish aristocracy in particular got the notion that working for a living was demeaning. That meant that things went downhill for them very fast.

The absolute peak of Spanish power came under Charles V in the early 1500's. The Protestant Reformation in the 1520's was the first real challenge to that power, and caused Spain to pour more and more of its energies into crushing the heretics. (Sound familiar?) Under King Philip, Spain was still the dominant power in Europe, but the rebellion of the Netherlands and the defiance of Elizabethan England in the later 1500's -- climaxing in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 -- provided the crucial turning-point.

All through the 1600's, Spain slid increasingly into cultural decadence, while France became the new dominant power. By 1700, the Spanish royal family was dying out, and the Spanish throne had become a prize for the other European nations to go to war over. (France won.) In the 1700's, Spain remained backward, conservative, and under the thumb of the Inquisition. The fact that her American colonies didn't break away until after 1800 didn't matter, because they were no longer a source of wealth.

I really hope that Spain doesn't prove to be a model for the fate of the US, because Spain still hasn't recovered from its long period of decline. However, Spanish history has been like that for thousands of years -- relatively brief periods when its position as a gateway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic made it a hub of cultural development, followed by centuries when it was just a sleepy backwater. I think the US has more natural advantages than that and, given a fair chance, should be able to recover fairly quickly from any decline.

not providing wealth for Spain in the late 18th-early 19th century. Spain had mints in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Peru and elsewhere that were busy churning out gold and silver coins right up to the revolutions. While some of these coins were used locally, most were shipped out, sometimes to the US or other countries, but most often to Spain. It appears to me that, like the American Revolution before them, the Latin American revolutions were spurred, in part, from a desire to keep the wealth in the colony, rather than shipping it to an absentee king and his administrators.

now, who is it proposing a Dept. of Peace?

"This is classic for a crumbling
system. The final glory is militarism. The fall of the Soviet Union took
place in an identical context. Their economy was in decline, and their
leadership grew fearful. Their military apparatus gained in size and stature
and the Russians embarked on adventures to forget their economic
shortcomings. The parallels in the US are obvious. The process has
significantly accelerated in the past few months."

dp

When I was in college, I had a preofessor who believed that where the UK is today, the US will be in 60-70 years. He predicted that the US is going to turn into an even bigger joke than the UK is.

BTW--He believed that the downturn of the US as a superpower began with the Oil embargo of 1973. He also was fascinated by the writings of Joseph Schumpeter, who beleived that greed would destroy the American Capitalist system and in Schumpeter's words, we would wind up with Socilaism by default.

Really amazing to see what Dr Perlman and Dr Schumpeter predicted turning true.

If you get a chance, check out Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" A very deep book, but it seems that it is coming moe true every day!