For the last 500 years, the dominant factor in empires rising and falling has been energy. Trump’s emphasis on fossil fuels may turn the American empire into a fossil. From Alfred McCoy at tomdispatch.com:
At the dawning of the British Empire in 1818, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned a memorable sonnet freighted with foreboding about the inevitable decline of all empires, whether in ancient Egypt or then-modern Britain.
In Shelly’s stanzas, a traveler in Egypt comes across the ruins of a once-monumental statue, with “a shattered visage lying half sunk” in desert sands bearing the “sneer of cold command.” Only its “trunkless legs of stone” remain standing. Yet the inscription carved on those stones still proclaims: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And in a silent mockery of such imperial hubris, all the trappings of that awesome power, all the palaces and fortresses, have been utterly erased, leaving only a desolation “boundless and bare” as “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Taken too literally, those verses might lead us to anticipate some future traveler finding fragments of St. Paul’s Cathedral scattered on the banks of the Thames River in London or stones from the Washington Monument strewn in a kudzu-covered field near the Potomac. Shelley is, however, offering us a more profound lesson that every empire teaches and every imperialist then forgets: Imperial ascent begets an inevitable decline.
Imperial Washington
Indeed, these days Donald Trump’s Washington abounds with monuments to overblown imperial grandeur and plans for more, all of which add up to an unconvincing denial that America’s global imperium is facing an Ozymandias-like fate. With his future Gilded Age ballroom meant to rise from the rubble of the White House’s East Wing, his plans for a massive triumphal arch at the city’s entrance, and a military parade of tanks and troops clanking down Constitution Avenue on his birthday, who could ever imagine such a thing? Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure.
In a celebration of his “works” that are supposedly making the “mighty despair” in foreign capitals around the world, his former national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, has recently argued in Foreign Affairs that the president’s “policy of peace through strength” is reversing a Democrat-induced decline of U.S. global power. According to O’Brien, instead of crippling NATO (as his critics claim), President Trump is “leading the biggest European rearmament of the postwar era”; unleashing military innovation “to counter China”; and proving himself the “indispensable global statesman by driving efforts to bring peace to… long-standing disputes” in Gaza, the Congo, and, quite soon, Ukraine as well. Even in North America, according to O’Brien, Trump’s attempt to acquire Greenland has forced Denmark to expand its military presence, putting Russia on notice that the West will compete for control of the Arctic.
Heston on the beach near a sunken Statue of Liberty?
AI can only use energy and not make it.
So much for Techno Triumphalism.