As the war between the United States and Iran enters its fourth week, the Straight of Hormuz remains closed to almost all shipping traffic. This was a wholly predictable outcome of Donald Trump’s lawless and unprovoked attack. An outcome that anyone who watched CNN for more than ten minutes back in the 1980s knew would happen as soon as we began firing missiles on Teheran, yet Trump did it anyway. Now the whole world is suffering the consequences.
Well, not the whole world. It was reported yesterday that Iran is in the process of formalizing a permanent means of controlling the Strait — backed by a multilateral coalition including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia and China — that will undoubtedly favor every single country that’s a part of it over the United States. It will give Iran the ability to engage in a case-by-case approval of Strait transit, throttling oil supplies heading to the U.S. while leaving other countries unaffected. It’s a setup that would’ve been impossible and unthinkable before this war, but it’s reality now. If this tollbooth setup becomes institutionalized it will represent one of the biggest blows to the U.S. economy and U.S. power in the postwar period.
And honestly, what’s to stop it? I fully expect Trump to try to ratchet up the violence in the region because all he understands is brute force, but anyone who knows anything about military power and military strategy – along with the degraded state of the U.S. military – knows that such a thing would be a losing battle. We’re not going to take control of the Strait. We’re not going to bomb Iran into surrender. We’re only going to kill a lot of people while doing little if anything to change the status quo.
All of which fills me with an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu.
Ever since the Pandemic hit I’ve been writing about how we’re in the dying days of the American Empire. We’ve never called it an empire, probably because with a few notable exceptions we’ve not exerted direct political control over other countries like empires have done historically. But thanks to our military, economic, and cultural hegemony America has exercised functional imperial power over much of the world since at least the end of World War II.
We can quibble over when the American Empire truly began to crumble, but a good argument can be made that our national mental break in the wake of 9/11 and that our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were major signposts of imperial decline. To be sure, a considerable amount of political, social, and moral rot had set in well before that – I’d argue that it began during the Reagan years, when we decided that denying the existence of worldwide problems and insisting upon the exercise of coercion and might at the expense of soft power and multilateralism was the way to go – but the events of the 21st century exacerbated that rot to the point where we’re now quickly crumbling.
I’ve been reading a hell of a lot of history over the past few years. Especially British history, because I’ve been trying to understand what it truly means for an empire to fall and what it means to live in a post-imperial society. History doesn’t directly repeat, of course, and all manner of different and unexpected things are likely to occur on our current timeline that never happened with the British Empire, but I keep coming back to two general ideas that are largely informed by the experience of British imperial decline.
The first idea is that an empire’s collapse is not something that the people living in it truly tend to notice as its happening. To citizens living in the imperial core, an empire falling doesn’t necessarily disrupt their daily lives in any obvious ways. It may simply mean that, when the bridge into town needs to be repaired or replaced, no one comes to fix it like they always had. Or maybe the mail doesn’t get delivered anymore. Or maybe manufactured goods cost a lot more or are harder to come by due to the degradation of trade, travel, and communication systems. If violence happens it tends to be out in the provinces. Otherwise, life goes on, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient and less orderly than it was in the past. One need only scratch the surface of late 19th century and early 20th century British social histories, fiction, and the like to grok the fact that, despite all manner of objective measures which showed a weakening and even teetering British Empire, most of the late Victorians and Edwardians really didn’t appreciate what was happening as it was happening.
In America’s case it may very well be our infrastructure failing or our mail no longer getting delivered, but there are a lot more modern signifiers we might expect. Stuff like Americans no longer being able to get medications as easy as people in other countries. Stuff like Americans no longer being able to take the quick customs line at European airports. Stuff like our goods and services becoming far more expensive and unreliable due to our inability to set the terms of world commerce and culture. Stuff like countries who would never dare directly challenge us in any number of international arenas before basically telling us to fuck off now. We’re already seeing a lot of that kind of thing happening of course. I expect it will get way, way worse in the coming years and I suspect we would not be experiencing this but for America’s decline.
The second idea is that empires have a lot of inertia and, as such, they carry on in name and even in certain aspects of power for a good while even after they’re functionally over.
A good argument can be made that Britain, the unquestioned supreme world power since at least 1815 and the defacto supreme world power for a good century before that, had been eclipsed economically and culturally by the 1870s or 1880s, with both the United States and Germany having caught up to and passed it in terms of industrialization, innovation, and overall quality of life. The British military, too, was a shell of its former self by the end of the 19th century, with it losing wars and skirmishes – or, more often, archiving pyrrhic victories – in its colonies that a preeminent world power never should even have to fight in the first place let alone lose. Some of this decline was inevitable – you can only subjugate people for so long – but a great deal of it was a function of complacency, arrogance, and stupidity on the part of British leaders that sent the Empire spiraling downwards.
Yet the Empire carried on in name and, at least on paper, grew even larger in the early years of the 20th century. But it was an increasingly sick and hollow empire. It emerged victorious in the First and Second World Wars, but (a) it required considerable help in both instances; and (b) the wars utterly ruined them, financially, industrially, militarily and, frankly, emotionally and psychologically. Britain quickly began to grant independence to its colonies in the postwar period, in part because the colonial model was no longer seen as optimal, but mostly out of pure necessity. It simply could not govern them anymore, and its weakness in that regard allowed anti-imperialist voices both in the colonies and at home to, finally, win the day.
Appropriately enough given the news event which kicked off this little essay, Britain’s last gasp as an empire was the Suez Crisis in 1956, in which it and France, deluding themselves into thinking that it was still the 19th century, tried to depose Egypt’s leader and take control of the Suez Canal. It was a miserable failure, tactically, strategically, and politically. The two venerable powers utterly failed to achieve their goals. Indeed, they came out way worse than if they had never intervened to begin with. They withdrew under extreme pressure from the United States, which had warned them against trying to seize the Suez in the first place because doing it was stupid and doomed to failure. The episode conclusively demonstrated that the United Kingdom could no longer pursue its own independent foreign policy without consent from the United States and conclusively ended Britain’s time as a preeminent world power.
Again, I understand that it is overly simplistic to make 1:1 historical comparisons, but my analogy-fixated lawyer brain cannot shake the notion that the United States has been speed-running the fall of the British Empire over the past 25 years or so. I can’t shake the idea that our post-9/11 national mood was akin to the rise of self-defeating British Jingoism in the 1870s and that Iraq, Afghanistan and some of our other recent military adventures were equivalent to the British Empire’s Boer Wars and the Siege of Khartoum. We’ve thankfully skipped over a couple of world wars, but what’s happening in Iran right now feels to me very much like a Suez Crisis kind of deal. That time when, finally, everyone’s realizing that they can stand up to the American bully, bloody its nose, and thereby end its pretensions to international supremacy. In reality, however, it was a supremacy it had already lost for all practical purposes.
I do not lament the fall of the American Empire or the fall of the British Empire before it. Empires are bad things in mere concept and, in practice, the British and American Empires have caused untold harm and suffering while doing little if anything to reflect upon or to atone for their acts. In America’s case the Cold War gave us a theoretical moral and ethical framework for our behavior in the world, rife with high-minded concepts such as freedom over tyranny and prosperity combatting want. But we never came close to practicing what we preached in that regard, deploying those ideals cynically to the extent we ever deployed them at all. We’ve had the means and opportunity to do great humanitarian things on a scale the world had never seen before but, with a few isolated exceptions, we’ve largely chosen not to. The American Empire’s ledger is covered with red and, despite some pretty damn good P.R. campaigns that argued the contrary, we’ve never shown much of a desire to even try to balance the books.
So no, I do not lament the fall of the American Empire. I believe that fall was avoidable at this particular point in time, and I wish it was winding down in radically different ways than it is given all of the death and suffering it has caused and no doubt will continue to cause over the coming years, but its end was inevitable. I actually think that America itself will be better, at least in the long run, for it ending. Or at least it can be. It can be if we learn from the calamities of the recent past and understand that we are merely part of this world as opposed to the protagonist of its reality. If we use our wealth, our resources, and our knowledge to build and discover things that work towards the betterment of humanity rather than devoting all of our energies to the business of domination and destruction.
I don’t suspect I’ll live long enough to see that project fully come to fruition if, indeed, it ever does. I mean, it’s been 80 years since the British Empire fell and the UK is still trying to figure out how it fits in the world, with episodes of admirable post-imperial progress giving way to reactionary response and backsliding and then back round again. To this day there are people with no small amount of power and influence in the UK who talk as if they, personally, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and Hitler in Europe, and that if they merely oppress the right people and protect the wealth and status of a select elite that The Crystal Palace will once again rise in Hyde Park and Britannia will once again rule the waves.
But the American Empire is dead, folks. It should not be eulogized, idealized, or mythologized. It must simply be buried. The work of the next several decades is to lay the groundwork for a new, post-imperial America of which our descendants can be proud. A new America which ensures that the American Empire will be forever thrown onto the ash heap of history.
