{"id":17399,"date":"2012-12-10T10:12:43","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T18:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=17399"},"modified":"2012-12-10T10:12:43","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T18:12:43","slug":"goodbye-pax-americana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/10\/goodbye-pax-americana\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Pax Americana"},"content":{"rendered":"

By 2030, the US will no longer be the global hegemonic power, according<\/a> to the US\u00a0National Intelligence Council.<\/p>\n

In a report called Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds<\/a>, the office of the Director of National Intelligence concludes that,\u00a0“In terms of the indices of overall power \u2013 GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment \u2013 Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined.” And “with the rapid rise of other countries, the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana\u2014the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945\u2014is fast winding down<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n

Most notably since the end of WWII, the US has been pursuing global dominance<\/a> through force and coercion. This project got a boost with the end of the Cold War – that so-called unipolar moment – in which the one great power rival Washington faced abruptly fell apart. The geo-political implications of this prompted euphoria among crafters of US foreign policy.\u00a0In 1992, the Defense Department circulated what came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, after then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. \u201cAmerica\u2019s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era,\u201d the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>, \u201cwill be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.\u201d America\u2019s mission, read the DoD document, would be \u201cconvincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

The primary consequence of unrivaled power and dominance on the world stage is that the US could perpetrate savagery on other states and peoples with hardly any accountability or threat of retaliation. It is comparable to what happens when an authoritarian gains unquestioned power over a single country: no checks or balances, no responsibility for grave transgressions, etc.<\/p>\n

Now, because of a mixture of hubris, profligacy, emerging economies, and the rise of non-state actors, “the post-war US approach to strategy is rapidly becoming insolvent and unsustainable,” concluded a\u00a0recent CSIS report<\/a>.\u00a0In some ways, Washington is taking this news kicking and screaming<\/a>,\u00a0desperately boosting US military presence<\/a> in the Middle East<\/a> and Asia<\/a>. But “If Washington continues to cling to its existing role on the premise that the international order depends upon it, the result will be increasing resistance, economic ruin, and strategic failure,”\u00a0according to CSIS<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By 2030, the US will no longer be the global hegemonic power, according to the US\u00a0National Intelligence Council. In a report called Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, the office of the Director of National Intelligence concludes that,\u00a0“In terms of the indices of overall power \u2013 GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment \u2013 Asia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-17399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17399"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17401,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17399\/revisions\/17401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17399"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}