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In retrospect, I can understand the shock of the 9/11 attacks more fully. Back then, a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China, when the U.S. seemed the singular imperial power on Planet Earth, that anyone -- yes, anyone! -- would dare assault not just the American homeland but the symbolic heartland of its economic power (the World Trade Center) and its military might (the Pentagon) seemed next to inconceivable. And yes, if that was a long sentence, it was also a long and devastating moment -- and at the time only Chalmers Johnson had truly imagined such "blowback."
It's certainly unnerving how far we've traveled in the 23 imperial years since then. In those two-plus decades, we've journeyed through a disastrous series of wars in distant lands and into an America in which billionaires are continually on the rise (and by now significantly richer than more than half of the rest of the population!), while ever more Americans seem to be, if I can make up a phrase, "on the fall." But above all, we've traveled into a country that, in 2016, was all too willing to elect one Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and, eight years later (yes!), do it all over again. As TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, an expert on the history of empires and their decline -- don't miss his book To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change -- suggests today, you couldn't have a more striking sign of imperial collapse than You Know Who in the White House again. And don't forget his latest crew of devastating cabinet picks, ranging from Pete Hegseth to run (or run off with) the Pentagon to Robert Kennedy, Jr. (talk about decline and fall in a single family!) to destroy the health of Americans, vaccine by vaccine, shot by shot. No need for outsiders to attack us today, not when we're so capable of attacking ourselves!
Yes, you might say that, by 2016, we Americans sensed that, in some fashion, we were beginning to go down and reacted accordingly. And as McCoy makes clear, when it comes to great imperial powers on the decline, this country hardly stands alone on a planet that ever more distinctly seems to be on the decline itself. But let him fill you in on a world in which the word "daunting" should have new meaning. Tom
The World's Four Legacy Empires Going Down
Through a Glass Darkly into a Future of Epochal Change
By Alfred McCoy
Some 2,000 years ago, an itinerant preacher, Saul of Tarsus, was writing to a wayward congregation in Corinth, Greece. Curiously enough, his words still capture the epochal change that may await us just over history's horizon. "For now we see in a glass, darkly," he wrote. "Now I know in part, but then shall I know fully."
Indeed, mesmerized by a present filled with spellbinding events ranging from elections to wars, we, too, gaze into a darkened glass unable to see how the future might soon unfold before our eyes -- a future full of signs that the four empires that have long dominated our world are all crumbling.
Since the Cold War ended in 1990, four legacy empires -- those of China, France, Russia, and the United States -- have exercised an undue influence over almost every aspect of international affairs. From the soft power of fashion, food, and sports to the hard power of arms, trade, and technology, those four powers have, each in its own way, helped to set the global agenda for the past 35 years. By dominating vast foreign territories, both militarily and economically, they have also enjoyed extraordinary wealth and a standard of living that's been the envy of the rest of the world. If they now give way in a collective version of collapse, instead of one succeeding another, we may come to know a new world order whose shape is as yet unimaginable.
An Empire Once Called Françafrique
Let's start with the French neocolonial imperium in northern Africa, which can teach us much about the way our world order works and why it's fading so fast. As a comparatively small state essentially devoid of natural resources, France won its global power through the sort of sheer ruthlessness -- cutthroat covert operations, gritty military interventions, and cunning financial manipulations -- that the three larger empires are better able to mask with the aura of their awesome power.
For 60 years after its formal decolonization of northern Africa in 1960, France used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate 14 African nations into a neo-colonial imperium covering a quarter of Africa that critics called Françafrique. The architect of that post-colonial confection was Jacques Foccart, a Parisian "man of the shadows." From 1960 to 1997, using 150 agents in the Africa section of the state's secret service, he managed that neocolonial enterprise as France's "presidential adviser for Africa," while cultivating a web of personal connections to presidential palaces across the northern part of that continent.
As part of that postcolonial empire, French paratroopers (among the world's toughest special forces) shuttled in and out of northern Africa, conducting more than 40 interventions from 1960 to 2002. Meanwhile, more than a dozen client states there shared autocratic leaders shrouded in vivid personality cults, systemic corruption, and state terror. In that way, Paris ensured the tenure of compliant dictators like Omar Bongo, president of the oil-rich country of Gabon from 1967 to 2009. Apart from exporting their raw materials almost exclusively to France, the firm economic foundation for Françafrique lay in a common currency, the CFA franc, which gave the French treasury almost complete fiscal control over its former colonies.
From Paris's perspective, the aim of the game was the procurement of cut-rate commodities -- minerals, oil, and uranium -- critical for its industrial economy. To that end, Foccart proved a master of the dark arts, dispatching mercenaries and assassins in covert operations meant to eternally maximize French influence.
The exemplary state in Françafrique was undoubtedly Gabon, then a poor country of just a half-million people rich in forestry concessions, uranium mines, and oil fields. When the country's first president was being treated for fatal cancer in a Paris hospital in 1967, Foccart manipulated its elections to install Omar Bongo, a French intelligence veteran, who was then only 31.
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