Crooked Timber of the US Empire

All happy empires are alike. Each unhappy empire is unhappy in its own way.

The happy empire believes the gods smile on its homeland. Its civilization is uniquely endowed with gifts to see further than other peoples. Its constitution is an act of genius. Its armed forces, the greatest ever assembled. Its powers, undying. Its domination is a gift of order to the world. Its culture holds the greatest stories ever told. Its museums are the graceful custodians of the loot of the world.

Like Donald Trump at his 2025 Inauguration speech, the happy empire lives forever at the dawn of a Golden Age.

But each happy empire becomes unhappy, and then the stories twist back into crooked timber. Some empires collapse fast. Some slow. Sometimes they fight back. Sometimes they throw themselves in front of trains like betrayed lovers. Sometimes they are haunted by the ghosts of their wiser victims, like Macbeth was haunted by Banquo’s Ghost. Sometimes we narrate the fall of empire as tragedy, sometimes as farce.

Unhappy empires twist their stories, but not in conditions of their own making. The conditions conceal each uniquely unhappy way. There are always money problems. Debt, exploitation and luxury do their work. There is often military over-extension, and generals who relive borrowed glory. There is the usual human frailty. Wayward minds. Prodigal sons. The addictions of fame, power, drugs, and ideas. Grandiose ideas, like occupying Mars or renewing greatness by seizing territory or the Panama Canal, march their leaders into swamps. Sometimes, the climate has the final say.

But, unhappy empires are dangerous. So much depends today on knowing the unique unhappy way of the American empire.

American commentators like to imagine their story as the culmination of Athens, Rome and Pax Britannica. But they mislead themselves with this tale of a greater Rome and a misunderstood Thucydides’ trap. Brittania did not hand over peacefully her rule of the waves. In other stories, we see fragmentary clues. Strangelove’s child? A Fourth Reich? The corruption of the military-industrial-congressional complex? An American disease? Far-right madness? The moral stain of slavery? The redemption of the American Soul? Or was this romance made in Hollywood, in a well-lit studio, in front of a green screen?

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville envisioned the American unhappiness as the vengeful, religious grandeur of the pursuit of the white whale. He wrote of America, “You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. We are not a nation, so much as a world.” The tragedy was Starbuck could not disarm Ahab’s vengeance. Today, America launches its expeditions to hunt the white whales, which wounded the American dream, not from Nantucket, but from Langley, not with whaling spears, but with drones, psy-ops and AI.

In History has Begun: the Birth of a New America, Bruno Maçães reversed the fable. He celebrated American unhappiness with reality because it was the inventive resource that would empower America to rebuild the world again “safe for America without making it look like America.” History had not ended. It had just begun. But history, alas, does not read from its lines.

However, we imagine the story of American decline, today its leaders and its people seem unable to arrest its fate. Trump can no longer solely be blamed. America has fled reality into a bubble of impunity that stops Americans from learning the consequences of fleeing reality. Its leaders and citizens believe that consequences are for lesser nations. But the consequences of imperial impunity disorder the unhappy American nation and destabilize the world.

Impunity leads America to denounce the use of nuclear weapons, and to fail to apologize for Hiroshima. To declare on Victory Day that the US defeated Fascism in Europe. To exempt Kissinger, the Iraq War hawks and the guards of Abu Ghraib from the Hague, while arraigning defiant world leaders before a court it does not recognize. It leads the USA to fail to deliver in full on Nixon’s promise in 1971 to admit Taiwan is part of one China.

Impunity leads America to abuse the privileges of the reserve currency system it insisted on in 1944; to play Congressional politics with the debt ceiling; to declare itself not a deadbeat nation, when it raises its credit limit, but does not pay off its debt.

Impunity leads America to the near annual government shutdown circus, with new vaudeville each season, but in which the ringmaster never tames the budget.

Impunity leads to endless misappropriation of other cultures, to the McDonaldization of the world, the exploitation of resources, and the looting of older civilizations.

Impunity leads America to say its prayers every day after another mass shooting, but refuse to learn from any country, Australia or El Salvador, where mass murder is not a daily event.

Impunity leads America to deny its defeat in Ukraine and to demand that Europe pay the bill for the catastrophe. To believe its military bases occupying the West Pacific make the world safe.

Impunity leads America to threaten and prosecute the International Court of Justice for judging, in accordance with international law, a genocide equipped by the USA. It leads America to believe it can plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars on behalf of the whole planet Earth.

Distracted in the echo chambers of social media, the impervious American speaks nonsense about the world, and ignores the corrections coming from outside, in the sun, where the world listens in.

Americans block their ears, stamp their feet, and march their social fabric, education institutions, justice system, business rules and political culture onto ruin. They ban Tik-Tok, and its people flee to Red Note. It spits the dummy when the rest of the world demonstrates superior artificial intelligence. The gods have sent Americans mad, before they destroy America.

Impunity makes America mad, bad, and dangerous to ally with. It has created a mental prison for its elites as strongly barred as the Leninism that entrapped the Soviet leadership class in the 1980s. As Vladimir Putin said in 2022, America today, sealed inside its bubble, is steadfastly walking the unhappy, steady and confident gait of the Soviet Union.

The decade ahead may be very hard on America. But as yet there are few signs that the American leadership class – in politics and in culture – is prepared to learn the essential lesson. Trump’s inauguration affirmed their collective denial of the reality of history.

The American century was a dream, created by the most powerful dream machine ever made. But the dream was never real.

Can the American mind wake from its fever dreams? Since 2016, or more, the American media convinced the world that post-truth politics was the unique disease of Donald Trump. Since January 2021, the world has learned that was not so. We should have known long ago. No one consented to the Washington Consensus. The Truman Show and Wag the Dog were released in 1998.

Can the American state pay for its dreams? The economic historian, Adam Tooze, has written that in the United States’ “simple liberal visions of modernization have most conclusively come to grief [and] the disharmony between politics and economic and social development is at its most extreme and consequential.” (Shutdown, 2021)

America is not a bulletproof republic. It is the dying salesman of its own tragedy. It may have passed the point of no return. It is angrily adrift abroad in a seething multipolar world. It is beset at home by accelerating crises of climate, infrastructure, economy, society, culture, emergency management, transport safety, and, frankly, common decency.

It is, as French historian Emmanuel Todd has said recently, a defeated country. A defeated country in denial.

Only by breaking the seal on the prison of impunity can America reverse the forces of disintegration. In early 2021, Tooze wrote, “the haunting question remains: Is the United States as a nation-state capable of responding in a coherent and long-term fashion to the challenges of the great acceleration?”

He has recently answered his own question with a resounding ‘No.’ After the succession of Joe Biden by Donald Trump, one old, mad, blind, despised and dying king following another, can any honest person answer, ‘Yes’?

Book Recommendation

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (2014)

To describe the United States as the inheritor of Britain’s hegemonic mantle is to adopt the vantage point of those who in 1908 insisted on referring to Henry Ford’s Model T as a ‘horseless carriage’. The label was not so much wrong as vainly anachronistic. This was not a succession. This was a paradigm shift, which coincided with the espousal by the United States of a distinctive vision of world order [my emphasis].

Tooze, The Deluge, pp. 14-15

What was that distinctive vision of world order?

It was the hegemony project - the idea that the USA could be the “world hegemon.”

In Wednesday’s deep dive for paid subscribers join me as I explain how Adam Tooze’s recent work (@adamtooze) on the hegemony project is the best way to understand the crooked timber of US empire.

You can watch my short video introduction to Adam Tooze’s history and The Deluge here:

You can watch Adam Tooze’s debate with the intellectual leader of neo-conservative Washington, Robert Kagan, “World order without America?” here.

This discussion centres on two very different understandings of the empire or super-state described in The Deluge.

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Jeff