Says it all…

Scattered villages find common cause when a foreign conquest oppresses them. They overthrow the ruling king then create a republic and a mutual cause against further incursions. The republic expands into an empire, both overextends its commitments beyond and consumes itself from within only to fall to dust and ruin thereafter.

Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s leading financial historians, echoes Diamond’s warning: “Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.” Yes, America is on the edge.

The neocons are not happy:

A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans see the U.S. as the world’s top military power now but doubt whether this will be true in 20 years. Only about a third of Americans believe the U.S. will still be ranked first militarily in 2029…

A shifting military balance does not bode well for American security or for global stability. Declining defense capabilities limit the foreign-policy options of current and future administrations and jeopardize security commitments while undermining national interests.

The ever insightful Eric Margolis crunches the numbers:

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.

Washington’s deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion.

To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today.

Nearly 5,000 infantrymen are not healthy enough to be sent on the gruelling mission against the Taliban because they are injured, have mental illnesses or are not fit enough. It means more than 20 per cent of the 22,987 officers and soldiers are ‘not fully deployable’, according to the Ministry of Defence.

The best way to describe Sir John Glubb is “Lawrence of Arabia….but smarter.” We can learn a lot from this dead white male…

Glubb also found that empires were remarkably consistent in their growth and decline, moving through six readily identifiable stages, which he called the Age(s) of Pioneers, Conquest, Commerce, Affluence, Intellect and Decadence.

About the USA, Glubb wrote: “The United States arose suddenly as a new nation, and its period of pioneering was spent in the conquest of a vast continent, not an ancient empire. Yet the subsequent life history of the United States has followed the standard pattern…..the periods of the pioneers, of commerce, of affluence, of intellectualism and of decadence.”

More US soldiers commit suicide than are killed in action