Geopolitics

Will the US rediscover its role of a responsible capitalist power after the twin wars and devastating financial crisis?

In this very probing article from http://www.oilprice.com/, author Gregory R. Copley, discusses the fallouts of the latest financial crisis and the military adventures, in terms of the weakening status of the US as a super power. Is the US the modern Roman Empire? Can wealth and military power forever maintain the superpower structure? Author has some interesting conclusions where he lays out the much-needed strategic mindset to navigate in this post-crisis, transformed world.

Author asks this question:

“The question is whether this current process through which the US is going must inevitably be played to a conclusion which sees the US itself — as the Roman and Hellenic and Mongol and British and Netherlands and Soviet empires once were — broken apart or reduced to modesty among the ruins of grandeur? It is not. Nothing is written which cannot be re-written.”

What changed the communist bloc in the aftermath of the cold war? How did the defeat transform PRC and Russia? Copley has an interesting explanation:

“The Russian Federation’s grand strategic growth began only with its recognition that it was forced, with the death of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1990-91, to put aside the pretensions that it had been a superpower. The defeat of the USSR-led bloc by the US-led bloc, which determined the end of the Cold War, engendered in Moscow the deep reflections and reorganizations, which only defeat can bring. Russia, with this realization, was able to revive the strategic momentum, which had been thwarted by the 1917 Revolution.

The West, and particularly the United States after the end of the Cold War, wallowed in a condition even worse than defeat. It wallowed in victory.

With defeat comes the ability — indeed, the license, mandate, and demand — to sweep out failed or obsolete institutions; to scour out the sclerotic accumulation of laws and bureaucratic procedures; and to purge the perpetuation of the kind of strategic insensitivities which had led to defeat. With victory, no such license is granted, and the presumption of superiority reinforces and compounds ancient structures. It does, however, reinforce the thinking and architecture, which had led to victory. Further, victory it leads to the excesses of those who ride to power on the exhausted backs of those who, in fact, had created the victory.”

…

“Thus, in relative terms, post-Cold War, Russia and — in a different fashion — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) learned, re-organized, and began the process of rebuilding their societies, less hampered by the earlier constraints of state structures. They prepared for a new world, and acted accordingly. They learned from history, ancient and recent. The West — but again, particularly the US — engaged in no such introspection; did not bow to the humbling workload of reconstruction; and was left hidebound by institutions which had acquired the towering and massive strength of fortifications built for a war long past.”

And what is west suffering from? Copley says, “the Saudi disease”

“Wealth and identity, while being built, demand absolute self-awareness, discipline, and a constant understanding of context. Wealth, when it is being spent, is blind to everything but self-gratification. I once called this “the Saudi disease”: I am wealthy, therefore I am smart. It is now the Western disease. And the West will continue its decline until it has sunk so low, spent so much, that it is forced and humiliated into self-review. Even alcoholics — those who admit their condition — are aware of this phenomenon.”

Excellent observation combined with analysis, Copley points out the potential alliances that may be forged between US and India, power structures in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Read the article at:

http://www.oilprice.com/article-the-us-finds-its-superpower-structure-and-capital-are-insufficient-to-cope-with-a-transformed-world.html