This is part of a series on U.S. collapse and the potential for civil war. Read part one for how propaganda factors into these issues, part two for how neoliberalism does, and part three for how the intentions of the national security state do.
An imperialist power can’t go on without access to the foreign markets that it exploits. This is the nature of capital; it can only solve its crisis of overproduction by perpetually expanding into more markets, making imperialism absolutely necessary for capitalism to continue. What happens when an empire in the capitalist era no longer has enough exploitable global resources and labor to maintain its internal economy? When the worst exploitation of capitalism can no longer be foisted onto the people of the exploited world, and must be fully inflicted upon the workers in the core imperialist countries?
Such is the scenario that Washington and its partnered imperialist powers seek to avoid as U.S. hegemony continues to crumble. All the time, it becomes more likely that they’ll fail to prevent the breakaway of large parts of the exploited world from imperial control. And when this occurs, it will combine with environmental, financial, and social factors within the United States to place the country’s existence in further jeopardy. Before focusing on those factors, I should review the U.S. empire’s losses in global market and resource access—and the systemic breakdown within the U.S. that this entails.
Washington losing exploitation access points while U.S. economy grows ever less able to sustain itself
More and more countries are building paths outside of neo-colonial subjugation. Peru’s new socialist president Pedro Castillo is closingseveral mines in response to environmental protests, putting the country’s mining companies—and U.S. capital by extension—in greater jeopardy. Xiamora Castro, one of the leaders of the movement to stop the 2009 U.S. coup in Honduras which ushered in an era of reactionary dictatorship, has won the Honduran presidential election. For a year following the reversal of the 2019 U.S. coup in Bolivia, the Movement for Socialism party has been building up the country’s living standards and sustainable development, in alternative to its former status as a colony for extractive U.S. corporations like Tesla.
Washington has continued to fail at its attempts to sow counterrevolution in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It’s losing economic control over ever more of Eurasia and Africa due to the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. And the shifting towards a multi-polar world where the dollar has less relevance, along with the dysfunctionality of the neoliberal economy, are driving the dollar towards collapse. As was observed earlier this year by Gao Desheng, the senior executive vice president of the Bank of China’s Johannesburg Branch:
The US government's excessive release of liquidity is highly likely to trigger a sudden plunge of the value of [the] dollar. Against the backdrop of mounting downturn pressure and the severe blow from the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government and Fed both agreed to take the stimulus measure supported by unlimited QE, which is widely deemed as [an] unbalanced approach. Excessive liquidity combined with a lack of the support from [the] real economy is bound to bring serious side effects. Even [if] the approach could help the US economy endure [the] current predicament, the following problems of recalling the liquidity from [the] market and to pay back the surging debts still requires [a] proper solution. It is still too early to give an optimistic forecast on the US economy prospects this year. The structural problems within the US economy for a long time are still not addressed, and the manufacturing has not been brought back to the US. The US' participation in [the] global economy is still not sufficient. A weak economy and poor employment are not conducive for the dollar to reverse current weakness.
When will this crash occur? There’s little point in speculating about a date, as capitalism’s collapse is unpredictable and chaotic by nature. But the intensification of the unemployment crisis, and the emergence in recent months of a “great resignation” where 11 million U.S. jobs are now open, have brought this unraveling closer. Capital has contracted so much that to keep profits up, the bourgeoisie have had to step up exploitation in the imperial center to the extent that many now see unemployment as a better option than being in the modern workforce.
The supply chain breakdown is the other big economic development from this year which portends to the dollar’s further decline. Becausethe U.S. has come to depend on imperialist globalization, the pandemic has disrupted its ability to transport goods from the exploited countries. It’s become so dependent because it’s deindustrialized throughout the last half-century, another consequence of neoliberalism and its mission to streamline profit. And that deindustrialization is continuing, at least in the areas which matter the most to the conditions of the masses.
This year, the CATO Institute defended the U.S. economy’s current state by saying “the most relevant data—on the U.S. manufacturing sector’s output, exports, financial performance, and investment—show that the nation’s total productive capacity and most of the industries typically associated with ‘national security’ are still expanding.” But this ongoing growth in some areas comes with a cost. Those “national security” aspects are the military-industrial complex, which siphons resources into the bloated armed forces budget and thereby further impoverishes the people. This perpetuates the empire’s internal cycle of debt and stagnation.
The weight of empire bears down upon our society ever more, while signs grow of the empire’s essential external appendages being soon to get cut off. What about when this combines with the even larger catastrophes imperialism has created for itself?
Climate crisis as the U.S. military’s greatest foil
I describe global warming as one of the crises imperialism has produced because while no one talks about it, the U.S. military is the world’s largest producer of petroleum. It’s the single biggest institutional polluter, and that’s without even counting the ways its actions perpetuate policies of climate degradation globally. Washington has been using its armed forces to illegally extract Syrian oil, military and CIA interventions are behind the continued existence of reactionary climate-denying regimes like Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and militarism is what keeps the U.S. corporate oligarchy in place. The empire and its wars are what have enabled 100 companies to facilitate around two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions.
As Codepink has assessed, the U.S. empire’s militarism is behind both its wild socioeconomic inequality and its exceptional complicity in the climate crisis, even compared to the other imperialist countries:
Why is the U.S. so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60% of Europeans own cars, compared with 90% of Americans? And why does each U.S. car owner clock double the mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient, widely-accessible public transportation, as Europe does? We can ask similar questions about other stark differences between the United States and Europe. On poverty, inequality, healthcare, education and social insurance, why is the United States an outlier from what are considered societal norms in other wealthy countries? One answer is the enormous amount of money the U.S. spends on militarism. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in FY2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its 20 closest military competitors combined.
And the consequences of this will ironically be dire for the U.S. military. Last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks showed concern for this, mentioning these reasons for why the U.S. military is “not ready” for global warming: “It's something like $750 billion of investment worldwide going on in lithium-ion batteries. The challenge is most of that is happening in China. They dominate that supply chain. It's a significant national security challenge for us. If we don't follow and be part of the solution, we will be left behind, and our vehicle fleets won't be able to be supported.”
This dysfunctionality that global U.S. forces will experience in the coming decades is tied in with the decline of U.S. imperialism. Bolivia was so important for the imperialists to hold onto because it’s rich in lithium. Now that Bolivia is lost to them, and China has been able to make lithium deals with the MAS government, they’re stuck without access to some of the resources they’ll need the most for their global military occupations to survive the climate crisis.
At least 128 U.S. military bases are threatened by sea level rise. What will happen to the efforts to relocate or protect them when the military vehicles start running out of lithium? And how will this coming energy crisis for the U.S. military impact the situation the Pentagon anticipates where the U.S. power grid breaks down due to the climate crisis? In 2019, the Pentagon put out a report which stated that:
Capability and capacity to repair or replace power grid unique infrastructure is reliant on production timelines exceeding a year. Most of these production facilities reside outside the United States, greatly adding to repair times and exacerbating vulnerability. Defense of the homeland requires reliable access to power generation capabilities to protect critical infrastructure areas, maintain sovereign security, and provide aid to the nation’s population when needed. Department of Defense installations are 99 percent reliant on the U.S. power grid for electrical power generation due to the decommissioning of autonomous power generation capability for budgetary cost saving measures over the last two decades. While generators would allow continued operations for a time, a long-term outage of the power grid would rapidly erode the ability to perform numerous missions as re- sources were diverted toward humanitarian assistance/ disaster response operations in the homeland.
The report was describing a scenario, speculated as happening within the “next 20 years,” where the U.S. electrical grid buckles under climate-related natural disasters. It says this will go along with an unmanageable increase in demand for water processing within Washington’s global military operations, with expanding extreme heat conditions making many troop deployments unfeasible. Not only will the climate crisis shrink the U.S. empire’s logistical range for occupying the globe, but it will place popular demands upon the armed forces to come to the aid of the empire’s citizenry, who the military expects to struggle amid the climate crisis. They’ll struggle because of the lack of investment in infrastructure maintenance, social services, and sustainable energy which U.S. militarism has brought about. It’s a vicious cycle of deprivation and destruction, one which the empire is wholly to blame for and will suffer the consequences for.
The empire can only respond by trying to foist the costs of this crisis onto its own people.
The coming explosion in the USA’s internally displaced persons—and how this could lead to deeper problems for the military
In a 2016 Pentagon training video, much of the world is predicted to descend into conflict throughout the next generation due to environmental degradation and growing inequality. The factor which worries the video’s producers when it comes to how the military will be able to respond to these crises is urbanization, and the fact that megacities are going to be a primary terrain for the armed forces to navigate. This is implied to include megacities like New York City, which is anticipated by this and other recent military sources to undergo class conflict which prompts domestic counterinsurgency warfare.
This is seen as worrying for the U.S. military’s tactical position. According to the video, “Even our counterinsurgency doctrine, honed in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, is inadequate to address the sheer scale of population in the future urban reality.”
This fear of failing to properly handle rebel insurgencies from within U.S. megacities is notable in the face of what global warming is going to do to the country’s urban areas in the coming decades. As environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten assessed last year, the influx of internally displaced persons is going to exacerbate the tactical crisis which the Pentagon describes:
Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly 1 in 2 — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life….One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities.
Additionally, research from sociologist Mathew Hauer estimates that 13 million Americans will be forced to abandon their current homes due to sea level rise. The U.S. empire’s unsurpassed role in worsening the climate crisis, and refusal to provide its own people with the support systems needed to stay afloat during this crisis, have made for a perfect storm of tactical disadvantages in the U.S. military’s long-term internal counterinsurgency strategy.
It’s made worse by the fact that when faced with such a desperate situation, where guerrilla rebels within U.S. borders have gained the potential for having the upper hand in some areas, the empire will without a doubt approach the situation reactively and un-pragmatically. The U.S. has shown it will do this with every dispute it’s lost throughout its geopolitical decline in recent decades. Washington has been losing the “War on Terror” because instead of ceasing the anti-Islamic policies which provoke jihadist attacks, it’s intensified its genocidal occupations, bombings, and drone strikes. Washington has been losing global standing among many of its traditional allies because instead of working with China amid the PRC’s rise, it’s started a new cold war which many countries can’t get on board with for pragmatic reasons.
The empire is blinded by its hubris. A hubris that only grows as its decline accelerates. The Pentagon budget for next year stands at $778 billion, a wild increase even from the outrageously unprecedented military spending hikes of the Trump administration. This is where the missing funds within the inadequate new infrastructure plan are going to. With this much funneling into the war machine, the country can’t reach the modernizations of the electrical grid needed for reaching net zero emissions by 2050, or for making the grid resilient enough to withstand the catastrophes which will occur between now and then.
The consequence of this neglect for the interests of the masses will be what the Climate Impact Lab estimates to be the largest upward wealth transfer in U.S. history, set to make the country’s poorest counties lose up to 20% of their income by the middle of the century. It will also cut the country’s GDP by as much as 5.6% by 2100, twice the GDP decline from the 2008 economic crash. This falling out of the economy, combined with the demise of the dollar and the further socioeconomic deprivation from mass internal migration, will produce just the kind of unrest which the Pentagon has been fearing.
And when the hyper-militarized police, the mercenaries, and the far-right militias partner with the military to crack down on this revolt—which given U.S. history could easily entail bombing neighborhoods or massacring protesters—the masses will become further alienated from their government. The 2016 Pentagon training video implies a tactically ideal scenario where the military can deal with these megacity adversaries by sending in special ops, and engaging with the guerrillas in high-intensity combat. But this is a fantasy. It would take far more than special ops to overcome the kinds of guerrilla forces which have already managed to find a substantial foothold in a megacity. The military will have to either surrender these cities to the rebels, or go all in with bombings, tank assaults, drone strikes, and troop deployments. Which will only destroy the government’s perceived credibility. Washington will be known as the regime that kills its own people.
Such is the kind of megacity that imperialism is creating: filled with desperate and disillusioned internally displaced persons, utterly strained in resources from rapid growth, and turned into the type of impoverished urban jungle that U.S. military experts have expressed apprehension about operating within. In its 2016 report speculating on the potential for Washington to be fighting “contemporary Stalingrads” within U.S. cities during the next few decades, the U.S. Army War College assesses: “a surplus of unemployed males with little to do but join gangs or engage in crime as a source of income. Joining extremist or terrorist organizations might also appear attractive as a way out. At the very least, in the event of some kind of conflict, these young men would provide a pool of potential recruits for those opposing the United States. In short, slums would be an inordinately difficult battlefield.”
The imperialists have only themselves to blame for this dilemma. They’ve engineered the conditions that breed civil conflict. By ruthlessly destroying the livelihoods of the U.S. population for half a century, while repeating the hubristic errors which have brought down all fallen empires, they’ve turned their own people against them while crippling their own tools for fighting off an internal class revolt.
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