US Intelligence Analysts: American Power is in Terminal Decline

By Dave Lindorff

The US is on the way out as a hegemonic power. 

That is the primary conclusion of a new report out of the National Intelligence Council -- a government organization that produces mid-term and long-range thinking for the US intelligence community.

Titled “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds,”  this 140-page study says emphatically that the “relative decline” of the US is “inevitable,” but adds that its future role in the international system is “much harder to project,” and goes on to say that “the degree to which the US continues to dominate the international system could vary widely.”

Among the factors that could determine what the US role in global affairs might be a little less than two decades from now are whether the US dollar continues to be the world’s reserve currency, how China handles the transition from a country of poor workers and peasants to a country with a large middle-class, and whether the US “will be able to work with new partners to restructure the international system.”

The study is interesting in that it is represents a complete rejection of the notorious  Project for a New American Century, which was a private Neoconservative blueprint for long-term US hegemony over the rest of the globe and which became the driving philosophy underlying the Bush-Cheney administration’s domestic and foreign policy in the first decade of this century.  The PNAC called for the US to establish unchallenged global dominance and to do whatever was necessary to  “prevent” any other nation from challenging that dominance going forward.

The authors of this new study take it as a given that the heyday of the US is over. As they put it, “The ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana -- the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 -- is fast winding down.”  They say, optimistically, that the US is likely to remain “first among equals” at least into 2030 “because of its preeminence across a range of power dimensions and legacies of its leadership role.”  But that’s a far cry from being able to dictate to the rest of the world.

The study offers four possible scenarios for the future. In what it calls the “most plausible worst-case scenario,” the US would withdraw inward, allowing globalization to “stall.”  While many people in other countries would likely consider this scenario an optimistic one, not a “worst-case” one, given the hugely destructive role the US has played over the decades since its emergence at the end of World War II as the world’s dominant power, the report’s authors see such a move towards US isolationism as leading to increased conflict and instability in the world...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1468