DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA - And then there was one

http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-080513.html



DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA - And then there was one
By Tom Engelhardt
May 8, '13

~snip~

After the rise and fall of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Japanese, some process seemed over. The United States was dominant in a previously unimaginable way - except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil plans to dominate the world.

As a start, the US was an empire of global capital. With the fall of Soviet-style communism (and the transformation of a communist regime in China into a crew of authoritarian "capitalist roaders&quot , there was no other model for how to do anything, economically speaking. There was Washington's way - and that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both controlled by Washington) - or there was the highway, and the Soviet Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence and ruin.

In addition, the US had unprecedented military power. By the time the Soviet Union began to totter, America's leaders had for nearly a decade been consciously using "the arms race" to spend its opponent into an early grave. And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the US continued an arms race of one.

In the years that followed, it would outpace all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts. It housed the world's most powerful weapons makers, was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop future weaponry for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a near monopoly on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn't).